Issue 29: In Search of Song

Autumn 2013

29 ISSUE

P O ET RY Held Within Song + It Begins Below Melissa Reeser Poulin + Christina Lee NO NF ICT IO N Choir Practice Brian Doyle F ICT IO N People Be Just Like Them Trees LaToya Watkins

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A U T U M N 2013

V IS UA L A RT The Unseen is Calling + Respite in the Pauses Julie Quinn + Delro Rosco + 2013 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize Judged by Maurice Manning

Runaway Dorothy Was the Name of the Band Jay Kidd

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Why/ 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 Delro Rosco. Detail of Trying To Understand Grace (1 Corinthians 13 Series).

Mineral pigments, sumi ink, aluminum powder, oyster shell white, and silver leaf on Kumohada paper on panel. 10 x 10 inches.

OPPOSITE PAGE Amelia Jane Nierenburg. Surface. Oil on canvas. 16 x 16 inches.

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staff/ extraordinaire

editor-in-chief

Brianna Van Dyke senior editor

Amy Lowe poetry editor Stephanie Lovegrove visual art editor

Stefani Rossi review editor

Paul Willis associate readers

John Patrick Harty Erika Lewis Kristen Thayer Guest reader Allison Backous Troy interns Aubrey Allison Kendra Chester marketing and outreach

Keira Havens Fundraising Kristin George Bagdanov print designer

Ruminate Magazine (ISSN 1932-6130) is published quarterly on FSC-certified paper by: Ruminate Magazine, Inc., 1041 North Taft Hill Rd, Fort Collins, Colorado 80521.

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

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GENERAL INQUIRIES We love hearing from you! Contact us at editor@ruminatemagazine.org, or visit us online at www.ruminatemagazine.org. You can also find us online at: Twitter: @ruminatemag. Facebook: facebook.com/ruminatemag. Instagram: ruminatemag. Pinterest: ruminatemag.

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FRIENDS OF RUMINATE This issue was made possible by the Friends of Ruminate, whose generous Summer 2013 financial support helped to make this issue of Ruminate possible. To become a friend, write us at editor@ruminatemagazine.org.

Benefactors Steve and Kim Franchini, Kelly and Sara McCabe, Randy and Linda Randall, Richard Terrell, Ralph and Lisa Wegner, John Zeilstra and Janice Van DykeZeilstra, Dr. Randall J. VanderMey

Patrons Imagined Design, Judith Dupree, Brad & Keira Havens, Ryan and Katie Jenkins, Tim and Katie Koblenz, Brian and Anne Pageau, Neal and Becky Stephens, Troy and Kelly Suto, Brandon and Kelly Van Dyke, Matt and Lisa Willis

Sponsors Helen Allison, Dale and Linda Breshears, Doug & June Evenhouse, Lee Hethcox, Manfred Kory, Rob Lee, Cheryl Russell

Anne Pageau propermakes.com

Copyright Š 2013 Ruminate Magazine. All rights reserved.

web designer

Katie Jenkins

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contents / 29 REVIEw

notes Editor’s Readers’ Artist’s Contributor’s Last

4 6

68

16, 40

poetry

74 78 8

Jay Kidd Runaway Dorothy Was the Name of the Band

9

Anna Rose Welch Aria

nonfiction Brian Doyle The Eighth Man Allison Schuette Like Grief to the Aching Side of Love Kevin McLellan An Emissary

10 11

James Crews Mad River, Mid-Morning God Particles

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Catherine Hawkins Almost Family

25

Joshua Robbins Knoxville Poetica

26 27

Andrea Janelle Dickens Cocoons Arctic Twilight

34 36

Sarah McKinstry-Brown After: An All-American, Post 9-11 Love Poem God as DJ

37 38

Melissa Reeser Poulin The Seeker The Prayer

49

Rachel J. Bennett We Were Not Altogether Here

Inside Front Cover

50 51

Andy Eaton Panel One: Collapse Panel Two: Collapse

17

64

Bryana Johnson Fourteen Reasons Not to Jump

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Linda Martin The Feather

66

Peter Caccavari A Cipher Which Settles for Substitutes

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Jeffrey G. Dodd But Since It Is a Matter of Questions about Words and Names

Back Cover

70

Christina Lee Aftershocks

Inside Back Cover

71

J. Scott Brownlee Prayer for Unmourned Collision

72

Jill Reid Piney Woods, Beauregard Parish

13 28 73

fiction LaToya Watkins The Mother

52

visual art Delro Rosco Trying to Understand Grace Rising Light Uncertainty Silence Between the Waves Offerings 130106 Enduring All Things Return Amelia Jane Nierenberg Surface Julie Quinn Trinity Joy IV Joy V Divine Presence Fellowship Divine Encounter Embrace 1 Awakening Cascade Reflections Becoming Treasure Hoagwood Reflections

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Melanie Springer Mock Review of Entering the Wild by Jean Janzen

Front Cover

41 42 43 44 45 46

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editor’s / note

Well friends, the Ruminate Headquarters has moved. For the past seven years we’ve been

in an 8’ x 10’ room in the basement of our quaint little house in Fort Collins, Colorado. We had certainly outgrown the office space. Luckily, my family had also outgrown the living space, and we wanted to find out what it would mean for us to have some land for gardening and chickens, a place for the kids to roam and catch grasshoppers and dig holes to China. So, just two weeks ago, we made the move to a farm property outside of town, replete with an old farmhouse and a big barn, home to the new Ruminate Headquarters.

Yes, the property needs a lot of work to transition from a drafty outbuilding to a functioning office, but I’m excited by all the possibilities. I picture beautiful Ruminate dinners out in the field, staff meetings where oodles of lovely volunteers can all gather and fit in the same room, space for all our back issues to be carefully stored, ample storage room for every kind of envelope and packaging material one can imagine, sunshine pouring in the windows and birds singing outside, big white walls ready for artwork, and space for books, lots of books.

While I was dreaming about all this and while we were packing up and moving, the material for this issue came together. We discovered that much of it engaged music and song, examined harmony and dissonance, or was lyrical in form. So we named this issue “In search of song,” which felt quite apt after our search for the “song” of our new home. We think the work in these pages speak to the power of music, yes, and also a little more abstractly, to that search we all find ourselves on at different times, that search to find the songs that are the essence of this life.

This issue features the sixteen finalist and winning poems from the 2013 McCabe Poetry Prize judged by Maurice Manning. We’re thrilled to share them here, and we’re honored to recognize Jay Kidd for his winning poem “Runaway Dorothy Was the Name of the Band.” Mr. Manning writes of Kidd’s poem: “It has been a pleasure to have this carefully composed and heartfelt poem lingering in my mind.” We couldn’t agree more.

The abstract artwork in this issue explores the balance of visual harmony, and artist Julie Quinn reminds us to “listen closely” while Delro Rosco finds inspiration in the pauses of life. We have also gathered lyrical essays from Allison Schuette and Kevin McLellan, an essay on monastic choir practice from Brian Doyle, and a powerful short story from LaToya Watkins with a dialect that sings and a character that is most certainly in search of song. The poetry in this issue imagines God as a DJ, speaks about singing hymns in the woodshed, and dreams about future songs and whippoorwills who never stop singing. We hope you enjoy this rich collection of voices.

And may we all find our songs to sing,

p.s. You can follow our progress on our barn/headquarters at ruminatemagazine.org/blog.

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Readers’/ notes thoughts on

in search of song from Ruminate readers

My husband plays guitar and leads our church in song. Sometimes I join him. Afterwards, people say how great it is that we can do that together and isn’t it romantic that we can blend our voices. It is a gift.

But it’s hard at times, when we are irritable, or tired, or nursing hurt feelings. Days come when we just don’t feel like working together. But we share the common goal of beautiful music and trying to help the body to enter into worship. We throw ourselves into the process, trusting that the other person will match us in rhythm, that our voices will dance and not stumble. And inevitably, it comes together despite us. And isn’t that the same for marriage?

Anna Tesch w h idbey island, was h ington

There is

an immediacy of God’s presence when the first measure of Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere Mei, Deus is sung into existence. The lush chords, the sobering austerity of the chanting, and the haunting Soprano solos, straining for heaven, allow me to find serenity through a minuscule glimpse of the angelic choirs. A piece so guarded that it carried the penalty of excommunication, it was a fourteen-year-old Mozart who transcribed the score from memory that allowed the work to resonate among the masses. This work reminds me that in a consumer driven, throw away pop culture, there will always be works, of every era, that possess a timeless, enduring quality, lifting the human spirit beyond its closed subjectivity into the realm of God’s presence.

Fr. James Kurzynski La C rosse , W isconsin

A friend asks if being a writer is like having tinnitus.

Do I ever get a reprieve from thinking? On the most frustrating days, no; my thoughts ring too constant to hear. The world insists on being observed, and the persistent buzzing might drive me mad. But when my thoughts dissipate, I soon feel anxious. I’m on

pause while meaning hides behind silence instead of sound. It’s a trade-off: all or nothing, the world a deafeningly wonderful imposition, or my mind quiet but hollow. So I prefer the sounding noise.

On the most glorious days, I’m able to parse a few harmonious notes out of the din.

Rebecca Martin LY N CHB URG, V I RGI N A

My first college roommate and I were both very independent and often struggled to see the common ground between us, mostly due to the amount of clothes she left on the floor. The one thing we shared, though, was our love of singing, which united us one afternoon in our wafer-thin walled dorm room under “The Answer” by Shane & Shane. The song begins with one voice. A second one quickly weaves beside the first. Then, the chorus arches into a twotoned, equally balanced harmony. With our voices bending in time and tune with one another, my roommate and I connected. The dissonance and seperateness of our relationship interlocked and we, for at least as long as the song, found harmony with one another.

J-me Odom T ulsa, ok lahoma

We drove the familiar road through dry plains as distant skies joked rain. Conversation had reached its natural end, and it was right to listen. The traveler sang, ‘Oh my sweet Carolina, may you one day carry me home.’ His voice, harmonica, and hope went further than our ears. This cry was shared by my friend—separated from family by too many miles and missed memories. But I was home—in a place anchored by six generations of history, whose surface had no trace of disenchantment. We both sat in longing filled silence.

Jesse French FOrt collins, Colorado

Send us your notes for Issue 30. We love hearing from you!

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prizes

2013

finalists Peter Caccavari A Cipher Which Settles for Substitutes Catherine Hawkins Almost Family Andrea Janelle Dickens Arctic Twilight

first place Jay Kidd Runaway Dorothy Was the Name of the Band

Anna Rose Welch Aria Jeffrey G. Dodd But Since It Is a Matter of Questions about Words and Names Bryana Johnson Fourteen Reasons Not to Jump Joshua Robbins Knoxville Poetica James Crews Mad River, Mid-Morning Andy Eaton Panel Two: Collapse

photo credit: Sarah Collins

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second place

Jill Reid Piney Woods, Beauregard Parish

Melissa Reeser Poulin The Seeker

J. Scott Brownlee Prayer for Unmourned Collision

h onorable mention

Linda Martin The Feather

Christina Lee Aftershocks

Rachel J. Bennett We Were Not Altogether Here

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by steve and kim franchini final j udge maurice manning

sponsored

On “Runaway Dorothy Was the Name of the Band” Maurice Manning writes: “The long, overflowing lines rush together as if the poem is tumbling down the page until it stops with a pang that is loving and wrenching at once. This poem builds a bridge between the very different worlds it spans and makes those worlds closer, necessary to each other. It has been a pleasure to have this carefully composed and heartfelt poem lingering in my mind.”

Maurice Manning is the author of five books of poems, most recently The Gone and the Going Away (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, April 2013). His previous book, The Common Man, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011, and his first book, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, was selected by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Younger Poets award.

Manning teaches at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky.

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Jay Kidd

Runaway Dorothy Was the Name of the Band In the whirling dervish of time that is New York on a Friday evening at dusk we run down the subway stairs to catch the train that is just pulling into the station and as my foot lands on the last step I hear the sound of a banjo being played by a bluegrass band on the platform and I must not cry as I jump into the car, the glare of the lights making everyone’s face look sterile, like we are riding in a medicine cabinet, and I try to speak, to explain what just happened but it doesn’t come out right except to comment on the exquisite juxtaposition of the music and the setting but what I couldn’t convey was the Appalachian horizon, vast and deep, the hoe in the soil, the laundry on the line or the church pew and the Methodist hymnal with my mother’s name inside, a name she doesn’t use anymore, but she stills knows the hymns and can sing them, in harmony, and when she does she is a country girl who can recite the fifty-five counties of West Virginia in less than thirty-seconds flat, something my brother and I used to beg her to do, and we would all sing the state song as we crossed the border on the old Route 60 but now that girl is past eighty and what will I do when it is all gone.

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Anna Rose Welch

Aria I’ve heard wolves reciting if, then across long distances.

I’ve heard them do this until it hurts, until after it hurts, until the stars’ trembling seems related.

As I grew and my voice deepened, my mother listened to nothing but Mozart, a violin high-throated and delicate, solitary like moonlight.

She put a violin into my hands, said I want you to sound like this.

With each bow stroke, slow and sweet, I pictured a man summoning a woman, half-naked, from a pure, marble block.

He’d fall in love with her as all men do, as some man would with me someday if I learned to listen closely to each note and tease it, shimmering from the strings; if I’d learn to forget someone’s hands ripped this tantalizing voice straight from an animal’s gut.

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James Crews

Mad River, Mid-Morning When the salted wind picks up, gnats hover on the air until it seems the slightest breath will send them onward, and it does, as stillness can scatter thoughts. I used to wonder why the curlews, plovers and gulls act so hungry here, and you said that’s just how they see the world: each millet seed or piece of bread is a single note in some future song.

I remember that winter in Chicago when we woke in your blue room above the bakery and smoked all day, steaming the windows, eating scones as hard as stones while the train rattled that mattress we scarcely left. Love, which is not the same as God, floats like this bottle on the current, filling, emptying as if on command—helpless.

I believe this egret and the mist can both teach us the delicacy with which they lift from the spit, testing the waters farther out, skimming above those deep dark places we could never reach.

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James Crews

God Particles I could almost hear their soft collisions on the cold air today, but when I came in, shed my layers and stood alone by the fire, I felt them float toward me like spores flung far from their source, having crossed miles of oceans and fields unknown to most just to keep my body fixed to its place on the earth. Call them God if you must, these messengers that bring hard evidence of what I once was and where I have been— filling me with bits of stardust, whaleskin, goosedown from the pillow where Einstein once slept, tucked in his cottage in New Jersey, dreaming of things I know I’ll never see.

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Catherine Hawkins

Almost Family The radio, rough and far-away, plays a little jazz. All doors swing open to the hot evening wind that lights the tablecloth to dancing. They sit, almost father and daughter, slicing tomatoes down the middle then again, the juice soaking and tickling to the elbows, tiny seeds grainy between knife and board.

He laughs when she talks, and she never stops talking. She doesn’t look up, but she can feel his eyes brown and laughing. Their hands flash separately but move together, lightning flesh.

The tomatoes reach the bowl’s glass rim, but they don’t leave the table until it’s so dark all they can see is the outline of things, as if pushing back a chair would break it.

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brian doyle

Here’s a story. A young Cistercian monk tells it to me, and then he and I just sit there for a while, by the abbey pond, watching the trout rise, neither of us saying anything, because some stories are so layered and riveting that you have to wander through them again slowly in your mind after you hear them the first time, like you wander back along particularly intriguing paths and beaches and streets, you know what I mean?

I think you do.

We have choir practice every other night here, said the young monk, and it’s almost always pretty serious, although sometimes, usually in summer, we get a little giddy.

Probably the late light, I guess. Well, it’s always the same guys, of course. Seven of us, six of whom can sing and the seventh is just the most wonderful man although he couldn’t carry a tune if it was a feather and he had a third hand. We make the same jokes, stand in the same places, make the same little singing errors. I mean, it’s a monastery, and you get into certain habits and customs, just because we are here all the time, with the same guys, doing the same thing, day after day, year after year. I’m not complaining—the consistency is a sort of prayer itself, of course, and after a while you get the sense that ritual and routine can be curiously freeing, rather than stultifying. I think when you are young you are terrified of ritual because it seems like the bars of a prison but when you are older you appreciate rituals as strong trees you can lean on, you know what I mean?

I think I do, I said.

Well, one night we were at practice, said the young monk, and it was like any other night, I guess, with moments when we were all hitting our stride and other moments when four guys were on their game and two were not, for various reasons, and we started working on a song which I knew better than the other guys, so I moved to the front to be the teacher,

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basically, and I noticed that there were seven guys singing, not including me. It took me a minute to process this, because it was so weird—it’s not like we get drop-in visitors, you know, and none of the monks who don’t come to practice suddenly come to practice, that doesn’t happen. So it took me a minute to spot the new guy. He was dressed like us, in the robe, but I had never seen him before, that’s for sure. He sure could sing, though. Kind of a rough baritone, like Lou Rawls if he smoked two packs a day. Or Johnny Hartman before he got warmed up, you know what I mean?

I do, I said.

Well, in the monastery, you don’t call guys out. It’s not done. For one thing we don’t talk more than is absolutely necessary, and for another there’s a sort of let-things-play-out ethic here, just relax and things will become clear soon enough, we have plenty of time, so I just let him sing. I don’t think the other six guys even noticed the new guy. We were in a good groove, and there’s a real pleasure in a good stretch like that when you are singing in a

group. So we just kept going. We sang the new song through probably ten times, and then it was about time to close up for the evening anyway, so we tried it one more time, and this last time I thought we nailed it, each guy’s voice fit right. Just lovely. When we finished we all laughed and I noticed the guy was gone, just like that.

Now, I don’t know what to make of this, said the young monk, and the more I think about it the more I think maybe there’s nothing to be made of it. A guy appeared out of nowhere one night, joined us for choir practice, sang beautifully, and then he vanished. No one else noticed him. I can assure you he was there; I am not a nut. He wore a brown robe. He had kind of a grainy baritone. He wasn’t tall or short. That’s all I can tell you. I never saw him again. I told the abbot about him and the abbot listened carefully and after I was done telling him the story and we sat silent for a while the abbot said boy, we could sure use a good baritone. That’s all he’s said about it so far. So there’s a story for you. If you wanted to treat it like a mystery there would sure be a lot of interesting details, like the choir door

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was locked the whole time, and we don’t have any guys who sing baritone, and the gate on the road to the abbey was also locked, and to make your way on foot through the woods to the abbey at night is an adventure and a half, not to mention there are bears and cougars in those woods, and the biggest owls I have ever seen, you wonder if the owls up there go around picking up sleeping deer or what at night. But if you didn’t want to treat it as a mystery, you could just marvel at the fact that a guy with a rough baritone showed up one night, sang the same song eleven times with us, and then vanished. I think maybe we spend too much time trying to figure out what stories mean rather than just marveling at the stories, you know what I mean?

I do, I said.

There didn’t seem to be anything for me to say, after such a story, so the young monk and I just sat there by the abbey pond for a while, watching the trout rise. These are enormous trout, by the way. A couple of times I thought I saw a trout the size of a couch, but that might have been a trick of the light. One time I did see a very large trout rise after a dragonfly, which seemed awfully ambitious to me, but who knows what when it comes to possible and impossible, you know what I mean?

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artist/ note

Julie Quinn

The unseen is calling How do you express the inexpressible? How do you show the invisible? How do you communicate the deepest joys and sorrows, questions and answers, longings and fears that we all face? It is a calling not undertaken lightly. For it requires gut-wrenching honesty, brutal soul-searching, and the courage to risk critique of your most intimate thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and abilities.

You are invited on this journey. A poetic expression of one artist’s spiritual journey. Through color, movement, line, texture—layers of expression, editing, bringing into creation visual expressions of unseen places, places where the divine meets human, heaven meets earth, spirit meets spirit, and the invisible is made visible. A yearning for the heavenly language . . . a grasping for the divine, a searching for purpose and meaning, for connectedness, for intimacy. A longing to inspire hope, faith, healing, and transformation in those who come alongside.

These are my visual prayers—offerings of love and suffering, affirmations that we all share a common experience and journey, that we do not travel these paths alone.

Let your spirit and heart go where perhaps you’ve not gone before.

Listen closely. The unseen is calling; the invisible is made known.

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Julie Quinn. Trinity. Mixed media on claybord. 24 x 24 inches.

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Julie Quinn. Joy IV. Mixed media on claybord. 7 x 5 inches.

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Julie Quinn. Joy V. Mixed media on claybord. 7 x 5 inches.

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Julie Quinn. Divine Presence. Mixed media on claybord. 6 x 6 inches.

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Julie Quinn. Fellowship. Mixed media on claybord. 12 x 9 inches.

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Julie Quinn. Divine Encounter. Mixed media on claybord. 14 x 14 inches.

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Julie Quinn. Embrace 1. Mixed media on claybord. 12 x 12 inches.

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Julie Quinn. Awakening. Mixed media on claybord. 36 x 18 inches.

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Joshua Robbins

Knoxville Poetica Now that the vacant quarter acre lot’s skunk hollow’s filled, and the kudzu-strangled bramble has been cut and cleared and hauled up to the county dump along with the year’s built-up trash—drivers-by’s pitched butts, greasy fast food bags and neighbor kids’ empties, some jerk’s milk-jugged motor oil—the cul-de-sac’s stacked 2x4s and plywood wait steaming in the morning’s too-soon heat. Early spring, a down market. Someone snaps a line taut and a red chalk puff hovers hopefully over duplex blueprint hieroglyphics then fades above redrawn property lines like a word’s sound vacating its meaning.

Soon the roused street will fill with the language of labor: ripping claw and framing square, circular saw’s carbide whine, tongue-and-groove, the nail gun’s pneumatic pentameter, all the bright syllables I haven’t earned and so cannot spend, though I sometimes try: mumbling to the hardware clerk my mouthful of counterfeit coinage—saying sixteen-penny, mason’s line, saying slip-joint, rasp—when really all I need is a replacement rake handle, new work gloves, bolts for the loose towel rack.

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Andrea Janelle Dickens

Cocoons On the windowsill, my tea mug cools, and dust and a breeze mingle with the steam. Each day brought showers, their bounty of sound, until the worms’ new volume pierced even windows closed at night. Our maisonette casement now opens to the tune of a minor feast, worms perched to spin silken cocoons, mouths feisty on mulberry leaves, appetites hammering the valley for days like storms, their melody of insatiability. The barely grown leaves dissolve into the space between their veins, the two of us sitting in our separate books across the room from each other. Half of March, we watched the worms’ asymptotic growth until their heads bobbed the crescendo to their symphony. One night, the roar became silence as the larvae slip into cocoons. We leave a day before the workers begin to unspin their harvest; all day our train crosses snowbound Alps. We watch the train engine round each switchback. Side by side, we stare all day out into the finespun snow, each alone with our thoughts, and we think about the busy silence of unwinding, about the slow business of death.

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Andrea Janelle Dickens

Arctic Twilight Along the Laugavegr, grey reveals its million shades, each its own news, own hue. Arctic twilight begins and ends all our days, wraps its skin around all our actions, its own peculiar guise.

The hills and drift of Norway stumped Monet: he slipped the drawstring of the sky drawn shut, over Sandviken, the light there a loneliness without hue.

A cloudless grey sky clings close to us.

Our horizon blurs all to one, and what we perceive is: the red barn in the painting, the blue and yellow buildings here along the Tjörnin, lights in their leaded windows, the green of the toolshed.

Monet said he never had enough greys, the infinite spectrum between black and white still insufficient. What we cannot wrench free from ourselves are the grey of basalt, of shale, of our melancholies, the leftover breakfast hours waiting to see the harbor’s waves.

And the waves themselves, the grey that rendered them unthreatening. Monet resolved his scene all to blocks, great snowy roofs silhouetted against grey hills. In today’s artic twilight, we cannot even see the buildings yet as blocks. This is still the type of light we can only trudge through, light that refuses to yield even to great effort.

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allison schuette

Dad lifts his face from the hymnal. The song breaks out of him like God’s Let there be light. The earth shakes beneath our feet. Stars fly from his mouth. They shoot forward and burst through the stained glass window. I imagine standing there, on the other side, color showering over me, over the cigarette butts and lost mitten, the liquor store on the corner, the bent man shuffling in a coat too big, all of us made holy, made over new. *** My father sat apart—behind the newspaper, behind his cross-stitch, behind the ballgame on TV, behind his classical music, behind his silence at the dinner table. Somehow I understood his apartness. I liked being alone, too.

When I tugged the chain, the toy closet would go dark. Thin bands of light would shine around the edge of each door, three of them, each taller than the next. I’d kneel on the floor.

The closet smelled like wood—the underside of the stairs leading to the basement, the bench littered with stuffed animals and board game pieces, the shelves by the tallest door climbing all the way to the ceiling. I clasped my hands in front of my chest and bowed my head. Dear God, make me good. Help me to love everyone.

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Warmth would suffuse my body, as if I had swum from the shadow of a coral reef into the sun-drenched water.

For a short time during my sixth year, I took regular retreats in the toy closet. I snuck in after school or slipped away from my older brother and the neighborhood kids playing in our sandbox. Temptations filled the world, and it wasn’t so easy to love everyone. I didn’t love Michael Seitz who threw sand in my eyes. I didn’t love my brother who refused to let me ride his tricycle. I didn’t love my mother who got impatient when her comb encountered a knot in my hair. (It wasn’t my fault Dad never “talked” to her.) So I retreated to the closet to renew my vows, to become like my father once more. * My father sat on the living room sofa while Mom finished dishes in the kitchen; the water roared as the last of it got sucked down the drain. Light from the end table lamp splayed across my father’s cross-stitch work. He tightened the needlework hoop one more turn. The public radio station played classical music. Some names I recognized—Beethoven, Bach, Mozart—others I did not. The speakers faced my father from across the room, one on the left, one on the right, a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire. My father traveled by way of the music.

He left behind his slavish day and winged his way towards a better world, towards God’s promised land.

When I grew old enough, I learned how to cross-stitch, too. But my mother taught me. She showed me how to lick the ends of the thread, how to press them between my thumb and forefinger, how to lay the eye of the needle just so, how to unfurl my fingers, slowly pressing the thread forward until the ends pushed through the eye. She helped me read the chart and taught me how to match the symbols to the correct color thread. When I reached the end of my first row, she showed me how to run my needle through the backside of the stitches to keep the thread from pulling free.

I worked on the opposite end of the sofa, across from my father. Sometimes, if I sat down before he did, he scolded me for not working with enough light. You’ll ruin your eyes. Then, he would click the lamp on behind me. I relished these opportunities, these small moments in which Dad demonstrated his love.

Like the nights he’d stand backlit in the doorway of my bedroom, one hand on the doorknob, one hand resting by his head on the doorframe. He’d lean forward. Goodnight sweetheart. Don’t let the bedbugs bite. I’d groan—Dad—as he pulled the door closed, leaving me just a crack of light. I’d turn toward his retreating presence, marked by the shuffle of his slippers on the carpet, the music still drifting up the hall. I’d feel the tug as he pulled away from me, like surf. *

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I spied on Dad from the dark safety of the kitchen window. A man had come knocking on our back door, late in the evening. Dad sat with him now on the patio. Cigarette smoke, weighted with menthol, occasionally wafted in through the screen.

Dad had not turned on the patio floodlights, but light from the landing by the backdoor lay diffusely around their feet like fog. I could make out my dad’s corduroy slippers and the man’s scuffed work boots, but darkness blurred the features of their faces. The man hunkered over his knees and held his head in his hands. The lawn chair creaked under his shifting weight. He cried. My dad faced him, knees almost touching his. He placed a hand on his shoulder. I heard him begin to pray.

I closed my eyes and let the sound of my father’s voice reach me. I couldn’t hear the words, just his voice, coaxing, yearning. It lapped at my ears, washing up and pulling back. I swam out on that rhythm even though the prayer wasn’t for me. In the days to follow, my dad would be more silent than usual, more withdrawn. I swam out now while I could, where in the ocean of God I knew my father lurked.

The people of our congregation admired my father for his worship life and his lay ministering. It drove my mother crazy. They only see him at church. They don’t see who he is at home.

Home: where Dad sat apart and behind.

I understood, but I was jealous, too.

The assignment told me to write a report on my favorite animal. I didn’t have one. I barely remembered our pet cats, Samson and Delilah. I liked Cisco, the mutt my dad had brought home from work, well enough. But anyone could write about cats and dogs. I wanted not a favorite animal, but a unique one. The female seahorse injects her eggs into the male’s brood pouch. There, his sperm fertilize the eggs, and he carries them ten days to six weeks, depending on the species. He gives birth in the dark waters of night. The young are left to fend for themselves.

I paused to look up the word, “brood.” A number of young produced or hatched at one time.

And further down: to think or worry persistently or moodily about; ponder. I conjured my father in his silence, the kind that descended after praying with someone. Or the thicker silence that fell upon him after a holiday with the Schuette clan. During the holiday, he was fine. He laughed with his brother and sisters around the card table reminiscing about the old days. He played golf with his mom and dad, berating himself when he later reported his score until Uncle Ron, the oldest and a pastor, reminded him with a firm hand to the shoulder, “Now Chuck, God calls us to suffer in silence,” and my dad would reply, “This score could tempt even Christ to complain,” and everyone laughed. He teased my cousins, tousled Kristin’s and Esther’s hair, used his Donald Duck voice—the one I had to beg for—till the youngest giggled uncontrollably.

Then the car ride home: my father’s hand searched the radio dial for a baseball or football game and, when the station crackled into static, he took to sucking on hard candies to help him

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stay awake, his mouth closed tightly around each sour ball or minty disc.

Then the week after: my dad deflated, as if he had given birth, his body shocked and in recovery, the bag of hard candy going stale in his dresser drawer.

I had a fondness for riffling through my dad’s dresser, especially the top drawer. I opened it for the scent of cinnamon, to swipe a piece of Dad’s Big Red. The initial bite burned my tongue until the sharpness of cinnamon melted into the sweetness of sugar.

No one else in my family liked Big Red. I grew to crave it and turned to cinnamon every chance I got: Red Hots, Hot Tamales, Boston Baked Beans.

The top drawer also contained my dad’s neatly folded handkerchiefs, each one ironed smooth, awaiting their turn in his back pocket. They kept a semblance of order in their corner of the drawer, pinning down what was otherwise haphazard chaos—loose change,

an unused money clip, Dad’s shoehorn, savings books for us kids, an occasional nut and bolt, keys to locks long forgotten.

Once, I found a chain of red foil squares. I tore one off and turned it over. “Trojan” stood out in bold black letters, and next to it, a small image of an ancient soldier’s head. A helmet covered his ears and a mohawk ran down its middle. I could feel a hard ring inside.

It slid when I pressed at it. “Latex condom,” the wrapper read.

I stretched across my parents’ bed and tore open the square. I slipped the condom out, moist and slick, tipped with what looked like the nipple of a doll’s bottle. I tried unrolling the ring of latex, but it kept slipping from my grasp and rolling back up. Finally, I realized I could put several fingers in the tip and roll the condom down over the fingers with my other hand. Once I got it started, I removed my fingers and stretched the condom to its full length. It laid on the bed before me, long and collapsed, a wasted possibility.

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* Dad worked for Grandpa Kohn who owned his own scale company. They sold and serviced the large scales used by the corn and soybean processing plants in the area. My dad was the business manager. Every night he came home at 5:30 to a table set and dinner ready or nearly so. He carried a briefcase with a combination lock that he never bothered to use.

As a child, I loved the pop of pushing the clasps open and the click of closing them, a world circumscribed, contained. Or so it seemed. My father’s entrance indicated otherwise: the sad creak of the gate by the backdoor, the whine of the screen, the huff of the storm door, the way he favored just slightly his right foot as he shuffled through the kitchen and into the living room. He moved as if against a strong current, as if something back there didn’t want to let him go. Even when he shook himself out of his coat and removed his hat, placing them where they belonged in the closet, he still didn’t seem to be home.

Then, after dinner, tea. Mom would clear the table once the kids had scattered. Sometimes, I would stay and drink tea, too. My mother’s steamed in front of her, rich and brown; my dad’s milky white, sweetened with sugar. Mom’s chair creaked as she pushed it away from the table to stand. She didn’t interrupt herself but continued telling Dad about her day as she moved to the stove, tested the side of the tea kettle with her palm, reached over the sink into the cupboard for a tea cup, and poured hot water for me. I lifted the lid of the tea canister and reached in for a bag. At the table, I sat in my usual seat on the end. My parents sat on either side at the other end. We made a triangle.

Just beyond the kitchen, my cross-stitch lay half-buried on the dining room table under days’ worth of junk mail, magazines Mom still intended to read, homework assignments either graded or yet to be done. The sampler, which I never would finish, peered up through the mess, each tight stitch bound to the fabric like grief to the aching side of love.

I laid the tea bag on the water. It floated on the surface until the tea began to steep, descending in wavy lines like seaweed. I dunked the bag and muddied the water. Mom, still talking, passed the milk and sugar. She took the spoon Dad had used and handed it to me.

But tonight, I laid the spoon down next to the Tupperware sugar dispenser, blew across the hot surface so I wouldn’t burn my tongue, and decided to drink my tea black. *** My father lifts his face from the hymnal. He closes his eyes and rocks forward on his toes, riding the swell of the organ. He does not need to see the words to know what to sing. I stand next to him, looking back to my own hymnal, singing the alto line. Dad’s rich male voice surges below me, but in singing the melody it also crests above me. Music floods the church, but nobody drowns.

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Sarah McKinstry-Brown

After: An All-American, Post 9-11 Love Poem After he got on one knee, and she said, I do. After they watched the televised bombs disappear the city. After everyone fell asleep. Shock and awe, him and her forgetting their sorrow long enough to make love, and bring the babies into the gaping blue. After nursing and swaddling while department store massacres unfolded, perfume counters and bullet casings on the brink of Christmas. Red, red, blue red, blue. After sirens. After boys with black hole eyes emptied their grief into automatic weapons. After playing house, buying curtains, making lists, pretending to be perennial and not just another boom. After the cold, hard ground, the evergreens mute and blazing. After the mothers and fathers on the other end of the headlines, the news of children huddled in closets.

After eyes hollow, after no ground could ever be hallowed. After she heard the news and called him, both of them with nothing to give the other except a silence to weep against. After winter after winter, after winter, after winter, it’s a wonder it didn’t happen sooner:

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The two of them screaming at each other in the restaurant parking lot, the bar, the idling car, the neon sign bruising their faces red and blue, blinking, open open open.

After he, after he gets on one knee, and she says, I do. I do. After they watch the televised bombs, the nothing

blooming. After everyone falls asleep. After shock and awe, him and her making love while tanks roll through another city, erasing memory, Oh, America, who are you to tell them that love is anything but holding on.

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Sarah McKinstry-Brown

God as DJ for my dad Holy, holy, holy.

Got a pot of black coffee and I’m smokin’ this galaxy to the filter.

It’s after midnight, ya’ll, and those stars your mamma made you wish on are static, so let’s see these phones ignite. You think it’s Me who saves? Al Green is the One can break and mend in the same breath. If I Can’t Stand the Rain don’t make your daddy sit down at the kitchen table and weep into his fists, then he ain’t got no soul to save. Call me. I’ll spin anything for you crows, buildin’ lives outta gum wrappers and barb wire. Right now, I’m gonna put the needle down and summon Earth, Wind, and Fire, ‘cause we both know it’s the only salve there is for all the nights you gonna spend burnin’ ‘neath My moon.

This one goes out to all the maniacs in their little pink houses, all you mammas and papas pacin’ livin’ room floors with your bundled wailings. And for all the rest of ya’ll, remember, it’s the devil wanna burden you with wings.

It was Me set you free with hips and fingertips. Could be your bones is days from dust. So go on now, get thee to the bedroom, the backseat, the dance floor.

Call in those requests. I’ll only say No if you ask for stupid stuff like Donna Summer or some Little Red Corvette.

The lines are open.

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Melissa Reeser Poulin

The Seeker They say there is one grief inside of everything.

It is like wind that guesses at apples, like the fog of a horse when it hits your palm, just before the wet touch you are afraid of.

They say God is there, too, as silence, held within song, turns out to be music.

Everything is dying— horse, apple, light, hand.

In my farthest dream, I am the horse, simply approaching to see who is there.

In the lake of the hallway there is a door I can open, giving way to a memory I never thought to love: called in from play, I linger in a field blue with dusk, heat rising from the scented grass, as if the sun didn’t want to leave the earth. Not yet.

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Melissa Reeser Poulin

The Prayer The ants know something I don’t.

A manyness that moves, they make quick work of a task I can’t see.

Bodies barely revealed on black plastic, they accept this tube as part of the world.

As for me, I’m in love with guarantee, with germination rates and five-year warranties.

My faith is a tool I hide even from myself, like the gas-powered edger I wrestle with, its pile of broken teeth. Here, bees make their early rounds.

Frogs consult the tomes of spinach.

Across town, birds return to wetlands reborn, the river unburied after centuries of cattle farms.

Because they must, the birds believe in the river, rejoice with songs of unbearable forgiveness.

The cherries and plums mistake March for June, breaking their blossom hearts open

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to spring, whether it’s really real or not. I want a handful of sunflower trust, to just begin again each morning, turn and follow the sun across the sky.

I want the diligence of ants, their hundred acts, moving more than can be carried or known.

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artist/ note

Delro Rosco

respite in the pauses I compose

deeply layered works that invite awareness of brokenness, dependence, and sufficiency while exploring themes of love and identity. My aesthetic is focused on creative spontaneity, gestural abstraction, restraint, imperfection, and serene beauty, which I strive to accomplish through expressive fluid brushstrokes with unexpected use of color and textures.

Extracting from the crossroads of my faith journey and nature, I find respite and inspiration in the pauses and outer fringes of everyday life.

By searching for connections between doubt and certainty, exposing and accepting weakness, rediscovering hope and possibilities, I humbly learn to receive undeserved grace.

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Delro Rosco. Rising Light (1 Corinthians 13 Series). Mineral pigments, sumi ink, oyster shell white, and silver leaf on Kochi paper on panel. 7 x 15 inches.

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Delro Rosco. Uncertainty (Vapor—James 4:13-17 Series). Mineral pigments, sumi ink, oyster shell white, and pure silver on Kumohada paper. 18 x 12.5 inches.

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Delro Rosco. Silence Between the Waves (Vapor—James 4:13-17 Series). Mineral pigments, sumi ink, and oyster shell white on Kochi paper. 11.5 x 10.25 inches.

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Delro Rosco. Offerings 130106. Mineral pigments, sumi ink, oyster shell white, and silver leaf on pastel paper. 9 x 8.75 inches.

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Delro Rosco. Enduring All Things (1 Corinthians 13 Series).

Mineral pigments, sumi ink, and oyster shell white on Kochi paper on panel. 10 x 8 inches.

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Delro Rosco. Return (Vapor—James 4:13-17 Series).

Mineral pigments, watercolor, sumi ink, oyster shell white, and pure silver on watercolor paper. 11 x 10 inches.

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Julie Quinn. Cascade. Mixed media on claybord. 24 x 18 inches.

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Julie Quinn. Reflections. Mixed media on claybord. 36 x 18 inches.

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Rachel J. Bennett

We Were Not Altogether Here after El Greco’s “View of Toledo” It’s easy when the green’s this green to miss your reflection crossing the bridge, to forget your prayer before the church, the path before the wavering grass. How many windows hold fast under this kind of sky? I’ll call you this city, which isn’t this city at all.

They are carrying bread and moonlight up the hill, long skeleton in repose. They are carrying prayers: may the green last, may we be strong enough to carry our hands. Do not depend on the buildings or the trees standing still. I saw you washing out to sea but caught myself: it was actually the sky, and eddies were just footsteps from feet that were yours and not-yours in equal measure.

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Andy Eaton

Panel One: Collapse His body on the floor beside the china hutch like a fallen china hutch, unopened. From the kitchen tiles, four white-coated men carry Andy through the house and out into a medic van. Her hand closes the screen. She locks it before returning to the table.

She pours out the soup, she clears away the highball glasses, the small ones with those oranges sliced and dancing at the base lined inside with a ring of juice, the sour leftover, a little crown where he held it, where as she lifts the empty thing off the placemat, mauve as her makeup, the impression of a hand begins to disappear. The sun in Phoenix heats the city even when it fades.

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Andy Eaton

Panel Two: Collapse A newspaper below the arm of a recliner makes a teepee in my mind.

Someone rocks the chair and lets a lazy Anyway slip into the room like a nib of smoke, and each time I become essentially the moment of my father’s father’s death, his head in a bowl of soup, the neighbor heard him singing hymns in the woodshed before a flock of pigeons flew off like the sound of one fat book being thumbed away.

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The Mother latoya watkins

The visits done died down a little bit now. Some still come. The rustlers like this one sitting in front of me. They still asking bout Hawk. Bout how he come to call hisself the Messiah. Bout who his daddy is, but I ain’t got nothing for them.

I look out the window I keep my chair pulled up next to. Ain’t no sun, just cold and still.

Banjo lift his head up when he see my eyes on him, but it don’t take him long to let it fall back on his paws. He done got his rope a little tangled up. Can’t move too much with it like that, but he can breathe and lay down. He alright. I’ll go out and work out the knot when I can—when this gal leave.

It’s cold out there, but I ain’t too worried bout Banjo. He got natural insulation. I’m the one cold and I’m on the inside—supposed to be on the inside cause I’m a person. I ain’t got no insulation though. This old house ain’t got none neither. The window is rickety and woodframed. Whole house is. Whole house ain’t no thicker—no stronger than a big old piece of plywood. Ain’t nothing to separate me from the cold wind outside but the glass and the pane.

This gal sitting there shivering like white folk ain’t used to the cold. Everybody—even me know white folks is makers of the cold. And this one here white as the snow on the ground out there. Ain’t a whole lot of snow out there. Not enough to stick—to keep these wandering folks like her out my face. I wonder if the snow reached Abilene fore Hawk and his white folks left life for good. Fore he crucified hisself and took all them other people with him.

Wonder if he left this world clean.

“Trees on the outside my window naked all the time,” I say, and I pretend in my mind I was raised here and not on 34th. Just pretend I been on the East side all along. On the East side where good-time whoring didn’t never catch, even if being strung out on drugs did. Where

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snow come to cover up the dirt in places where grass don’t never grow, like icing covering up chocolate cake or brownies or anything dark and sweet. The East side. Where you be happy poor and don’t try to pretend you can whore your way out. I just pretend in my mind I was brought up poor and wasn’t never no whore.

“Ma’am?” the girl say like I done confused her. Lines come up on her forehead. Make all them big freckles look like they shifting. Like she got skin like a sow. Skin that got a life of its own and move and breathe and filthy. She run her hand through her stringy, red hair.

White folk hair. I pray to Jesus she don’t leave none of it in my orange, shag carpet.

“Some folks see green in the summer. But come this time of year, everybody trees look like them out yonder.” I nod my head at the window. I want to make sure she get a good look at the naked, flimsy trees out there. “Like they naked. Like they poor,” I say after a while.

“Oh. Yes,” she say, nodding her head and letting her eyes open real wide like she recognize something I just said. She lift up her head a little bit to look past me—to look out my window. “But won’t you let the dog in? He’s so small for the cold.” I don’t say nothing, but she say something else after a while. “Joshua’s father, Ms. Hawkins. I asked about him. Remember?”

I sigh real loud. I want her to know that what she asking me to talk bout don’t come easy. I’d rather tell her my momma was a junkie whore just like her momma, and the little two-room shanty the government help me rent now would’ve been a mansion in the sky for either one of them. I want to tell her I was fourteen and pregnant when Butch Ugewe come to the Hitching Post and saved me. Made me his. A honest woman. I want to finally tell somebody—anybody—how momma ain’t put up no fight. How all Butch had to do was offer her a little bit of under-the-table money to make me his. But I can’t.

I shrug my shoulders. “Everything different when you traveling through places,” I say, thinking bout where I growed up and how pretty everything looked on the outside. How the womens what lived in Ms. Beaseley’s whorehouse on 34th was poor and throwed out by the world, but couldn’t nobody tell it by looking at them on the outside. Men couldn’t even see the ruin of the place they was in once they got past Ms. Beaseley’s nice lawn and long country porch. The painted up women with twice-douched snatches covered up all they ugly they was pushing theyselfs into.

I move my eyes away from the window and put them on the girl. She got a long bird face and her teeth stick out a little too far for her tiny mouth. I can tell by the way the sides of her mouth drooping down, she ain’t used to being in a place like mine. I don’t want to make her feel more uncomfortable, so I don’t say nothing bout the pregnant looking roach crawling slow up the wood-paneled wall behind her head.

“I reckon peoples be just like them trees, you see?” Her face blank. I can tell she don’t see.

“Everybody got a season to go through being ugly and naked.” I laugh a little bit.

“Yes, ma’am,” she say. Then she sigh and let her eyes roll halfway round in the sockets.

“We all have problems, but can we—” “That enough heat on you?” I ask. “Can’t never keep this old lean-to warm. That enough heat on you—” I stop myself from calling her “miss”. I want to spank the back of my own

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hand. She younger than me. Probably bout by twenty years or more. Still, I want to make sure that the old electric heater sitting on the cracked and splintered floor near her feet humming is doing what it’s supposed to do. Sometimes it blow cold air instead heat like it’s supposed to. I want to make sure it ain’t freezing her.

She look confused bout my question. Them lines in her head get deeper, and she start shaking her foot a little. She want her story for the paper. Want to find out if I think my son was God like them folks what was following behind him in Abilene.

Last time I saw him, Hawk told me he was the real son of God, and Jesus was a scud. Told me he was the truth, and me and the rest of the world best believe it. Dust storm was swirling outside like it was the end of things that day. He walked into my life after all those years.

All I could wonder was how he found me. Walked in and spread his arms like a giant black bird and said “Woman, you are the mother of I am.”

I shake my head. “Hawk was always a good boy. Always. After Butch died, he helped me raise hisself for as long as he could. He did everything he could to make sure we was tooken care of. Hawk wasn’t but nine, but he sure learned to do what he had to do.”

Hawk asked me bout his daddy when he was still a little boy. I told him it was Butch, and Butch denied it right in his face. Later on, after Butch was dead and my legs was back to

Some of them say I can make money and be rich, but I want to be

where I am.

welcoming mens all night long, I told him bout Mary and Jesus and me and hisself. Tucked him into bed, and he looked up at me like I was something. Everything was still in the house that night. No tricks, no butch, no drugs. And I wanted him to be still and special and good, so I told him the same story I heard as girl. Same story the preacher shouted over the pulpit some Sundays when Ms. Beaseley would drag ever whore in the house down to Good Shepherd’s Baptist Church. Cept I made him the star. “Truth is you dropped right out the sun to my arms,” I told him. “I was just a girl. Ain’t know nothing bout mens and babies. You spe-

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cial, Hawk. You special. God your daddy. You special.” I wanted him to be normal. I ain’t want him to be no whore son. Folks would’ve judged him for what I was.

When Hawk first died, the papers and stuff ain’t bother with me too much. Reckon wasn’t really no way for them to know who I was. I hadn’t been his momma since I gave him up. But after his body went missing from out the morgue last week, all kind of stuff done printed in the paper. Newspapers coming to get my story—to know bout Hawk and me and how everything happened. Some of them say I can make money and be rich, but I want to be where I am. I want be happy poor. I tried most of my life to whore myself rich. I don’t want to pretend. I’m gone be where I’m at.

Fore his body went missing, it was all scandal. It was a story printed in the paper bout him messing with a little girl up there in Abilene. Say he was charged with aggravated sexual assault on a child cause he used some kind of doctor instrument to see if the little girl had some kind of cancer in her woman part. Paper say he was doctoring them Abilene folks and ain’t have the right training. Had his own community—own world out there. He was God and made soap and growed food, and them folks gave him everything they had so he could have more than they did. Hawk got thirty years in prison that I ain’t never know bout for doctoring on that little girl. Least that’s what the paper say. Called it some kind of rape or something. Say he made all them folks kill theyselves, so he wouldn’t have to do his time.

Now though, since they can’t figure out what done happened to his body, they printing stuff bout proving who he really was, eye witness accounts of his miracles, and the search for his real daddy. I can’t tell them nothing. I don’t know what to think. All I know is I don’t talk to the big ones. I only let them small timers come through my door. They don’t come promising nothing. They want to hear me.

The lady look at the pad she been writing on. “Yes, but Butch Ugewe wasn’t his biological father, right?”

I try to dig back to stuff I remember from church and Ms. Beaseley talking. She was like some kind a madame preacher. Always saying the world need whores so the good Lord can have folks to save.

I finally smack my lips and say, “Shoot. Baby, you gone have to forgive me. Bonanza bout to happen.” I get up slow cause my body don’t move the way it used to. I cross over her legs and say scuse me, making my way to the TV. I push the button on the thing, and it make a loud popping noise that make the girl jump a little bit. “Ain’t no need to be afraid, chile,” I say, making my way back over her legs. “Things old round here. We all got our ticks.”

She sigh. “Yes, but Butch Ug—” “You a God-fearing woman, umm . . . what’s your name, baby?” I ask, and wait for her to tell me her name again.

She look at me like she don’t know what to say. Then she say, “Rhoda. Rhoda Pearson, and I was raised Catholic.” She kind of tilt her head up a little like Catholic is more better than regular God-fearing.

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“Oh,” I say, and I don’t know what else to say cause I don’t know much bout them Catholics. “Y’all go by the Bible?”

She nod her head and shrug her shoulders at the same time. Her lips is straight across like a line drawed on a stick-figure face. Like she don’t know what that got to do with anything—her religion.

I think bout my last conversation with Hawk. He talked bout earthly fathers and his heavenly one. “Well, you know in one them books, Matthew, I think, when everybody get to begetting somebody else?” She nod her head. “Well, Hawk told me that ain’t had nothing to do with Jesus momma. That’s all bout Joseph. The step-daddy.”

“That’s right. The genealogy in that book is Joseph’s,” she say, nodding her head. She interested in what I got to say now.

“Well, if the Jesus, the one you and half the world think was the Messiah, and his disciples ain’t care nothing about who was and wasn’t his real daddy, why we always trying prove DNA and mess today?”

She laugh a little and then sigh. She sit the pad down on her lap and look at the old TV I got sitting on top the big floor model. Bonanza going and she act like she into it.

This one chubby. She got brown hair, and I know it’s shedding soon as she walk in. Got strings of it all over her shirt, and it don’t look healthy at all. She holding her little notepad close to her chest like it got secrets about the world in it. When she sit down on the couch, the plastic I keep it covered with sound like it’s screaming. She look around the room until she land her eyes on me. Look like she trying to place the dates on my old-time furniture.

“It ain’t antique,” I say. “Just old. Stuff ain’t nobody else want no more.”

She smile and nod her head. I sit down in my rocking chair next to the window.

“I hated to hear about your son’s death, Ms. Hawkins,” she say. I wave her words away with my hand. She keep going. “I hate for any mother to lose her child. I’m a mother myself, Ms. Hawkins,” she say, grabbing at her breast with her chubby hand. “Miscarried four times before my son was born. I know what it’s like to lose a child.” Her eyes look sad like she want me to be sad with her. She looking at me hard. I wave my hand at her again.

“I hadn’t seen a hair on Hawk head in years fore I saw them surrounding his place on the news. I loved him. Mommas always love they boys. But Hawk been gone from me longer than two weeks.”

“I take it you all weren’t close,” she say, looking at me from the corners of her eyes like she done found out something important, or I done gave the best gossip of the day.

And I think on it for a minute. The last time I saw him, I cooked for him. Smothered pork chops, collards, sweet potatoes, and hot water cornbread. It was the first time I had cooked for him since fore drugs took hold of me. Fore I lost him—for they took him. He wouldn’t eat the pork chops. Said they don’t do that at the House of Joshua. Said they don’t do a lot of other things. They don’t bathe with regular bath soap. They make theirs out of lye. Said pork chops and real soap is grounds for excommunication.

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He brought a white man to my house that day. Short, stocky something. His skin was bout as pale as the off-white paint on my wall, and he was bald at the top but had his hair swooped over like he wanted to hide it. I wanted to tell him his head was slick as a table even with that hair swooped over, but I had seen too many white, bald, swooped heads to let my tongue go like that. He didn’t never open his wide rubber lips—not the whole time he was here. Just stood there like some kind of midget bodyguard.

He told me I looked good. Said he could see clean in my spirit, and I ain’t apologize to him bout leaving him to be with myself. For never coming to get him when them white folks took him from me. I ain’t tell him I was sorry for letting him go out into the world ten years old and full of my lies. I ain’t apologize bout nothing.

Apologize for what? Hawk ain’t end up so bad. Turned out better than he would’ve if I wouldn’t have messed up. Foster family what got him, kept him. Made him go to school.

Made him stick with it. He went to school for theology. Found hisself in there, he said. Sat at

His eyes was like two light

chestnuts, but his skin was

dark as pure brass. my table and tossed words I ain’t understand around like a empty grocery bag, blowing in a dust storm. Seeing him that day with his midget driver and bodyguard and being served by them white folks like he was sweet Jesus hisself made me feel good bout saving him from being a whore son.

Sat at my table and told me he found his daddy. I wanted to find out who he found. Wanted to know who his daddy was myself. All his life I had tried to look for signs in his body.

Something to tell me which one of them mens that had me made me have him. Looked at his height. Even that day, his tall body swayed when he walked through my front door. He had to bend—kind of fold hisself just to get through. His eyes was like two light chestnuts, but his skin was dark as pure brass. He was a big, muscular man. Look like he could crush you without trying.

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Hawk stretched out his hands like he was bout to be pent up on a cross and asked me in his thunder voice, “Woman, would thou like to be saved? Set free?” Then he told me his story bout being my savior—savior to all mens and womens. Savior of the world. Told me he had place for me in paradise. Told me he wanted me to come to Abilene.

“We was close enough,” I finally say to chubby. She write on her pad.

“What was he like as a boy, Ms. Hawkins?” she ask, smiling. I see some green stuff in her teeth, and it make me smile too. I don’t say nothing bout it. Just sit there smiling back at her.

I shrug my shoulders. “Hawk was a regular boy. Wanted what regular little boys want.

Went where regular little boys we—” “I know, I know, but he had to be different in some kind of way, Ms. Hawkins. There must have been something significant about him. He led all of those people in Abilene. Most of them followed him for more than twenty years, and a lot of people say they saw him perform miracles. People died for him, Ms. Hawkins,” she say, holding her hands out in front of herself, letting them shake a little like she having a fit. She finally drop them back down to her lap and sigh.

“Was he anything like his father, ma’am?” she ask.

I look at her long and hard. She just a little younger than me. Look like she probably in her late forties or something. Got a round pie-face like a trick used to come see me when I

Then he told me his story bout being my savior—

savior to all mens

and womens. was still a little girl. He didn’t never seem to mind my young naked bottom on the nasty bare mattress. I always imagined him going back home to nice clean sheets. Leaving me dirty and ruined and spilling over with his seeds. Now I imagine him as her daddy.

I let myself smile. “You from here, young lady?” I ask. And she look like she don’t want to answer, but she do.

She nod her head and smile. “Been away most of my adult life though. Never wanted to write for the Avalanche. Too small. Everything about this place is small,” she say, looking

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around my den. “Alas, I am here. The winding roads of life, huh?”

Her eyes land on the only picture hanging on the wall. The eight-by-ten frame is crooked and dusty. I haven’t touched it in years. She got questions in her eyes. The black woman in the picture smiling with her hand halfway covering her mouth, and a white man touching— look like a soft touch—the side of her face and looking at her with love in his eyes. A dark image in the background blurred out of focus, but it look like a child playing in the background.

“May I?” she ask, pointing that the picture, standing up like she gone walk toward.

“Gone,” I say. “If it tickle your fancy.” I turn my head and look out the window. Banjo resting on his paws, tied up to the tree. I think about maybe putting a blanket out there, so he won’t have to lay on top of the snow. He old and tired and ain’t barked to complain bout being tied up. Tied up to that tree is all Banjo know though.

“Oh, it’s the photo that came with the frame,” she say out loud, and then she laugh a little bit and start making her way back to the couch. “So is he? Is—or was your son anything like his father.”

“You anything like your father?” I ask. Her eyes get wide, and she look down at her hand.

“I suppose I used to be. He’s nothing like himself these days. Alzheimer’s. He . . . ,” she trail off and sniff. “He dies some everyday.” She look sad, and I feel kind of sorry bout pushing her, but I know her kind. She want her story. She’ll cry to get it.

“Guess we all got a little bit of our daddies in us. If we dig deep enough we find that. Hawk ain’t no different. He was his father’s son.”

“Who was his father, Ms. Hawkins? If you don’t mind my asking.” She add the last part on kind of quick.

I shake my head cause now I can’t get the picture of my old trick out of my head. I see him on top of me with Alzheimer’s. He drooling on my face and calling me a strange name.

“I was Hawk daddy after Butch was gone. After I was gone, he had a foster daddy. I’m sure he had pieces of all us in him,” I say.

“Yeah, but I meant . . . , ” she say and just stop talking. She tilt her head to the side and smile. “Yeah.”

Hawk told me that Jesus was scud and his disciples was tricked. Told me I couldn’t get to heaven if I didn’t go through him. Called hisself the “Great Mediator.” Called God El Shaddai; said El Shaddai told him I was pure as a virgin, so he choosed me. Said that white man, who name was Troy, was the one true disciple of the one true Messiah. I laughed at him and that white man that day.

“Woman, my family are those who do the will of my father,” he said that day, looking at me all serious. “All real men like this one,” he said, pointing at Troy. “Woman, these men have cast their homes, their businesses, and their people aside. Everything to follow the one true Messiah.” He was nodding his head and poking his lips out like he used to do when he was young—when he in trouble and wanted to cry his way out.

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I asked, “You mean for me to believe you Jesus hisself, Hawk?”

He just shook his head. “I mean for you to believe I am Joshua the Messiah. Jesus was a scud. We—my Father and I—we chose you from the beginning. I mean—we mean,” he said, pointing to Troy and up toward the ceiling, “for you to believe the truth. To carry it. To live it.”

This one is a homely looking thing. Look like a baby—mutt baby. She mixed. Black and white, I think. She ain’t got no pen and pad, but she done bought a official looking white woman with her. Woman look like she FBI or something. Got a real straight face and a long thick body. Something like a giant or a angel or something out of this world. Coal black hair pulled back in a bun. It look wet. I want to thank her for at least tying it up fore coming here.

But her face—the way the bones in her cheeks all high and tight make it look like she can’t smile if she want to, like she evil and mean, and I don’t want to say nothing to her. She ain’t the one here for the story though. I can tell by her empty eyes. It’s the young’un—the mutt want the story.

She look bout fifteen—a tall fifteen. Look like white trash with drops of black up in her.

Hair that dirty blonde a lot of mutts born with, and it’s long and stringy and kind of thin for her kind. She don’t look right with the FBI lady. Make me think bout Joshua and the last time he was here with his midget bodyguard. They looked lopsided just like these two. Cept with them it was they builds. These two gals is lopsided in other ways. They lopsided in what they got. One get to be all white and one don’t. Anybody can look at them and see that.

The young’un look like she belong here—here on the East side with the poor black folks.

Look like one of us, so out of all the wonderers that been in here asking bout my boy, I offer her a cup of water. I don’t want to offer her FBI agent nothing, but I gone head and do it. The young’un say yes, but, just like I knew she would, FBI say no. She looking around like she expecting to see a roach or something, and I kind of want to tell her that they don’t go to crawling till I turn the lights off for bed. I want to tell her they like bed bugs, cept they don’t want me—my blood. They want the crumbs I drop that been dropped down to me.

She look at the young’un and nod her head toward me, and the young’un open her mouth and say, “We aren’t really supposed to be here. Ms. Gertrude risked her fostering to bring me here.”

FBI Gertrude reach out her hand and let it slide from the top of the girl head all the way down to her shoulders, and I hope she don’t leave no hair on my couch. “It is really not a problem, Chloe,” she say, and I realize she ain’t American. Sound like she from somewhere hard and cold like Germany or Russia. I had a trick that had been to both places, and his body always felt like popsicles. He was hard and rough, and I couldn’t never do nothing good for him. “You have been through so much already. Gertrude only want to help.” Then she do something that surprise me. She spread her lips and smile like it hurt.

The young’un smile back at her fore she look back at me. “I need you to tell about Joshua Hawkins. They printed your name in the paper, and Ms. Gertrude—she’s my foster mother since everything happened—”

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“Maybe you should tell her what happened, child,” Gertrude say.

The girl ignore her and say, “I’m Chloe Hawkins, ma’am. Joshua was my father.” She say her words with a straight face like I’m posed to know. Like I been expecting her or something. But Hawk ain’t say nothing bout no kids when he come here three years ago. Ain’t say nothing bout no wife either. Matter-of-fact, Hawk ain’t really say nothing bout hisself. I look at her skin and know she carrying somebody blackness. She tall like Hawk, and her eyes sit big in her head kind of like his.

“Oh,” is all I can say. I don’t feel nothing like I think a grandmother would. I don’t feel nothing like wrapping her up and warming her from the world. I want to though. Want to feel how I forgot to feel with Hawk. Want to want to go bake a tray of cookies or a pie or something like that. But I don’t. Just sit here and wait for her mouth to guide me.

“I had twelve brothers and sisters,” she say, letting her eyes drop to her lap. “They’re all gone now. Died with my father and mothers. I was with Gertrude. They placed me there after . . . ,” her words just stop.

She look down at her hands and start bending her fingers back like she want to pop or something. She look back up, and her eyes shining different cause they got tears in them.

She sniff and sigh, and I know.

“You her, ain’t you?” I ask, looking in her eyes. They chestnuts like Hawk’s. They just like his. His eyes was the first thing I noticed when I slid him out my snatch like piss. They was brown and nutty, and I knowed nothing that beautiful didn’t come from me. I wanted to pop

She trying to get comfortable, and I want to tell her that the springs poking out

ain’t gone let her.

them out and save them—hold them close to my heart. I loved his eyes. They was always his very best thing. They was always the thing I wanted to save from seeing the whore in me.

“You the one he got in trouble bout touching,” I say. “You my grandbaby?” I ask.

She nod her head and sniff hard. The water in her eyes start to spill on out, and Gertrude rub her back. “I know he wasn’t certified or anything, but he would never hurt me. Not the

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way they say. He was good doctor. All he eve—” “It is okay, Chloe,” Gertrude say, spitting a little on the last letter of each word she say.

“Remember what the doctor says. Do not make excuse for him. The only way to face it—” “Stop it, Ms. Gertrude,” she say loud enough to cause the lady’s eyes to get wide but still soft enough to not be disrespectful. “Just stop it. You’ve got to stop hating them. I can’t get past them. They were all I knew.” Gertrude nod her head and look at me. Chloe look at me too. “They took me from home after the whole thing got out—after the mole leaked it. They took me, and now I don’t have a home anymore.”

“Yes, you do, Chloe. You are with Gertrude,” Gertrude say real fast and sloppy like she got to hurry and get it out. Like if she don’t hurry up Chloe won’t understand that she want to be there for her.

“I know,” Chloe say real soft. “But I want my family. I want them to rest in peace and not lies,” she say, the words spilling out her mouth like fire ants from a stepped on nest. “I want to follow the truth. I believe my father was him—the Messiah. He lives. I don’t care what people say. How they want him to look. He—” “Okay, Chloe. Okay,” Gertrude say, nodding her head.

Chloe smile and rest her back in my couch. She trying to get comfortable, and I want to tell her that the springs poking out ain’t gone let her. I want to tell her I had that old couch since Hawk was a little boy. I done screwed on that couch. I done shot-up and throwed-up on that couch, but I don’t say nothing. I let her try to find her place in it.

“Please, ma’am,” she say without looking at me. She looking at her hands in her lap. “My father was the son of El Shaddai. I know that. But there have to be witnesses in the world.

I’m a witness. But you have to tell them—tell them who his father was.” she say, looking up at me. Her eyes filling up like a glass under the faucet. “Tell all these folks so they can finally know. Tell them so they can be saved too.”

I think bout Hawk and El Shaddai and God and this little half-something gal sitting in front of me. She want the story—acting like she need it. And Hawk was a good boy, and his story was really the only thing he ever asked me for. Wanted his daddy and to know I wasn’t perfect like I kept telling him. Wanted to know the truth bout hisself, and I ain’t had no way of knowing myself. He went on out and made his own truth, and I ain’t got half a right to take that away from him.

All them skinned knees and unfixed lunches and bullies and growling stomachs and me high or on my back or not there flash fore my eyes. And his last visit do too. The one where he bought the white man with him. How he left with tears in his eyes cause I laughed when he asked me to come follow him in Abilene. How his lips quivered like they did when he was six months bout to cry. How he was asking me to be the momma of God cause I had told him when he was little I was. How I struck a match to my cigarette and laughed in his face. I see it all, and I know Hawk wasn’t never confused. He knowed I was a junkie whore and ain’t know who his daddy was, but he wanted me to be something else. He wanted me to be what I said I was.

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He went out and made me the momma of God. I laugh a little, thinking bout people following an old junkie whore, bowing to her like she pure and righteous and clean. Like she the momma of God. I look in Chloe lonely, lied to eyes, and I wonder. They the same eyes as Hawk’s. I wonder if Hawk would’ve done that exam on her if I told him his momma was a whore when he was little. Wonder if he would’ve been a messiah if he seen the truth back then. Wonder what would’ve happened if I’d of popped out his eyes after he slid into the world.

I open my mouth, thinking bout what Hawk made me. What I want him to be.

“Baby, I ain’t knowed no man when Hawk was made. Matter-of-fact, I called him Hawk cause it seem to me he dropped right out the sun into my arms,” I say. “And if you want me to, I’ll tell the world.”

And that little girl smile so wide it feel like the sun shining on me for the first time ever.

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Bryana Johnson

Fourteen Reasons Not to Jump Because you are young with many soft rains in front of you. Because you are old with many soft rains behind you. Because of the sharp blood of the trees and the smell of the ground that rises on every side.

Because of the bread in your cupboard that you left uneaten. Because children have killed for bread. Because the world is a great killing-field.

Because the world is a vast ball-room. Because of the lilies of the field.

Because the green earth will never let you go. Because she has always been like a gray miser chasing pennies across the tiles. Because the royal and cerulean sky does not want you. Because you have no wings.

Because out of diamonds gripping the ground comes the spring, a chorus of crocuses. Because someday you may find a puzzle with five thousand pieces and put it together, cardboard slice by cardboard slice.

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Linda Martin

The Feather for Zoey Yellow kayak nudges a silver shoreline, three cellophaned bouquets bungeed to the bow.

I slip into my spray skirt, zip up my life vest.

Slender boat swings like a compass needle on the bay, east toward Halibut Cove, south toward Haystack Rock.

I spin at the center of a far-flung grief, shadowed, unsure of my direction.

High September clouds, channel marker clanging, waves crest like folds in a silken comforter.

I paddle west, remembering my daughter’s infant daughter, deeply, briefly known.

Her birthday roses then, unwrapped, set adrift in a lavish lonely gesture. Mountains curve toward the open sea.

A tiny feather skims lightly on the tide, white, fine as baby hair, beside me a moment and gone.

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Peter Caccavari

A Cipher Which Settles for Substitutes Perhaps it is the umbilical memory of the womb that makes us nostalgic for being a part of another person.

That blood-pact with our mothers gave us a taste for it and now we can’t seem to let it go.

It is why Catholics eat their God and drink His blood. It is why bodies find their way into each other.

And yet, there is always some barrier that puts us in our place, that stops our forward progress, that leaves us stranded. So we resort to more remote minglings. Ascetics have tried to get inside the skin of another by opening up their own.

They marked their flesh with glyphs of longing, a cipher which settles for substitutes.

Christ-aching pilgrims lashed their bodies to share a bond of pain, to inflame compassion in a mutual suffering. Others held out their hands, into which were placed stigmata, red apples with quite a bite.

The most distant, most tenuous ties of one with another are in poems.

There words trail like thunder from lightning, the light gone, the echo fading, and the rain falling, pelting the ground, re-making the dirt, which forgives the rain for not being lightning.

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Jeffrey G. Dodd

But Since It Is a Matter of Questions about Words and Names There, under Pisgah, my grandmother scrubbing her frypan, glancing first at As for me and my house then through the window at the neighbor child who will be abducted, smothered—and whose torn orange sock behind the schoolyard will trigger the town’s terror deep and far. My grandmother, who once had a face her father’s fist could not resist, is now the preacher’s wife unable to console the child’s mother, only crying Yea, though I walk until she sees again the valley slung low before them.

Or, my mother, our town’s first lady cop running the fifteenth fairway after a truant who’d lifted cigarettes and beer and then a nine-iron from the backswing of an old man’s slice, she the club’s next target as she reached for her pistol. “Not much older than you,” she says days later as she leaves me at the church where the man in a suit yells thy rod and thy staff. I know this eases her, my being told about dining in the presence of mine enemies. As she gears her cruiser toward the crush of law, I reach to the closet’s dark edge for the gin I’d lifted from my best friend’s brother.

Now my wife, for whom the mere mention of our daughter’s name is an anointing, frantic to extend her milk and the tie that must be unbound, eating herbs of the wild Pacific, mechanizing her breasts and optimizing production until she’s full mother and full factory, a kind of half woman–half life-giving machine: The Terminator reborn by lactation consultants and California hippies. And I, who as she’s feeding our daughter and crying about drying up, can only fight to find the words for our cup runneth over and over.

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review/ 29

Entering the Wild:

Essays on Faith and Writing

by Jean Janzen • Good Books, 2012

reviewed by Melanie Springer Mock

In a 2009 interview for Christians in the Arts, Jean Janzen had this to say of her own creative process: “A developing poem is making some order out of chaos. It is finding a shape, a form, in which the wild can be held.” So it is with the award-winning poet’s memoir, Entering the Wild, published last year. From the seemingly disparate moments in her life— and that of her family, her forebears, her denominational community—Janzen has created an order, and we as readers can call it good.

Janzen, who now lives in Fresno, California, is already the author of several poetry collections, including most recently Paper House, published in 2008. Her work has appeared in a number of literary journals and poetry anthologies. Rudy Wiebe, considered by many a father of Mennonite letters, has said that “Jean Janzen writes our songs,” praise both figurative and literal. Metaphorically, Janzen’s poetry inscribes the life of her people, the Mennonites; but Janzen has also written songs for a revised Mennonite hymnal, published in the early ‘90s, including “Mothering God, You Gave Me Birth” and “I Cannot Dance, Oh Love.”

In Entering the Wild, Janzen narrates the process of crafting these hymns; and I found the chapter titled “Three Women and the Lost Coin: How Three Women Found Me” the memoir’s most compelling. In 1990, Janzen was asked to be on a committee to recreate a Mennonite hymnal that might “nourish . . . congregations for twenty years or more.” The committee, wanting to include several hymns honoring the feminine characteristics of God, turned to Janzen. Janzen describes encountering the work of three mystic women—Julian of Norwich, Hildegard von Bingen, and Mechtild of Magdeburg—and finding there “the possibilities of devotion and celebration that opened windows to my own imagination.”

Janzen wonders whether the Mennonite church would “allow this medieval, yet fresh, language into our hymns,” and as a fellow Mennonite, my inclination is to immediately respond to this question: I can’t imagine that they would. Yet Janzen unfolds her answer to the question, tracing her own journey through the medieval texts, revealing how the

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women’s writings opened up God—and her imagination—in new ways, and showing how the Mennonite hymnal committee gave Janzen a substantive gift she hadn’t even known she’d needed. “Their gift to me,” Janzen says, “was the opportunity to create out of the writings something I had not sought.”

The chapter includes some lyrics for each of the three songs Janzen wrote, allowing us to read Janzen’s powerful reframing of the mystics’ texts, refracting their understanding of the feminine divine. She gives new voice to women speaking God’s love centuries ago. Janzen’s poetry here—and the story of its creation—expands our perception of God, renaming God for us; God becomes Root of Life, Eternal Vigor, Saving One, Moving Force, Mother. As a Mennonite, I was especially moved by Janzen’s story, recognizing the potentially subversive nature of her words and the risk taken to have them included in a hymnal used by most Mennonite churches.

While “Three Women and the Lost Coin” looks at a relatively brief moment in Janzen’s life, other essays cover larger expanses—or, at least, seem to. Interestingly, Janzen marks each chapter with a date, though these are rarely fixed on a singular time. For example, chapter five, “Piano: Music as Presence,” covers the years 1933 to present, noted in the chapter’s subtitle. Within the chapter, Janzen narrates the purchase early in her marriage of a used baby grand; her first piano recital at age six; sitting at the piano in Chicago, while her husband worked long hours as a medical resident; the lessons she gave while living in Fresno; and finally, playing the piano for her ailing mother, and then right after her mother’s death.

Rather than focusing on a single event, then—say, her piano recital in 1933—Janzen effectively conveys to us the ways stories continue to unfold. Significantly, too, she addresses the idea considered often in memoir: that our present, who we are today, will absolutely influence how we carry understanding to and craft a narrative of the past.

Although the last event in “Piano,” playing after her mother’s death, happened somewhat removed from its creation here in Entering the Wild, Janzen acknowledges elsewhere in the book that her present, and the very act of writing, are part of the “mystery of life itself,” and that the “dramatic beginnings” in our lives (a first piano recital, for example) “enlarge us in ways we cannot imagine.”

Perhaps given this orientation, those readers seeking a comprehensive memoir will not find it here. At times, I hoped for something more: more story, more detail, more insight into Janzen’s life as a mother and as a poet. What we have are glimpses of Janzen’s life journey: hints at the challenges she faced as a wife to a successful medical doctor; flashes of insight into her development as a poet; and some connections, all too fleeting, to her Mennonite roots, primarily in Russia.

Still, there is power in compression and the beauty of lyrical prose. Entering the Wild is fundamentally poetry, and might well be read as such. Throughout, Janzen relies on the toolbox of a poet, allowing us to see her life through turns of phrase and keen attention to detail. Hers is the individual story made universal, open enough for all of us to step inside; together, we can enter the wild with Janzen, and find an extraordinary world created there.

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Christina Lee

Aftershocks Christchurch, New Zealand Even the sky here seems fissured.

It leaks dawn like an accident.

All these people with their shatterproof faces, scaffolded smiles, pulling down caps and tightening scarves.

They clutch purses close.

There is no trust left in them.

On the streets they shuffle among the rubble of cathedrals.

Like jilted lovers they work all conversation back around to it.

Mostly they look down as if remembering the shock of loss: how it comes from nowhere, how it begins below.

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J. Scott Brownlee

Prayer for Unmourned Collision Give him nothingness.

Bury his bones three-feet deep where no spear grass roots cling & white crosses can’t reach.

Leave him freedom to breathe & be reborn again, finding resurrection in each word he can’t speak to feel fully convinced every black bending —whether of phoneme, highway, or belief—contains sound reasoning for his own existence now split into many. He inhabits the windshield & sky & the truck’s grill he merges into. & though this yearling fawn dead on cement, bright in the eye-like headlights of traffic, finds it impossible to say what he cannot say—each path taken a sadness—help him enter & exit the truck’s momentum as it meets his spirit collapsed back to fence posts, fresh hoof-prints in caliche, his breath lessening. Let his ending be quick as the mockingbird’s speech, turkey vulture’s preaching, fire ant’s elegy.

Watch his body rot green, insectrich now anonymously but still full of purpose, unexpected beauty: beetles feasting on blue entrails with their pincers, pill bugs curling in spaces they carve out of skin, golden cockroaches, even, nesting near crickets—here where only the meek assemble to claim him —gleaming with communion.

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Jill Reid

Piney Woods, Beauregard Parish An old man remembers how piney woods once jumped fences and landed in pastures, prairies, red clay hills, how they swelled and knotted like the old, hard-knuckled hands that sliced the long-leaf, the loblolly in the timber tight rows of log camps. He shuffles with the chicory dark gurgle of the coffee pot and lugs the children through his memory, exhales the tangy, amber breath of woods and knows what the trees did before he and his sons came with their saw prone hands.

We wondered who would sing the woods after the last woodsman’s silence sunk beneath the hand-cut slabs of gravestone.

My great-grandmother said to listen for the whippoorwills.

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An Emissary kevin mclellan

Sometimes, but not often enough, I heard the river. Sometimes, but not often enough, the flames resembled his yellow. Verne, my dead pet canary, was cremated in our campfire.

The next morning, I walked across a clearing and noticed something small in the dirt. It wasn’t moving, but as I neared I could see that it was a bird—a sparrow. I crouched, put the back of my hand flat on the ground, and it jumped in my hand. No, the sparrow wasn’t quite in my hand and not quite on my hand, somewhere in between, yet I could feel its claws. I stood up with the sparrow. We looked at one another.

I’m not sure how much time had passed, but at a certain point I realized that we were surrounded by curious children and a brawny man. The man said, “This isn’t typical behavior, sparrows are skittish, perhaps it’s injured . . . ,” so I walked with the sparrow to a nearby tree with the intention of leaving it on a branch, but a breeze began, just slightly, and the sparrow took flight. It flew to the river. It followed the river. It followed the course of the river.

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contributors / 29

Rachel J. Bennett grew up on the Illinois-Iowa border. Her work has appeared in journals including elimae, New Madrid, Permafrost, Smartish Pace, the Portland Review, Toad, and Verse Daily. Her poems have been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and have been finalists for awards through Smartish Pace and Bayou Magazine. She studied English and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Grinnell College, participated in the Irish Writing Program in Dublin through the University of Iowa, and calls Brooklyn home.

J. Scott Brownlee is a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow at NYU. His work appears in Hayden’s Ferry Review, RATTLE, Beloit Poetry Journal, Nashville Review, Ninth Letter, BOXCAR Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Devil’s Lake, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Brownlee writes primarily about the people and landscape of rural Texas and is a founding member of The Localists, a new literary movement that emphasizes place-based writing of personal witness, cultural memory, and the aesthetically marginalized working-class, both in the United States and abroad.

Peter Caccavari lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he has lived most of his life. He has previously published in ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum and Connecticut River Review. He was one of four winners of the 2013 Poetry Contest for the Cincinnati Public Library. He teaches at the University of PhoenixCincinnati Campus, where he is Director of Academic Affairs.

He is currently working toward permanent diaconate in the Roman Catholic Church. He continues to be humbled by the depth of love and forgiveness his children constantly model for him, and his wife has turned making granola into a corporal work of mercy.

James Crews was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. His work has appeared most recently in Ploughshares, the New Republic, and the Times Literary Supplement, and he is the author of The Book of What Stays, winner of the 2010 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. He has worked as a salesman of Bespoke Wallpaper, an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer, and an English teacher in rural Oregon. He spent this past summer working as a cook at a Buddhist monastery near Thunder Bay, Ontario.

Andrea Janelle Dickens is originally from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and currently splits her time between Oxfordshire, England, and the Phoenix area where she teaches at Arizona State. Her poems have recently appeared in Thin Air, the Found Poetry Review, and New South Journal.

She is also a ceramic artist and a beekeeper in her spare time.

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When Adelaide Dodd grows into her teenage years, she’s likely to be very embarrassed by her father, Jeffrey G. Dodd, just as he was by his. Until then, he will use her as a stock device in bios like this to explain to others why he copied out every sentence in the New Testament that begins with a coordinating conjunction, and why he’s currently writing 200 poems, each taking one of those sentences as its title. This is a kind of passion, he may explain to her, for joinery—for connection—like when I’m holding you or your outstretched arms when your mother walks in the room.

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland. He is the author of many books of essays and fiction, notably the sprawling Oregon novel Mink River. His new essay collections The Thorny Grace of It and Reading in Bed will be published this fall.

Andy Eaton was born in California and now lives in Belfast where he met his wife, who nurses in a local hospital. He is a PhD student at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry and a songwriter for Blackbird Cathedral. His poems recently appear in, or are forthcoming from, Crab Orchard Review, Magma, and Narrative.

Catherine Hawkins lives in northeastern Massachusetts where she pursues writing and the romantic idea of smallscale farming. She holds a degree in English and music from Gordon College, and she currently teaches Latin to eager and not-so-eager 3rd–12th graders. When she isn’t writing or teaching, she’s most likely singing, drinking coffee, or selling honey and eggs at the local farmers’ market.

Treasure Hoagwood writes: “I have been involved in oil painting most of my life, having been interested in photography for the last ten years. Artistic endeavors always remind me that the world is larger than we perceive, and this seems especially true in photographic pursuits. A glimpse into another world, a reflection of a reflection, the metaphorical values playing out in light and shadow. It challenges me to look for more than is apparent, whether in myself, in others, or the world around me.”

Bryana Johnson is the recipient of several poetry prizes, including a prize in the 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg contest and the grand prize in the 2013 Utmost Christian Writers Contest. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Having Decided to Stay, was released with Ethandune Publishing in 2012. Among many other things, Bryana loves Emily Dickinson, P.G. Wodehouse, C.S. Lewis, acrylic paints,

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acoustic guitar, Austrian economics, Amy Carmichael, educational theory, Gerard Manley Hopkins, rain, Loreena McKennit, watercolors, J.S. Bach, political science, thunderstorms, history, calligraphy, G.K. Chesterton, Frederic Bastiat, the wonder of green things, and children.

She writes regularly about the good life, literature, and the world’s great Lover over at www.bryanajohnson.com. You can also find her on Twitter at @_Bryana_Johnson.

Jay Kidd lives in New York City with his husband Ken, and they have had the very deep satisfaction of living on the same street in Greenwich Village for nearly twenty-five years. Jay’s work has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review and the Burningword Literary Journal, and he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He studies the craft of poetry at the Writers Studio. After many years of being a psychotherapist, Jay now works as a certified life coach helping people navigate the human experience. He is a graduate of Earlham College and Union Theological Seminary. Jay is a practitioner of Bikram yoga because he likes the heat, and some of his best poetry ideas have often occurred to him in the middle of an asana. Also, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “God’s Grandeur” hovers always at the back of his mind.

Christina Lee lives in Sierra Madre, a tiny foothill town just east of Los Angeles, California. She teaches seventh grade English at a nearby public school. This August, she graduated from Seattle Pacific’s MFA program with a concentration in poetry. When she’s not grading, she spends her time hiking, doing yoga, and traveling as much as possible. Her books are organized by color.

Linda Martin used to be a ski writer, but as she matured (marriage, property, children) she turned to poetry, receiving an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma in 2011. Since then she has called herself a poet, profoundly grateful to have found a spiritual practice that combines solitude, community, and beauty. She and her husband own a glass shop in Homer, Alaska. They ski and bike together, but in the kayak she’s on her own. Her poems have appeared in Rock and Sling, Hobble Creek Review, Hawaii Review, and other journals.

Kevin McLellan is the author of the chapbooks Shoes on a wire (Split Oak, forthcoming), runner-up for the 2012 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry, and Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010), a collaborative series of poems with numerous women poets. He has recent or forthcoming poems in books and journals including: 2014 Poet’s Market, American Letters & Commentary, Barrow Street,

Colorado Review, Horse Less Review, Kenyon Review Online, Sixth Finch, Western Humanities Review, Witness, and numerous others. Kevin lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and sometimes teaches poetry workshops at the University of Rhode Island in Providence.

Sarah McKinstry-Brown studied poetry at the University of New Mexico and the University of Sheffield, but she earned her real education on the streets of Albuquerque, where she frequented poetry readings in bars and coffee shops all over town. Her favorite quote on writing comes courtesy of Trappist Monk Thomas Merton. “Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives.” To learn more about Sarah, visit Sarah. midverse.com.

Melanie Springer Mock writes: “I am a professor of English at George Fox University, Newberg, Oregon. My essays and reviews have appeared in the Nation, Christian Feminism Today, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Mennonite World Review, among other places. My most recent book is Just Moms: Conveying Justice in an Unjust World, published in 2010. I blog about (and deconstruct) images of women embedded in evangelical popular culture at Ain’t I a Woman? (aintiawomanblog.net).”

Amelia Jane Nierenberg is a student at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York where she is editor of Fieldston’s art magazine, Dope Ink. She received five Regional Honorable Mentions, three Regional Silver Keys, and three Regional Gold Keys from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. Her work has been shown in the Fieldston Summer Show, the NYC Scholastic Regional Awards, TAG Summer Show, and #artbecause. It is either forthcoming or available in Slash of Red, Torrid Literature, Oxford Magazine, Flyway American Athenaeum, and the Black Fox Literary Magazine. She spends much of her free time painting.

Melissa Reeser Poulin’s poems have appeared in Water~Stone Review, Catamaran Literary Journal, and Sugar House Review. A longtime gardener and aspiring beekeeper, she is currently compiling an anthology of new writing on bees.

More at melissareeserpoulin.com.

continued on page 76

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contributors / 29

Julie Quinn’s earliest childhood memories include chatting endlessly with the elderly Japanese gentleman who lived next to her family. As the daughter of an Air Force serviceman, she was born and raised in Japan. She has no doubt that these memories have influenced her artistic journey and language, for in her work there is an Asian influence in the rhythm and movement of the pieces. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, and her work Trinity is currently traveling throughout Europe in the International Contemporary Christian Art Exhibit sponsored by the Vatican. Her work is also included in several public and private collections and has been published in magazines and books. More artwork and information can be viewed at juliequinnstudio.com.

Jill Reid lives in Pineville, Louisiana, with her five-yearold daughter, Ellie, and too many books to count. She teaches English at Louisiana College and is a secondyear MFA poetry candidate at Seattle Pacific University.

Though she has lived in Texas while completing her MA at Baylor University and spent a semester abroad in England, her roots are in rural Louisiana, a place that flavors many of her poems. Her poems have appeared in Relief Journal, Ruminate, Big Muddy, Fourth River, and Tipton Poetry Journal.

Joshua Robbins is the author of Praise Nothing (University of Arkansas Press, 2013). His recognitions include the James Wright Poetry Award, the New South Prize, selection for the Best New Poets anthology, and a Walter E. Dakin fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He is visiting assistant professor of English at the University of the Incarnate Word where he teaches creative writing and literature. He lives in San Antonio.

Born and raised in Hawai‘i, Delro Rosco has worked as a professional illustrator for over twenty-five years. Since 2007, he was inspired to do more deeply personal work as a response to what touches and affects his heart. His

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work is a response to his Christian faith, discovering his role and identity in life and beauty found in nature.

Meditating on scripture, his work is a form of praise. He finds that within the creative process unexpected surprises evolve as the work begins to awaken and attempts to seize and suggest what is good, beautiful, and true; until it eventually speaks. This imaginative beauty that surfaces is inexplicable, ethereal, and hopeful.

Allison Schuette is an associate professor of English at Valparaiso University where she also co-directs the Welcome Project (welcomeproject.valpo.edu). Inspired by StoryCorps, Allison and fellow co-director Liz Wuerffel began collecting local audio/video stories of diversity and difference in the belief that personal narratives help us drop our defenses and speak more honestly about what it takes to live well in community. Previous work has appeared in MQR, AGNI Online, Gulf Coast Review, the Cimarron Review, and other journals.

LaToya Watkins writes: “I’m a doctoral candidate and rhetoric instructor at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Admittedly, I’m not a true academic. However, I am a writer and I am blessed and reflective and inwardly loud. I am thankful for the smallest things and humbled by life on earth. I mother three children, three dogs, and love one very supportive husband. My stories have appeared in Specter, Lunch Ticket, and Kweli Journal. I live, teach, learn in Texas and everywhere.”

Rumina

Anna Rose Welch is a classical violinist from Erie, Pennsylvania, who recently earned her MFA in Poetry from Bowling Green State University. She lives a quiet life with five morbidly obese cats, a regular supply of salted milk chocolate covered caramels, a collection of old postcards, and the complete series of Frasier on DVD. She spends most of her time trying to write poems. Her work can also be found or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Barrow Street, Linebreak, Water~Stone Review, Gingerbread House, and Rufous City Review.

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“Carolyn Weber lives gracefully and writes elegantly. Her poetic eyes search beneath the surface, unearthing delightful insights missed by those in a hurry. Holy Is the Day is a call to see God and latch onto him, so he takes us through the day as he envisions it. This is a beautiful book that spoke to my heart and changed my day.”

—Randy Alcorn, author of God Is Good and Deception Listen to an interview with Carolyn Weber at

ivpress.com /holy-is-the-day

ivpress.com 800.843.9487

Ruminate Holy is the #9868 1

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RUMINATE prizes

2013

W illiam Van Dyke S hort Story P rize F inal Judge : Melissa Pritchard P ri z e : $1500 & publication in Ruminate deadline : Nov. 1, 2013 entry fee: $18 submit: www.ruminatemagazine.org/contests

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last/ note thoughts on

in search of song from the contributors IN this issue

Music Appreciation 101: Before my dad taught me to ride a bike or throw a left hook, he showed me how to hold a record without touching its face; without leaving fingerprints, scratches, evidence.

Now I am grown, and I know why a record reads like a cross section of a fallen tree: when my father pulls an album out of its cover, a whole year of his life is right there, circling like kids on bikes in cul de sacs, waiting for him to start the turntable, place the needle in the groove, and call them back.

When my children were young, I’d place my ear against their chests and listen to the beating of their tiny little hearts. The songs I heard there were beautiful and frightening. My fears for them, out there in the world, produced stories that made me cringe when I read them. I worked this way until last summer when my father suffered a stroke. After he slipped into a coma and doctors told our family to prepare for the worst, I placed my ear against his chest and let the soft music soothe me. I wasn’t afraid at all.

LaToya Watkins Fiction

Sarah McKinstry-Brown poetry

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Maurice Manning’s

a poem called “Playlist,” and it is one of my favorites because it uses music to capture an ephemeral moment of content domesticity and reflects a way that I live my life, as if there is always a soundtrack going on.

The poem in this publication also describes a profound and poignant experience of music; I was bowled over by the bluegrass that I heard on the subway platform one evening. Some essence of who I was in my bones came to me, generations of ancestors on both sides of my family, all of whom are from the Appalachian South, appeared in my mind and collided with modernity, with the intensely urban life in the Northeast that I have found myself living. I knew that with the eventual passing of my parent’s generation that this mountain history would come to an end, and yet it could live on inside me, as music. Music did that.

poems are the first that come to mind when I think about musical language and the place music plays in my own rurally-rooted poetry—primarily because of Manning’s attention to and exploration of how regional Southern dialects, when unpacked and placed within traditional metrical frameworks, create an unexpected harmony between our culture’s aesthetic periphery and its center.

The academy tends to think of Shakespeare, Donne, or Eliot when discussing metrical prosody, but Manning challenges as well as extends those discussions by showing us that uneducated, academically-distant Southern voices can be as beautiful and necessary to the contemporary poet’s toolkit—ranging from the strict iambic pentameter of a Baptist preacher’s hell-fire sermon to the loose free verse of a Kentucky grandmother’s rocking-chair tale.

Jay Kidd poetry

J. Scott Brownlee poetry

I’ve written

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Physical work, performed well, is a concert. I like to work alongside my husband as he operates drills and impact wrenches, wields a hammer and loads a ladder. The ladders are his special music.

An aluminum extension ladder sounds like a jazz riff when an experienced worker raises it and sets it against a building, and a livelier variation when he lowers it again. At the end of a day, my husband’s work truck clatters triumphantly into the yard, ladders bumping against one another like cymbals.

Linda Martin poetry

One day I walked into a store in Cincinnati and discovered the mountain dulcimer. I had no idea what it was, how it sounded, or how to play it. Though not musically talented, I bought it.

Within months I chanced upon local dulcimer lessons. That eventually led me to learn from an Irish harper who also taught dulcimer, leading to my love of Irish music, which eventually led to trying my hand (or foot) at Irish dance, where I met my wife. I can safely say that my initial leap of faith in buying the mountain dulcimer changed my life.

Peter Caccavari poetry

O dear, it’s all music. Music is the greatest of arts, period. Music doesn’t need any digestion or thought or contemplation or effort on your part; it just enters your ear and goes straight to your head and heart. It’s all music all the time, seems to me. Music is prayer. I want to write like we speak, which is to say with music and swing and salt and rhythm and cadence and humor and

pain in the songs we sing. We sing all the time, haltingly or with all our might. What a gift, to have music coursing though us from the moment of conception to the moment we change keys.

Brian Doyle nonfiction

Drawing was a fun way of escaping into my own little world. Escape from what? How bad could it be for a five-year-old? Maybe it was the challenge and intrigue of making something good. As an adult, I’m more aware or concerned with the things of the world. I wish some things were better. My work almost always begins with some kind of searching or struggle. But within this wrestling, goodness or beauty seems to surface. Perhaps beauty is only realized after having gone through the struggle. Maybe I am that child that still longs for making something good.

Delro Rosco V isual A rtist

I’m finally

learning to sight-read. Somehow I slipped through six years of choir without it, parroting the music instead. Then, as now, the tangle of lines on the page overwhelmed me, so far removed from the pleasure of joining my voice with others. Years later, I stumble to match the symbols with the appropriate amount of silence or sound. Humbled, I think of my nephew speaking his first sentences, of my ESL students taking on new webs of grammar. I begin to see notation as language, arbitrary and messy, harnessing time and space to the workhorse of meaning-making.

Melissa Reeser Poulin poetry Continued on page 80

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last/ note thoughts on

in search of song from the contributors IN this issue

The best poem I knew as a boy played through the tinny speakers of my father’s Ford as he worked the pedals and I steered, both of us singing the Oak Ridge Boys’ “Y’all Come Back Saloon.” This summer I took my young daughter to see her grandfather as he creeps up on seventy, and I was confronted with the reality that his last note is nearer than I care to admit. Thirty summers after that short drive in my father’s Ford, as our plane taxied toward the runway for our flight from Houston to Spokane, I sang into her tiny ears: She played tambourine with a silver jingle And she must have known the words to at least a million tunes.

Jeffrey G. Dodd P oetry

This month, I moved cross country to the desert.

Understatement: the landscape is different. The Superstition Mountains loom through my living room windows. But what startles me, reminds me I’m in a new place more than the dust and cacti and red rock mountains, are the strange sounds.

The chirring of unknown insects in the palms at night. The strangled sounds of strange tall birds in the morning. The first monsoon against the tile roof. Learning what this new place sounds like is the Google maps for another sense. Sounds root me every bit as much as landscape and vistas.

This past

summer, I spent six weeks at a Buddhist monastery in the Thai forest tradition, which meant no electricity, no cell phone signal, no internet access. In spite of the lack of contact with the outside world, I found that I missed music more than anything.

We chanted songs in Pali each morning before and after meditation, but that was not nearly enough.

When I was alone in my cabin in the evening, I would sing aloud to myself fragments of remembered songs, lyrics I made up myself, and bits of poems I had once memorized. I craved all kinds of music, but because I had no access to a radio or iPod, poetry became the most accessible. I was surprised to find that I could pull the lines of poems I loved seemingly out of thin air, and I was grateful to rediscover the pleasures of learning a poem by heart, how reciting the words could bring me more deeply into the poem and into my own experience.

James Crews Poetry

Andrea Janelle Dickens P oetry

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Treasure Hoagwood. Reflections. Digital photograph. 5 x 8 inches.

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Julie Quinn. Becoming. Mixed media on claybord. 12 x 12 inches.

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