Issue 32: Clearing It Out

ISSUE

POETRY So I searched you + At the Cloisters Hannah Nguyen + Kendra Langdon Juskus N ONFICTIO N The smoke clears + Soft, slow, and round Robert Rebein + Amy Nolan VI SUAL ART Mining their stories + They and the face and hands Randy Horst + Scott Laumann

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S U M M E R 2014

+ 2014 VanderMey Nonfiction Prize, judged by John Wilson

First Place: Work Ethic Jessie van Eerden $

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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.

FRONT COVER Randy Horst. Chartes Spectrum #1: In Search of Heaven – Orange. Digitally altered photography. 11 x 15 inches.

OPPOSITE PAGE Randy Horst. Saint Sebastian #1, Detail. Conte & painted bamboo. 15 x 19 inches.

STAFF/ EXTRAORDINAIRE

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Brianna Van Dyke

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Copyright © 2014 Ruminate Magazine. All rights reserved.

CONTENTS / 32

NOTES Editor’s Readers’ Artist’s Contributor’s Last

4 5 14, 32 76 79 12

Ae Hee Lee Barley Tea

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Noel Sloboda Scaled

31

Megan Denton Swan Song

49

Jeff Reed The Bee Keeper to the Heart Surgeon

50

Rhonda Parrish Matches

51

Kendra Langdon Juskus Theology of the Body

68

Hannah Nguyen Cerulean

33-48

69

Andrew Johnson Vidi Aquam

15, 16, 54, 67, 73

70 71

Janet McCann Small Poem with Two Machine Translations Viscious Nostalgia

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Mark Parlette Flushed

NONFICTION Jessie van Eerden Work Ethic Robert Rebein A Fire on the Moon Amy Nolan My Mother’s Hips

10 17 55

VISUAL ART Randy Horst Select images from: digitally altered photographs series and psychological portraits series Scott Laumann Select images from: “They and the Face and Hands” series

POETRY

Front Cover Inside Front Cover

Inside Back Cover Back Cover

REVIEW Melanie Springer Mock Review of Letter and Life

by Bret Lott

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Lisa Repko Borden Review of A Geography of Memory

by Jeanne Murray Walker

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EDITOR’S / NOTE

Welcome to Issue 32,

What Clearing Out Gives Us

I wanted to do something a little different with this editor’s note. And in honor of our theme “Clearing it Out,” I decided to write a list inspired by this topic and the work in these pages.

the chance to pay attention a blank page freedom from what wears out our hearts a clean fridge “pelvic truth” the bare and sometimes lonely space to make art appreciation for strong packaging tape the essentials surprises a lifted veil, a clearing of the smoke space to pray truth telling wide vistas silence a reminder of what to keep and what to toss room to dance in the kitchen perspective an openness to change a floor to sweep

It seems to me that when we need to make important changes or be reminded of deep truths, a good list is the perfect place to begin.

Plus, I like making lists.

In this case, my list is a sampling of and an introduction to the rich voices, images, and stories gathered here. We hope you enjoy!

Happy reading,

P.S. I’d love to hear what you like from this list or what you’d add. Send a note to @RuminateMag on Twitter or Instagram and use the hashtag #ClearingItOut.

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ISSUE 32 Summer 201 4

READERS’/ NOTES THOUGHTS ON CLEARING IT OUT FROM RUMINATE READERS

Our son visits on Father’s Day, pokes around in the refrigerator, and pulls out a bottle of BBQ sauce with an expiration date of 2002. He holds the bottle up in front of me and points to the offending date. “Seriously, Mom?” Time to clear out the fridge.

In yoga class the teacher invites us to clear all thoughts of the day’s activities from our heads. I tick through my “to do” list and wish for a “Clear All” button to press. I visualize a screen full of “to dos” disappearing. Then the screen in my mind’s eye refreshes with the next fifty items on the list.

Time to clear out of town and go on vacation?

I’d like to tell you a story of a time when I cleared out the clutter and lovely whitespace appeared, but like an ocean tide, chaos goes out and comes back in again. For one small moment, sun glistens on empty sand and catches the light of bubbles that mark the spot where tiny sea creatures burrow. Then the sea rushes back.

For one small moment my refrigerator is clean and I can see my choices; my mind is free and I can focus on my body; the beach is quiet and my soul is at rest.

Sydney Avey

G R OV ELAND, CALI FOR NI A

A few weeks ago I moved out of my apartment. My girlfriend walked in while I was packing everything up and her suspicions about my hoarding was confirmed. She started clearing things out and shooting me perturbed glances in the process, as if she wasn’t sure she wanted to get too much further into the life of a man who couldn’t throw things away. She is good at clearing things out. She realized a long time ago that the simple, healthy life meant having fewer things.

For this reason, and for a few others, she quit her job

the day after I moved out of my apartment. Clearing her job out of her life has meant being pressed by necessity and living in a very primal state of simplicity. The next step is simple: find a job. For her, clearing out is good but insecure and scary. For me, clearing out of my apartment has meant feeling like I don’t have a home and that all my things are scattered all over town. I cannot be simple or meet her in her primal need. Scattered and cluttered meets concise and clear, and both of us are scared of what that could mean. Growing into oneness is a hell of thing. She can clear things away until there’s nothing left, but if I don’t do the same, her life is still full of clutter.

Jonathan Allston G RE E N VI L L E ,

SO U TH CA RO L IN A

Isn’t it strange how you can hold onto something, like a book, given to you by a person you once loved— even after he’s left you in the most cruel way—and for a while, you keep that thing where you can see it, like on your desk, until you muster the courage (or maybe stop the masochism) and move it into a hiding place, like a closet—and then one day, as you’re preparing to leave the home you inhabited when you loved this person, you come upon this thing—the only thing he gave you—and instead of putting it in a box to take to your new home, you put it in the Goodwill bag and drive it down the street and hand it off to a stranger, who drops it in a big blue bin and wheels it away, and it’s funny how you don’t have second thoughts or feel the least bit sad—only notice there now seems to be some open, uncluttered space in your heart that wasn’t there the minute before.

Jessica Lynne Henkle P O RTLA N D,

O REG O N

continued

»

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READERS’/ NOTES THOUGHTS ON CLEARING IT OUT FROM RUMINATE READERS

It started like any other Wednesday night show, which we’d been playing for the past year and a half, strumming REM and Neil Young from old acoustics in an Indian restaurant. We were paid in curry and naan bread, bottomless sodas and the freedom to play anything. The only one who paid attention was Erich, milking the place for $2 drafts and slurring requests for Pink Floyd. The place made a profit only when it burned down, which happened twice. The lesson is: if you feel a change of career coming on, buy some good fire insurance.

I came home that night to find an envelope on my couch in my girlfriend’s handwriting. Places in the room usually filled with her belongings were now gaping like a hockey player’s mouth. My cell rang.

“Hello?”

“Hey man,” said my guitarist, “I’ve been back here tearing down and, uh, Erich, well, died. We thought he was sleeping. He must’ve sat there twenty minutes before the bartender nudged him to ask if he wanted another . . . ” I rearranged my furniture and deleted the girlfriend’s number. We never played the Indian place again; it burned down for good two nights later. But even the stench of charred wood and wiring didn’t stop me from stepping under the yellow caution tape at 3 a.m. and finding a familiar, vacant barstool. I set the unopened letter atop a scorched table and strummed “Wish You Were Here” as seared window blinds waved in the night, letting spirits move on to a new home.

Matt McGee

T HOUSAND OAKS, CALI FOR NI A

I’ve never been diagnosed with OCD, but the writing’s on the wall (neat as a pin, of course). When

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I’m around too many people for too long, I count things: lines on the floor, the tops of my teeth, knots in the wood paneling. When we moved into our current rental house, sight and smell unseen, the dirty, dog-smudged floors and pervasive mothball fumes drove me close to madness. During that first sleepless night, I promised myself we’d pack up and leave the next morning. The grime was unbearable; we’d clear out of there. In the light of morning, through the swept cobwebs of reasonable thinking, by some miracle of stymied compulsion I can’t understand, my thoughts relaxed. I scrubbed the floorboards instead of counting them, and we’ve stayed for close to a year now. I’m so glad. The bad smells are lost to the fresh breeze through the windows, the paw prints are painted over, and I believe there will be more times in life when I won’t need to clear out to make myself feel better.

Rebecca Martin B LACKS B U RG,

VI RG I N I A

Behold the power of resentment—how stealthily that chemical corrodes. Undisturbed, undetected, traces of it build up on the insides of my pipes. Invisible to everyone around me until it eats through, or until I am taken apart and flushed out completely, it contaminates every good thing that flows through me, every cup of cold water I offer you to drink.

Emily Ruth Hazel

How hard

N EW YO RK , N EW YO RK

could it be, a seven-day silent retreat among forty complete strangers, saying absolutely nothing and interacting with no one? I planned to hole up with Thomas Merton and the writings of St. Theophan, keep my biggish mouth shut, muse extensively, consider the lilies—a cinch of a week. I figured

I’d clean house big time, rid myself of the need to interact with human beings, in order to gain, perhaps, one or more of the “things most needful” to which Jesus liked to obliquely refer.

Except that silence around other people isn’t silent.

It’s loud, because we are social beings created to commune. Being truly alone, as in all-by-oneself, is not like sitting at a table for six and not being allowed to ask for the salt. Complete silence in company wasn’t spiritually therapeutic, like fasting from food is. In being ignored, I felt nullified. How do the disfigured, unwashed homeless, mentally ill, and elderly feel when people shun them?

My journal entry on day three: “Here in the terrifying silence we’re offered the chance to discover how minute we are. When the clutter is removed, life is experienced raw and tender—this vanity of vanities.”

The silent retreat for me was like swimming into a tsunami. In the future, I’ll reach toward God in the presence of God, not counter-intuitively among lovely human beings who are arbitrarily off limits on the assumption this helps me reach toward God. Jean Hoefling

LOU I SV I LLE, COLORAD O

If our family had a motto it would be: “We’ll deal

from my grandparents’ honeymoon to Niagara Falls in 1910. Letters that my dad kept from his friends deployed in France during WWII. My child-sized table and chairs. My son’s photos from an exchange trip to Germany. We saved all those treasures and made room for a wonderful baby who will get to be the keeper of seven generations of family history. She will, of course, have to deal with it later.

Maggie Stock B U TL E R,

P E N N SYLVA N IA

To keep an orderly house, professional organizers advise throwing out ten things a day. No minor task, for those of us whose parents lived through the Depression. Periodically I would say to my husband, “It’s time we got rid of some of this clutter,” to which he would respond, “I’ll tackle my shit after you’ve finished yours.” Since I never completely finished mine, he never dealt with his.

Recently, overwhelmed by the prospect of moving stored items into an already furnished home, I hired an organizer. “We’ll reorganize, create space, get rid of stuff you don’t need,” she assured me. My unit of progress would be pounds removed per day. After lining up a wastebasket, a recycle bin, and a donate-tohospice bin, we started with the garage. Rust-stained plastic tarps—trash candidate. Twenty–five Trader Joe’s paper bags—recycle. An unused latte machine— hospice donation. Easier than imagined. Then we came to the real cemetery of unclassified stuff: fishing tackle, men’s gardening gloves, stiff with age, a box of hooks, six jars of screws, a broken bicycle, kayak straps, hardened ski wax.

Here I stopped. Even as my helper urged me to be ruthless—ski wax in one hand, garden gloves in the other, and thinking about how many pounds the bicycle might weigh—I was unable to jettison anything else into one of the three bins.

Examining the mildew spots on the gloves, I realized I wasn’t reorganizing; I was clearing out a husband of over twenty-eight years.

with that later.” For us, “later” arrived in 2013 when we moved my mother from her two-story home where she and my late father had enjoyed sixty-five years of marital bliss, saving everything from everyone.

The daunting task of sorting, donating, pitching and packing hundreds of cubic feet of “stuff” made me thankful we hadn’t been short-listed for the TV show Hoarders. But I was determined to finish for many reasons, best of which was that I was going to be a grandma and needed an uncluttered space for grandbaby visits.

Through tears and accusations, tantrums and threats to throw everything away, and days languishing in regret that we hadn’t done it sooner, we also found pieces of our lives worth saving. Tintype photos of great-great-grandparents. A deed of my great- Lorraine Hanlon Comanor grandfather’s property dated 1834. A train schedule

TRU CK E E , CA L I FO RN I A

SEND US YOUR NOTES FOR ISSUE 33. WE LOVE HEARING FROM YOU! 7

RUMINATE PRIZES

2014

H O N O RA B L E M E N T I O N Amy Nolan • My Mother’s Hips

photo credit: Doug Van Gundy

F I R ST P LAC E Jessie van Eerden • Work Ethic

F I N A L I STS Hal Ackerman • Hot Flashes Angela Doll Carlson • Stations Tammy Delatorre • Out of the Swollen Sea Brenda Hood • Silence Elizabeth Hoover • Phantom Language Christopher Klahn • Fathers As Boys Doan-Trang Nguyen • Dining Out Sophfronia Scott • Why I Must Dance Like Tony Manero Madeline Sonik • Dead Ewes

S ECO N D P LAC E Robert Rebein • A Fire on the Moon

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by DR RANDALL J. VANDERMEY W I T H J U D G E JOHN WILSON

S P O N SO R E D

On “Work Ethic” by Jessie van Eerden, John Wilson writes:

This midrash wrestles with the biblical text the way Jacob wrestled with his mysterious antagonist.

John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture and an editor at large for Christianity Today. His reviews and essays appear in many publications, including the New York Times, the Boston Globe, First Things, and National Review.

Wilson lives and works in Chicago.

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WORK ETHIC JESSIE VAN EERDEN

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What I think is that she wakes up one morning and clears it all out. The men are counting their toes and their new sons’ toes, their umpteen wives, their purses of coin, scooping their barley heads into mounds like boys with contraband raisins. They flick the flies away, sneak watch chains under their coats, and the big heads of their hundred cattle rise and follow the trail of the sun like velvet-nosed satellite dishes. It’s no wonder it’s a man—it’s Jacob—that dreams the ladder with restless angels clambering up and down, unable to decide between heaven and earth, because there are piles of good things everywhere—it’s distracting. And the women tally theirs too, even though their piles are smaller: a bracelet and gourd dipper, a jug of clean water, a marriage which means a tent over your head. But I think that one day Leah clears out the place and walks up out of there, all the people watching this woman married by custom, the eldest daughter first before the younger one that Jacob really wanted. The people have always thought Leah mad for his favor, that because she is daily unloved by a husband who will open her legs only in pitch dark, and call her by her sister’s name, Rachel, his other wife, that she is to be pitied. But that is not what I think, not anymore. I think she is mad for something else. I think she has always gone about her regions of work in search of the main region: she went ahead and found names for her baby boys, she named them See, Hear, Fasten, Praise, and the later ones Hire and Dwell—her only girl she named Judgment—then she went on with the wash, the mopping, the beating of rugs, the tabulation of Jacob’s coins, all the while keeping all her old selves straight, on a string of beads, which I know to be a lot of work. Loving him hasn’t been work, not really, not with his beautiful black hair and slight lisp, but she can’t be bothered with even that task today. No, today she gets down to the main work of clearing out the cluttering good of these comfortable things, the extra baggage, the clothes on her back, water in the well, her station in the tent village as a woman of means, whether pitied or not. She woke up this morning nearly smothered by these things that wear out her heart, which is trying to see through them like a kid in a crowd at the dogfights, hearing the terror of the gnawed shank but not getting to see it—go on and clear the crowd. I think she is naked and climbing the ridge beyond the swamp, climbing all morning and evening, into the night, her princely boys left sleeping, rocked by the handmaid, and Judgment with her hair a tangled spray on the pillow, and Leah stands out there, smelling peat moss and spruce, in the dark. She can breathe out here, terrified by so uncrowded a place, knowing, yes, this should terrify her. She vows right now to climb back down and work so hard to tell them there is something beyond all that, to tell the men hoarding their barley mounds, the women vying for new dresses and Jacob’s favor and a son with the best name—to tell them (tell me) that you must come up here, out beyond the tents, where it is bare and lonely and shaped like loss. Otherwise how will you ever know your unknown self, a bead neither lost nor found, not a bead at all? How will you ever know, for the very first time, what it is you have always wanted?

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Ae Hee Lee

Barley Tea You only need a couple of roasted grains of barley and water.

When the slightly bitter waft of the boiling kettle tickles your skin, open the cap and watch the harvest of brown petals swirl into the figure of a woman stooping over the field.

She whistles a hushed song akin vapor and homes left behind, not sad, just painfully gentle, as she follows a trail of sheaves left for her to pick up.

She does not have to look up to know that she has found favor in the eyes of a new love.

And so she gleans grains roasted in the twilight until you know that your tea, in faith, has brewed enough.

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Noel Sloboda

Scaled Always before earthbound, father convinced himself mother would fall back in love if he showed enough daring to skip across tree tops.

We came outside to watch as he clambered up the white oak after our old calico, four stories up, stuck and wailing a jungle song. He was only an arm’s length away when he froze, pressed his face against the bark as if the tree might crook its limbs to return his embrace.

The cat continued its clamor while we shouted encouragement— then father dribbled down as if years had passed since he first left the ground.

My brother blamed high winds while sister thought maybe a bee.

For years, I could not imagine a reason and father offered nothing as he shuffled past mother back toward the house, jowls sagging like popped balloons.

I did not look up but felt a change in the cat’s cries— as though she wanted to shape syllables on her sandpaper tongue, to curse father for having soft fingers and stringy arms not up to holding on to anything for long. His promises were all hollow. She knew now he never would get up to rescue her from this place she once believed would provide an inspiring view.

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ARTIST/ NOTE

SCOTT LAUMANN: THEY AND THE FACE AND HANDS I am interested in frameworks that exist beyond what is visual: those present in nature, behavior, and human physiology. They and the Face and Hands is a series of eleven paintings focusing on the face, eyes, and hands. It is a response to and a dialogue with the excerpt below from Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy.

That very unity of experience that constitutes a human self cannot be located at any point in or around this body through which we live, not even in the brain. Yet I am present as agent or casual influence with and about my body and its features and movements. In turn, what my body undergoes and provides influences my life as a personal being. And through my body, principally through my face and gestures, or ‘body language,’ but also verbally, I can make myself present to others.

The human face, and especially the eyes, are not just additional physical objects in space. We say that the eyes are the windows of the soul, and there is much truth to it.

They and the face and hands are areas in space where the spiritual reality of the person becomes present to others. There the inmost being of the individual pours forth, though of course the person is no more literally identical with his or her face or eyes than with lungs or toenails or brain.

—Dallas Willard

Editor’s Note: Images on pages 15, 16, 54, 67, and 73 have been converted to black and white.

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Scott Laumann. They and the Face and Hands. Oil and acrylic on canvas. 16 x 20 inches.

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Scott Laumann. They and the Face and Hands. Oil and acrylic on canvas. 20 x 16 inches.

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A FIRE ON THE MOON ROBERT REBEIN

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The event was billed, somewhat grandiosely, as The National Modified Championships, or, more simply, “The Nationals,” and was held each year at the end of July on the halfmile oval at the Kansas State Fairgrounds in Hutchinson. Although there was nothing particularly “national” about these annual races (almost all the drivers and car owners were from Kansas or Oklahoma, with only a few from farther-off states like Texas or Nebraska), in the world of build-it-yourself, southwest Kansas dirt track jalopy racing, the Nationals at Hutchinson were as big as things got, and no one involved in racing in that part of the country would have thought of missing them.

Certainly that was the case for my family that late summer of 1974. My father and his brother Harold had been building open-wheeled jalopies—typically 1930s-era flathead Fords with the fenders removed and a roll cage welded to the frame—and dragging them to various dirt tracks on the southern high plains since the mid-1950s. Then, in May of ’74, the family mania became even more all-consuming when my brother Alan, just days removed from his high school graduation, began driving a late-model stock car in the weekend races held at Dodge City’s McCarty Speedway.

The weekend routine rarely varied. Late Friday night or early Saturday morning, Alan’s #17 Chevelle would be loaded onto a flatbed tow truck and delivered to our house so that my brother Paul and I, ages six and nine respectively, could go to work washing and waxing it.

This we accomplished with an air of bloated self-importance, lording it over our friends in the neighborhood who, by decree of my father, were not allowed anywhere near the car lest they break something or “fall off the truck and try to sue us.” When the job was done, Alan would emerge from the house with his Bell helmet and Simpson Flame Resistant Nomex® fire suit, followed a few minutes later by a pit crew made up of my brothers—Tom, Joe, and Steve—all wearing navy blue #17 jumpsuits my mother had embroidered by hand. To a six or nine year old, this was a thrilling sight to behold, on par with watching astronauts stroll across a sun-splashed tarmac on their way to the lunar capsule. Not long after they drove off to “secure a good spot in the pits,” Paul and I, wearing our own #17 jackets, would accompany our mother to the 5:30 mass at Sacred Heart Cathedral, where we would be instructed to “say a prayer that your brother doesn’t get himself killed tonight.”

This I did in an entirely rote manner. In the two or three years I’d been going to the races with my family I’d seen cars spin out, crash into one another, roll over, and flip high into the air, and the drivers always emerged unscathed from the wreckage. Occasionally an ambulance would arrive on the scene and a driver would be hauled to the local hospital as a precaution, but he’d always be back in action the following weekend. Where was the risk in that?

After mass let out at 6:30 or 6:35, my mother would steer the family’s 1967 Buick Skylark into a long line of pickups and cars streaming from Wyatt Earp Boulevard to the track in Wright Park. The atmosphere in this procession of cars was festive, bordering on raucous. Men and teenage boys, some of them shirtless and tattooed, yelled and threw beer cans at each other from the backs of pickups. Whenever a streetlight switched from red

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to green, the car at the front of the line would peel out, and one by one the cars behind would follow suit until the air on the street was filled with the smell of burning rubber.

Meanwhile, fans of the different drivers would taunt each other endlessly from open windows (“Your boy’s gonna finish dead last, just you wait!”), while fans of a different sort drunkenly reveled in the prospect of disaster (“Here’s hoping we see some BIG wrecks tonight, ha ha ha ha!”). According to our mother, we were “better than that,” “cut from a different bolt of cloth.” However, that did not make us any less competitive, and if anyone dared to yell an insult about the #17 car, you can bet that Paul and I were quick to answer in kind. “Oh yeah? Well, get ready to eat some dust, buddy!”

Once a parking place had been secured in the buffalo grass lining the Arkansas River, another line awaited us at the gate to the concrete grandstands, in the belly of which

THE NOISE MADE BY THESE MACHINES WAS AS YET A DULL ROAR, A MERE FOREBODING COMPARED TO WHAT LAY AHEAD, WHEN THE ACTUAL RACES STARTED. men with cigarettes hanging from their lips rented out cushioned seatbacks and sold T-shirts emblazoned with the name and number of this or that driver—#98 Rod Keller, #15 J.D. Martin, #77 Jack Petty, #11 Jim Harkness. Next came the crush of humanity lining up before the hotdog and Coke stands, past which our mother always dragged us unrelentingly, her hands locked around our wrists in what can only be described as a death-grip. “Come on, boys. You’ve already eaten, for goodness sake!”

By the time we got into our seats halfway up the grandstand, the water truck would be wetting down the track and a motley crew of race cars, both late-model stocks and open-wheeled modifieds, would be busy packing down the 3/8 mile clay oval. The noise made by these machines was as yet a dull roar, a mere foreboding compared to what lay ahead, when the actual races started. It was still possible to shout a message to the person sitting next to you and be heard, maybe even understood. After the heat races

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started that would no longer be the case. By then the steady, ear-splitting roar of the engines, along with the dust rising up from the track and the mud flying from the cars’ tires as they slid through the turns, would produce a state of deaf-muteness/tunnel vision among all in attendance. To communicate required shoving the person next to you to get his or her attention, and following that up with a kind of frantic, improvised sign language. C-A-N EYE G-O 2 T-H-E R-E-S-T-ROOOOOOOM???? The longer the race went on, the deeper this trance-like state became, until finally it was so deep and intense as to be physically painful. Everywhere in the stands people would cup their hands over their ears and squint or in some cases close their eyes against the rising dust. Meanwhile an

IT SAID “COOLNESS” AND “OUTLAW” AND “RAW SPEED.” ABOVE ALL, IT SAID “DANGER.” overpowering, scorched smell—a mixture of cascading dirt, engine exhaust, burning rubber, and cigarette smoke—pervaded the air. Once a race had reached this state of fever pitch, only two things could bring it to a halt: a checkered flag, signifying completion of the allotted number of laps, or else a yellow or black flag, signifying a wreck or some other danger on the track.

All this was nothing, however, compared to what happened whenever one of Alan’s races came up, for on these occasions my mother’s pre-race anxiety would mushroom into something far more full-blown and terrible. As a pack of cars took to the track and the #17 Chevelle was spotted among them, my mother would reach out and involuntarily take hold of whichever of my knees was closest to her. Then as the green flag dropped, and Alan began to make his way to the front of the pack, bumping and grinding and trading paint, sliding into the banked corners side-by-side with whatever car he was trying to pass, then diving low and accelerating into the long front or back-stretch, the grip she had taken on my knee or thigh would increase exponentially. The closer to real

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or theoretical danger Alan came the harder she gripped my leg. If he happened to spin out or crash into another car, then she would raise both of her hands up to her face, and then, just as quickly, slam them back down, reestablishing her death grip. Often, the morning after one of these nights of racing, I would wake to find a series of bluishpurple bruises running up and down my leg. This behavior of my mother’s annoyed and embarrassed me, but on another level I understood and even admired it. It meant that she was even more deeply immersed in the racing experience than I was. After a time, I came to accept the bruises she inflicted on me as the emblem of what racing had come to mean to her, if not yet to me—an impossibly loud marathon of witnessed and/or experienced terror.

To me, the best part of a night of racing occurred at the end, after the feature race was over and fans began to leave the stands accompanied by race promoter Jack Merrick’s familiar voice: “Thank you and we’ll see you again next week.” That’s when a big metal gate at the bottom of the grandstands was swung open and diehard race fans like us were allowed to spill out onto the track. Paul and I were always among the first kids out of the gate. Our goal was to scour the track for as many plastic, tear-away visor guards as we could collect. All night long, as their faces were assaulted with mud and dust, drivers had been tearing these strips of plastic from their helmet visors and tossing them out of their car windows. Now a reverse process was underway, as kids raced each other around the track in a bid to be declared the unofficial winner of our own “trophy dash.” What a wonderful, surreal experience it was to be out there on the hard-packed, high-banked, floodlit clay, the dust and engine exhaust from the A Feature still floating in the air like a fog. Looking up at the moon so high in the night sky, I would sometimes pretend that’s where we were, and that the moon was, by process of substitution, an impossibly small planet earth.

Once we’d had our fill of the track, Paul and I would venture into the pits proper where drivers and pit crew members leaned against or sat on the hoods of their battered cars, smoking cigarettes and sucking down glistening cans of Coors. Although it was the 1970s and young drivers like my brother often had shoulder-length hair, the older drivers sported a look straight out of the 1950s. These were men of my father’s generation. They slicked their hair straight back from their foreheads in a style known as a DA or “duck’s ass,” and if they wore a fire suit at all (many didn’t), they would step out of it as soon as their last race was over, preferring to receive the public in rolled-at-the-ankle jeans and a white T-shirt with a pack of unfiltered Camels rolled into one of the sleeves. Whoever had won the Trophy Dash that night—invariably it was one of these men—would have the foot-high prize prominently displayed on the hood or roof of his car. I remember one such car with particular vividness. It was the #77 Mustang driven by a man from Wichita named Jack Petty. Everything about the car, from its flaming orange-and-yellow paint job to the way Petty’s name was etched above the door in two-tone cursive lettering, spoke to me. It said “coolness” and “outlaw” and “raw speed.” Above all, it said “danger.”

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I could not help but compare all this to the effect produced by my brother’s fire-engine red #17 Chevelle, every detail of which I was intimately familiar with from having washed and waxed it so many times. Whereas the #77 Mustang was driven from the left like a streetlegal car, allowing Petty to wave to the crowd or hold a checkered flag out his window as he took a victory lap, Alan’s car had been reconfigured by my father (no doubt at my mother’s insistence) so that it was driven from the middle, like a sprint or super-modified car. That is to say, both the driver’s seat and the steering wheel had been moved so they sat atop the automatic transmission, a configuration that allowed Alan to steer the car through the entirety of a race without ever taking his hands from the wheel. But this was not the end of the car’s safety features. There was the bright red fire extinguisher strapped to the inside of the car’s extensive roll cage, and, just behind Alan, in the car’s reinforced trunk area, the high-tech fuel cell with its plastic bladder stuffed with foam to keep gas from leaking, sloshing around in the tank, or exploding in the event of a crash or roll-over. All of this was impressive, to be sure, but it was also vaguely embarrassing, maybe even a little shameful (at least to me it was). I used to complain about it to my brothers Tom and Joe whenever Alan and my father weren’t around. “Who drives a stock car from the middle instead of the side?

Definitely not cool.”

“You only think that because you’ve never seen a really bad pile-up,” Tom replied with a shrug. “Once you have, you’ll change your tune in a hurry.”

“Maybe,” I said doubtfully.

An eighteen-year-old racing men often twice his age, Alan tended to be a cautious driver who took what a race gave him and did not test the limits of what he or his car were capable of, the way some drivers did. He won a lot of heat races that summer. He even won a semifinal or two. And he usually finished near the front of the A Feature. These were sizable accomplishments, particularly for a driver as young as Alan was. However, in my even younger eyes, all of this success was beside the point. To hell with heat races and the long, overly loud feature! The race I wanted to see Alan win was the Trophy Dash—that quick, four- or five-lap sprint in the middle of the evening’s races that determined which driver got to kiss the trophy girl while a photographer from the Dodge City Daily Globe snapped his picture. How I longed to run into the pits, my ears ringing, to find that night’s hardware sitting proudly atop the red hood of the #17 Chevelle. It never happened.

Even so, I admired my brother greatly. Two or three times a week, while he and my father were away at the shop “slaving over that car,” as my mother always put it, I would sneak into Alan’s room in the basement of our house and put on his fire suit, gloves, and full-face helmet, then stand looking at myself in the room’s full-length mirror. The suit, a secondhand Simpson, was white with a royal blue stripe running down the arms and legs. (One of these stripes, I think it was on the left side, had been burned off before Alan bought it, causing my mother to sew a new one in its place.) Of course, the suit was too big for me—the arms and legs a foot or more too long, the gloves always threatening to fall off my hands.

However, I did not see any comedy in this. Or, if I did, I gave it only the shortest notice.

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What I saw when I looked in that mirror was an older, taller version of myself—the me as I existed in my dreams of heroic conquest—climbing out of Jack Petty’s orangeand-yellow #77 Mustang to claim yet another prize from a stunningly beautiful trophy girl. I imagined the scenario so many times I had both sides of the post-race interview memorized.

Q. You won again! How do you do it?

A. Well, I only know one way to race—pedal to the metal.

Q. Aren’t you afraid of crashing or rolling your car?

A. Nah. That’s what tow trucks are for—to pick up the pieces.

Q. What about the other cars and drivers? Do you have anything to say to them?

A. As a matter of fact, I do. Go fast or get out of the way, because The Kid’s coming through . . .

At the end of the interview, I’d take an imaginary comb from my pocket and drag it through an improvised duck’s ass, precisely the way I’d seen my favorite drivers do the

HOWEVER, IN MY EVEN YOUNGER EYES, ALL OF THIS SUCCESS WAS BESIDE THE POINT. moment before the photographer’s flashbulb exploded in their smiling faces.

By the end of that summer, Alan had racked up enough points at McCarty Speedway to claim Rookie of the Year honors in the late-model stock division. This was quite an accomplishment, and it came with a trophy and a notice in the Dodge City Daily Globe (albeit, sadly, no kiss from a trophy girl). Despite this success, however, my father and mother agreed that Alan was still a little too young and green to race in that year’s season-ending Nationals in Hutchinson, as Jack Petty and a hundred other drivers would do. As a consolation of sorts, he’d be allowed to watch the race from turn one in the pits, while the rest of the family, my father included, sat high in the grandstands along with ten thousand other dirt track race fans.

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*

The Sunday of the 1974 Nationals turned out to be a dry, hot day “without a whisper of breeze,” as one of the drivers later said. My family made the two-hour trip from Dodge City to Hutchinson in the cooler, morning hours, arriving at the fairgrounds long before the first race began. In my mind, this meant that we’d have time to take a stroll down the Midway, maybe even go for a ride on the Zipper, which was then at the height of its amusement park fame. But I was wrong about all that. “The fair’s not until September,” my father reminded me. “There’s a race then, too, but it’s nowhere near as big as the one we’re going to.”

With all hope for a ride on the Zipper lost, I had nothing to look forward to except the races themselves, which I imagined to be identical to those held in Dodge City. After all, both races were put on by the same promoter, big-voiced Jack Merrick. However, I was

BY THEN, THE NOISE OF THE RACE WAS ALMOST UNBEARABLE, AND THE DUST RISING UP FROM THE TRACK WAS SO THICK IT WAS HARD TO SEE WHO WAS LEADING, OR EVEN WHICH CAR WAS WHICH. wrong about that, too. While the grandstands at McCarty Speedway held perhaps two thousand spectators, the stands at the fairgrounds held more than five times that, and that did not count fans who climbed onto the roof or stood with their fingers poking through the fence at the edge of the track. I marveled at all of this as we made our way to our seats, halfway up the grandstands and just in front of the flagman’s tower.

By the time the first heat race was set to begin the temperature on the track was well north of 100 degrees, and it wasn’t much cooler where we sat. Several drivers had ditched their gloves, and some had ditched their fire suits as well, choosing to drive in T-shirts instead. Everywhere in the stands, people fanned themselves with race programs or wrapped wet kerchiefs around their necks. Rumor had it that more than 110 cars had participated in qualifying the day before. How many of these would survive the heat

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races and end up in the thirty-lap late model feature, or the even bigger fifty-lap super modified feature, was anyone’s guess.

“It’s gonna be crazy no matter what,” my brother Tom predicted. “Fifty cars in a feature! Holy cow!”

“Just say a prayer no one gets hurt,” my mother said.

I looked at Tom, and we both laughed at the same time. This was just mom being mom.

Evidently there was something wrong with her that made her say these things all the time. Who knew what it was?

After the National Anthem was sung, the first heat races got underway. As usual, these were a carnival of noise and rising dust. I covered my ears with my hands and watched to see how my favorite drivers would do. #98 Rod Keller finished near the front in one of the heat races, as did #15 J.D. Martin in another. In the final heat for stock cars, #77 Jack Petty of Wichita took first, while two Dodge City drivers, #8 Don Kreie and #12 Tim Wheaton, finished not far behind him. This was a thrilling result, but by the end of the stock car heats, my interest had begun to wane. I knew few of the cars in the modified class beyond #11 Jim Harkness of Ness City. Instead of watching the races, I began to campaign for a trip to the concessions stand. And for once my mother agreed to let me go, provided a couple of my older brothers went along. We spent the next several races in the shade of the grandstands, sucking down Cokes and gawking at the trophies that would be given to the winners of the two features.

We made it back to our seats in time for the late model feature. It was an exciting race. Jack Petty started on the pole, and he held that lead for seventeen laps before being passed by Dodge City’s Don Kreie. Then Petty caught Kreie on the very next lap and managed to hold the lead for another five laps, until he and Kreie traded paint in one of the corners, and Petty’s car blew a rear tire, falling all the way to last place. By then, the noise of the race was almost unbearable, and the dust rising up from the track was so thick it was hard to see who was leading, or even which car was which. To keep from choking I pulled the collar of my T-shirt over my mouth and nose. A few laps later I pulled the shirt up over my eyes as well. I didn’t even see Kreie take the checkered flag but only heard about it when promoter Jack Merrick announced the winner over the PA system.

There was one more race to go—the massive fifty-lap feature that would determine the Nationals champion in the open-wheeled super modified division. All around us in the stands, as the dust from the previous feature settled, race fans speculated on who would take home the trophy. Would it be #11 Jim Harkness of Ness City, #86 Jon Johnson of Utica, #4 Grady Wade of Wichita? However, there was even more discussion of the “dryslick” condition of the track and how hot it was.

“What are they going to do about the dirt?” my mother asked. “The drivers can hardly see in front of them. It’s like the Dust Bowl out there!”

“I don’t know, but I’m sure they’ll get it figured out,” my father answered, sounding none too sure about this.

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A water truck headed onto the track and began to wet down the lowest part of the banked oval. However, after only a couple of laps, the truck headed back into the pits and the race announcer Merrick called for the drivers who would compete in the modified feature to take to the track.

“That’s it?” my mother asked. “That’s all the water they’re putting on the track? Is that going to be enough? Bill?”

“I guess it’ll have to be,” my father answered ominously.

I remember thinking how odd it was to have him in the stands with us. It should have made me feel more confident and safe, but something like the reverse was true. With him there, my mother kept none of her concerns to herself. Instead, she aired them openly. It was too hot. The track was too dry. There were too many cars. I was almost glad when the noise of the cars coming onto the track got to be loud enough that she finally had to quit airing her complaints and sit watching like the rest of us.

More than forty cars were lined up two abreast on the flat, half-mile oval. They stretched from the pole position just underneath the flagman’s stand all the way back into turn four. Forty cars was at least fifteen more than I had ever seen on one track before that day’s late model feature. The cars were a motley crew. Some were new and sleek-looking—something like a contemporary sprint car but without the massive wing mounted to the roof. Others, however, looked like the jalopies my father and his brother Harold used to make out of Model A Fords in the 1950s. One of these cars, painted in primer with a number made out of duct tape, had an orange, slow-moving-vehicle triangle mounted above its rear bumper. In some cases, the drivers of these cars lacked full-face helmets, and several were without gloves, having sworn off these earlier in the day when they had trouble tearing away dirt-covered visor guards.

An ominous dust cloud began to form even before the pace lap was complete. By the time the race leaders had taken the green flag, the cloud was so thick that visibility farther back in the pack could not have been more than twenty or thirty feet. It was scary how quickly the cloud had grown, and how loud the cars were. It was more like what you might expect from the middle or the end of a feature, not the beginning. As I pulled my shirt up to my nose, I could feel the familiar trance/tunnel vision coming over me.

Then it happened. As Harkness and the other leaders completed their first lap, a hardcharging car farther back in the pack came upon one of the slower cars and accidentally ran up over its exposed rear tire. Instantly the faster car was launched high into the air. A collective gasp went up in the grandstands as the car flipped end over end before landing hard at the entrance to turn one. Its front axle flew off and began rolling in the direction of the flagman’s tower. I felt my mother’s hand grabbing at my leg.

“Oh God, no! Oh God! No!” But there was nothing anyone could do to stop what was about to happen. We just sat there, mouths agape, as car after car, blinded by the dust, drove straight into the

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growing pile-up. Some hit the pile head on. Others, catching a glimpse of the wreck, hit the brakes at the last second and slid into the pile sideways. After watching five or six cars hit the pile in this way, I turned and looked at the cars coming out of turn four. They had no idea what lay ahead. The dust was too thick. One after another, they too joined the smash up.

Then a fuel tank on one of the cars exploded and caught fire, sending a thirty-foot tower of flames and billowing black smoke skyward. Drivers began to spill out of the wrecked cars willy-nilly, as crewmen from the pits ran forward with fire extinguishers in an attempt to keep the fire from spreading. The effort was without effect. One car after another was engulfed in flames.

My mother tried to cover my eyes, but I broke away from her. As I did so, I saw one of the drivers climb out of the roof of his burning car, his arms held out to his sides in a Christ-like pose. His entire body was on fire. He stood there a long moment, as though

IT WAS TOO HOT. THE TRACK WAS TOO DRY. THERE WERE TOO MANY CARS. trying to decide what to do, then leaped from the burning wreck in the direction of the infield, where two men grabbed him by his arms and dragged him into the grass.

Another driver, his body charred and smoking, lay in the middle of track, not fifty yards from where I sat. I squeezed my eyes shut, only to open them again a few seconds later. I kept doing this, over and over.

The fire was so intense I could feel it on my face and arms, the front of my legs. I could feel it in my hair. I remember thinking, It’s an inferno . . . like that blimp, the Hindenburg. . . . It’s going to burn and burn until everyone is dead and nothing is left but ashes . . .

More men ran forward from the pits with fire extinguishers, but their efforts were like throwing a bucket of water into a bonfire. Merrick, the race promoter, came on the PA to say that someone should call the fire department. But no trucks arrived and the

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fire burned on, one explosion following another, until finally all thirteen cars involved in the wreck were consumed.

Four or five minutes into the holocaust, Merrick announced that a fire engine had arrived at the south gate of the track. But it turned out the gate was locked, no one knew who had the key, and the firemen had to drive all the way around the track to find an open gate, and another five minutes passed before water was finally brought to bear on the flames. Meanwhile, a couple of ambulances arrived to carry away the drivers who had been burned in the blaze. Even then, cars that had been dragged away from the pile continued to burst into flames. Each time it happened, the crowd would flinch as one

WE DROVE THE REST OF THE WAY HOME IN SILENCE. and my mother would call out, “Oh God, oh God.” Ten minutes after the wreck, several smaller fires were still going, while the whole area before turn one where the pile-up had occurred was reduced to a charred ruin.

“Please, people, move back away from the fence,” Merrick called out over the PA. “Move away from the infield, and let the firemen do their work.”

By now it was clear that the race would not continue, and the crowd of thousands began to flow toward the exits.

“Let’s go,” my father said.

“What about Alan?” my mother asked.

“He knows where we parked. Come on.”

As we joined the exodus, Jack Merrick came on the PA and said in a dazed voice, “Thank you very much and we’ll see you next year.”

It was the sort of thing he always said after a race was over, and usually it was received without comment, as mere background noise. Not this time.

“He’s telling us thank you?” someone near us asked loudly. “To hell with that!” Other voices soon joined in. “Too many cars . . . No fire trucks . . . Should’ve never run the last

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race . . . Should’ve put more water on that track . . .”

We found Alan slumped against the Buick in the parking lot. He looked stunned, in shock. “Are you all right?” my mother asked. “The wreck must have happened right in front of you.”

“It did,” Alan said.

But when we asked him what he had seen, he just shook his head and climbed into the very back of the car, refusing to talk about it.

We joined a long line of cars making its way from the track. On the radio, it was announced that two of the drivers who had been badly burned in the crash, Jerry Soderberg of Dodge City and Jack Petty of Wichita, had been airlifted to the University of Kansas burn center. Another driver, Aaron Madden of Tulsa, was in a trauma unit in Hutchinson.

“That can’t be right,” I said. “Jack Petty drives a stock car.”

“A lot of these guys drive both, particularly at Nationals,” my father said in a low voice. “Jack might have done that. You never know.”

I shook my head, refusing to believe. Meanwhile, the voices on the radio continued to describe the crash and its aftermath. On and on they droned, repeating the same facts over and over again. Finally my mother reached forward and angrily switched the radio off.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but if I have to listen to those idiots for another second I’ll go crazy.”

Nobody objected. We drove the rest of the way home in silence.

*

None of the drivers involved in the wreck that day died—a fact I still find hard to believe.

Aaron Madden and Jack Petty—for it was indeed Petty who stood like a burning cross atop his car before making his dramatic leap into the infield—even returned to racing. I can remember being at McCarty Speedway in 1975 or 1976, the last two years Alan raced, and seeing Petty circle the track holding a checkered flag in his gloved hand. In his fire suit and a full-face helmet he looked more like an astronaut than ever, and it was easy to imagine that under all that equipment he was whole again, without the scars that covered most of his body. It was a fantasy I preferred to keep intact, and I do not recall running into the pits after the race was over in an attempt to get Petty’s autograph.

Then, a summer or two after the Hutch fire, I accompanied my father on an errand he had to run to an outfit called S.O.S. Engine Rebuilders on Trail Street in Dodge City.

One of his irrigation motors had overheated and warped a head, and he had dropped the thing off to get it machined and to have the block re-bored. As soon as we entered

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the front of the shop I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up, for everywhere on the wood-paneled walls were framed pictures of race cars with drivers and pit crews crouched down in the grass before them. I was beginning to recognize a couple of the cars when a door at the back of the room flew open, and a large man emerged. It was Jerry Soderberg.

I forced myself to keep my eyes up and my face expressionless as the man came forward to greet my father. According to what I had heard and read, Soderberg had been the last of the three burn victims to get out of the fire. He’d had to pull his own engine header away from the frame just to escape. In the process, he lost all of the fingers from his hands and received third-degree burns over eighty-five percent of his body. Looking at the man now, I could see all this was no myth. The man’s fingers were gone, and the skin on his arms and neck looked as though it had melted and re-congealed.

“Hello, Bill,” Soderberg said, shuffling toward us. “Got your motor right here.”

“Thanks, Jerry,” my father answered. “Do you know my son Rob?” “Don’t believe I do,” Soderberg said, looking right at me. “How are you?”

“Fine,” I said, watching as the man took up a torque wrench in his fingerless hands and began to put the finishing touches on my father’s irrigation motor.

Although I had thought of it often, and sometimes had bad dreams as a result, only then did I really begin to grasp the full meaning of what I witnessed that day in Hutchinson. The closeness of death, the terrible texture and reality of it. One day the world is a comic-book tale with comic-book heroes who always win and comic-book villains who are always, inevitably, defeated. And then something happens, a veil is lifted, the smoke clears, and that comic-book world is gone forever. Anything is possible.

Nothing is guaranteed. We stand appalled not just by what we have witnessed, but even more by what we have been moved, however tentatively, to imagine.

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Megan Denton

Swan Song Give me just a few bees in the heart, and a small blue bowl for mandarin oranges.

Bring me a pair of lemon-yellow panties in a basket of kelp and terracotta velvet.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll hang my bathrobe on the two wooden pegs, and cruise, whistle-clean through my book of transformations. I’ll wait to be born, entirely breathless, feet planted steady as my favorite kitchen lamp. Touch me, and remind me who I am. Let the saint on the back porch roam, staking my garden down under an iron sky. I am a shiver spreading its claws out across the salty rose, up onto the steps of the unpainted altar with its waterweed crown.

If anyone told me, I didn’t believe it. I thought the valley was everywhere. I thought I could describe my strength as a dark blue dress with silver threads, hooded breaths of light chasing the nameless comets. Now, in an orbit of planets and tiny moons, the hot night makes me keep my bedroom window open.

This is an invisible gift, beating its soft wings.

This is mercy stepping into the hour, singing like a spring lamb to its mother. This is the thought I woke to, as the heat of beauty came fluttering up, no longer able to be moved. If anyone told me, I didn’t believe it. There are small kingdoms dripping from my ribs and breathing all around me. This is the fountain of a thousand drooping souls, the sour pulp in the nerves of things. Soon, soon I will dance in the kitchen, the overturned lamp in the shape of a swan.

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ARTIST/ NOTE

RANDY HORST: MINING THEIR STORIES I’m most interested in how we respond to life’s challenges, to our expectations about who we are and how we’d like our lives to be, and to our encounters with the divine.

My digitally altered photographs include sculptural images of saints, commoners, and beasts from the exterior of Chartres Cathedral in France. The seafood and vegetables are from Paris Street Markets, and the flowers are from Monet’s gardens in Giverny. The sculptures, originally intended to be our spiritual heroes and guides, confront the challenges of their own desires.

I’ve also begun a series of psychological portraits that explore life’s challenges. As with many artists before me, I mine the stories of biblical and Christian characters, but I don’t attempt historical representations. Rather, their stories provide me with a starting point from which to explore the range of our emotional responses to life experiences. I place my figures in a psychological reality modeled on my own understanding of that biblical and Christian character’s circumstances within their story.

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Randy Horst. Chartes Spectrum #1: In Search of Heaven – Purple. Digitally altered photography. 11 x 15 inches.

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Randy Horst. Chartes Spectrum #1: In Search of Heaven – Blue. Digitally altered photography. 11 x 15 inches.

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Randy Horst. Chartes Spectrum #2: The Fruits (& Vegetables) of Heaven – Blue. Digitally altered photography. 15 x 11 inches.

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Randy Horst. Chartes Spectrum #1: In Search of Heaven – Red. Digitally altered photography. 11 x 15 inches.

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Randy Horst. Chartes Spectrum #2: The Fruits (& Vegetables) of Heaven – Orange. Digitally altered photography. 15 x 11 inches.

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Randy Horst. Chartes Spectrum #2: The Fruits (& Vegetables) of Heaven – Green. Digitally altered photography. 15 x 11 inches

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Randy Horst. Chartes Spectrum #2: The Fruits (& Vegetables) of Heaven – Purple. Digitally altered photography. 15 x 11 inches

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Randy H0rst. Chartes Spectrum #2: The Fruits (& Vegetables) of Heaven – Yellow. Digitally altered photography. 15 x 11 inches.

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Randy Horst. Healing of Saint Sebastian #1. Conte, spray paint, & vinyl screws. 19 x 15 inches.

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Randy Horst. Healing of Saint Sebastian #2. Conte, spray paint, & vinyl screws. 19 x 15 inches.

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Randy Horst. Saint Sebastian #2. Conte & painted bamboo. 19 x 15 inches.

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Randy Horst. Jonah #1. Mixed media collage. 19 x 15 inches.

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Randy Horst. Jonah #3. Mixed media collage. 19 x 15 inches.

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Randy Horst. Pharaoh’s Army #4. Mixed media. 19 x 15 inches.

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Randy Horst. Pharaoh’s Army #5. Mixed media. 19 x 15 inches.

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Randy Horst. Job #1. Mixed media. 19 x 15 inches.

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Jeff Reed

The Bee Keeper to the Heart Surgeon The comb is full of honey.

Such sweetness settling after ceaseless effort.

When the plaque has narrowed the way in and out, just before the jam, I wonder if you find the compilation waxing the tired walls a kind of beauty? Testament to hard work and sacrifice gathered up, waving little children lining the parade, goodbyes thick with love?

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Rhonda Parrish

Matches She liked their straight lines, bright red tips.

The sulfur taste on her tongue.

She built her nest of them high in the boughs of an ancient Rowan tree and when Winter’s breath blew folded her flint wings, tight, and shivered beneath the dusting of snow.

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Kendra Langdon Juskus

Theology of the Body I. It is a baby’s only theology: his first study of God— whom some call a man— is nine months in a woman, small lips at the heart of her breast.

He eyes her from brow to chin and back, transcribing the light of her face.

II. At the Cloisters, a monk’s fingertips shine over his illuminated manuscripts.

Royal blue, scarlet, green: each sweep of his pen like a newborn’s eye tracing the inscrutable face of love.

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REVIEW/ 32

LETTERS AND LIFE: ON BEING A WRITER, ON BEING A CHRISTIAN

by Bret Lott Crossway Books, 2013

REVIEWED BY MELANIE SPRINGER MOCK

For a number of years, I’ve used Bret Lott’s short essay “Genesis” in my first-year writing courses. “Genesis” narrates Lott’s first memory of printing his name, and traces the way that initial creative act becomes Lott’s “own small imitation of God.” The essay is rich in its simplicity, a fine example of the old (but true!) first-year writing class bromide of showing, rather than merely telling about, an experience.

My students love “Genesis,” and so do I, its meaning unfolding for me in different ways each time I teach it. Lott’s essay manages to disrupt students’ entrenched thinking about what a deeply spiritual essay might look like, its evidence of God’s creative power—working through the artist—thrumming in every word. And, bonus: not a religious cliché to be found in the entire piece.

Lott’s newly published book, Letters and Life, limns and amplifies the themes expressed in “Genesis.” Letters and Life enters into a centuries-old conversation about what it means to be an artist and a Christian, relying on what has already been written about the Christian artist to expand and deepen our notions of faith and art, showing that, like the child-narrator in “Genesis,” the artist in creation imitates God. Letters and Life is separated into two parts, as the book’s title suggests. In the first section, Lott unwinds his ideas about what it means to be a writer of literary fiction— and, more than that, a writer who attempts “to give God his due” through the literary fiction Lott creates. This, Lott argues, is a difficult task, and one he has yet to figure out, despite his many years at the craft.

In the five chapters that constitute “Letters,” Lott considers what might be termed a theology of writing, as he contemplates what it means to be not only a Christian who believes very much in the incarnation but also an author who believes very much in a written text’s ability to reflect and embody a living Christ. In constructing this theology, Lott turns for help to those we might consider the greats in Christian letters— most notably Flannery O’Connor, to whom he devotes an entire chapter.

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Although the opening section of Letters and Life will appeal especially to those who enjoy reading literary criticism, Lott includes enough of his personal voice— and personal stories—to make these chapters more than an academic exercise. And while my attention flagged at spots during “Letters,” I remained intrigued by Lott’s intentional consideration of his own work, and the ways that consideration might shape my own writing as a person of faith, as well as that of the many undergraduate writers I teach.

The book’s second part, “Life,” embodies the principles Lott explores in “Letters,” and does so beautifully. “Life” includes only one long nonfiction essay, running almost 100 pages, titled “At Some Point in the Future, What Has Not Happened Will Be in the Past.” The essay ostensibly explores the death of Lott’s father, but—of course—is also about so much more: life and its passing; fathers and sons; our familial, literary, and spiritual inheritances; the writing process; how language itself is sometimes an inadequate vessel to express life’s experiences.

When he moves to the essay’s denouement, Lott declares he cannot adequately write about his father’s death: “Even now, at this end of having tried to, I understand even more deeply how I do not have the technique, or the courage, or the language to achieve the story I want to tell.”

As a writer, I can resonate with Lott’s frustration, his sense that words cannot always capture experience, and that “there is no way” to write about some things, except to try: to put down what we believe to be true using the insufficient resources we have.

As a reader, though, I’m grateful for Lott’s willingness to persist: “At Some Point in the Future” seems, to me, one of the finest examples of creative nonfiction I’ve read.

Lott’s essay is richly detailed, moving seamlessly through time and place. His narrative straddles several countries, decades, generations; it is both sprawling and compressed.

Though the topic of a parent’s death could mire a writer in maudlin reverie, Lott’s essay ends with powerful affirmation, and the assertion that stories about death are also undeniably about life, too.

Letters and Life would be an excellent text for an advanced writing course and, indeed, I will be using it next semester for a “Studies in Writing” course offered to English majors and minors at my university. Lott provides both a theoretical basis for how and why we write as well as a powerful example of Lott’s particular theories at work. While some nascent writers may struggle to understand all of Lott’s “Letters,” they will have no problems immersing themselves in his “Life,” and in the remarkable incarnation—the word made flesh, as it were—found in Lott’s story of death and birth.

The book is worth purchasing for Lott’s essay alone.

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Scott Laumann. They and the Face and Hands. Oil and acrylic on canvas. 16 x 20 inches.

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AMY NOLAN

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In a photo taken at Christmas 1969, my mother, still a newlywed and two months pregnant with me, wears a pair of red, yellow, and black plaid Pendleton hip-huggers.

She and my father are lounging in a chair; she’s leaning into him, half on his lap so that one hip is tilted upward as she snuggles against his body. They are both smiling. My mother’s magnificent hip dominates the photo: it curves transcendently upward. The photo captures my father, a dead ringer for comedian Louis CK, looking as if he had won the lottery. It is easy to see why he wrote in a love letter to her: I miss your bun.

My mother watched my father die of a heart attack exactly three years after this photograph, when he was forty and she twenty-eight, nine months pregnant and hosting a Tupperware party; less than three years after that she discovered her second husband was an alcoholic, and she was again pregnant. She had left a job she loved, teaching art, to be a full-time mother.

Thirty years after my mother and father posed for that picture, I wore those same Pendleton pants to a rave in Detroit, where I stomped and soared to the music. A black leather belt hung loosely around my hips, like the red-haired Lola in the film Run Lola Run. I was the same age my mother had been, but single, in graduate school, high on ecstasy and the imagined places where literature and ideas could take me.

I have often tried to forget that I inherited my mother’s hips. For most of my life I tried to run them off, as if they were stray cats. I ran long distances, kick-boxed, walked, swam, starved, biked, and in high school even did a brief stint working out with a pogo stick in the basement while listening to the Rocky IV soundtrack—determined to get rid of my hips.

The year I lived at home after graduating from college, my mother and I hadn’t been on the best of terms. I had no clue what to do with my life, and she did not approve of my boyfriend Jay, who was twenty-eight and living with his mother, and who I’d been seeing since my return. On our first date, he’d come to the door looking like a pudgy version of Tom Cruise’s Maverick from Top Gun: gelled, spiked dark hair, mirrored sunglasses to cover up his marijuana eyes, leather jacket with a broken zipper, and a toothpick sticking out the side of his mouth—an image that was only looking to get laid.

Like a clairvoyant, my mother somehow knew that I wasn’t a virgin anymore. She and I had been trapped in the car, me driving, both of us looking straight ahead at the road as the Red Hot Chili Peppers sang, “Give It Away,” on the radio.

I bit my lip, embarrassed by the ridiculous timing, unable to stop the music video in my head that featured the nearly naked band jumping around a desert landscape, their sinewy California bodies painted gold, and horns protruding from their heads, like sex devils. My mother and I had hit a nerve of silence. She had informed me that we are all pathetic, and we should all be grateful for what we have in life, and that I thought I knew it all. Of course, back then, I at least thought I knew more than she did.

My mother finally blurted, “See? It’s just like that song. If you give it all away no one will ever want you!”

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I glanced at her: “Oh my god, mom.”

She eyed me with a combination of disgust, concern, and fear. “You don’t understand.

You can never go back now.”

The desire to eradicate my hips took hold at age thirteen, the year I discovered MTV, and I could never go back to the way I once saw the world. As I felt myself pulling away from the natural landscape that had shaped me, music videos lured me toward a world that was sharp and shiny, and I developed a new longing—to absorb the fluid image.

I was drawn to the British, New Wave androgyny that dominated videos in the early ‘80s—to men and women wearing eyeliner, dramatic streaks of red across their cheekbones, multi-colored hair that took flight. This wasn’t just performance, it was re-invention. They were like exotic birds, beautiful with fluid sexuality. They hammered out the beats of Eros: joy, freedom, expansion, and emotion.

In the basement I danced to David Bowie, and I spun in circles like Stevie Nicks, arms outstretched, wearing a scarf and one of my stepdad’s t-shirts, as the newly found beat rippled through my body. I recall how many songs and movies in the ‘80s were about being hunter or hunted, about repressing desire or exploding with violence, with titles like Predator, Die Hard, Fatal Attraction, Terminator. My friends and I looked to these films for inspiration—and others, like Vision Quest, Karate Kid, Flashdance, and Footloose, complete with their training montages. These were stories about underdogs that become hard bodies, pushing themselves to the brink—stories that feature and emphasize thin, muscled bodies that transcend the mire of mediocrity, that aspire to soar over the malaise that seemed to define the decade. The message seemed to be that if we could conquer physical pain, we could somehow conquer life. These films pulled at something deep within me, something to do with being preoccupied with mastery and battle, whether it related to sexual conquest, subduing nature, and/or going to war with the body—sculpting it, battling its “bulge,” transforming its buns into steel, beating it into submission: the conquering of appetite, of need, of softness, of all that is feminine.

In his essay “The Anorexic Ruins” philosopher Jean Baudrillard argues that such an explicit mind-body disorder signifies “disgust for a world that is growing, accumulating, sprawling . . . a world that cannot manage to give birth. The principle of satiation and inertia can be read as the desolation of time, of the body, of the land.” Just as the land has been carved up into grids and rivers dammed up to suppress their wild, life-giving force, so has the image of the body.

At fifteen I became so close to my bones that I ran myself right into the hospital, and in two months, having gained sufficient weight, I went home. I ran my first 10K at sixteen, triathlon at eighteen, myriad road races, all the way up to a marathon at age thirty-eight. I ran even after foot surgery at thirty-nine, into arthritis at forty. But I still have my mother’s hips.

When I was fifteen, one of my favorite films was Amadeus. Despite its title, the story is really about Antonio Salieri, a brilliant but largely unknown composer

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who “confesses” to a priest that it was he who killed Mozart. Locked up in a mental institution for attempted suicide, the elderly Salieri is deeply tormented by a persistent sense of mediocrity. As a burgeoning classical pianist, I had never heard of Salieri.

But as I watched the movie, I saw the imagined Mozart through his eyes, and I at once felt sorry for him and found him terrifying. I could understand why he was so angry, so pained. It was impossible to condemn him. The prospect of being “forgotten,” left behind, having his talent passed by, rejected, was too painful for him to bear.

At the end of the film Salieri loudly proclaims to the other inmates that he is “King of Mediocrity” and they are his subjects, as his old, decrepit form is wheeled through the

stinky, labyrinthine halls of a mental institution. This scene, even more than that of Mozart’s body being tossed into a paupers’ grave and covered with lime, to me is the most sad and nightmarish part of the film. Even though the God-touched Mozart dies young and poor, his music and his genius transcend even death.

Salieri’s anguished predicament reminds me of one of my favorite passages from the Tao Te Ching: “Be a valley of the universe.” For me, it evokes an acceptance of gravity, of relaxed hips, of a kind of surrender, which could be terrifying, exhilarating, or neither— instead, gentle. Would Salieri understand, or find some peace in this phrase? But what does that mean to a perfectionist or someone who hates her hips and does not know stillness?

Poet Linda Hogan, in her collection The Book of Medicines, writes of “the house of

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pelvic truth.” The first time I read this phrase, which comes at the end of the poem, “The Ritual Life of Animals,” I had to put the book down and just sit with this new phrase.

I did not understand it, at least intellectually. But deep, deep within, I knew exactly what it was—and reading it in words felt like coming home. The boldness and mystery of the phrase felt like a call—to remember something of who I really am. Coming into that deeper knowing, and the wisdom that goes with it, is to accept, even embrace, the lowness, the wideness, the horizontal, the valley rather than the mountain—that which is opposite of what my culture values and celebrates.

With time, I have learned to appreciate the strange gifts that anorexia gave me: among them, an early awareness of the deep imbalances and unhealthy nature of the American diet, within my culture, region, and in my own family; thanks to a kind, hippie therapist who taught me what bulgur wheat was, an early awareness of the value of eating local and organic, and a burgeoning knowledge of the power of food to be political, representational, and a source of deep pleasure. I have also learned that a deep fear of being ordinary, not so much being fat, often scaffolds the house of the anorexic mind.

My mother always spoke of her body in disparaging terms. She hated her underbite, and the scar on her chin from when she crashed into a table corner as a little girl.

Wistfully she would tell me that I was much prettier than she was at my age, and instead of boosting my confidence, her admission made me shrink with guilt. I thought she was beautiful, especially when she laughed. I loved that scar on her chin. It made her interesting. And I loved her stories about her childhood home. She told me about the lodgers that Grandma took in to make extra money: cute German beatniks, a traveling musician, the kid who stole her Rolling Stones albums. She told me about how her own mother formed the center of the house and the time she and my aunt Ethel got drunk after dinner and threw the dirty dishes down the cellar stairs, dressed in heels and pearls, laughing hysterically. I loved my mother’s soft skin, her creativity, the notes she’d place in my lunchbox, written in her impeccable script, the strength of her arms as she’d grab my hands and perform goofy, herky-jerky dances. And I loved her dark humor.

Years ago, my mother and her best friend, Nancy, went to see the movie Basic Instinct. I saw the movie that same year; I was a senior in college, and I went with two friends. Afterwards, we earnestly discussed the misogyny, feminism, and depiction of bisexuality within the film—the way that women’s power is so often turned against the body and other women, and of course, we discussed how hot Sharon Stone was. When my mother and her friend saw the film, it was after they had spent their entire afternoon at an in-service for elementary school teachers. They went to unwind, having no idea what Basic Instinct was about.

In the opening scene of the film, an unidentified naked blond woman straddles a man in a huge bed that is draped with silk sheets. Cocaine, candles, and mirrors—all signs of early-nineties opulence and decadence—surround the couple.

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As the music rises in intensity, and the couple approaches a theatrical, simultaneous orgasm, the woman reaches down and grabs an ice pick. She bucks wildly on top of the man, lifts up the ice pick, and stabs him over and over. Blood sprays everywhere in a spectacular gush.

When I watched this scene with my friends, I had my hands over my face.

When my mother saw it with her friend, they had both busted out laughing.

My mother’s hips showed me what it is to be a woman—all the unspoken things that strike terror and wonder and a strange kind of pride that I would not even begin to understand until I was on the other side of forty. Even my childless hips, with all their years of yoga and Pilates and running and swimming, cannot prevent the earth’s gravitational pull. The fact of gravity is so plain and simple, like rich dirt, the smell of horses, whose great hips are worthy of awe, or the frankness of my cat’s stare. And yet, we act as if age and gravity were to be eradicated, cut away like disease, like weeds, like whatever is soft, and slow, and round.

I learned about the power of hips before I could understand it, much less celebrate that power. When I was twenty-three and being interviewed after a co-worker had murdered our boss, a police detective told me I looked like the murderer’s wife, except I didn’t have that “forties spread” in my hips yet.

When I was twenty-four, my toothpick chewing boyfriend raped me, and my hips held me together.

When I was twenty-seven, a man I broke up with said to me with a voice deep and sad: “You are a powerful woman . . . but you must use your power for good.”

When I was twenty-eight, a man I barely knew slapped my ass as I walked out the door past him. I turned and glared into his eyes, and he just stared, frozen, red-faced, surprised at himself. At the time I had no compassion, no mercy. I had found my Medusa face. Like many other women born after feminism, I thought I needed to be a warrior.

The greatest irony of this is that in doing so, I became lonely for real kinship with other women—women who could actually embrace, if not love the miracle of their periods as a reminder to rest and take some time off, who laughed until they farted, who could live as if men were not the mirror of their worth, who wouldn’t be so hard on each other, so competitive, so judgmental, so unforgiving.

My mother’s hips carried me. My body remembers how her hips rocked magically back and forth in front of me as I rode on the back of her bike. I remember the bowl of her butt, which moved rhythmically with the creak of the bike as she carried me. I clung to her hips in the wake of my father’s death as she sat in a stupor, smoking cigarette after cigarette.

My mother’s hips create a center of gravity. Every year my brothers and I return home to the place in which she raised us because she is the center. We stand in the kitchen on Thanksgiving marveling at the movements of her 5’2 stocky body, now seventy and slightly stiffer from rheumatoid arthritis, but still solid and strong as she performs a

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makeshift jitterbug with my 6’4, bald, and tattooed baby brother.

My mother was at home when my brothers and I left for school and returned. She made lunches and put silly notes in the bags. She sprayed Solarcaine on our sunburn, and took care of us when we were sick, giving us Vernor’s ginger ale and tapioca pudding. When I acquired lice in the second grade, she boiled my sheets, brushed my

hair with a metal comb, and massaged my head with prescription shampoo. She was Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and she treated us like celebrities on our birthdays. She made our cakes from scratch, and never missed an event with her camera.

She made the Halloween costumes we asked for every year, and channeled all of her creativity into each outfit, especially with my two younger brothers (one year Ron insisted on being a dill pickle, and Tim was the Headless Horseman, complete with a bloody stump for a neck). Some might say that these are just the things mothers do, but to me they were miracles.

We used to play a game called chicken and the egg. I was the egg. I couldn’t have been more than five. In this game, I would get on my hands and knees and curl up until my face touched the carpet. My mother would sit on my back, but not with all of her weight— just enough to capture that fine line between comforting containment and crushing claustrophobia. Sometimes I’d tell her to bounce a little so I could feel my body shrink,

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feel how small I could become. One day, she bounced too hard. My face crushed and rubbed into the carpet.

My nose a bloody mess, she carried me to the bathroom and tended to my face. As we do whenever we end up in the bathroom together, mom and I looked at our twin

reflections in the big mirror—she the adult version of me. She cried when she saw that she had bloodied my nose. This was the only time I’d seen her cry, before or after. Seeing my mom cry made me cry harder. I didn’t understand it then, but I think we were crying over everyone and everything.

When I made my mother laugh, I felt high, wound-up, and smart—anything but mediocre— because she does not laugh easily. Her liberal appreciation of the absurd blends with a grounded conservatism that makes her at once maddening to argue with and the most trustworthy person I’ve ever known.

When I made her laugh, I felt like I could save the world.

Years after the chicken and the egg incident, my mother and I once again stood together in the bathroom. Our reflections spoke with each other, as always.

I watched as she carefully plucked her eyebrows and chin. She told me that when she looked in the mirror she saw her own mother, staring back at her.

“Grandma used to say that it’s hell to get old,” she said, thrusting her chin up toward the mirror in search of stray hairs. “Is this what she meant?”

Yank.

I laughed and shook my head, looking at her reflection. “She always said that the three of us looked alike.”

“I know,” she said, considering. “I never thought so.”

“Me neither,” I lied. I took the tweezers from her fingers and plucked the hairs she missed.

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At the 11:00 United Methodist Church service, my grandmother would survey her domain, and beam proudly when other people said we looked alike. My mother would eye me to see if I was embarrassed, but I never was. I’ve looked over my shoulder many times, at the lives of my mother and grandmother, with satisfaction. We all have the same thick, dark hair, the same height when fully grown, and the same shoe size: seven medium. We share a fascination with the connections between people, and the stories behind strange family relics: an elephant-shaped ashtray, a strawberry red candy dish, and a china nativity set with a decapitated Joseph, whose head was then hastily glued into place, slightly off-kilter.

My grandmother and my mother both lost their first husbands suddenly, and young.

My mother’s own father had died of polio when she was a year old. My grandmother was dramatic and moodily beautiful, and a fantastic dancer, with her thick, salt and pepper hair, fancy hats, gloves, and cigarettes. My mother was always intensely private.

Next to her bed, she keeps a light-weight wooden box with a brushed gold veneer that is fast chipping away. Inside it is a small pile of photographs—some of them are of my brothers and me as babies, others are graduation photos of her siblings, her best friend from college, a few of my father, and a series of black and white photos taken of my mother when she was in college in the early 1960s. She is smiling shyly, a thick swatch of dark hair framing her face, standing by a lake, and wearing a black pea coat.

In other photos from what looks like the same day, a young Japanese man poses for the camera: lean and athletic, he stands on one foot along a pier, clowning around, like he is about to fall into the lake. He wears Ray Ban sunglasses, which attractively accent the straight black hair that wisps across his forehead. He wears a cut-off sweatshirt, striped pants, and brogues.

I ask my mother who he is. With a measured casualness, she says, “Oh, just a friend from college. Akio. We were both art students. He was very smart—he double-majored in art and biology, and I think he’s a doctor now . . . ” “What happened?”

Whenever my mother doesn’t want to answer, she gets up and moves around, starts cleaning, or goes into another room as she utters a sing-song sigh, “Ohhh . . . ?”

I follow her. “What happened, mom?”

“When Grandma found out that I was dating a Japanese man, she wrote a letter to the college, expressing her concern and disapproval. Akio and I broke up soon after that.”

“Mom! How could grandma have done that to you? How could you speak to her after that?” But I already knew.

When she told me this it was with intellectual distance—little affect, no edge. Her voice flat, she had chosen her words carefully. She hadn’t wanted to tell me this, because of how much I loved and admired my grandmother. I had rarely thought about the relationship between her and my own mother.

After my mother told me about Akio, I registered a tendril of insight into why she

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always seemed to be at a distance, cautious, never invading my privacy, standing in doorways, watching from windows, asking permission before she came to visit or attended any events that my brothers and I were involved in.

Now she was saying, “You have to understand that Grandma was of that generation that lived through World War II, and there were still strong feelings about the Japanese— people still called them Japs. She was just trying to protect me.”

My mother’s story about Akio and the heartbreaking lack of her own family’s acceptance is even more poignant to me now, since I married a man twenty-two years my senior. When we began dating, everyone had an opinion. Cousins and family acquaintances came out of the woodwork to remind me of the obvious: that he is older than I am. What if he dies? What if you meet someone younger? What do you possibly have in common?

I do not tell them because they wouldn’t understand: that I had found a man who beholds my hips, who treats my body like a sacred place of worship. If this isn’t a miracle, I don’t know what is.

I think of Linda Hogan’s “house of pelvic truth” as being the intelligence that lives below the belly—the part of me that hums with wisdom, but has no words. Pelvic truth is the deepest, most honest base of feeling. I can’t seek it out; it does not require “doing.” I surrender to its wisdom. I have to be still, be gentle, and trust my own knowing. I cannot help but be angry at my culture that so thoroughly represses, punishes, shames, and even ravages it. So many of us are wounded there: numb, locked up, tense, forceful. And we then enact those abuses on ourselves, each other, and the world. If I liken my pelvic truth to an abused or neglected animal or child, I am then responsible for my own healing, growth, and life.

In late March, when the snow reveals the sleepy black earth, my mother puts on her coat at some point during the weekend and says, “Let’s go for a walk around the yard.”

Ever since I was in high school, we would take this short walk around the small stamp of property and make it last an hour. Some years, the snow would still be lying around in stubborn slush-piles, and I would just be starting track season, beginning to run outside again, the sleepy, heavy grip of winter sloughing off like skin.

Even though I am forty, my mother takes me by the hand as we do our annual lap around the perimeter of the house, which is surrounded by white and red pines, maple, and oak trees. The yard dips lower in the back, revealing a birch-filled marsh. The songs of the frogs used to be deafening on hot summer nights—but in the last five to ten years, their music has faded.

My mother points out every bright green shoot poking out exuberantly in contrast to the dark dirt, the latest robins’ nest in a tree or in the eaves of the garage. As we reach the edge of trees that merge the backyard with the marsh, she always says, “Okay, now be very careful . . . the trillium might be starting, but the dead leaves cover them up. Watch where you step.”

If we see the delicate blossoms we exclaim with delight. It always feels miraculous to

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me, especially after a tough winter. Today there are four small blossoms, all white. Each year we hope to spot a lady slipper, a state-protected flower that used to be plentiful around here. I have since learned that state-protected means nothing, since people still pick them. Its flower is named for its resemblance to a delicate shoe—it is usually pink, and its orchid blossom feels like skin to the touch—soft and sensual. For the last couple of years my mother has attempted to plant them, but so far, they have not returned.

Saved for last on our walk is the trailing arbutus, which grows right at ground level, insulated by pine needles. The flower literally creates “trails” along the ground; it blooms in groups, so if you see one blossom, you can be sure that more are near. My mother and I crouch down on our knees, our noses to the slight rise in the earth, and we gingerly pull away the accumulated layers of needles. When we find one tiny white blossom, we can smell them at the

same time: the sweet, fruity scent is an anti-depressant. We laugh at ourselves as we inhale the wet ground, which is a mixed smell of pine needles, earth, and wintergreen, which is also starting to come up.

Kneeling there in the wet needles, I say, “Mom, I have to tell you something important.”

She sits up. “What,” she says, low and suspicious, a half-smile on her face.

“Mom, when I was seven years old, you know, that older kid, D.B., down the street? Well, he took me in the woods down the road and molested me, and I’m working through it, finally, and I needed to tell you because it’s part of my healing process and I don’t want it sitting here between us anymore, and, yeah.” I take a deep breath.

She does not look at me; she keeps her eyes fixed on the ground and works at the dirt, stabbing at it with her trowel. “Shit. I knew it. I knew that kid was rotten.”

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I touch her sleeve. “Mom, look at me. I’m okay. I’ll be okay. I just wanted you to know the truth. I don’t want there to be secrets anymore. And I’ve been afraid that you think I am selfish for—I don’t know, not having kids, for putting graduate school first . . . ” She looks at me with a pained expression. Tears fill her eyes. “Amy, you are a light in my life. Don’t you know that? I could never think you are selfish. You are my only daughter, and I love you so much.” Then she playfully whacks me, to distract us both from the tears that almost come but never do—not completely. “Ya poop.”

Late that night after the walk with my mother, I lie awake in the long hours before dawn, listening to the frogs singing way back behind the house. I think of one of my favorite passages from the Bible: “Be still and know that I am God.” I used to think it was a punitive command, like “do as I say and not as I do.” But now, I think of the frogs, who live low, in the most threatened, forgotten—therefore most sacred places—and sing like they belong here, whose skin, and legs and hips I always thought were very human.

I imagine that one day it might be possible that my hips—not what I do or what I aspire to be—could be the source of my own song to the Divine.

In the wake of receiving acceptance from my mother I feel such a swell of surprise, love, grief that I almost can’t take it. I don’t know what I expected—I just knew I had to tell her, to let her in. But the “push-pull” has been the dance my mother and I have done my entire life. It has kept me from being still. Maybe now the movement—the rhythm of a body on a bicycle, of learning to sway as I read a poem—can guide me toward loving my hips, toward embracing my own, beautifully ordinary, pelvic truth.

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Scott Laumann. They and the Face and Hands. Oil and acrylic on canvas. 20 x 16 inches.

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Hannah Nguyen

Cerulean Perhaps you were my earliest memory, swathed and lying inside my carriage I looked up into your immensity, because as a child my prayers flowed into your flow of porcelain, blue robe of the Virgin that stood atop my dresser, and glass-ceilinged in cathedrals you were the transparent delicate backdrop to cherubs and saints, so I searched you, summers spent along your unending lengths of mountain roads and coastlines, sky-ridged splashes of chicory guiding the way toward cerulean summit, pearly underside of shell after shell gathered up close, in my palm, pressing a conch to my ear to hear cerulean spoken, a great deep breath winding through the tunnel, thinking, in the beginning was the world uttered through and through.

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Andrew Johnson

Vidi Aquam The nave doors open and children file in, scattering throughout the pews, waiting turns for Confession with the priest. Under white arcs and domed celestial ceiling, some sit silently and read. Others squat on the floor, use the pews as desks to draw on construction paper, resting bony knees on the cold cobbled floor or using kneelers as cushioned seats. Silence swirls around the room, broken only by soft sibilance escaping the priest’s booth. After the last confession, they form a line. The teacher leads them past a Baptismal font near the door. They each sink fingers into the holy water, pull them out, and playfully genuflect. They dip fingers and cross themselves for a Remembrance they do not yet grasp. They plunk and cross to mimic adult ritual, to mock monotony, to expose a faith that is, if anything, some form of play. One girl plunges a finger deep and pulls it out, less like wetting her hand, more like spearing a fish. She shakes away holy excess by vigorously wobbling her wrist, flopping her hand, flicking fingers. Droplets plummet to the floor as she walks, baptizing the stone. She wipes hand on hip, then presses the wrung finger to forehead, sternum, left shoulder, right. Walking out the door, she is greeted by sunlight that glimmers on her skin.

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Janet McCann

Small Poem with Two Machine Translations Under the Hammock Pen pokes out from leaf mould.

Mud encrusted barrel, Steel dulled to white mist.

Won’t write, but almost.

Grey indentation, snail trail.

Something to say but no voice.

I

Beneath the Hammock Fountain pen presses Through meadow mould.

Barrel covered by mud Steel with a layer, which white fog Has made more difficult.

Not writerly but nearly.

Pulled one grey impression: A line after the snail.

To say something, but voiceless.

II Under the hammock Fountain pen reaches up from rotted leaves.

Covered barrel of steel with mud, a layer, to which fog imposed a dumbness.

Not writer but almost.

Pulled a grey impression, a line after the slug.

To say something. But be voiceless.

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Janet McCann

“Vicious Nostalgia�

for John McD, who named it

not a pleasant stirring in your breast, a bright goldfish circling your heart, but rather a leech, a dozen leeches, sucking blood. things are not what they were in that long-gone other world where no one died except an aunt you had met twice and she had given you a Japanese fan, which you still have. vicious nostalgia has no such gold like the flowers in that fan, waving. it is a shark, teeth sinking into your ankle, your thigh, blood spreading in the water as you swim toward the disappearing shore. benign nostalgia is always personal, your uncle shows you a picture of Paris and says he will take you there, the siamese cat sleeps fastened to your chest like a great pendant. you taste honeysuckle with a neighbor child on that first 4th you remember, kiss him ten years later at the barbecue, behind the acacia. benign nostalgia does not spout slogans. benign nostalgia does not wish your childhood on your grandchildren. it has nothing to do with politics or police. it knows that nothing that was, not anything will come back again, and there it is.

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Mark Parlette

Flushed Windmilling my arms, kicking out my legs, lunging, jumping, bending, squatting, I understand things as a flushed and clenching heart. I have been afraid to speak of love— that battered cup my mother tied around my neck when I arrived sticky and shouting into the world, which was a bedroom with yellow drapes. That cup that replaced the umbilical cord the midwives found wrapped around my throat.

I’ve known nights when terror gathered like the groans of frogs in the marsh, when it whined in my ears like insects, endless and mechanical. I’ve known the fear of death, how it empties and smothers each other thought. What a relief, then, to feel the cup bobbing at my chest as I hinge and pivot, push and swell with breath. Why not sweat fervently like the vast-bellied men in a sauna?

Let my sweat soak into dirt and polish tile floors. Let it slick the bodies of lovers and athletes. Let it wrinkle noses and turn heads. Let it fill every container I pass.

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Scott Laumann. They and the Face and Hands. Oil and acrylic on canvas. 20 x 16 inches.

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REVIEW/ 32 THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY: A PILGRIMAGE THROUGH ALZHEIMER’S

by Jeannie Murray Walker Center Street, 2013

REVIEWED BY LISA REPKO BORDEN The elderly woman sitting near the dessert table held her hands tightly in her lap. Agitated and tired at once, her eyes scanned the room, seeming to search for some familiar thing to rest upon.

Several times during the course of the evening I stopped by her post.

“Now, who are you?” she would venture cautiously.

“I’m Lisa,” I would smile. “Byron’s wife.”

“Oh!” she would say, brightening. “I’m so happy to find out who he finally married!”

My mother-in-law seemed smaller than usual at her birthday party that evening. With her pretty dress and pale eyes, she seemed child-like in the diminished stature of her once-strong frame. I had, by then, been married to her son for more than twenty years, and yesterday she had known me and the four grandchildren I had borne her, even if she struggled to bring our names to her lips. Tonight, however, she was too tired to keep the effects of her disease at bay. Tonight she was glad to meet me—again and again and again.

Jeanne Murray Walker’s The Geography of Memory walks us kindly into the frightening maze of grief and loss we travel when accompanying an aging loved one through Alzheimer’s-induced dementia. With candor and a quiet sense of awe, Walker enters the process, not shying from the pain but allowing her mother’s slow demise to bring surprising transformative renewal in her own life. While the book’s subtitle reads A Pilgrimage Through Alzheimer’s, the message should not be relegated to a readership that is touched in some way by the disease. The larger topics, common to all of us, include a fresh perspective on memory, on the separations that precede growth, as well as the joining together that matures and deepens our relationships. Perhaps most beautifully, Walker offers a way for us to embrace the confusion of a loved one’s dementia, looking for clues, the sightings of the one we’ve known, hidden in metaphor and the seemingly random recollections brought to the forefront of a once-clear mind.

The book opens with the middle-of-the-night news of Walker’s mother’s passing. We feel the disorientation and total blackout of emotions as Walker struggles to comprehend what has happened. Her response will directly impact the twenty students she is teaching in London, and her mind rocks and reels between her own needs and desires and theirs. As the second chapter closes, her students have returned from a weekend away and are settling into their seats: Several of them turn their faces toward me, a bunch of sunflowers swiveling toward the light.

In that moment I cannot conceive of how to explain that their London Study Abroad program is over, that they waited tables for two summers to earn money for the trip that now may go down the drain, that they will have to fly home immediately, and they might not get credit.

Walker knows she has every right to leave, to close the course and return to bury her mother.

She yearns to be with her sister and help do the final things we can do for our parents. She wants

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to assist with the last details, to care for “the body that held me before I came into the world.”

In the end, Walker knows her mother would want her to stay, to finish what she started. She writes: “So I don’t leave my students. The students never learn that my mother has died. On Wednesday morning, my mother is quietly buried in Dallas while I am teaching a class in London.”

Still smarting from this matter-of-fact disclosure of the outcome of her impossible choice, we now have the next forty-five chapters to travel the ten years that have led up to this poignant moment. The journey is closeness and distance in calculated measure, just as London and Dallas are as close as a phone call or as far away as a missed last goodbye.

There is nothing sentimental or overwrought in Walker’s honest assessment of her relationship with the extraordinarily clever and resourceful single mother who, though widowed, raised her children with a firm belief in God’s goodness and the conviction that hard work and a positive attitude will bring good results. As we learn more about the final years of an extended goodbye, we visit scenes, memories, and lessons recalled from the sixty-four years of a mother-daughter relationship, tracing their journey to becoming independent and very different adults. Walker is, among other things, an introverted literature professor on the East Coast. Her mother is, among other things, an extroverted flower judge and retired nurse in Dallas. There are large areas of life they would do well not even to discuss. Walker speaks frankly of her strong need to pull away, the inexplicable urge, even from a young age, to separate herself from the clinging love of a woman adept at generating strong currents of control. And yet there is grace—grace for the brokenness that caused her mother to hanker after those levels of control.

To separate is to grow. Yet, to join is also to grow. Walker’s relationship with her sister, distanced not by lack of love but by busy lives and different choices, takes a strong turn into unity as their mother’s disease worsens. We watch these very different women unite while maintaining the essential integrity of their differences. The invitation to a closer revelation of self is not one their mother is able to accept. The mother-daughter relationships are drawn closer by the practicalities of actual care, kindness, and conversation, but emotional intimacy is not offered. Walker reveals this kind of shortcoming with a tender frankness, absent of judgment: “In hindsight, I recognize Mother herself was like a safe. For all her chatty, off-the-cuff friendliness, she herself was profoundly enigmatic.”

As her mother’s memory appears to increasingly evaporate, Walker is surprised by the clarity of her own childhood memories as they come, unbidden, to her. In frequent passages on the nature of memory, we can’t help but wonder at the mystery of the mind. Walker’s ponderings suggest that we are concurrently all the selves we have ever been. My eight-year-old self has not vanished.

Rather, I carry her within me and she is present, if not center-stage, at this moment. The function of a clear mind may be, among other things, to keep all of our selves in their proper time zones.

The Geography of Memory offers us this lens of grace through which we can view dementia. I extrapolate from Walker’s writing that, perhaps, short-term memory, having gathered less weight with which to carve a groove in our minds, has only been able to carve a light groove. Perhaps, then, the mind skips over these shallow grooves in its struggle to find the right place in time on any given day or in any given conversation. It lands more easily in the deep grooves of long-held memory and, voila, one of our past selves turns up, a being out of time. This kind of gracious interpretation of Alzheimer’s allows Walker to see her mother’s dignity even during the most undignified displays of loss of social decorum.

There is much grace to be taken from The Geography of Memory. The writing is beautiful, round, and filling, without excess but deeply satisfying. This is a book that provides a map of where, as the risen Christ once said to Peter, we “do not wish to go.” We go there anyway, hopefully in the arms of someone as understanding as Jeanne Murray Walker.

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CONTRIBUTORS / 32

Megan Denton currently lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with her cat, Mona, who has no teeth. She recently graduated from The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga with a BA in English: Creative Writing.

Though she has not yet applied for MFA programs, she hopes to do so soon. Her poetry has also appeared in Rock & Sling, Cleaver Magazine, and The Sequoya Review. She is an old-soul, grandmotherly-type young person trying to figure out how to be a real adult without losing her sense of childlike jubilation. She has an identical twin sister, a tiny birthmark that looks like a clover, and lots of Earl Grey tea.

Andrew Johnson is a poet and essayist living in Kansas City, Missouri. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Sonora Review, MAKE, Saint Katherine Review, The Pinch, Killing the Buddha, and elsewhere. Most days he wakes up early, pounds some coffee, and writes like crazy for as long as possible until the other humans in the house wake up, then he spends the rest of the day wrangling two small boys and driving them around in a mini-van he has come to tolerate for its practicality, but one day, he swears, he will drive a Volkswagen Thing all over the country, and it will run on veggie oil, and that dream helps keep the minivan-induced depression at bay.

Lisa Repko Borden loves the music of Jackson Browne, the Psalms of David, and the writing of A. A. Milne. She has lived most of her life outside the United States and is currently settled in Tanzania, her sixth country of residence. With thirty years in Africa, her writing is shaped by creation, faith, and twenty-seven years of parenthood. Her book, Approaching God, speaks of intimacy with God as she ponders God as Friend, Father, Mother, Artist, Healer, and Guide. Lisa sings in the shower and dances in the kitchen and is much in love with her husband, their four children, and two new daughtersin-law. Secretly, Lisa believes that poetry is the best and highest language.

Kendra Langdon Juskus is a freelance writer and editor as well as the assistant editor of the journal SEVEN, published by the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College. Her poetry and/or nonfiction have been published in Ruminate, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Seeding the Snow, Books & Culture, and PRISM, among others. Her writing has received awards from Ruminate, Prairie Light Review, and the Humane Society of the United States. She is a poetry graduate of Spalding University’s MFA program and lives with her husband and son in Illinois, where this summer they will be foraging berries from the local forest preserves and making lots of jam.

Randy Horst lives in Goshen, Indiana, where he teaches art and art history at Goshen College, a small liberal arts college associated with the Mennonites. He is a 1983 graduate of Goshen College with a degree in art education and a 1986 graduate of Bowling Green State University in Ohio with an MFA in drawing. Prior to returning to Goshen College, he taught art for fifteen years at the University of Montana Western. His work has been displayed in regional and national solo, group, and juried exhibitions. Randy and his wife enjoy international travel, a wide variety of ethnic foods, and Jazz music.

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Scott Lauman is a visual artist of multiple disciplines, including working directly on specific natural sites, painting, ink block printing, video, installation, and “drawing” with found elements. Since the mid-1990s, he has completed numerous commissions for Time, Rolling Stone, Reader’s Digest, GQ, the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, the Grammy Awards, and Warner Brothers, among others. Over the past decade, he has lived and worked in Spain, Philadelphia, Orange County, Minnesota, San Diego, Germany, and San Francisco and has exhibited in several galleries in the US and abroad.

He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his wife Alicia and daughter Paloma (for now).

Though Ae Hee Lee was born in South Korea, she lived in Peru for fourteen years. Her hobbies include travelling and enjoying the simple pleasures of life, such as taking strolls under snow and sipping cups of tea with a good book at her side. She graduated from Calvin College with a major in English and minors in writing and ESL and has been recently accepted to Notre Dame University’s MFA program. Her poetry has been published in Dialogue, Cobalt, Cha, Wisdumb Tooth*, exhibited at the Calvin College’s Center Art Gallery, and is forthcoming in Spark: A Creative Anthology.

Amy Nolan teaches creative writing and is becoming a certified healing touch practitioner for animals, especially horses. Her nonfiction appears in Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, the Bellevue Literary Review, and several other literary journals. She won Solstice’s 2013 Nonfiction Award, and her memoir, The Whirlpool, was a finalist for Autumn House Press’s 2013 Memoir Award. Her essays have appeared in publications including Midwestern Miscellany, The Examined Life, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Literature, Cultural Critique, and the Red Cedar Review.

Janet McCann is a crone poet who has been teaching creative writing and other vices at Texas A&M since 1969. Journals publishing her work include Kansas Quarterly, Parnassus, Nimrod, Sou’wester, Christian Century, Christianity and Literature, New York Quarterly, Tendril, Poetry Australia, and McCall’s. She is the recipient of a 1989 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship winner, and her most recent collection is The Crone at the Casino (Lamar University Press, 2013).

Mark Parlette lives, writes, and works as an adjunct professor in Charlottesville, Virginia. In addition to yellow drapes (now gone), the bedroom in which he was born had matching dresser, bureau, and bedside table (wooden and white with gold trim.) Also, and noticed for the first time on his last visit, a lamp with its base carved into the shape of a woman, in flowing robes, who holds the stem of a giant flower. He writes both poetry and fiction. His first published short story is forthcoming in the Spring 2015 issue of J Journal.

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 Meant to Be, forthcoming from Chalice Press. I blog about (and deconstruct) images of women embedded in evangelical popular culture at AintIAWomanblog.net. Despite my vocation, I’m not always a bookish person, and like watching bad reality television, running, eating junk food, and taking long naps, under my desk if necessary.

Hannah Nguyen’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cradle Songs: An Anthology of Poetry on Motherhood, Drash: A Northwest Mosaic, Quill and Parchment, Third Wednesday, and Spillway. An April 2014 featured reader for Puget Sound Poetry Connection’s Distinguished Writer Series, she volunteers as an English-as-a-secondlanguage tutor, Lego builder to her five-year-old son, and masseuse to three rescue cats in Dublin, California.

Rhonda Parrish is driven by a desire to do All The Things.

She has been the publisher and editor-in-chief of Niteblade Magazine for over five years now (which is like twenty-five years in internet time) and is the editor of the forthcoming World Weaver Press anthology, Fae. In addition, Rhonda is a writer whose work has been included or is forthcoming in dozens of publications including Tesseracts 17: Speculating Canada from Coast to Coast, Kzine, and Mythic Delirium. Her website, updated weekly, is at rhondaparrish.com. Also, she loves sushi.

Robert Rebein is the author of Dragging Wyatt Earp: A Personal History of Dodge City (Swallow Press, 2013).

His essays and other nonfiction have appeared in Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Redivider, The Cream City Review, and other literary magazines and journals. He lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he chairs the English department at IUPUI. continued

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Jeff Reed serves as the lead pastor of Hillside Covenant Church in Walnut Creek, California. “Preaching and poetry uniquely inform one another,” he says, “but if my affections must choose an allegiance, I choose the poem.” On turning fifty last August, Jeff decided, as a form of fallow-field Jubilee, to take a sabbath from writing new poetry for the length of time it would take for his front-yard grapevine to produce the first sweet grape after its fall pruning. As grace would have it, that ripening is coinciding perfectly with the release of this summer’s issue of Ruminate! His poems have appeared in The Lamp Post, Christianity and the Arts, and First Things. His work can be read at windinthereeds.tumblr. com.

Noel Sloboda is the author of the poetry collections Our Rarer Monsters (sunnyoutside, 2013) and Shell Games (sunnyoutside, 2008) as well as several chapbooks, most recently Circle Straight Back (Cervená Barva Press,

2012). His work has appeared in Fourteen Hills, Gigantic, Modern Language Studies, Other Poetry, and Sentence.

Sloboda has also published a book about Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein. He teaches at Penn State York.

Jessie van Eerden is author of the novel Glorybound (WordFarm), winner of the 2012 ForeWord Reviews Editor’s Choice Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including the Oxford American, Bellingham Review, the Literary Review, and the River Teeth Reader. Her prose has also been included in Best American Spiritual Writing and Red Holler: An Anthology of Contemporary Appalachian Literature.

Jessie received the Milton Fellowship from Image Journal and Seattle Pacific University for work on her debut novel, and she received her MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa. She lives with her hound Mona in West Virginia where she directs the low-residency MFA writing program at West Virginia Wesleyan College.

Prize • $ 1 5 0 0 + P U B L I CAT I O N I N R U M I N AT E Entry Fee • $ 2 0

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Deadline • O CTO B E R 1 5 , 2 01 4

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LAST/ NOTE THOUGHTS ON CLEARING IT OUT FROM THE CONTRIBUTORS IN THIS ISSUE

In the high plains town where I grew up, the thing pretty much everyone was waiting around to do was to “get the hell out of Dodge.”

Nobody said anything about going back, in memory or otherwise, and yet that’s the act that has occupied me in the years since I followed the lead of Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson and cleared the hell out of there.

“Happiness is Dodge City, Kansas, in the rear view mirror.”

So I thought then, at any rate. But for some of us, the place that raised us up and forgave our feeble sins remains the place—then and forever—no matter how little we thought of it in our younger days.

Robert Rebein

NONFI CT I ON

I like

to use visual patterns in my artwork.

They decorate and they disturb at the same time.

As humans we embrace activity and personality patterns. Patterns create structure—structure creates meaning. But over time, one can accumulate quite a few patterns.

After a while the old ones just become dead weight, creating mass, not structure—creating dogma, not meaning. To live in the moment means seeking out new patterns, even if the changes are only subtle.

The only way to avoid the dead weight is to accept the discarding of old patterns—it’s a natural process and means you’re still alive, both physically and spiritually, actively becoming you.

Randy Horst

VISUAL ART

This isn’t

about the clearing out of homes.

It’s the clearing out of all the places you’ve built them. The clearing out of the soul—re-arranging, painting the walls yellow maybe, or salmon. It’s the clearing out and the hauling off of dead stars and planets and all things heavy. The clearing out of old lovers, those who doubted you and pointed and laughed themselves sick. This is the eviction notice thumbtacked to your heart’s crib: it’s time to leave.

Megan Denton

P O ETRY

I am amazed how sticky and resilient disturbing mental images can be, clinging to the rusted hangers in the deep and busy closet of my middleaged mind. Clearing out these unwanted spoilers is not nearly as easy as cleaning out the junk in my real-life closets and actually requires an opposite strategy.

Instead of the clumsy and tedious attempt to rid these poisonous memories by extraction, it seems better to pursue a course of extinction by stuffing my mind-closet with more stuff—really good, rich, noble, elegant, pure stuff—cram it so full of fresh air and bright colors that the moldy images begin to suffocate and implode for lack of breathing room and attention.

Jeff Reed

P O ETRY

continued

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LAST/ NOTE THOUGHTS ON CLEARING IT OUT FROM THE CONTRIBUTORS IN THIS ISSUE

I am

forty-four years old, and have just begun treatment for compulsive exercise—a holdover from being anorexic many years ago.

I had been hospitalized as a teenager in the 1980s, then recovered by exterior standards, gaining enough weight to be released. All my life I have been obsessed with weight, food, and exercise. I have kept it to myself, and only recently “came out” to my therapist about it. Once I did, I felt something in me open up; a space emerged where fear and shame had resided for years.

The relief was immense.

I have since cleared out my entire library of books on health: well-meaning tomes by Dr. Oz, information on the Paleo diet, the gluten free diet, the Atkins diet, the Schwarzbaum Principle, and all of my health magazines, which I realized are really just diet magazines that perpetuate impossible standards of beauty and fitness.

The hardest thing, though, was clearing out the exercise choice that landed me in the hospital in the first place: running. But in doing so, I now see differently. I notice the sounds of birds, the feel of wind on my skin, the silence underneath the distant din of traffic, and the rhythm of my own steps gently touching the pavement, not pounding. I’ve cleared the debris so I can finally learn who I am.

Amy Nolan

NONFI CT I ON

I have tossed out poems written more than a hundred times, unquestioned assumptions about people and places, daydreams about winning things. But bits of old pain are much harder to get rid of.

Janet McCann

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ISSUE 32 Summer 201 4

It’s easier

to clear out an overcrowded attic or garage than it is to straighten up a messy relationship. This is because we have difficulty seeing the misunderstandings that pile up between us.

My poem in this issue of Ruminate explores the process of gaining perspective on a “cluttered” domestic situation. It also touches upon the difficulty of saying—and hearing—what we need to when weighed down by misconceptions.

Ultimately, while the family in the poem might not be any happier by the close than it was at the start, both the father and the narrator have gained a little clarity about what’s not working in this household. And in that clarity there’s a measure of hope.

Noel Sloboda

P O ETRY

I couldn’t leave you there. You were taking up more and more space in my brain every day, growing like a tumor. It wasn’t healthy.

So I channeled you through my pen, bled you onto the page, stained it with all my love, pain, angst, and fears. Not chemotherapy, not poison.

The pen is surgical. I don’t want to be free from you completely, just return you to your correct proportions, clear out enough space for me to breathe. To live.

Rhonda Parrish

P O ETRY

Scott Laumann. They and the Face and Hands. Oil and acrylic on canvas. Varying sizes.

Scott Laumann. They and the Face and Hands. Oil and acrylic on canvas. 16 x 20 inches.