Issue 34: Keeping Things Whole

ISSUE

POET RY Coating our hollows with pearl from John Blair FICT IO N Fishermen, fathers, and doing as he did from Joseph Celizic V IS UAL A RT On a light burning brightly just beyond our vision from Melissa Weinman INTERV IEW Lauren F. Winner on writing, revision, and resurrection from Ann Swindell

34

S P R I N G 2015

+ 2015 William Van Dyke Short Story Prize judged by Larry Woiwode

First Place: “Nesting Doll” by Tori Malcangio

$

15

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 Melissa Weinman. Celestial Bodies II. Oil on panel. 8 x 16 inches.

OPPOSITE PAGE Melissa Weinman. Tree of Life. Oil on panel. 48 x 48 inches.

STAFF/ EXTRAORDINAIRE

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Brianna Van Dyke SENIOR EDITOR

Amy Lowe POETRY EDITOR

Kristin George Bagdanov VISUAL ART EDITOR

Stefani Rossi REVIEW EDITOR

Paul Willis WEB EDITOR

Renee Long INTERVIEW EDITOR

Paul Anderson ASSOCIATE READERS

John Patrick Harty Erika Lewis Kristen Thayer Diana Small Benjamin Myers GUEST READERS

Laura Droege Nicola Koh INTERNS

Alexis Gresh

Kristin Norton Laura Nepodal MARKETING & OUTREACH

Keira Havens PRINT DESIGNER

Anne Pageau givecreative.co

WEB DESIGNER

Katie Jenkins

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

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

SUBSCRIPTION RATES & SERVICES Subscriptions are the meat and bones of this nonprofit and what keep the printers printing and the postage paid. Please consider subscribing to Ruminate.

If you receive a defective issue or have a problem with your subscription order, please email us at subscriptions@ruminatemagazine.org.

Send all subscription orders and changes of address to subscriptions@ ruminatemagazine.org. Library subscription services are available through EBSCO and WT Cox Subscriptions.

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

DISTRIBUTION Ruminate Magazine is distributed to bookstores by Kent News Company and through direct distribution.

FRIENDS OF RUMINATE This issue was made possible by the Friends of Ruminate, whose generous Winter 2015 financial support helped to make this issue of Ruminate possible. To become a friend, write us at editor@ruminatemagazine.org.

Benefactors Duncan and Leslie Fields, Steve and Kim Franchini, Nicola Koh, Kelly and Sara McCabe, Randy and Linda Randall, Ralph and Lisa Wegner, John Zeilstra and Janice Van Dyke-Zeilstra, Dr. Randall J. VanderMey

Patrons Grace Church, Judith Dupree, Brad & Keira Havens, Ryan and Katie Jenkins, Tim and Katie Koblenz, Brian and Anne Pageau, Jeff Parkes, Cheryl Russell, Ben and Morgan Van Dyke, Brandon and Kelly Van Dyke, JJ and Amy Zeilstra

Sponsors John David Deutsch, Jennifer Fueston, Manfred Kory, Nancy Schrock, and Mary Van Denend

Copyright © 2015 Ruminate Magazine. All rights reserved.

CONTENTS / 34

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

4 5 78 80

FICTION Tori Malcangio Nesting Doll Joseph Celizic Offloading at St. Paul Harbor Nektaria Petrou The Evil Eye Expert

POETRY

16, 56 25

Holly Virginia Clark Where There Is No Faith, a Hound

26 27

Dave Harrity Meadowland Reverberation

28 29

Heather Derr-Smith Field of Blackbirds Sparrow

42

Laurie Klein Re: Union

43

Shann Ray Wife Psalm 2

44 45

John Fry You, Breath on a Coal [Now I Ache at the Strange]

46 47

Amanda Leigh Rogers Day Four Day Five

48

Hope Wabuke Job (War Survivor’s Guilt)

49

Roger Desy Field

50 51

George David Clark Iscariot’s Psalm Original Sins

52 53 54

John Blair The Story You Heard Hard Pearl The One Thing

10

30

65

REVIEW Karly Borden Review of North of Hope

by Shannon Huffman Polson

40

INTERVIEW Ann Swindell Lauren F. Winner on the Writing Life

75

VISUAL ART Melissa Weinman Celestial Bodies II Tree of Life Rosefire Series Seeds of Mercy Laura Carpenter Truitt Thresholds Series Before we figured it out

Front Cover

Inside Front Cover 17-24 Back Cover Interior

57-64

Inside Back Cover

EDITOR’S NOTE/ 34

During a recent retreat at the nearby Benedictine Abbey of St. Walburga, I was reflecting and journaling on all the many “hats” I wear and how I can sometimes feel scattered and fragmented as a result. I also thought about the latest national conversation around women balancing work and family and the supposed myth of “having it all.” I imagined diagramming my body to reflect this feeling of disjointedness: a marriage curled into the small of my back, a daughter on my left shoulder, a son on my right, a little magazine called Ruminate tucked under my chin, a platter of to-do lists balanced atop my head, and a chain of urgency wrapped around my feet.

This exercise soon took a turn as I found myself imagining a cloth of despair draped across my chest, a cloth too heavy for breath, for lungs, for air. For me, this cloth weighs heaviest when the periods of depression hit. And, I realized, it also weighs heaviest when I’m feeling distracted and pulled in too many pieces or places, and especially when things feel urgent, whether the urgency is real or imagined. I recently read that many AA members know to take special care of themselves and be on guard for the potential of a relapse when HALT occurs, which stands for hungry, angry, lonely, and tired. I would add fragmented to that list. And, I think we are all vulnerable to our version of a relapse when any one of these factors appears.

Thankfully, I was journeying with a good book that reminded me of Jesus’s words, the words he uttered to a couple of souls throughout the Gospels: “Your faith has made you whole.” This simple statement stopped me still; no more diagramming my body. So I prayed it over and over—rolling it around my tongue and against my cheek and inside my breath, asking for faith, for wholeness—for myself, my family, my community. * When we gathered the content together for this issue and noticed the common thread of wholeness in many of the pieces, we decided to name this issue Keeping Things Whole (after Mark Strand’s well-known poem of the same title). It feels right to continue the work I started a few months ago—to keep sitting with this word, this promise, to keep leaning toward it with hope. And it feels right to remember other pilgrims are walking along with me on this journey, and through their words and their paintbrushes, they are seeking wholeness, too.

And yes, I know it’s a big word, a big dream. Ugh, I truly know! Sometimes it seems impossible.

But what does feel possible is holding a word in my mouth, savoring it, reading a story that gives off light, pondering a poem that tells the truth, being for wholeness and against fragmentation, doing small things with great love as Mother Theresa insisted. Yes. Small things. Great love.

May it be so for all of us,

4

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

READERS RUMINATE/ 34 THOUGHTS ON KEEPING THINGS WHOLE FROM RUMINATE READERS

Alone for the first time in weeks, maybe months, I stood in my friends’ apartment in a state of panic. They were away on a work assignment, and I was house-sitting and taking care of their cat. It was a favor to them, but also a favor to me. After months of wrangling and bitter arguments, I had finally left my husband. I needed a place to live, and my friends obliged.

Now it was midafternoon and after all the tears and yelling and counseling, I had achieved my goal: I had left him.

And now I had not a clue as to what I should do with myself. I felt like a hollow shell of a woman, not even someone I recognized. Rooted to the spot where I stood in Laura’s kitchen, I had the odd idea that if I moved I would disintegrate and blow away. I needed someone. But who? My friend Terry came to mind, and I fished her phone number from my purse.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, no doubt hearing the desperation in my voice.

“I left Tom,” I sobbed.

“Oh, honey, I’m sorry, but isn’t that what you wanted?” I couldn’t think of a word to say. She asked me where I was.

“Look, I have some company, otherwise I’d come right over. Can you make yourself a cup of tea?”

Tea. Yes, I could do that. But what came first? The steps of this simple task eluded me.

“Is there a kettle on the stove? Tea bags on the counter?”

She walked me through the process like a mother with a child. Eventually, the kettle whistled. I poured hot water over the tea bag and held the cup inside the temple of my hands as if it were a talisman of comfort and hope. And that afternoon, it was. It still is today.

I’ll make one now.

Linda C. Wisniewski

D OY LESTOW N, P ENNSY LVAN IA

Black girl talks like white girl.

Living in a predominately white town until I left for college makes me sound white. I’ve heard this all of my life. I still hear it.

Black girl talks like black girl.

I’ve listened to others tell me I sound black when I say things a certain way, when I’m angry or joking.

Black girl talks like . . . ?

Both. I still get both. People think I sound black. People

think I sound white. They erase my pigment with the pink stub of an eraser, or they scoop out my insides and hang my skin like a flag on a porch. They sum me up as one or the other.

Black girl feels like pieces.

I decided on neither. If people insisted on totalizing me with opposing labels because of what I said or what I ate or what I listened to, then I would just be nothing. I would just be me—nothing.

Black girl feels like hope.

I memorized Psalm 139 in high school. I played it in my head and I spoke it again and again until I knew it by heart.

First line: “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me.”

God searched me and knew me. Did others know me? No. How could they? I barely knew myself. But God knew me.

He loved me anyway.

Black girl talks like Charnell.

God has listened to me talk for a while, and He’s never said anything about my voice. He’s only listening to me, Charnell, and that’s good enough for Him. Charnell talks like Charnell.

People think it’s their job to cut others up into small, identifiable parts and sort them into the appropriate bins.

When I stopped letting others sort my pieces and stopped sorting them myself, I began to know myself as a whole person, as the body I inhabit, as the mind through which I process, as the soul I truly am.

Charnell Peters

WESTF I E L D, IN D IA N A

I know wholeness. It’s when I have time to notice how blue my daughter’s eyes are, time to admire the curve on the handle of my coffee cup, time to get lost in the shade of green and misty orange hills of a Cézanne landscape or time to sit in silence and think. I love to feel whole, complete, at ease—well oiled, at peace, calm. I bask in these moments like a cat on a sunny windowsill.

But I also know disconnect. I know spiraling and spinning out and away from anything still and true. Like when I almost died from a deadly virus. Or when my dad died, and my mom sent me off to college with only one month to grieve. Maybe delving into a new world was the right way to cope for some, but it wasn’t for me. I was fractured, broken, lost—the foundation of my life had fallen away. I felt alone;

5

READERS RUMINATE/ 34 THOUGHTS ON KEEPING THINGS WHOLE FROM RUMINATE READERS

my only friends were grief and loneliness. I didn’t even know that wholeness existed. And if I had, I wouldn’t have known how to seek it.

Luckily, time marched on, and I found recovery. I can’t proclaim the steps I took to heal my fractured heart, but I can tell you I prayed a lot, made some scary mistakes, wrote obsessively, and prayed some more. Now, those days of acute disconnect are behind me, and the memory of that dark time serves to increase my joy of today. I revel in the small moments and the days I feel whole.

And I know my journey isn’t over; it can’t be. The journey is life—beautiful sunsets and traffic jams, happy days and sleepless nights, dreams and worries, family events and arguments with my spouse. There will be tragic days and glory days. But through it all, my constants are prayer and stillness. These constants are not always easy to find, but I have discovered, and will continue to rediscover (why do I always forget?), that my quiet heart always has something to say if I take the time to listen.

Valerie Van Selous

P ENNI NGTON, NEW J ER S EY

My husband and I spent this past summer in Santa Barbara, California, with a family that, as they say in Texas, has become kin to us. One evening on the porch I sat chatting with the mother of this wild bunch. I had just returned from visiting my mom for her 50th birthday.

Sadly, we had a huge argument which led to an avalanche of old wounds. The lines of communication were temporarily closed. Unburying this with my friend that evening felt natural and safe. She said, “We are eternal beings so we have time enough to figure ourselves out.” At that moment, I felt the word eternity finally took on some form.

Most days I think I should know how to smoothly navigate relationships, and that I should have family dynamics all sorted out. My friend’s statement was an invitation to pause the fixing of all that is unresolved. Wholeness meant pausing, not striving; reflecting, not analyzing.

Pausing meant acknowledging what remained broken while trusting both my mom and I had something to offer each other.

I still couldn’t help but tumble around in what I said and didn’t say, what I did and didn’t do, and how all those

6

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

bad things were going to show up in other sacred places, like my marriage and work. In the aimlessness, I realized my friend’s invitation to wholeness meant giving myself space to ask the same questions over and over, “What do you need, what is hard, what is good, what can you give, what can you not give?”

Wholeness had to mean my mind was not separate from my body, had to mean sitting by the window with a cup of tea, counting the birds, cleaning the glass so I could see more clearly, so I could feel more clearly, so I could be more clearly. Accepting this invitation for myself—into time enough—was laying a foundation for peace. Perhaps it would be the foundation for a porch that would eventually be whole and stable enough for another’s company, even my mom’s.

Katie E. Pryor

D RIP P IN G S P RI N GS, TEXAS

In her ninety-second year, my mother had a stroke that left her with speech and motor impairment. Diligent about her exercises, she made a miraculous recovery, moving all four limbs and regaining her coordination. She spoke cogently of both current events and those thirty years in the past. “Whole,” I thought, gratefully.

However, over the next few months, I slowly came to realize that I wasn’t dealing with the same person. Although I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly was amiss, I knew something was absent. Her middle sister’s death made this change evident. Mother, an empathetic person who rescued injured animals and worked for the blind, had always been close to her family with the exception of her father.

Yet as her sister Doris lay dying, she instead focused on her dance videos. Then, reneging on an important agreement she’d made with her younger sister, with whom she had been especially close, she claimed, “She doesn’t love me. I don’t care if I ever see her again.” Nothing was further from the truth, but nothing I said would change her mind.

What was broken? I struggled to remember neuroanatomy: the amygdala, an organ the size and shape of almond, was the home of emotional life. Had the embolus compromised its blood supply, killing compassion, taking away the essence of my mother? Wholeness had always been a tangible concept for me, and it was difficult to label some-

one as fractured due to the loss of this emotional center.

If exercises can help regain motor and speech skills, was there a therapy to restore empathy?

Following Doris’s death, I found letters from my grandfather to my mother that spoke of his love for his family, the pain he was experiencing by being apart from them.

During their separation, my grandmother, with whom Doris had lived, had deep-sixed his letters. Could they now, seventy years later, speak to Mother?

One evening, as she rested in bed, I read them to her, watching her face for any sign of emotion. “I never saw those letters,” she said, biting into her lower lip. She blinked repeatedly, as if to remove an irritant from her eyes. For a moment, I visualized blood flowing into that almondshaped organ, allowing her father’s words to touch her before it stopped and she turned to the wall and fell asleep.

Lorraine Comanor

Daily we are

T R U C K EE, CALI FOR NI A

scattered. Daily we collect the bread crumbs of our lives—thoughts and aims not achieved but discovered—and we spend our time fulfilling each need as it comes until our ultimate union with dirt. Only then is there an image of our lives, whole-sighted and unfiltered, visible only to those we’ve left behind. And it seems that what we all strive for can only be found in what we all strive against. But the truth is that wholeness, oneness, unity, can be found in life, and not just in the daily toil; rather, it can be found in perspective: a shift in consciousness that allows for our first-person view to broaden.

And there wasn’t just one time but so many times that I have thought the opposite: like when I thought if she loved me enough, I would finally have everything; or when I thought that losing those last few pounds would turn me into the person I wanted to be, complete and finished, a work of art; or when I was just sure that their applause after my turn at the microphone would validate my entire existence, and that the solace of monks and wise men would inevitably follow. But in reality, that never happens and the getting just leads to more wanting and the wanting just leads to more separation. We become ensconced in our appetites, the wall of our desire tall and opaque between us, blocking out any real chance of connection, of wholeness.

And so the way to get to the other side is to rise above it, go beyond it, and recognize that these barriers are nothing more than abstractions—constructed like state lines or names given to oceans. And even though these moments are fleeting—very few stay in this space for long—they are still the brightest, the ones that become benchmarks for our journey.

And one way or another we always get to where we’re going. When we look back, our best times are always the ones that we shared. Finally, we understand that what we were forever seeking we had all along and we see the real truth of the thing: that we are whole beings who are part of something infinite and that what is infinite would not be so without us.

Matt Briand

M E L BO U RN E , F L

My parents’ wedding

invitation sits in a wooden frame on the corner of my writing desk like a relic from their marriage. They’re divorced now, but I can’t bring myself to part with it. Growing up, it always hung in our kitchen, but I came across it one day rummaging through storage boxes at my mom’s house where I—just barely 23 and freshly separated from my husband—found myself living. I spent hours going through closets and photo boxes, reconstructing who I had been before my marriage, before my parents’ divorce, before my grandmothers died, before my brother lost his battle with cystic fibrosis, before everything in my life changed in the span of a few years.

Beneath glass and pressed wild flowers the invitation read: “Each of us alone is incomplete. Together with Christ we are as one, in this there shall be joy.” I scoffed at this churched-up version of a Jerry Maguire sentiment that had first failed my parents and then me. What a beautiful lie. Husbandless, was I just a half a person now? I certainly felt ripped in two. My faith had not stopped my husband from cheating on me or asking for a divorce, but it stayed like knotted tangles of loose thread around the fraying seams of my life.

Wholeness comes from healing, I think. It’s the moment when Christ says, “Your faith has made you well,” and it’s almost a surprise that you really are. For me that realization came after years of pulling, ripping, repairing, and adding new fabric to the old rags of my life and faith. And in that time, I’ve learned that another person won’t make you whole. There is an expanse between each of us in a relationship that gives “the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky,” as Rainer Maria Rilke said. That distance is sacred ground, and I had so often let myself or someone else trample all over it while trying to feel complete.

I keep my parents’ wedding invitation on my desk as a reminder that I am whole. In this there shall be joy: in healing, in seeing yourself and others as complete, in being seen by others as whole and loved as you are, and being made whole again and again by faith, broken though you may be.

Becky Cotton CH ATTAN O O GA, T EN N ESS EE 7

RUMINATE PRIZES

2015

F I R ST P LAC E

S ECO N D P LAC E

Tori Malcangio Nesting Doll

Joseph Celizic Offloading at St. Paul Harbor

H O N O RA B L E M E N T I O N Nektaria Petrou The Evil Eye Expert

JUDGE Larry Woiwode

8

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

F I N A L I STS David Athey Ha-Meow-Ha

Arthur Powers Redemption

Angela Doll Carlson The Exploding Boy

Stephen Policoff My Back Door Sunday

AF Glover The Other Possibility

Brad Rhoda The Last Thing It Is

Lance Nixon Baltics

Michael Caleb Tasker The Luckiest Man in Town

Allyson Potter Electric Feel

Jude Whelchel Body Talk Soft, Body Talk Loud

LA R RY WO I WO D E W R I T ES :

“Nesting Doll” opens in a way I generally don’t find congenial, without the incline, as John Updike has put it, that tips you toward the story’s end. The opening is, rather, a complex meditative description of a stilled state of mind the reader isn’t sure will unlock. The next sentences suggest the direction the story is headed, but with little indication of the power it will release.

The paragraphs of intellectual speculation and wordplay along the way suggest the distance the narrator must assume to bear the complexity of her loss. She has woven layers of nesting dolls around a tragedy she can barely name, but once she and her husband meet the young woman who bears their daughter’s beating heart, their doll nested in another, the emotion becomes so intimate and intense I was one with the parents’ loss. I wept.

On a re-reading, once the content and contours of the story are familiar, each sentence settles in place more firmly, authoritatively, at a deeper level on each trip to the inside of that powder-blue house. The increased meaning and dimension is the hallmark of every story that over the ages continues to deliver the shocking power of unconditional, unending love.

Larry Woiwode’s fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, GQ, Harpers, Paris Review, Partisan Review, and a variety of publications, including two dozen stories in The New Yorker. His work has been translated into a dozen languages and is included in four volumes of The Best American Short Stories. He is the poet laureate of North Dakota.

9

TORI MALCANGIO

You’d think I’ve learned almost all there is to know about hearts, but when I hear heart, I immediately begin an inventory of her other pristine parts—mitochondria, scapula, the cerebellum, the Corpus Christi hospital where I gave birth to her on February 25, 1995. Does it really matter where we’re born? If you ask any other mother like me, the place a child dies should be wiped off the planet. Can we commission a kind cartographer to draw us a griever’s map, where the haunted places we’re running from are left off?

Let me start with her as a fetus, and tell you she moved so much in the womb I thought for sure I was carrying Isadora Duncan. My pregnancy made liars out of those “What to Expect” books: I grew smaller, my significance shrinking by the day under the reign of another, more supreme, human. Together, she and I completed the miraculous handiwork of six million Italian seamstresses and knitted her lobes and cords and stems, stoking the furnace of her heart to 159 beats per minute, then eventually, as I held her vernix–buttered body, it slowed to a more earthly 142 beats per minute.

I get it—it’s nothing but counterproductive for me to reach back so far. So easily I get lost in the maze of memory, and poor, malnourished Joe is strapped with guiding me out. “You’re stagnating again,” he’ll say, after coming home from work to find me balled up on the couch in my slippers, the rye toast from breakfast hard on my plate. I’m a morbid ball of bones like

10

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

those field mice Joe finds decomposed in our BBQ and hustles to the trash in a wasted effort to shelter me from more death. But those summers: from the time she was four months old, the three of us would flee our desert heat with a crate full of blankets and board games and seek refuge in the same salt-rot condo on San Diego’s Mission Beach. The tide slapping the shore, discordant and compulsive, though I remember even then trying to force a regular rhythm and sync her to eternity.

I was always too self-conscious to wear a bathing suit, and as she grew into the version of me I’d been aiming for all my life, she probably began to resent my pathetic insecurity. One day she caught me looking sideways at myself in the mirror and asked why I frowned. What girl wants a mother with no outrageous fantasies? If I could go back and stare at her chest before the breasts came and watch the sternum pump under skin the color of abalone in a shell shop, I’d say, Don’t waste a breath on anybody who looks away in the middle of your stories.

She had a heart like . My daughter’s teenaged friends are poets when it comes to filling in blanks for me. Like gold or a goose. How about the Golden Goose, they say, giving and giving? Who am I to hurt their feelings and tell them it’s the wrong fairy tale and further, that she was made of neither? Not mineral. Not foul. She was made of .

Yesterday isn’t too far back, and yet it’s so long ago I’m afraid I’ll get the bewildering course of events confused with her birth. Yesterday—this is me saying it like I believed it—was designed to bring closure. As if I’m open. As if only an autumnal draft and the accompanying pebbles and street soot have been stripping my finish. As if I simply need someone to shove me closed with a heel, to slam me against the frame and rattle my dead bolt.

Yesterday Joe drove. We plugged the address into the car’s navigation, but not before I asked if we wanted it in there, the address, forever. Things living in things living in things.

The nesting dolls of this century aren’t the nesting dolls of my century. This new technology is rendering us forgettable. It used to be when you died, you died, and the parts you and your mother had knitted were buried with you. So, if you woke, you could gather yourself and play house with the living until angels or harps, or whatever Joe believes in, summoned you back.

“We’ve been married,” Joe said, barely audible over the car’s radio, “for two of her lives.”

While Joe appeared to be waiting for me to either breech the silence with a hymn or leap from the moving car, I made a mental list of things that close: mouths, eyes, curtains, gates, banks, escrow, and schools. Starbucks closes when you need a latte at midnight because looking through the donor recipient list is more exhausting than anything you’ve ever done.

But of course, how idiotic to cap suffering of any kind, to think a glass ceiling would survive a tsunami. Every sorrow is engineered to outdo the last. It’s a competition, this life. I’d be a winner, if losing were winning.

Joe parked in the weedy gravel drive and grabbed the small wrapped box out of the console.

I’d noticed it earlier, but I felt like keeping quiet about anything that might start a fight. Joe’s ideas lately frightened me. He said the other day: If it weren’t for your prescriptions, we could go live off the grid in a yurt and kill our own food.

11

“This is not the house I expected,” I said as we got out of the car. The sudden rush of sun and heat made me shiver.

“What did you expect?” he said.

“A castle, I guess.”

“They didn’t have to buy her heart,” he said.

Warm my heart. Break my heart. Crush my heart. Heartbroken. Heartsick. Half-hearted. Young at heart. Home is where the heart is. Heart and soul. Heartthrob. Change of heart. Follow your heart. Heart on your sleeve. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Or is it feral? Is it that absence makes the heart scrounge back alleys for chicken bones and warm bodies? That an abandoned heart is rabid and needs to be put down before it runs off and mauls a small child?

She knew “Like a Virgin” and the Gettysburg Address by heart.

When I talk about “the recipient,” I mean Tessa. I mean Tessa the twenty-one-year-old whose name topped the cardiac recipient list because: A. she was young and B. her congenital heart defect was no fault of hers. Neither was the car accident my daughter’s fault, but who’s counting?

And who was listening to me berate the upkeep of the powder-blue house as Joe and I navigated the uneven sidewalk to the front door? Three cats, the chalky brown of cheap chocolate, lounged in the unscreened widows. They have my daughter holed up in there, I thought, and she hates cats. It’d have been worse, I supposed, if the recipient had been a boy. A boy who, if given the chance, would have reached for my daughter’s heart only to fondle what was more accessible. A boy who might be deranged enough to find humor in a girl being inside a boy.

A plump, ponytailed woman in a grocery-store apron answered the door. Her name tag said Sandy, 15 years of service. “Tessa can’t wait to meet you,” Sandy said. She gave me a hard, exuberant hug as if I’d just pulled her from a burning house.

Tessa stood up to greet us as we entered the small kitchen area. She was as tall as Joe and her long hair, the color of wet sand, was pulled back on one side with a jeweled barrette. There was no ignoring the stunning battle happening on her face, her large eyes fighting for space already claimed by gorgeous lips and a prominent nose like Audrey Hepburn. I suspected she wore the low-cut tank top often, proud of the scar that resembled an umbilical cord dropped between her small breasts.

“So nice to meet you guys,” Tessa said. The artery pulsed at her neck and my staring seemed to speed it up. “This is hard, right? I mean harder for you, I’m sure, and I probably shouldn’t be so scared to meet you guys, but I swear, I’ve never been like such a nervous wreck.”

“Don’t be nervous,” Joe said, reaching into his pocket. “This is for you.” He handed Tessa the small wrapped box. She admired the festive tuft of silver ribbon Joe must have found in my wrapping stash.

“Please,” he said. “Go ahead. Open it.”

Inside was the flashy opal ring from Joe’s dead mother. The platinum band and setting had been polished.

12

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

All along, I’d thought the ring would be mine. I’d assumed it was my job and responsibility to claim those things my daughter couldn’t. Last week, I’d come close to moving into her bedroom and calling the boys in her address book and asking them to dinner. Me and Joe and the boys she might have fallen in love with, eating turkey tetrazzini and blasting the stupidity of college entrance essays. Too soon, she had become private, guarded. She’s growing up, Joe had said more than once. Becoming her own person, he said. I still can’t be sure his comment didn’t provoke the universe to shake up our painless lives.

“My gosh,” Tessa said, cupping it in her palm like a cuckoo’s egg. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“So, how you feeling?” I said to Tessa. I think I hoped for sick or dying, so I could start the process of reclaiming my daughter. I could say, “We gave it a shot; sorry it didn’t work out. Now give her back.”

“Best I’ve felt in years.”

“Finally, her color is back,” Sandy said, bringing glasses of water and pulling out chairs for us to sit: Joe and I on one side, mother and daughter on the other. With my one resilient fingernail, I traced the table’s wood grain. Was this where Sandy sat in moonlight while Tessa lay in the hospital, her flesh fastening over a stranger’s heart?

A year and a half ago, on my daughter’s sixteenth birthday, I watched her at the kitchen counter as she pressed that tiny, pink organ donor dot onto her temporary driver’s license and I thought: she can drive us to the beach this year. Can we be so stupid to think death grants amnesty to those who refuse to acknowledge its haughty little cackle? Do we know what horoscope a person should read if they’re a Leo with a Piscean heart?

“Did you get to see it?” I asked Tessa, now rubbing at the shallow groove I’d carved into the table. In spite of Joe sending vibes to shut up, I fixed my eyes on Tessa. “Her heart, I mean. Did you see it?”

“No,” Tessa said, smiling off at something. The ring lay gleaming on the table like a dead damselfly. “But I have visions of it all the time.”

“Like what?” I said. Joe emptied his water glass.

“I’m not totally sure, but it’s sort of a sea flower or something because it moves like it’s underwater, you know, swaying and bobbing, opening and closing. A bright pink, and soft like a baby’s tongue or the insides of a cat’s ears. A thing people want to admire is what I’m trying to say.” Tessa held her hand to her chest and smiled. “You ready to feel?”

At once, the four of us stood; Sandy brushing an eyelash off Tessa’s cheek. Lucky Sandy, Lucky Sandy. How quickly I could adopt the dangerous envy of a jilted child.

Joe took my hand in his as Tessa slipped off her tank top and stood in her bra. Not meaning to, I admired Tessa’s symmetry, from broad square shoulders to delicate winged clavicle to belly button, her once binding tether to the universe, so easily severed. Sandy closed the blinds behind them, either to hide her daughter’s semi-nakedness from neighbors or to lend the

13

moment the privacy she somehow knew we’d never been allowed. The room, now dimmed, smelled differently: drugstore perfume and the faint leftover stench of gauze dressings and ointments. I wanted to cry for the distance Joe and I had yet to drive home. A two-hour drive! And how could we continue pretending she was still “with us,” as they say, when we’d know for certain she wasn’t?

Tessa pulled my hand from Joe’s and began to guide it toward her.

“No, Joe first,” I said.

All these ancillary beats: The dishwasher. The revolving sprinklers. The alarm clock. The sound track to Jaws. Joe flipping through channels. The telephone when I take it off the hook and let it deet-deet-deet because I fear another call. I fear Joe calling from work to tell me he’s had a terrible nightmare about losing our daughter and, so sorry, but he’s inadvertently dragged me in. I am stuck in his REM, he will say, and as I begin my escape to go find her in her room sleeping with fists tucked under her chin, the TV will blurt another human-interest story about us, The Heroes.

Silly me, I’d always thought heroes made impossible decisions. We’d made no decisions. We were dragged through doors and paperwork, we were made to sit and listen, we were given icy apple juice and the Xeroxed phone numbers of grief counselors.

Not shy in the least, Tessa stood still while Joe, his head turned discreetly toward the window, pressed his palm above her left breast. “I can feel it,” he said. “I can feel it. My girl, she’s so strong.

My baby doesn’t quit.” He moved in closer, holding his hand to Tessa while talking up at the ceiling. “I love you forever. Don’t forget it, baby girl. Tessa is taking care of you now.” Since the beginning, when he cried, I couldn’t. I guess because it felt like he’d gotten there first. The winner!

Tessa, without disrupting Joe’s reverie, picked the ring back up and tried it on. It slipped off her ring and pinkie fingers and she wasn’t able to work it past the first knuckle of her index finger.

“I think that’s a sign you’re not supposed to wear it, sweetheart,” Sandy said. “Just put it somewhere safe.”

“No,” Joe said. “No. There is no safer place.” He took his hand off Tessa and helped her wiggle it on her middle finger. Every day I’d been trying to find Joe attractive again, even on a purely functional level, as in: I love that he breathes through his nose; I love the bend in his knees when he’s squatting to pick up the wet towels that I’m too tired to hang up. It was just us for as far down the road as I could see. My other option was to put myself in his shoes and run away from me.

“It’s all colors at once,” Tessa said, holding her ringed finger into the low lights of dusk slanting through the blinds’ seams.

She dropped her hand and turned to me. “Your turn.”

She was made of . Me. Or maybe I was made of her, which explains the sensation I have every morning upon waking that I’ve been vandalized overnight, and the soft, resilient parts of me stolen. If she was made of me, does that mean I can claim and inhabit her short-lived happiness, the way I do good parking spaces and unbruised apples or our spot on the beach, the one spot in front of lifeguard tower 21 near the ancient wood roller coaster, where she and Joe

14

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

and I would spread our giant blanket every day and toss Cool Ranch Doritos to the seagulls? It was our spot until one day, years back, another family staked their umbrella there. “Assholes,” I mumbled, and she told me I was going to go to hell for thinking I could own the shoreline.

I stood delirious with my hand flattened up against Tessa.

“Can you feel it?” Tessa asked. “Can you?”

I felt it. The beat was steady, the desperate thumping of a small creature caught beneath a rubber raft. I wanted to save it: tear open the skin and pull her out, dry her off. But she was strapped in, not going anywhere. I pressed harder, thinking with enough pressure I might infiltrate the ventricles and set up house in the atrium. A beautiful atrium with wild peacocks and peach trees and waterslides. We’d planned on building a pool in the backyard this summer.

“A prize fighter,” I said. “A beat boxer.” I was laughing, then crying. Same as Joe, always caught in the drift of extremes.

“Tessa’s sick heart hadn’t pumped half that power,” Sandy said.

“Are you running?” I asked Tessa. Since she could stand, my girl was a runner. She ran down the beach so far ahead of us, I’d call to her over the roar of the surf and she’d gallop back, her gold hair wended in damp tendrils that we’d brush out at sunset around the bonfire.

“I walk to my job at the dry cleaners. That’s all,” Tessa said.

We would drive home in the dark, Joe laughing at the comedy station, then crying to a Paul Simon song. We would agree we were hungry, but not account for the fact that it wasn’t the kind of hunger food could sate.

Tessa sat back down at the table. I did too, moving with her, my hand stuck to her like a tumor, a mom seizing her second chance. I had no idea how to separate. I had no strength to do anything but feel and record the rhythm resonating deep in me. Tessa seemed to enjoy the attention, or maybe it was the touch. Nobody had touched her like this and she probably understood that nobody ever would again.

“It’s her,” I said. “I can tell. My baby is carrying on as if nothing ever happened.”

Tessa smiled. Sandy smiled. They had every reason to believe things would be smooth from here on out.

“When she was a baby I taught her sign language,” I said. I could hear Joe breathing, and normally this intimacy bothered me, but I recovered an image of him from at least a decade ago at the beach, tanned and stacking pallets and driftwood in the beach fire pit. “Her first signed word was doll.”

Right then I removed my hand. I let go. I did it, and I wasn’t sure how or if I’d done it on my own or if some entity overseeing my feeble human consciousness had commanded my hand. Air filled the space between Tessa and me; I thought for sure I’d fall back and hit my head on the tile, hard enough to stop my heart and catapult me to the child who ate green olives and drew hearts into the car windows when they fogged.

I grabbed Tessa’s right hand, shaped her index finger into a C, and rubbed it twice down her nose. The opal fractured the room’s dim light into colors I still can’t name. “Doll,” I said. Then again, “Doll.” One-two, one-two, I stroked her smooth nose, listening to her breath wisp and feeling its warm moisture intersect my wrist.

15

ARTIST’S/ NOTE

MELISSA WEINMAN: ROSEFIRE Beauty is love in physical form.

When I see the beauty in nature around me, my first response is, “Thank you for loving me.” All of creation is an outpouring of God’s love for us.

My Rosefire series is a body of work inspired by T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. In the 1990s I developed the concept of Rosefire and made it the subject of a body of oil paintings. The notion ends Eliot’s poem, where he quotes the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich in the following stanza. The first two lines belong to Julian, but Eliot concludes with his own image in the last three: And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.

Rosefire is love in action. Painting it is my attempt to depict that even in our darkness and ignorance there is a lifesaving light. When it seems as if all is lost, we can walk in darkness and trust that a light is burning brightly just beyond the peripheral edge of our vision.

16

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

Melissa Weinman. Even the Night Shall Be Light About Me I . Detail. Oil on panel. 40 x 40 inches.

17

Melissa Weinman. Even the Night Shall Be Light About Me I. Oil on panel. 40 x 40 inches.

18

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

Melissa Weinman. Even the Night Shall Be Light About Me II. Detail. Oil on panel. 40 x 40 inches.

19

Melissa Weinman. Even the Night Shall Be Light about Me III. Oil on panel. 40 x 40 inches.

20

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

Melissa Weinman. Rosefire Depths. Mixed media and oil on paper mounted to panel. 18 x 14 inches.

21

Melissa Weinman. Rosefire Storm. Mixed media and oil on paper mounted to panel. 24 x 18 inches.

22

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

Melissa Weinman. Rosefire Falling Ash. Mixed media and oil on paper mounted to panel. 18 x 14 inches.

23

Melissa Weinman. Celestial Bodies I. Oil on panel. 14 x 11 inches.

24

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

Holly Virginia Clark

Where There Is No Faith, a Hound A hound is dead on the side of the road, the grace of his sun-soaked body diminishing the crude fact of— what? I can’t name it till I can see the god who lies beside him. I do not hesitate or slow: I could be the woman who hit the hound—sick with the yelp, the drag, the wracking of the truck— knowing not how she’s done what she’s done, as she hoists the body on her back to lay on the berm, her ears flooded with layers of sound, the oriole under the sparrow, the drone of a mower under the drone of a jet under the deafening morning light.

25

Dave Harrity

Meadowland

Horse bones frosted on the flurried field— rib cage crushed under a boot, marrowed hive of heat & sternum stilted to the ground, matted clutch of hair. Body crossed,

body broken. What to bury: cranium, radius, tibia, carpus— not crucified, but certainly a sacrifice. Beasts that eat the flesh but not the bone; beasts shrined in cages

of their sympathetic wounds—tight-boxed curios or battered swirl in galaxies, weathered sesamoids bound up, confused in day & night & sun & star. So easy to get tangled up, bound into the field

of honeysuckle rolled chokeweed (lunged, released, & lunged again, becoming ghosts we don’t actually believe) shadows ripped from seams, loose-let animals, beasts to steal away the blood

from the body. Beasts to steal away the body from the bone. These little zoo mistakes in taking light for day & breath for life. So pick them up & pack them in a paper bag,

so dig a hole to put them in the ground, but you’re still a ragged city labryinthed in a shell, swelled inside the sprawl you’ve built to lose yourself.

You thimble full of blood, you jar of

bottled air—taste & see you’re still the sting & smell & slighted skin—pocket bright with totems, fancies strung with relics that nourish not a thing. This matter of the pulse you are, the pulse

raged in your prayers, idol counted out & catalogued: vertebrate indulgence paid, silver coin patella spent, the purchase can’t be counted out: a colt’s holed skull

gray & woven through the grass, orison left unsaid above the earth.

26

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

Dave Harrity

Reverberation

What seems like spring comes earlier this year— cold-bodied limbo twisted in a nest: near the field, a wren rustles out her babies for first flight, such small evidence there is

of any sacred thing. Tied to seasons, we’re the thread wrapped round god’s imposing pinky—each bow reminding him that things don’t make themselves. Stand of birches

brushed along the field—bonewhite quiet gathering, pink light hued against the vaulted gray: surprise spring snow that’s started slow & gathers in the fireweed,

the quiet snaps to pistol peals through the storm, cold lips let a bullet loose, horse falls flat against the earth. Goldseal simple swallowed red in noise, torn through budding columbine. Like hunting,

yes, like hunting if you call a thing something that it’s not, or sing a lie back to yourself. It’s the shifting of the sky or each of us taking turns learning how to wither,

beatings which we simply can’t avoid. So try & call this to the front of you: the way it feels when struck against the cheek—heat spike ironglaze, galled ache tongued & gummed. Even as they hang you up,

belief in what you cannot see might keep you breathing long enough to see another day. Sure, there might be babies born to save us, born in sleepy towns strung out

across the empire, but that’s hope’s sickness lush & bloomed—kudzu crammed to phlox. So go about & fantasize the band around the moon god’s miracle hello, paraselene bracelet

billowed circle on a starry wrist, his whisper through the knuckled branches kind, his hair an early meadow rue. The birds are trying hard to fly before they hit the ground. The shot rings

its sanctus bell like blind apology. A horse is bleeding out in grass. & you can’t do a thing but lie down with yourself. & you—& you & yes: & all your walking to & from your evening doors,

searching hard for halos in accumulating snow.

27

Heather Derr-Smith

Field of Blackbirds They haul their burlap sacks of broken vertebrae, still trying to quiver them into place, snap the atlas in its lock.

All of us exiles and wanderers, flapping our wings over the dead in the fields.

I found wolf scat on the path.

The deer-hide knot of excrement was the color of frost and fragments of chipped bone like relics were scattered in the dirt.

The air was a battlefield, the aerobatics and ballistics of wings.

I know the risk of crossing disputed territory.

The rich man’s thirst could never be quenched and there is no way in hell to get from this world to that.

28

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

Heather Derr-Smith

Sparrow We found a curled snail in the burial hole, sucking with its mouth at the salty stones.

We stood dumbstruck at the lip of the grave.

I thought of the Anabaptist martyr whose decapitated head kept singing after it rolled into the basket.

I know he watches me.

How beautiful, the delicate nest mended with spider silk.

The cuneiform etched on a linden leaf.

The seams of the grasses.

Rilke said praise is all that matters.

29

OFFLOADING AT ST. PAUL HARBOR JOSEPH CELIZIC

We were iced-in at the docks, the Bering Sea covered by slats of ice, flat and cracked like some fractured prairie. Manny steered us through while the rest of us sat hunkered in the engine room, listening as the thick ice pressed against the hull, steel squealing, all of us praying it’d hold. None were so thankful to see St. Paul Harbor as our deck boss Bonner. He jumped off as soon as we docked and went marching into town—supposedly to kill a man he knew.

The crew wasted no time with the offload. Brailers dropped in and out of the Romania’s half-filled tanks, as deckhands stood among the mounds of opilio crab. They piled bodies into elastic carriers, ushered the catch to its collective fate. “Seventeen eighty-one,” a greenhorn called, and I added it to my count. Later, we’d compare numbers with the Trident manager to make sure they didn’t skim off the top.

Manny finished his conversation with the manager and approached me on deck. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Bonner since he left the boat, and I knew he was going to ask me to follow him. I was already conjuring my excuses.

“What’s his name?” Manny asked. “The man he’s looking for.”

He was a natural-born Romanian, his real name Maniu. A solid six five, he always stood too close when he spoke, his accent like a muzzle.

“Something Aleutian,” I said. “Had a lot of K’s.” I spat at the ice below.

“Bonner hasn’t dodged an offload in fifteen years,” he said. His stare wandered about the harbor. “If he wasn’t so stupid, I wouldn’t think anything of it. But you know Bonner.”

Men speak like bards, I thought. The word kill is worn tired by all its possible meanings. “I wouldn’t take him seriously.”

His face sagged, an even mix of black and white hairs on his head and beard, his hot breath steaming. He ignored me. “You need to bring him back.”

The crew had been fishing for three days straight, limping on no more than a few hours of sleep. We had a twenty-hour offload in front of us, but not a single man would’ve had trouble lying down and dozing where they stood.

“I can’t leave the crew shorthanded. I’d feel guilty.”

30

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

“You’ll feel worse for ending their season,” he said. “I won’t fish without Bonner. I’ll take us back to Dutch Harbor before I do that.”

I would’ve thought he was bluffing if I hadn’t known better. Ever since Bonner had saved his life, Manny wouldn’t leave a dock without him on board. “He’s my superstition,” he’d said once, embarrassed. And of course we all knew the story, the day Manny decided to leave the wheelhouse and work the deck. It was the best crabbing he’d seen in twenty years, trap after trap filled with a hundred-plus king crab. He wanted to be there, touch their shells, feel like he was part of it. Once on deck, he forgot where to stand. The boat swayed on the waves and an eight-hundred-pound pot swung wide, knocking him into the freezing water. Like a reflex, Bonner grabbed the life ring, tossed it with the same deadly accuracy he used with the hook, nearly holed the Captain’s head. They pulled his sopping body up, his face tight as a coiled rope, and he just sat there holding Bonner’s shoulders. “I thought it was done,” he’d said about his life. “I thought it was over.” It happened the year before I joined: the one story Manny and Bonner could tell without me.

At the end of the dock, the island’s old tugboat, Redoubt, was preparing to break the ice, so more vessels could port. The boat’s motor churned in the water, gurgling like a man drowning. I knew Manny’s mind was lost, trapped back in that day. He was shivering, shaking the metal floor panels. I’d be powerless to dissuade him, but I’d try.

“He’s going to get drunk,” I said. “He’s not going to kill anyone.”

“He’ll have time to do both, if he wants,” said Manny. “This ice is thick as bone.”

Bonner’s figure, his red flannel and denim, was nearly out of sight.

“Say I do follow him, and he finds this native he wants to kill,” I said. “What am I supposed to do?”

Maybe it was pointless to ask—we both knew that’d be my problem, not his. It didn’t matter what happened in St. Paul, what Bonner did, only that he made it back. I was the only other crew member who knew him, the only one he might listen to. It had to be me.

A deckhand called out another weigh-in, and I started to write it down. Manny ripped the board away from me.

“If Bonner doesn’t come back, you’ll all be off this boat,” he said. “There’s no point in any of you being here without him.”

There was a point, though, I thought. An unfathomably giant and celestial reason why each of us was on this boat, why the ice was in the harbor, why we’d made it here alive. There was a reason why Bonner was back on this island, why I had to follow. None of us knew it, could fathom it. The reasons for our circumstances hid in places words could not follow.

I got off the Romania, head wobbling, the world twirling around me. I struggled to adjust to the fastened land as I followed Bonner, his figure drifting like a storm through the evening steam, the swollen hills of St. Paul Island throbbing on the horizon.

It’s nearly impossible to get a spot on a crab boat. I knew once I got mine on the Romania, I’d never leave. The vessel was named after Manny’s homeland, but the boat was my country, Manny and Bonner my countrymen. It was the only place I’d ever belonged.

First-time deckhands always called it Ramona, assuming it was named after Manny’s wife or mother, some woman he loved. But Manny’s first love was his country. He spoke of

31

it tirelessly, recounted memories with the zeal of a man who meant to return. He hated the Alaskan cold, the Bering Sea, the fishing, was only in it for the money. I would die at sea, if I had the choice. I’ve never felt more secure than amidst the constant ebbing, those vigorous shifting hills of water, like the whole world was readjusting itself, unsure of what it should be.

Its motion gave me footing—it was steady land that made me dizzy.

Many men are known by names that aren’t theirs, and during my first season, the Romania’s crew decided I should have one. They named me Suds after my clean speech and resilient liver. Whenever I opened my mouth to speak—which wasn’t often—the deckhands claimed they could see the bubbles from where my mother force-fed me soap long ago. And on nights when I drank my mind free of my body, and I no longer knew what I said or did, they reported that my mouth stayed free from all profanity, no matter how sodden I got. My jaw had a mind of its own, they said. Didn’t even know the words. I was the anti-sailor. The antistereotype. The only fisherman to never swear. A myth grown larger each time they told it.

I wish I could take the credit. Truth is, there’s something foreign that takes hold of my tongue, my legs and hands. I was an orphan, a foster kid bounced from one religious family to the next, each of them trying to fix me. Now I had this compulsion, this virus, something that wouldn’t let me cross arbitrary lines. The world had shaped me, the world itself shaped by some force, some god. I was a marionette, a vessel on the waves, an observer taking it all in.

My first foster family, the Olivers, said my eyes were like black holes, looking for something new to devour. I ran away five times, picked and pried my way out of every window lock they could find. After the last time, they said, “If you don’t want to stay, we won’t keep you.” It’s the second nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.

Bonner first told us about his son the previous fall. It was the middle of our king crab season; he’d been ranting about the old times, the derby years, back before federal regulations limited the number of boats that could fish, before they set our cargo limits, capped each season at nine-hundred-million pounds. We were hunters reduced to reapers, each year a predetermined course with the illusion of choice. No matter what we did, we yielded the same result—same profit, same number of crab, same black sky meeting us at port.

It was this helplessness that reminded Bonner of his son on St. Paul.

He was eleven years old, born to a native who Bonner had met at the MillerCoors, the island’s lone bar. They only hooked up once, he said, and now she was raising the boy with her husband, a man she’d been with long before she got pregnant. He rushed to marry her as soon as he found out, assuming the child was his.

At sea, we’re all liars. The open water makes men think of what could be rather than what is, so we craft our histories, reinvent our lives. Bonner was the worst of us, and so the crew shrugged off his story. Even Manny didn’t believe him. “He wants a son,” he’d said, when Bonner was away. “That doesn’t make it true.”

Then Bonner told us about the phone call. The mother said the man was starting to hit his son. He beat him so bad she had to pull him out of school for two weeks to hide the bruises, the burst blood vessel in his eye.

“I’m going to kill him,” he said, like it was a discovery, the words as new to him as they were to us. We continued to haul in pots, chop bait, count crab. We were in the middle of good

32

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

fishing, our cages full of tumbling pink masses, legs flailing as we pulled them from the water. The weather had cleared, the air windless, and we were in it, feeling that release that felt like an exhale, like intimacy, that strange mix of excitement and calm. All fishermen are dreamers, risking their lives for payday at the season’s end, thirty or forty-thousand for a few weeks’ work. At sea, we were presidents, CFOs, heart surgeons. This moment was too valuable to spend listening to Bonner, to care what parts of his story were true.

Later, Bonner came to me. He was an ex-Catholic, knew I was a reformed Baptist. Both of us wrestled with beliefs we thought we had. “God won’t forgive murder,” he said. “Not when it’s premeditated. The more I think about it, the worse off I am.”

AT SEA, WE’RE ALL LIARS I almost said that Jesus died for all sins—no matter the severity—just as a reflex. I stopped myself, not wanting to give him permission. “Then don’t do it,” I said.

“I already have.” He pointed to his temple. “I must’ve done it a hundred times by now, over and over. Sort of makes me a serial killer, doesn’t it?”

I didn’t answer, couldn’t focus; I kept looking at the water.

“If I ever make it back to St. Paul’s, I’ll have to kill him,” he said. “That’s the sign, the deal I’ve made with God.” I was too exhausted to question his flawed logic. The wind was picking up; soon the waves would be crashing over the deck, ending our respite, and I wanted to bunk up, sleep through the storm. Jesus had it easy, I thought. Sure, he walked on water. But he never had to walk across the Bering Sea, climb mountainous whitecaps, steep peaks that would’ve required ropes and hooks. There was no parable of the man who intended to murder. No parable of the man destined to sin.

“What do we do when God leaves us no choice?” he asked. “When he forces us to do something we don’t want to do?”

I had no answer. No one did. I tried to walk away, escape through the cabin door. Bonner kept on as I scavenged for the handle.

“What does he think of us? What does he think of a man like me?”

St. Paul Island sits between Otter and Walrus Islands, near St. George. All those animals and saints together. They say the island used to be part of the Bering Land Bridge, Beringia, back when Russia and Alaska were still connected some 15,000 years ago. It’s named after the Feast of St. Paul and St. Peter, a holiday intended to bring different sects together for intercommunion, uniting those with different doctrines. Leaders meet: they converse and smile and hold hands in prayer. Then they return to their separate buildings and beliefs, their different versions of God. I stalked Bonner into town; its streets embowered in darkness, futile lights glittering stubbornly on the undersides of rooftops. He turned the corner and entered the MillerCoors.

Inside, its tables were crowded and hazy with smoke, its walls lit with fluorescent green

33

signs. Some Aleutians lay deep in drink, worn from the rookeries, salved for the moment by warmth and numbness. Bonner sat at the bar with two beers: one filling his throat, the other standing upright like a soldier. He wasn’t a large man, looking more like a garbage collector than a deckhand. Most of our bodies began to bulge after the first few seasons, but Bonner’s never got any stronger; he just scraped by.

I sat on the stool next to him, wishing I’d planned something to say.

“How’d you find me?” he chuckled. He drank and stray drops spilled from his mouth, glistened on his patchy brown beard. “Alright, give me your best, Suds. Make old Manny proud. What’d he tell you? That he’d stop fishing? Abandon the whole season? Fly back to the motherland on account of me?”

“Is this your big plan?” I returned. “Get hammered?”

“Can’t do it sober.”

“You’re not going to do anything.”

He finished his first beer, started the second. I ordered him another, along with two shots, figuring if I got him drunk he’d be easier to persuade. Maybe forget the whole thing. I’m sure he saw right through it, but he drank anyway.

WE’D SIT WITH OUR FACES RED AS EMBERS, WAIT IN SILENCE FOR HOURS. NO WORDS, JUST BEING. “Supposed to get more snow tonight,” I said. “We shouldn’t stay long.”

Bonner ignored me. “The worst part is, he knows the boy’s not his,” he said. “She told him about me. He knows he’s beating another man’s son. I know what you’re thinking: so he slaps my boy around, so what? He wouldn’t be the first man to do something like that. I’ve never even met the kid. But it’s different when it’s yours, when you have to wait a year before you can do anything about it. It starts a fire in you, builds it so big, there’s nowhere for it to go but out.”

“What’s the man’s name?” I asked, unable to remember. Maybe we could talk it out here, let the fire burn in the safety of the bar.

“Ikuak.”

The name sounded familiar. With five hundred Aleutians on St. Paul, there were probably half a dozen Ikuaks.

We heard a crash from the far corner of the bar. I jerked in my seat, felt my knife in my pocket. All fishermen carried one in case they got tangled in a rope tied to a steel pot and needed to cut themselves free before getting dragged to the ocean floor. Some natives erupted in laughter, and we saw an older man who had fallen off a stool struggling to get back up.

“Worthless snow Mexicans.” Bonner sneered. “I hate this island.”

Some men are capable of murder. It was easy to envision Bonner using his knife, stabbing

34

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

Ikuak in front of his son. He’d think it justified, righteous. I couldn’t decide if an abusive father was better than no father at all.

“Would you live here?” I asked him. “Stay to raise your son?”

“He deserves better than me,” he said. “A son needs a father who knows how to live, who can teach him right from wrong. I can’t do that. I live like I’m trying not to step on a land mine.”

His false humility was a defense, something to allow him to leave in good conscience. Still, I thought about my last foster family, the Gannons, how they knew when to reach out or give me space, how to put up with all the abuse a sixteen-year-old can give. The father used to take me hunting and fishing, even when it got below freezing. We’d sit with our faces red as embers, wait in silence for hours. No words, just being. I watched him, learned how to set bait, to pull a steady trigger. Those were the best moments I ever had with a father figure. I didn’t have to think about who I was or wasn’t. I could lose myself following him, doing as he did.

We ordered more beers, more shots. When I thought Bonner was drunk enough, I tried again. “Let’s go back to the boat,” I said.

“I’ve got to see my boy before I go.”

I shook my head. “Come on. Before it snows.”

“You can’t wait to get back out, can you?” he said. “You can’t stand being on land. How do you live the other eleven months of the year?”

“It’s not easy.”

He chuckled, then pointed to the bathroom and started to walk that way. I waited at the bar.

It took me several minutes before I remembered the window above the corner stall.

By the time I got outside, Bonner was already strung halfway out the window, drunk and wriggling, trying to free himself. His shirt was riding up on his torso, peeled back like a halfskinned fish. He cursed himself half a dozen times when he saw me. Then he sighed.

“You gonna help me down?”

I pulled him by the arms, to no avail. I grabbed his pants and yanked, twisted his hips. He flopped to the ground. “Good,” he said, snow clinging to his beard. He dragged himself up and started veering down the road, his body tilted like a bent knife. “Alright. Let’s go see my boy.”

Half-drunk, Bonner still knew how to find the dark-shingled one-story. He knocked on the dirtstained door and waved me off. “Let me do the talking,” he said, as if I had any other plans. A dark-haired, dark-skinned woman answered. Her face hardened when she saw him.

“What do you want?”

“Where is he?”

They were both curt, hardly making eye contact as she led us inside. I learned her name was Shelly, short for something I didn’t bother to learn. She acted like she didn’t want us there, but we all knew that she’d called Bonner. We wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

The room was sad and dim. A single lamp burned on the nightstand, and a half-full bookshelf reached nearly to the ceiling, shelves lined with tattered books and action figures.

The boy was in bed, and I could barely make out his features. He was purple with bruises, his face puffy and wet, wounds oozing. His mother raked her fingers through his hair.

“I thought you said you had a son,” Bonner said. “All I see is a hundred-pound salami.”

The boy smiled; he liked him already. Shelly rolled her eyes. “You have five minutes,” she said, and left for the kitchen.

35

The boy looked like his mother: dark, round-faced, strong. Even as he lay on the bed, beaten and bruised, he held his head squarely, his neck unwavering, his gaze like the moon. He didn’t look at all like Bonner. It would’ve been easy for her to hide the secret all those years, harness its power, use it against Ikuak when she felt helpless.

Bonner crouched at the bedside. They spoke in whispers.

“Where’s your Pa?” “He left.”

“Where to?”

“The craters,” the boy said. “He always goes out there when a boat’s in.”

My mind was tired. I couldn’t stop staring at the boy’s face, the burst blood vessel in his eye. It ignited my own hatred of Ikuak. Maybe I could do this, I thought. We could make this man pay, save this boy. Escape on the Romania, never to return.

“Where does your Pa keep his rifle?” Bonner asked.

The boy took us to the garage. It was full of rubble and cobwebs. He stood in the doorway, his purpled face even more grotesque in the light. His reddened eye looked menacingly at Bonner as we gophered past bags and boxes. We found tools: hammers, saws. Nothing useful.

“We need something with range,” Bonner said.

“Are you the one?” the boy asked him.

Bonner kept rummaging, ignoring him. “You all need to clean this place.”

Determined, the boy repeated himself. “Are you him?”

Bonner paused. His hands rested in the piles of rubble. The echo of our noise settled and died.

“Yeah. I’m him.”

The boy watched him the way children study animals at the zoo. He was foreign, yet familiar.

Every mannerism was a new discovery. He learned more about his life in those ten minutes than he had in the sum of his years, and I knew he would be a different boy from that point forward.

His old self had vanished; he’d grow into a different man than he would’ve been if Bonner had never come. We were stealing something from him by coming here, replacing one man with another. It brought a lump to my throat. I thought of all the foster families I’d run away from, all the men I could’ve been if I’d stayed with one. A man who didn’t need the Romania or Manny, one who didn’t need Bonner.

“He dreams about you,” he said to Bonner. “He told me once.”

I spotted the long, narrow tip of a barrel. I grabbed and pulled, freeing it from the heaps. It was a paintball gun.

“How about this?” I asked. “Might be the best we can do.”

Bonner shrugged, nodded. We already had our knives, and we were running out of time. I started to look for paint.

“What happens?” he asked. “In the dreams?”

“He didn’t say,” said the boy. “But sometimes he wakes up screaming.”

I found a bag of paintballs. They glowed green in the dim light. Some had broken, covering the others with their slime. I loaded them in the hopper.

“Come inside,” Shelly said from the door, her voice like a razor. Neither of us had heard her come in. The boy just stood and looked at his mom.

“Let him stay,” Bonner said to her.

36

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

“Inside. Now.” “Shut up and let him talk to his old man,” Bonner said.

“Old man?”

Bonner must’ve known it was the wrong thing to say, but he wanted her fire, her brimstone, the years of wrath he knew he deserved. Shelly turned red. She screamed at us to get out, never come back, said Bonner wasn’t a father, that he never would be.

Bonner stayed to defend his parentage while I fled through the house. On my way out, I eyed a photograph hanging on the wall. It was Ikuak and Bonner’s son holding a seal they’d hunted off the coast. I recognized him: I’d seen him once before, years ago, in a fight outside the MillerCoors. I’d been smoking outside, making gray circles in the air, when two men tumbled out of the bar like gumballs down a chute. One rolled over the other. There was a punch and a cry.

I’d turned to see Ikuak lurching on all fours, clawing at a young native, his black tresses sailing in the wind. The man had piercings on his face, and Ikuak began ripping his rings out from his nose, ears, and lips. The man writhed, slapping helplessly. Then, with a strength I hadn’t seen before or since, Ikuak grabbed him by his clothes and threw him onto the roof.

HE WAS GRAVITY, RELATIVITY, THE SPEED OF LIGHT. I should’ve told Bonner the story, told him that Ikuak was not a man. He was no different from tidal waves or tsunamis, heart attacks or tumors, any other cruel act of God. He was gravity, relativity, the speed of light. Our destinies had been fine-tuned long before time, and matter had decided to part ways in that hot and huddled center. We were at the mercy of natural laws now.

Our meeting could have only one outcome.

I waited outside with the paintball gun. Frigid air beat my cheeks, flakes the size of small leaves fell around me. Something rustled near the house, and I turned to see a blue fox digging through a fallen trash can, its paws curled like hooks. I shot at it, watched it scatter.

I started to wonder if I might die tonight, wondered if I’d be willing to save either one of them.

I always struggled with the concept of the atoning sacrifice, how one thing could pay the price for another. It seemed oversimplified—no two things were the same, equal. Part of me wondered if maybe Jesus’ death hadn’t paid for any of us, if we were all still on our own. But as Bonner emerged, stumbling over the gravel, still enraged, I knew that the dogged wraths of Man and God knew no target, only what they were owed.

“He’s running from us,” he said.

“How does he know you’re here?”

“He doesn’t. Whenever a crab boat comes to offload, he gets drunk and hides at Crater Hill, in case I come back.” He smirked. “He’s scared of me.”

37

You’re wrong, is all I could think as we marched toward the hills, paintballs rattling, me still thinking about that man on the roof. He’s scared of what he’ll do to you.

We walked along the ridge wall, the cliffs overlooking the sea. A cornice of snow reached daringly over the side, icicles teething above the rocks. Wind lilted over the cratered hills, and the brown rings of cinder cones broke out from the snow like halos or Saturn’s rings. My ears were saturated by the sounds of our breathing as our boots crunched noisily over red tufa and volcanic rock. If Ikuak were here, he could hear us coming a quarter mile away.

We reached the top of the tallest crater, a good seventy feet up, scanned the rocky fields, the divots of smaller craters below. Wind turbines on the other side of the island spun methodically in the sky.

Finally, Bonner pointed. “There. Look.”

It took me awhile to spot the movement down in the center of a nearby crater. A man paced in a circle, his long hair blowing in the wind. Bonner leaned into the hill and moved swiftly on his hands and feet, though stumbling. I struggled to keep up, using the barrel of the gun to limp my way downhill. The man heard us as we reached the flats. He looked up. It was Ikuak.

He didn’t try to run. Instead, he waited as we neared, his arms trembling at his sides. Bonner stopped within speaking distance, and I aimed down the sights of the paintball gun. I felt silly holding it, wondered how straight those slimy bullets could go.

“My son told me about your nightmares,” Bonner said.

Ikuak sniffed. I couldn’t tell if he’d been crying or not, if he was feeling fear or guilt or sorrow. He was a tower in the night. “Are you him?” he asked.

Bonner pulled his knife.

“Don’t.”

Bonner charged. They made contact and Ikuak threw him to the ground. He loomed over him and I fired, taking a couple of shots to set my aim. Eventually I hit Ikuak’s body, and the balls popped bright green on his chest and side. He cried out, held up his hands, and backed away.

“Please. Don’t do this,” he said to Bonner.

There was a moment when I thought Bonner might quit, that this might be enough for him.

But he rose and charged again, forcing Ikuak to wrestle him to the ground. They fought too closely for me to shoot. Bonner’s knife hand was pinned, but he kept thrashing and kicking, and soon Ikuak was smothering him with both arms, both legs. He muscled Bonner’s knife away, tossed it aside.

He stood, pointed to the ocean. “Leave,” Ikuak told him. “Please leave, and don’t come back.”

Bonner couldn’t speak, couldn’t reason. He was too committed to avenging his son, to feeling like a father, if only for the moment. He plucked his knife from the ground and charged a third time. Ikuak caught him with a right hook, sending Bonner to the dirt, and I saw the spray of blood from Bonner’s nose, saw the knife fall to the ground. Ikuak picked it up, and I wondered if this was Ikuak’s nightmare: to be forced to kill this man he’d never seen before, a man who cheated with his wife, got her pregnant. This weak man who would not stop coming. An endless temptation to kill.

I thumbed the bulge of my own knife folded in my pocket. I wanted to run in, stab Ikuak, save Bonner. This was what had been asked of me. I, too, was to perform this terrible act I was

38

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

witnessing, but of course, I couldn’t. I didn’t possess that mindless fortitude, the ability to free my mind long enough. I’d be too conscious of it all, too empathetic. I’d feel the knife in my own side as I tried to jam it into his, recoil before I had broken the skin. In the end, I couldn’t shake the image of Ikuak and the boy smiling with the seal, couldn’t bring myself to be the one to forever steal those moments from Bonner’s son. Even though I knew they were already gone.

Instead, I watched as Ikuak plunged the knife in, as it came out stained, then reentered. I watched Bonner thrash at the night, all the power around him, the weight of the stars. Ikuak held him steady and continued to stab and hold, waiting after each thrust before he took the knife out and stabbed again. Bonner screamed as the pain finally reached him.

In those last seconds, I watched as his eyes seemed to find steady footing, all movement and matter and time washed away, the nuggets of whatever was left sitting there like gold in silt, all of it revealed to him. He choked and gurgled as it ended. When he went still, I could feel him in the air. I could sense him lost out there, crushed under the weight of his own will and kismet, waiting to be brought back.

Ikuak exhaled, quivered, his body covered in glowing paint. The stillness finally slaked his hunger. I left before our eyes met, before he decided to come for me, too. I ran into the fields, kept looking back, waiting for Ikuak, for the glowing splotches of paint on his body, my end waiting in Bonner’s knife. It never came.

I walked the edges of cliffs, my eyes filled with wanderlust, their gaze wayfaring across the stars, black holes searching for whatever they could find. Bonner’s body was miles away, Ikuak was part of the night, and I slogged back to the boat where Manny waited to hear my story. There was nothing I could tell him to let me stay, to keep the Romania running. He would stop fishing, and I would be cast out like Cain, cursed to wander. A life I already knew.

Rapturous light and thunder broke in the distance: a Coast Guard helicopter taking off from the island base. It followed me, whirring overhead, its tail blinking as it flew out to rescue some fisherman, someone caught at sea. They’d take him out of the boat, the water, wherever he was he would be found, saved. Now, he was suffering. But they would bring him back. They’d take him out of the cold, wrap him in warmth and light, and bring him home.

39

REVIEW/ 34

NORTH OF HOPE: A DAUGHTER’S ARCTIC JOURNEY

BY SHANNON HUFFMAN POLSON reviewed by Karly Borden Zondervan, 2013

Shannon Huffman Polson’s rigorously honest memoir, North of Hope, reminds me of

the Psalmist’s prayer, “Teach us to number our days that we might gain a heart of wisdom.”

One of the ways we learn this task of counting is through contemplating and mourning death, and Polson generously imparts the wisdom she gathers upon learning that her parents have been mauled by a bear during one of their remote camping trips in the Arctic.

This is a story about grief—intangible and jagged—and the author’s struggle to hold and smooth it after her parents’ tragic death. Feeling the need to create structure for her mourning, Polson turns to music and nature in the hope that retracing her parents’ last steps in the wilderness and participating in a choral performance of Mozart’s Requiem will usher her out of bereavement. Polson lets readers track her honest, emotional journey of making sense of life and death, and of giving purpose to her grief.

I was afraid I would be reading a sappy story riddled with trite lessons that spun tragedy with unconvincing hope for the sake of a happy ending. North of Hope is far from that. Polson doesn’t share her journey as an expert on these matters, attempting to teach readers the stages of grief, or the proper way to rejoice. Rather, we journey through her deeply sincere questions with her, knowing just as much as she does in the thick of her sorrow.

As I began reading her initial explanation of her trek into the Arctic, I was eager to hear exactly why she was going on this pilgrimage: Did she need to solve something? Did she need research for her book? What was she hoping to see or do? She doesn’t offer insight. Instead, readers uncover those intentions with her as she moves from What am I going to do now? to Why am I even doing this? This is the story of grief: making sense not only of What now? but also of Why should I even keep moving forward?

In conveying her grief—the guts of the story—she dutifully and beautifully assumes the challenge of putting words to emotions that are often categorized as too weighty for words.

While the reader might be tempted to think, I can’t imagine, Polson challenges us to actually imagine by contemplating questions that are too relevant to be rhetorical: Where exactly is the heavenly home? How can we know when it is the last time we’ll see our loved ones? Are we meant to be pilgrims of the depths? She shows us how pain that is too much to handle also comes with exquisite beauty, as common as dirt, as unexpected as grace.

40

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

Polson quickly admits her own “human delusion that believes that if we can answer questions, fill in the story, somehow we might turn back the clock.” Her informational binges are evident even in the “Acknowledgements” section of the book, where she thanks choral directors, cultural institutes, museum staffs, librarians, universities, search and rescue divisions, Arctic guides, geophysicists, geographers, and geologists for their help with her studies of social history, Arctic geography, music philosophy, indigenous practices, and poetic references. Though she eventually accepts that no amount of knowledge has the power to soothe her, she challenges what readers have come to understand about life and death by uniquely blending her emotional process with this gathered information, including poetic details on subjects like the spiritual significance of bears, the shortcomings of American burial ceremonies, and the communal ritual of performing music.

The description of her trek is robust, complete with excerpts from her parents’ river journal, notes from their personal diaries, and letters she collected from them. Each chapter has an epigraph with quotes from different writers’ musings on life, nature, and death. And their influences are evident: Polson’s descriptions of the rolling tundra landscape reminded me of Annie Dillard’s perspectives, and her constant, reverent connection to nature reminded me of Mary Oliver’s wise simplicity.

She strands a line of music through her story by interjecting the chapters of her expedition with flashbacks focused on her participation in Seattle Pro Musica’s Mozart’s Requiem. Each segment is titled with a succeeding movement of the composition (Kyrie, Tuba Mirum, Offertorium, Sanctus, Benedictus, Lacrymosa), and the reader soon learns that “listening to and performing music helped [her] express passions and yearnings within community in a way that [she] would not have known how to otherwise.” Her reverent relationship with music invites us to search our own lives for a medium as powerful as the one she conveys, though she’ll poetically compel us to turn toward music by the time we close the book.

I wonder how a book like this would impact someone in mourning; if her descriptions would hit too close to home, or if she would offer the much-needed comfort that this pain is not unique. That this is the human condition, this pain, this loss, and even this violence. Around the world, people lost whole families and friends every day to war, disease, starvation or circumstance. This pain—and the search for meaning in its wake—is what it is to be human. Realizing this did not assuage my pain, but it did tell me that I was not alone.

She notes that suffering “demands a focus on absence and loss, and cleverly tricks one into believing that there is no other possibility.” However, her story offers a different possibility: hope. What is revealed in her process of rafting down the Hulahula and practicing the Requiem is the mystery of relief that comes with yielding to something bigger than oneself—be it the Arctic wilderness or a knowing God who says, “There’s enough hope to rejoice even now, I promise.” Still, as Polson notes, simply knowing these responses to life cannot substitute for the journey of learning them, and her journey is one worth traversing.

When I closed the book, I felt as if I had gained a heart of wisdom, having contemplated the consequences of death—mostly grief—and how, as Polson shares, “I am meant only to know that there are worlds beyond my knowing, and that the only appropriate response is awe.”

41

Laurie Klein

Re: Union While they are sleeping apart, she keeps bringing the meadow home on her body. Burrs penetrate seams, thorns of cheatgrass skewer shoes: ingenious, annoying life on the move.

With each reunion, at a new motel, rendezvous reunites them, until her secret hope opens its trench coat and underneath there is only the old recognition, her prayers will not tame him: restive, curious, born to rove.

So many points of departure between them, all the little rifts that temperament, taste, and habit beget, even their bodies quietly rife with cells—coming and going—as constant as they are constant, in vow, in friendship.

Like seeds, thumbing a ride, today she slips into the notion of being transplantable, picturing patience armed with a pocket spade, rending, tending the place each one falls.

42

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

Shann Ray

Wife Psalm 2 I hope I never stop believing what you’ve told me of God. The knife in your hand over the pears at breakfast, Anima Christi, the feminine soul of Christ your bone-weary anthem in our soft bed, your cry a God-bearing cry. Your body a banner over me.

43

John Fry

You, Breath on a Coal soul become flesh you set it on fire

uncomfortable, bones your ancestors gave

hair for a shirt bird for a heart

cinders of some star unnamed, you glow by

in manifest dark being breathed upon

are you this ember —but whose breath

or are you breath (because it was fire)

44

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

John Fry

[Now I Ache at the Strange] to dearest Him who lives alas! away: bitter would have me taste: my taste was me —but worse, was gall, was heart burnt, the radiographer said. (if only answers were alkaline.) gnosticism had eaten cleanly through the esophageal lining of my eschatology: x-rayed raw from cigarettes & battery acid sold as coffee at corner stores. handed a cup of clay, she bade me drink —but even novenas can’t coat a stomach already gone firebox as the sun in its fifth cycle —& just as dark matter may be where God grew lonely— HearestThou, can you follow this ion trail I am breathing: a chalkline circle around my mouth

45

Amanda Leigh Rogers

Day Four You chose a face of fire for your ardor until earth turned its shoulder; then you donned a mask of bone to show a colder love, white bone to say remember: something blazes.

You foresaw the sad insomniacs, our aimless shuffling on empty midnight roads and how our tears would wash a bit of bone to nothing once in a while. But yes, let misery dissolve the moon, you said, so that my countless far-off faces will dazzle them, at least to death or morning.

46

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

Amanda Leigh Rogers

Day Five Yes, one fish became flesh for thousands who lay back in the grass satisfied, and thought nothing bad can happen now.

But before all that, the first fin wriggled, then millions could move themselves slick and agile through streams or heaving seas, all that dim will through which your slippery designs flash like fire.

Even in the lightless deep, oh, they shimmer; even the monster jaw that lures with lurid phosphorescence says something about light.

The birds, too, they poured like light from your mouth, bird after bird, spilled over the empty sky, a tide of rainbow, a field of song. Each little boat of bones holds fire, a furnace to roar against death.

Each nest is full of surrender.

Confusion stirs the softer elements, and a new stench of dead flesh, and beauty feasting on beauty.

But, oh, yes, says the swish of fins; oh, yes, please, wings whir.

We’ll take it. We will take it all.

47

Hope Wabuke

Job (War Survivor’s Guilt) and in the denial of the words. i know how as latex-wrapped fingers press close to see inside grandmother will press lips tight together. grandmother will press sickness sounds down deep deep down. to push back the rising of aunt’s voice throat cut bled out by latex-gloved hands back home in Amin’s war until the sounding rings out in tiny brown bead shapes rung round brown skin. and grandmother will press fingers soft to one, all. a silent hail mary, a silent grace.

48

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

Roger Desy

Field for my father

— you were not here — you were not there — a way of life — remote too old — beyond reproach — too lost in your ways to know you better — barriers hidden in languages — and a son too young

— fatherless in the province of catholicism in the canada of your promise rooted in windy snow to the sands of the more provincial desert virtues — fear of the unknown — faith in fear — beatitudes of poverty and isolation

— and given your experience — the distance of your past — estrangement is the heir to the wilderness that stirs in the cup of your right hand

— but now — after suffering — after forgiveness — love and death are all the elements that matter — like water in the roots of ice locked in its lattices — pending different surfaces and temperatures —

regret and loss at peace with unconditional acceptance — where — here

is always room for you — a place to stay — a field to wake to and take in in frost and thaw in season — to get to know — and call your own —

49

George David Clark

Iscariot’s Psalm The only way one kills a god is by securing his permission.

Submit that he will rise. Applaud the lonely way. To kill a god you coax him from his skin façade.

I’ve seen the veil torn in a vision of the way: you only kiss a god to kill him. That kiss is your incision.

50

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

George David Clark

Original Sins Does everyone choose lesser incarnations of their loves over the originals since Adam? I dreamed my wife into a woman I despise. Is that the wrack of original sin?

* The trick of licorice is that it kinks its sugar with a snakebite. The trick of gin, that it wraps a mind in mink. Mixologists, combining them, concoct an “original sin.”

* Apiarists gentle swarms of Africanized bees by sending docile, virgin queens into the vice-hives, culling out the former sovereigns, the original sins.

* Though the man is good who clones himself, his clone is twisted, vicious, scissors in its grin.

The classic denouement leaves one man dead, the other weeping: the clone only the original’s sins.

* We were the exact same band, same songs, but we found more and better fans once we started going by the name of Pristine Eden and the Original Sins.

* They’re rarer than the glasswinged butterflies that ghost through Panama like bobby pins, but in the holy drowse of his confessional all any priest dreams of are original sins.

* Orthodox musicians are not psalmists, though their instruments are God’s. Men’s voices haunt the angels when, like David’s, they are broken by their fervor in all loves

or in all sins.

51

John Blair

The Story You Heard The story you heard is wrong, but so what? The truth is happy-ruthless with your rusty heart, goat-jawing the seams, slick tongue like a quick finger wet and surprising.

It hates you and does not care if in the moment before sleep, when prayer still lingers in your chest, cool menthol and smallish lies, you start to doubt, so that the stumbled hallways of your dreams canker with hooks and needles and violent ends, or quiet ones, embalmed in slow dissolve, the simple mise-en-scène of box within box, Euclidean and serene. So, then, the story: fruit and monkey love in a garden, gopherwood and wine.

Spring every hale morning, peace by suppertime.

52

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

John Blair

Hard Pearl No farther out than the nearest star unclenching in the wimpled dusk, the quiet discourse of In the beginning God implied begins. New marble dies and goes hard against the chisel like old love, and spirals of gas smash and scrum into light which is the souls of the misplaced dead that Pliny believed lived on inside fava beans so as to make plum progress through each one of us back into the world, leaving behind limehard grains of absence to coat our hollows with pearl and dreams of leaving.

53

John Blair

The One Thing And so here’s the thing they say, as if there could be just one of any one thing, one dirt, one air, one cell, one body, breath in, breath out. The many is all, pitiless as the shark’s teeth rattling out of the Cretaceous into the glass jar on your son’s bedroom shelf. And so here’s the thing in its limned self, the wound, as sage Rumi would have it, by which the light enters us: a child, your child, sobs inside the cankering worm of his loathing, rank as father’s milk in the hair shirt of himself.

This, the Ding an sich of alone, of oneness, burns with multiplicity, the tangled million helices of our herald flesh and fate, father to son to sorrows.

54

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

We pay for sacred things in the blue geld of blood, in the simony of best intentions.

The one thing of which you are certain: what we are renders us like lard every sea-changing day.

You want the steady hum of the completed universe, intoning Om like the open mouth of a tenable god. You want dry fields salted with ruin and hard winters. You want just one thing to condense itself inside your weeping child like the angel lingering contrapposto inside a blue fog of perfect marble, blessed with the hard penitence of all god’s waiting.

55

ARTIST’S/ NOTE

LAURA CARPENTER TRUITT: THRESHOLDS These works operate on multiple thresholds: First, a metaphoric threshold, a place that is specific to my local landscape. Second, an architectural threshold between inside and outside, looking out and seeing in. Third, a structure’s threshold between life and death— construction, decay, and destruction. Finally, an enacted physical threshold that I think about while painting, trying to paint in between foreground and background and creating structures just to destroy them so that they sit at a midpoint of completeness.

My most recent work examines our relationship to landscape through programs like Google’s Street View. My street view pieces use public images of specific places that have personal, political, or historic significance and recontextualizes their digitized versions, imbuing them with a new meaning and sense of space.

Many of these paintings in Ruminate are conglomerates of street views, with added structures or destructed architecture as a way to put these places into a different time. By painting these in the shape or size of a digital image, I’m referencing film, photography, and painting’s interconnected and changing nature. I’m reasserting the importance of the act of painting and addressing the medium’s contemporary insecurities.

56

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

Laura Carpenter Truitt. Private view of public space. Oil on canvas. 120 x 82 inches.

57

Laura Carpenter Truitt. We can have it all. Oil on canvas. 60 x 82 inches.

58

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

Laura Carpenter Truitt. Interbuild 2. Oil on canvas. 60 x 82 inches.

59

Laura Carpenter Truitt. Interior. Charcoal on paper. 11 x 22 inches.

60

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

Laura Carpenter Truitt. Interbuild. Charcoal on paper. 15 x 11 inches.

61

Laura Carpenter Truitt. Before we figured it out, DIA. Charcoal, colored pencil, and oil pastel on paper. 8 x 11 inches.

62

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

Laura Carpenter Truitt. Rebuild. Charcoal, colored pencil, and oil pastel on paper. 15 x 22 inches.

63

Laura Carpenter Truitt. View from the outside. Oil on canvas. 24 x 20 inches.

64

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

NEKTARIA PETROU

Even the Golden Horn, the bridge, the Old City, the minarets, and the seabirds know that I am dying of the evil eye. In the morning twilight, they are all a comforting gray, like Nona’s hair. Everything is motionless, fuzzy, sticking together, just like in my dreams. The Ramazan drummer bangs away among the rickety wooden houses of Kasımpaşa. He doesn’t stop outside our building because we’re all Jewish here, but I can hear him in the wharf below: bap-bap-BAP, bap-bap-BAP. He’s probably driving the Jews down there crazy. I fall asleep on the cushions of the oriel bench, listening to the rapping that is supposed to wake everyone for Ramazan breakfast. When I open my eyes, the sun is rising and everybody is fasting. Patches of fire burn the water. They moved toward the shore and rise onto the windows of the Old City.

A man in a straw fedora climbs up the stairs from Kasımpaşa, leans against the guardrail, and stares at our building. A few minutes later, my mother opens her bedroom door and tiptoes through the foyer without noticing that I am dying.

Mother goes to work early on Mondays so that she can pick me up from school and walk me to my English lesson at three o’clock. Afterward she takes me for an ice cream, and then we go to the Fish Bazaar for groceries. I love Monday afternoons. So I soldier through the day, even though I can’t stop yawning and the left side of my head is throbbing through my eye socket.

After shopping, we go home to our rosy Ottoman building in Refik Saydam Avenue. Its turquoise-tiled lintel and heavy iron doors make me feel like we are entering a sacred place. A synagogue, maybe, like the one in Zülfaris Street. We step into the first hallway. To the right is Muhtar Bey’s barred window. Muhtar Bey is the doorman. Instead of a little cabinet by the entrance, he has an interior window that opens onto the hallway. All he and his wife have to do is pull back the dark blue curtain, check to see who has come in, and go back to their business. I always think that Muhtar’s wife, Aynur, should wave to me, but Mother says that waving is not her job. Aynur Hanım is just a ruffling of the curtains, a muffled voice on the other end of the line on Monday nights when Mother doesn’t have time to cook and Nona is out playing cards with her friends.

The stairs leading to the second set of doors are marble. My father was standing on them the last time I saw him. I kissed him goodbye in our apartment, but then I ran down the four

65

flights to the upper entryway landing and watched him go. The half-moon window above the inner doors is stained glass. The afternoon sun was shining through it, at the crossing place between inside and out, when I last saw my father. I didn’t run to him and hug his knees. I watched him go. I didn’t ask when he was coming back. He didn’t. That was May 1941. Mother says they sent lots of non-Muslims off to labor battalions then. She also says that I was still in the womb when he left, and that my memory is not real.

Mother calls Aynur Hanım as soon as we enter our apartment. She prefers to do that rather than knocking on their door before we come up. “Aynur Hanım, what did you cook today?” she asks the receiver. “Meatballs, pilaf, and purslane . . . hmm. Ok. Send up two portions, please.”

Muhtar Bey brings up our food on a tray. The doors to the other rooms are closed. My mother never opens the apartment door without closing the interior doors. “Don’t let them see inside,” she says. “And never put your best things in the foyer. Only old stuff goes there.”

“Is it because of the evil eye, like Nona says?”

“No,” says Mother while we wait for Muhtar Bey. “It’s because of unfair taxes. Do you remember when they auctioned Mrs. Levi’s carpets in the street? No, you couldn’t. That was 1942. You were only a baby. But lots of Jewish and Christian families went broke then to pay those taxes. The others were jealous.”

“That’s the evil eye. Nona says that the evil eye is jealousy.”

“Taxes and the evil eye are different things.”

Muhtar Bey knocks. Mother opens and says in Turkish, “How are you, Muhtar Bey?” “Well, thank you, Madam Ester. How are Madame Flora and little Juliet?”

Muhtar Bey has a funny Black Sea accent. I love him because he takes us children to school and carries our heavy bags and holds our hands like a father, but I have to try hard not to laugh or smile when he speaks. He sounds like a shadow puppet, sing-song and silly.

“Very well, thank you,” says Mother. “We just came from the Fish Bazaar. Can you believe how expensive strawberries are this year? I didn’t buy any. Tell me, how are your children and Aynur Hanım?”

“Well, now, thank God. But we almost lost our girl Selma. She was burning with fever. We even took her to the doctor, but the doctor couldn’t do anything. So we went to someone else.”

“Who?” “I’ll tell you another time, Madam Ester. I have to collect the garbage now.”

“Of course. Don’t work too hard.”

Mother gives Muhtar Bey a good tip. “You take care of them and they’ll take care of you,”

66

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

she tells me in Ladino after he’s gone. Ladino is our language. Nona says that we brought it with us from Córdoba in 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella kicked us out of Spain and Sultan Beyazid II welcomed us.

“But never tip too much,” Mother adds. “Remind them that you don’t have a lot of money.

Say how expensive things are or that you can’t afford something. Never let them see what you have.”

I don’t know much about Muhtar Bey and his family. Every time we climb the stairs to the upper floors, I look down through the stairwell, between the railings, to the lower ground floor. Off to the right are the storage rooms for coal and wood. To the left is Muhtar Bey’s door. He has the biggest apartment in the building, but it’s not as bright as ours, and they can’t see the Golden Horn, and Mother says that it must be noisy because of the traffic in Refik Saydam Avenue. Their shoes fill the space outside their door. Muhtar Bey’s shoes are always pressed down in back so that he can take them off quickly when he goes to the mosque. Aynur Hanım’s shoes are plain and brown like Muhtar Bey’s, but they have a little heel, and the uppers are not folded. Their children’s shoes are hand-me-downs from all the other children in the building. Last year I had a growth spurt. I outgrew my favorite pair of blue satin sandals in just a few months. Mother gave them to Muhtar Bey’s daughter Selma.

Now I see my blue satins on the lower landing, toes pointed toward the door, and I wish I were Selma. * After Muhtar Bey pinched my cheek and disappeared down the stairs, there was no more soldiering through it. I couldn’t eat any meatballs and purslane. Mother didn’t believe that I was ill and sent me to bed. The next day I couldn’t walk straight. I wobbled and bumped into things. I knocked over a table and broke Mother’s favorite crystal ashtray. She scolded me.

Nona put me back to bed, made me drink hot milk, and called Dr. Filo. He arrived just before dinner, leaned his bald head toward me, and said with his school-toilet breath, “Does she take her temperature under the tongue or anally?”

“Under the tongue, doctor!” said Nona. “She’s a little too old for the other, don’t you think?”

I hated Dr. Filo. I hated all doctors. I hated taking my clothes off, being prodded, looked at, and talked about as if I were a thing or not even there. And after all that humiliation, Dr. Filo didn’t even know what was wrong with me. He put his stethoscope away and withdrew to the foyer. Through the half-closed door I heard him say in French, “It’s nothing. Just give her an aspirin and a pudding.”

“It’s not nothing,” said Nona, trying to straighten herself. She wasn’t hunched, like most grandmothers, but bent at the waist.

“Madam Flora, I am a doctor. These things pass eventually.”

“Give my regards to Mrs. Filo,” said Nona. She gave him his money, but she didn’t offer him coffee and chocolates. The door opened and closed. Toilet-breath was gone.

“Did you hear?” said Mother. “She’s faking. Go to your poker game. You shouldn’t pay any attention when she does this. Remember, it’s not the first time.”

67

Nona came into my bedroom and sat down beside me on my pink satin quilt, the one that she herself had made as a present for my tenth birthday. It was embroidered with daisies at the edges and, right in the middle, the word Amour in fancy white letters. Nona took off her gold earrings and bracelets and set them on the nightstand. She pulled out the Star of David that she wore tucked behind her blouse and let it dangle on her chest. That meant she wasn’t going out.

“Albondigas de prasa?” she asked.

“Yes, Nona.” Leek meatballs were my favorite. Nona kissed my forehead and went into the kitchen. I put on her bracelets, which were three times too big for me, as well as her heavy pinchy earrings, and fell asleep.

“Wake up, my angel,” said Nona. She stuffed pillows behind my back and covered my pink satin quilt with a tablecloth. She brought a tray of albondigas de prasa, matzo, and charoset, which is not only a Passover food in our house, but also food for the sick. Nona makes leek meatballs and charoset better than anyone else. Some women make charoset with only raisins, apple, almonds, and orange. Others add dates. But Nona makes it from raisins, dates, almonds, walnuts, cinnamon, and apple with “just enough sweet wine to get it to spread easily.” Nona hates stinginess, especially with food.

“Eat for me, sweetie,” she said. “Charoset is medicine.”

I ate for Nona. Mother didn’t come home until late. “Nobody ever fussed over me like that,” she said.

Nona didn’t answer back. She went about her business, as she always did, not even turning her head to look at my mother. Nona’s neck didn’t turn anyway. It was locked in one position: forward. Mother followed her around, complaining the whole time, until Nona finally said, “Aren’t you going out this evening? Don’t think I don’t know about that person.”

Mother took a plate of leek meatballs to her room and slammed the door.

For breakfast Nona brought two slices of pan d’Espanya with milk, but the lemony smell of the cake made me sick. I couldn’t open my eyes anymore. My neck hurt so much that I thought, this is what it must feel like to be old like Nona.

“Eat, eat for me,” said Nona. “Eat or I’ll be sick too!”

“I can’t. I want to see the City. I want to see the Golden Horn.”

“Why don’t you sit with me in the front room? I’ll make your bed up there, in the oriel.

We’ll have tea and watch Istanbul together.”

“I can’t get up, Nonika. I can’t stand the light. Tell me what it looks like.”

Nona went to the oriel. “It’s flat, like a mirror,” she said. “You can see all the buildings of the opposite shore reflected on the water. The boats docked at Fener look like little white game pieces. The old Jewish Quarter of Balat is warm like embers. Do you know that I am the first one in my family to have moved away from there? My family lived in Balat for over four hundred years.”

“You’ve told me a million times, Nonika. Is anybody there below, watching? A man in a straw fedora with a red feather in the band?”

“A man with a . . . you’re delirious, angel. Go back to sleep. I’m going to call the rabbi.”

I heard her dialing, waiting, sighing, and then talking with the rabbi’s wife in French.

Mother came out of her room and asked, “Is she still carrying on?”

68

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

“I invited Rabbi Leon and his wife to dinner,” said Nona. “I’ll take care of the cooking.”

“Tonight? I can’t. I have to work.”

“Tell them your child is sick.”

Mother poked her head into my bedroom. Her hair was black, shiny, and pulled into a bun. She wore a red dress. Her middle was smooth and cinched, and her breasts stood out like cones, just like in the magazines. Her new corset, the biggest seller at the shop where she worked, made her look like a movie-star. People were surprised that Mother hadn’t remarried. She told everyone that she needed more time. Nona said she was holding out for a wealthy husband, one who could buy an apartment in a building with a lift because Mother was sick of our five flights of stairs.

After Mother left for work, Nona tied a bunch of rue to my bedpost. She also pinned a little blue-eye bead on the left side of my pajama collar and muttered, “O ye who guard us from the evil eye, strange harm, black mouths, and other demons, take this evil to the bottom of the sea!”

Then, in her regular granny tone, she asked, “Do you want to watch your mother from the window? Like we always do?”

“No. But tell me what you see.”

“It’s like a pond now, blackish green. Clouds are blowing down from Eyüp. We might have some rain. Look, a seagull just landed on our eaves. He has a red beak, like he’s wearing lipstick. Come, sweetie. Don’t you want to see him?”

“I can’t, Nonika. But . . . is there a man with a straw fedora? And a red feather in the brim?”

“No such man.”

“And Mother?”

“She just turned up Vine-Covered Mosque Street. She’s off to work now.”

Nona was busy all morning. I knew that she was making all her best dishes: cheese pastries rolled in circles like roses, meat-stuffed rolls called mantikos, honey-roasted chicken, and the artichokes that she had bought at the market earlier that week. At noon she brought me a plate of mantikos. Everyone said that Nona’s were the best. She put a special mix of herbs and spices into the meat and onion filling, and she always lied when the other ladies asked for the recipe. Rabbi Leon loved Nona’s mantikos as much as I did. Once I said that maybe he loved Nona as well. Mother boxed my ear for that.

“For me,” Nona pleaded. “Will you eat one for me?”

“I can’t.”

“Come on, sweetie.”

“What does it look like now, outside?”

“The sky is overcast. The water is dark gray and rippled, as if hundreds of birds were flying above the surface. Now will you try to eat a little?”

I ate half. Nona patted my head and called me her girl. Ten minutes later I sat up and vomited onto the floor.

69

“My little bird!”

“Did I dirty the quilt?”

“No, sweetie, no. You’re such a careful girl. Bravo. It’s all on the floor.”

When I woke from my afternoon nap, Nona’s silver-backed Ottoman mirrors were reflecting the orange light of the sun setting behind the Old City. Nona’s mirror collection was usually kept packed away, out of the sight of daily visitors like Muhtar Bey. All he and the delivery men ever saw was a dark foyer with empty hooks on bare walls. That afternoon, however, the doors to our living room and dining room were wide open. The mirrors were in their places, and our little apartment, with the exception of my windowless room, was as bright as a Bosphorus palace.

“Did it rain?” I asked.

“No, dear, the clouds blew away, down to the sea. But your mother’s home.”

“Mother!”

“She’s changing her clothes.”

“Will you tell me what’s happening in the street? And what the water looks like?”

“Of course, my treasure.”

After brushing my hair, Nona went to the living room and took her mother-of-pearl opera glasses—a souvenir from her honeymoon to Paris—from the leather case embossed with the words Saint Michel. I could see her scanning the Old City.

“They just lit the banner between Süleymaniye’s minarets: ‘Welcome, Ramazan!’ The last rays of sunlight are dancing on the water like Christmas lights. Down below in Kasımpaş a there’s a whole lot of laundry hung out to dry. Do you know, dear, that when Mehmet the Conqueror couldn’t break the boom pulled across the Golden Horn, he had his ships carried overland, right across this spot where our building is now? They slid the ships into the water just below us, in Kasımpaşa, and then they took Byzantium.”

“You’ve told me a thousand times.”

“Oh God,” said Nona. “May it be turned back upon him!”

“What?”

“Nothing, sweetie, nothing. I thought that a man was going to hit one of the stray dogs, but he was only playing. He’s petting it now. And here comes your mother . . . with the rabbi. They’re just entering the building.”

“Is there a man wearing a straw fedora with a red feather?”

“Shall I leave your door open or closed?”

“Open, please.”

According to the alarm clock beside my bed, it took Rabbi Leon seven minutes to climb our five flights of stairs. Rabbi Leon was a fatso. Not a round fatso, but a wide one. Out of breath, he

70

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

would always touch the mezuzah in our doorframe, kiss his fingers, and then turn sideways to enter. His wife was the opposite kind of fat, narrow and bulging in front and back. As they entered the foyer, Nona said, “Thank you so much for coming on such short notice, rabbi.”

I pulled the Amour quilt over my head. I could hear them chatting first in the foyer and then in the dining room. They talked about everything but me for a while: the rabbi’s summer house in Büyükada, the humidity, the profiteroles that they had eaten yesterday at the Golden pastry shop, how much my mother hated our stairs, the demolition of my primary school and the plans for the new synagogue that would take its place, corset sales at the shop where Mother worked, Madam Dora’s aching knees, and Nona’s mantikos. It wasn’t until the fruit and marzipan were served that Nona said, “Rabbi, I think that it’s more than just a headache. I think it’s the evil eye.”

“Madam Flora, I’ve told you and the other ladies so many times. The Talmud says that the evil eye can only affect you if you worry about it.”

“That’s what I tell her, rabbi, but she doesn’t listen,” said Mother.

“And the Talmud also says that out of a hundred deaths, ninety-nine will be from the evil eye,” said Nona. “Can you do something for her, rabbi? Say a prayer?”

“We’ll have a talk. And say a prayer, of course.”

Half an hour later, after coffee and liqueur, Nona came in and propped me up on the big fluffy lace pillows with pink ribbon running through the edges. Normally, these were only for decoration and had to be removed from the bed when I slept, but Rabbi Leon’s visit was special.

“She’s ready,” said Nona.

Rabbi Leon sucked in his stomach, passed through my narrow door, and said, “What’s this I hear, Juliet? Headache, dizziness, chills, and you can’t stand the light? Is something bothering you, dear? Could it be the English teacher? I’ve heard that he’s not always so nice.

You can tell me.”

“She should be grateful for those lessons,” said Mother, leaning on the doorjamb. “I never had private lessons when I was a child.”

“Madam Ester, do you mind if I speak with Juliet by myself?”

Mother went to clear the dishes from the table.

“Now Juliet, tell me, do you like your English teacher?”

“That’s not why I’m sick, Rabbi. It’s my head and my neck.”

Madam Dora squeezed between the rabbi and my armoire, put her hand on my forehead, and said, “She has a fever, you know. She’s not faking. We’d better send for Dr. Sasson.

Flora’s right. Somebody’s given Juliet the evil eye.”

Rabbi Leon draped his tallit over his shoulders and said some prayers. I hid under the pink satin Amour quilt. The next morning I wasn’t any better. Mother called Dr. Sasson, another fatso with an ugly red nose. Dr. Sasson had no idea what was wrong with me, but he prescribed penicillin anyway “as a diagnostic.”

“What is a diagnostic?” I asked after he had gone.

“If you were that sick, you wouldn’t care,” said Mother.

“Shame on you!” said Nona. “Go take the mirrors down and close the hall doors. Then call Muhtar Bey. Ask him to come up.”

71

“Muhtar Bey?” “We’ll have him fill the prescription for us.”

“I need to go out anyway,” said Mother.

“You’re not leaving the house until your daughter is well. Call Muhtar Bey, and then go sit with Juliet.”

A few minutes later the doorbell rang. “Listen, Muhtar Bey,” said Nona in Turkish. “The little one isn’t feeling well. Could you run down to the pharmacy and get this prescription for us? I know you’re fasting. I hate to put you to the trouble, but neither of us should leave the house right now. She’s ill, you see.”

“Right away, Madam Flora.”

He returned in half an hour. Nona thanked him, told him to keep the change, and gave him a plate of dates “for the iftar.” Just as she was about to close the door, Muhtar Bey said, “You know, Madam Flora, our girl Selma was ill a few weeks ago. Did Madam Ester tell you?”

“No.” “The doctors didn’t help at all. They said that Selma was going to die and that there was nothing we could do about it. My mother-in-law brought Father Dimitris.”

“A priest?”

“Yes.” “Why not the imam?”

“The Orthodox priests are the evil eye experts, Madam Flora. Imams are good for other things, but nobody is better at exorcism than Father Dimitris.”

“How do you know it’s the evil eye?”

“I can smell it from here.”

“Thank you, Muhtar Bey. I don’t want to tire you anymore. Have a good evening.”

As soon as Muhtar Bey’s footsteps could no longer be heard on the staircase, my mother said, “You shouldn’t involve him in your superstitions.”

“Ester, dear, maybe we should think about what he said.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Have you noticed anyone jealous of her? Other pupils at the English teacher’s . . . or . . . maybe somebody staring in the street?”

“Oh, Mother. Please.”

Dr. Sasson came again the next morning. The fever was worse, and I couldn’t eat or drink anything. He prescribed more pills and said, “This might be more serious than I thought. I advise you to take her to the hospital.”

“No hospitals!” I moaned. I didn’t want to die, but I had accepted that I was going to, and the thought of all those doctors looking at me naked was worse than death. I preferred a coffin. Please, God, I prayed, don’t make me go to the hospital.

Nona opened the door for Dr. Sasson. He left, hopefully never to return. I heard Muhtar Bey mopping the landing. “How’s the little one?” he asked.

“Badly, Muhtar Bey. Could you get this prescription for her?”

“Of course. And while I’m out, why don’t I pass by the church near the Hazzopulo Arcade?

Father Dimitris is tops. Everyone says so. He’s the one who cured our Selma.”

“I don’t know, Muhtar Bey . . . ”

72

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

“Trust me, Madam Flora. I’ll go get the pills and the priest.”

Muhtar Bey returned while I was sleeping. Nona woke me and had me take the new pills with the orange blossom sherbet sent up by Aynur Hanım. I glanced into the foyer: the doors to the other rooms were shut and the mirror hooks were bare, but there was Muhtar Bey, standing by the window that had been filled in when the next-door block was built. It was the first time that Nona had ever invited him into the apartment. Next to him was the priest.

He was a humongous man, like the Cyclops or Goliath, with wild black curls and a short beard. He came in wearing a suit and tie and carrying a leather suitcase. Before Nona could convince him to sit down, he pulled out a black robe, put it on over his suit, and buttoned it all the way to the top. He kissed the fold of his red stole, slipped it over his head, and put on a tall hat with a long black veil that trailed down his back, all the way to his knees.

“Coffee or lemonade, Father?” asked Nona.

“Nothing, thank you. I’m fasting.”

“But, Father, you’re—” “Fasting in solidarity with the Muslims. I always fast when I’m invited to an iftar in the evening.”

“I’ll pray, too,” said Muhtar Bey. “I’m not an expert like Father Dimitris, but God always listens on Ramazan afternoons.”

Father Dimitris had to duck his head to enter my room. His face was flushed, and his eyes were bright red, as if a nasty kid had given him double shiners. “What’s your name, girl?” he asked.

“Juliet.”

“Pretty.” He reached into the pocket of his robe, pulled out a little bag of candy, and said, “Rose lokum. You can have it after I read you.”

What did that mean, “read me?” Was exorcism something like telling fortunes with coffee grounds? “I can’t eat anything,” I said. “My head hurts too much.”

“Later, then.”

“Mother says I’m faking.”

“Where is she?”

“In her bedroom, probably, or out.”

“I’ll talk to her.”

He opened his censer, lit its charcoal dust with a match, and dropped two powdery tears of incense on top. Strands of flower-scented smoke came swirling out of it like the genie of Aladdin’s lamp.

“May I put the ends of the stole over your head?” he asked.

“Why?” “So that grace pours over you, like myrrh running down Aaron’s beard.”

73

Aaron sounded all right, like something Rabbi Leon might say. Or even Nona. I nodded.

Father Dimitris draped his golden tassels over my head and shoulders. At first the loud Greek chanting frightened me. I wanted to crawl back under the Amour quilt, but after a while I started to like his voice as much as I liked the ezan and the prayers in our bright synagogue on Zülfaris Street. Ester appeared in the doorway just as he was finishing. She wasn’t wearing her red dress or any makeup.

“Good afternoon, Madam,” said Father Dimitris.

“Good afternoon.”

“You know, she wasn’t faking. But it’s all over now.”

“I never said she was faking.”

“Yes, you did,” I said.

“Don’t talk back!”

“And you leave me for that man.”

“You see, she makes no sense at all, Father. What man? I only said that she’s ungrateful, and that she exaggerates.”

“How can a child be ungrateful?” said Father Dimitris. “Leave gratitude to grown-ups.”

Ester’s eyes opened wide and her mouth pursed. I could tell that I was going to get a spanking, sometime when I least expected it, but I didn’t care. She went to her room. Nona reached for the priest’s hand. There was something in her palm, money probably, like the tips that she slipped to Muhtar Bey. Father Dimitris gave Nona a playful slap on the wrist and took off his hat.

“You can’t go empty handed!” said Nona. “What can I give you? In appreciation for your trouble, coming all the way up here, all those stairs! I must give you something.”

“Only your blessing,” said Father Dimitris. * Nona goes off to the kitchen and returns with two jars of her watermelon jam, one for Father Dimitris and one for Muhtar Bey. When they’ve gone, she sets the table with a white cloth and flowers for Shabbat. I peel off the Amour quilt, tiptoe to the living room, and look out the window, across the Golden Horn. Thick clouds are blowing down from the north again.

Within a few minutes, Eyüp goes as white as the lokum starch on my fingers and disappears from sight. So does Hasköy, on our side, as the rain comes toward us. Soon it’s pouring so hard that the opposite shore and the Golden Horn are swallowed up in storm, and all I can see is Father Dimitris dancing in Refik Saydam Avenue like a delirious child. My headache and neck ache and chills are gone. So is the man in the straw fedora.

74

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

INTERVIEW/ 34 LAUREN F. WINNER ON THE WRITING LIFE: PROCRASTINATION, REVISION, AND RESURRECTION Interview by Ann Swindell Long before I met Lauren Winner, her ability to seamlessly weave faith into her writing sparked and challenged my own understanding of the craft. She was able to relay spiritual experience in a way that avoided cliché but invited a sense of mystery into her words, and in her stories, I found a place where literary excellence and spiritual questioning were simultaneously present.

Years later, as a student of Lauren’s in the MFA program at Seattle Pacific University, I had the opportunity to learn from her, first-hand. In many of our conversations and classes, she shared aspects of her writing life with us, and those conversations piqued my interest in how she approaches writing as a process and a discipline. I was thankful for the recent opportunity to speak with Lauren and learn more about her personal writing process.

SWINDELL: Do you have any constants in your writing life? Is there anything that you do regardless of what type of article, book, or project you’re working on?

WINNER: Procrastination is one constant. I keep wishing to wake up and be a different person—now, at thirty-eight, I delude myself into thinking I’ll be a different person in my forties. Among other things, I would like to be a person who is disciplined, who writes for four hours every morning, come rain or shine, and then stops. I haven’t been that person yet, but I keep hoping I will become her.

SWINDELL: When you have a book idea, how do you go about moving from concept to manuscript? What comes first in your process, and what comes last?

WINNER: Oh, I just start writing. I never know what I think about something until at least the fourth draft.

I often, though not always, write a proposal or précis of the book; I find it very helpful to try to sketch out a picture of the whole. If I am bored by the end of the précis, I know to set the book idea aside. But the proposal or précis never bears any real relationship to the book itself. The structure always changes wildly,

the table of contents changes; sometimes the whole concept of the book changes so much that it isn’t really the same book at the end. [My book] Still began as a book about the dead women who continue to influence my faith life; all that really remains of that in Still is the hovering presence of Emily Dickinson.

SWINDELL: Readers of your books know that you have a consistent voice that threads through your work. Is that voice something that has come easily to you?

WINNER: I am tempted to ask you what that voice is! I do think there is, in some ways, a consistent voice, but I also wonder: if I were to sit down and analyze my books as though they were books by some other person, would the voice seem only consistent, or would it change? I admit I hope the latter—it seems to me that if I sound exactly the same over a fifteen-year period, maybe something is wrong.

As a reader, I am very attracted to voice. When reading fiction or nonfiction prose, what holds me—or fails to hold me—to a book is usually voice more than anything else. I want a riveting voice more than I want a topic I care about, even more than I want characters who intrigue

75

me (though, of course, character is often inextricable from voice). So, one thing I do to work on my own voice is read what I read. Another thing I do more and more is cut—cut adjectives, cut repetition, worry over and sometimes cut anaphora or epistrophe.

SWINDELL: So, do you ever get writer’s block? How do you move past it or around it?

WINNER: I don’t believe in writer’s block—but if I did, I would like your formulation of moving around it. I think the whole concept of writer’s block is premised on notions of what writing is and how it works that aren’t helpful. (Maybe there’s some neuroscience out there that explains how writer’s block is a real thing. If so, I would like to read it.) What I “get” is not writer’s block but a plague of avoidance. I avoid, and avoid, and avoid.

SWINDELL: How, then, does this avoidance (and procrastination) impact your writing life?

WINNER: For reasons I don’t really understand, sometimes I am able to solve problems only at the dead last minute. So, I have been working for several years on a book about overlooked biblical images of God: Wearing God, it’s called. There’s a chapter on the way the trope of clothing works in the Bible, and for a year and a half, there were two paragraphs in that chapter that I just hated. They didn’t really say anything—they certainly didn’t say what I wanted them to say, but the problem was that I didn’t know what, really, I wanted them to say (or maybe better: I didn’t know what the paragraphs themselves wanted to say). I rewrote and rewrote and worried over those paragraphs for hours—probably forty hours over two years. And then—at the fourth batch of page proofs, that is a moment when you are not supposed to make any substantive changes, but only notice tiny typos—I finally wrote two paragraphs that are utterly unlike any of the paragraphs I produced in the forty hours.

They are among my favorite paragraphs in the book, and they say what needs to be said—something I had no idea needed saying before writing them.

The same was true a few weeks before, when I was going over the copyedited manuscript. I stayed in

76

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

my office for about thirty-six hours and rewrote, from top to bottom with totally new research and new material, two chapters of the book, chapters I had been trying to rewrite and trying to rewrite for months. And somehow in the vise of copy edits—new material came. New, much better material. The thing I had been wanting to say all along, I think.

I have been reading Rowan Williams’s recently published Gifford lectures, The End of Words.

In it, he borrows Margaret Masterman’s concept “language under pressure,” by which Williams means the use of poetic devices and other jarring and odd formulations. Metaphor, irony, allusion—all of this puts language under some pressure, and forces it to say something that might not otherwise get said.

It’s a useful concept, I think—illuminating. That lastminute writing is another kind of language under pressure. I beat myself up about it—it seems like more evidence of my own un-discipline: why can’t I manage to write these same paragraphs earlier? If a student ever said that to me, I would interrupt her and tell her to accept her process for what it was, grateful that the words came at all.

All of that, I suppose, falls under the heading of revision—maybe anything after a first draft is revision.

I prefer it, revision, to first drafting, generally.

Revision is the hard work, but it is also where the fruits come, and it is fun hard work. I often think of something Diane Glancy wrote: “I think in terms of revision because I have been revised. As a Christian, I feel I have started over and over, continuing one development after another. . . . Writing is in the rewriting. It is in the revised. . . . When I write, there usually emerges both a death and a resurrection. . . . I write if I can tolerate the snarl and gnarl of the writing process.”

SWINDELL: That idea of revision and resurrection points to a deeper connection between faith and writing—a connection that seems central to your work. Can you share about this connection?

WINNER: I want to say, gnomically, “I think I often write my way back into belief,” and leave it at that.

And that would be a true enough answer. (Or maybe

it would be better put “God often writes my way back into belief.”) But there are some other, more specific things I can say. In recent years, the most forceful intersection of writing and faith in my life has been writing sermons. I serve as vicar of a small Episcopal church in Louisburg, North Carolina, and I preach there once or twice a month. To write a sermon is, in short, to write about a short section of Scripture, understanding that your writing is primarily one line in an ongoing dialogue in your church community.

This writing has awakened me to the Scriptures, in ways I hadn’t been awake before—no surprise, I think, since writing is the way I wake up to anything.

Writing sermons is also, slowly, doing something to my writing life—specifically, before I accepted the call to the church in Louisburg, most of my preaching was occasional guest preaching, and I could devote ten, twelve, or even twenty hours to one sermon, if I wished. St. Paul’s has hired me for a very small number of hours a month, so I am now typically writing sermons in six hours. This is doing something I don’t fully understand with my sense of what it means to say a piece of writing is “finished,” or “good enough.”

SWINDELL: Earlier, you mentioned your new book that is coming out, Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God. Can you tell us more?

WINNER: This is the first of my books in which I have, in any serious way, written about the Bible. The whole book is an examination of the images and metaphors Scripture gives us for speaking about God—God is fire, God is clothing, and so forth. At the same time, it is also the first time I have written in any extended way about prose—the book is about figurative language in the Bible, metaphor in the Bible. It is about what all that figurative language does to and for our friendship with God (friendship with God being, of course, one example of biblical figurative language), but it is also simply about the language.

So, for example, there is a very close reading of the abundant meanings to be found in three verbs in one verse in Isaiah, and in the Arabic and Aramaic

cognates for one of those verbs—why these three verbs, and what do they do to the metaphor Isaiah is making, and in turn what theological and spiritual suggestions does the metaphor hold? How might we pray inside a metaphor thus verbed? It has been a delight to write about language in this attentive, granular way.

SWINDELL: For you, what is the interplay between writing and faith?

WINNER: Hmmm. Looking at it like that, it seems kind of depressing: maybe I should try to write about something else. Gardening. Politics. But I imagine that if I wrote about gardening or politics, those too would be about faith, because faith is inextricably and explicitly shot through my life. I don’t mean that in an overly pious way. I simply mean, so much of what I read, think about, teach, and do has something to do with Christianity. It doesn’t, alas, always have to do with God, but it always has to do with faith or religion. So, even if I were to sit down and write about something else I am interested in, I imagine it would wind up circling back to faith. An essay on cooking would inevitably hint at the Eucharist, or at the church’s annual cycle of feasting and fasting. An essay on reading poetry would inevitably come around to the prayers in Carrie Fountain’s Instant Winner, or to the question of whether poetry is, can be, should be contemplative practice. So, I am not sure that for me the thing is so much an interplay between writing and faith, as between life and faith, or hermeneutics and faith—for good and for ill, faith (admittedly a sort of pockmarked faith) is one of the lenses through which I look at everything else.

77

CONTRIBUTORS / 34

John Blair has published five books including two poetry collections, The Occasions of Paradise (U. Tampa Press, 2012) and The Green Girls (Pleiades Press, 2003), and he directs the undergraduate creative writing program at Texas State University. He grows bonsai and raises border collies.

Joseph Celizic writes: “I received my MFA in fiction from BGSU, where l teach, and I currently live in Bowling Green, Ohio, with my wife, Emily. Though I came to faith in late high school after reading the gospels during spring break, the complexities of trying to follow and understand Christ have only magnified over the years and continue to guide my writing. My work has been published in various journals, including lndiana Review, Third Coast, North American Review, and CutBank, and has been shortlisted in Best American Mystery Stories.”

George David Clark’s Reveille (University of Arkansas Press) received the Miller Williams Prize, and his most recent poems can be found in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Believer, Blackbird, Southwest Review, Yale Review and elsewhere. He edits the journal 32 Poems and lives with his wife and three kids in Valparaiso, Indiana.

Holly Virginia Clark’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Birmingham Poetry Review, Hunger Mountain, the North American Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

Holly holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is currently a doctoral student in literature and creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. She lives with her husband and two-year-old daughter Eliza just down the hill from the university.

Heather Derr-Smith is a Mennonite poet with two books. The first, Each End of the World (Main Street Rag Press, 2005), is about the war in Bosnia in the 1990s. Derr-Smith volunteered in a refugee camp in 1994 and wrote poems as a way of bearing witness and giving voice to the people she met there. She returned to the region in 2005 and again in 2010 as a visiting poet at the International University of Sarajevo. In 2008 DerrSmith traveled to Damascus, Syria, to interview Palestinian and Iraqi refugees from the War in Iraq for her second book, The Bride Minaret. Derr-Smith’s poems often wrestle with questions about suffering and God but also seek to stay alert to the beauty in the brokenness of the world and the possibilities for redemption.

78

ISSUE 34 Spring 201 5

Roger Desy writes: “I like to think that observing nature in its phenomena preserves not only nature and the observations, but saves us. I revive myself by feeding birds, taking long walks, time at the sea, and keeping an old one-room schoolhouse open to give poets a place to read. I have a strong weakness for winter poetry. If you like winter, you like it all.

And I write sonnets, giving an old form new room, perhaps a new freedom. Samples are in the Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, Poet Lore, South Carolina Review, and other journals.”

Originally from la frontera of South Texas, John Fry currently lives in Austin, Texas, where he studies medieval mysticism at UT-Austin and edits poetry for Newfound Journal. His poetry can be found in Blackbird, Colorado Review, West Branch, and Tupelo Quarterly, among others, and in the chapbook silt will swirl. Favorite things include his feline companions Linus and Fergus, the Davis Mountains, the writings of Simone Weil, and the paintings of Agnes Martin.

Karly Borden is especially passionate about the healing and discovery that happens from communal experiences and creative expression. She was raised in a military family that moved in and out of the United States until she started college in Santa Barbara, California. After earning her degree in English, she worked at a women’s business center, which shaped her vision to see women become economically empowered both locally and globally. She currently resides with her husband in Austin, Texas.

Dave Harrity’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in CopperNickel, Memorious, L.A. Review, Softblow, Revolver, Confrontation, Portland Review, Existere, and the Cresset. As the founder of ANTLER and the author of Making Manifest: On Faith, Creativity, and the Kingdom at Hand, he travels the country teaching workshops on creative practice and spirituality. He likes craft beer, dogs, home improvement projects, jazz, and sometimes all four at once. He lives in Louisville with his wife and children. Get in touch with him at about.me/daveharrity.

Laurie Klein’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Southern Review, New Letters, Ascent, Terrain, Mid-American Review, Natural Bridge, Potomac Review, and other journals.

Winner of the Thomas Merton Prize and a founding editor of Rock & Sling, she lives in the Pacific Northwest. Her first collection has been selected for the Poeima Poetry Series (Cascade Books).

Tori Malcongio was diagnosed with a life-threatening heart arrhythmia six years ago; after three surgeries, Tori is back to running twenty miles a week. She lives in a San Diego suburb with her husband and three kids (eight years, six years, and a nine-month-old nugget of love). Her work has appeared in the American Literary Review, Chattahoochee Review, Mississippi Review, Tampa Review, Cream City Review, ZYZZYVA, River Styx, Passages North, Smokelong Quarterly, Pearl Magazine and more. She received the American Literary Review Fiction Prize and the Waasmode Fiction Prize, she and has an MFA from Bennington College. Plans for the future include getting the novel published; raising chickens; and teaching the kids how to flush toilets, share, and do what they love.

Shann Ray’s collection of short stories, American Masculine, received the American Book Award, the High Plains Book Award, and the Bakeless Prize. He is also the author of Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity, a work of creative nonfiction political theory, and Balefire, a poetry collection. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Montana Quarterly, Narrative, Poetry, Ruminate, and Northwest Review. His debut novel, The Woman Who Dreamed of Sunlight, is forthcoming with Unbridled Books. He thinks Ruminate is beautiful, and when it arrives in the mail he holds it close like a beloved friend.

Amanda Leigh Rogers writes: “I live in southeastern Pennsylvania with my husband, three teenage sons, and our beloved mutt Daisy. I’m interested in the moments and places where one being touches another, where one world touches another, where energy leaps between two things that seemed self-contained and unconnected. That’s why I write poetry and also why I like to pet Daisy. My book, Wing of Earth, Wing of Fire is available through Fountain Publishing and my blog www.amandaleighrogerspoetry.blogspot.com.”

Born in New York, Nektaria Petrou received a postgraduate education in the UK and a life education in Greece, France, and Turkey. Her writing explores themes such as confused identity, the loss of one’s home or past, the pleasures and torture of memory, Greek and Turkish history, and minority experience. Within stories of ethnic and religious conflict, she proposes instances of tolerance that overturn prejudices and surprise readers. Petrou’s essays have been published in Al-Monitor, Daily Sabah, and Turkish Press. She is currently working on a novel about the Orthodox Christian minority of Istanbul. Petrou speaks Greek, English, Turkish, French, Spanish, and Italian. Her twelve-year-old Siberian Husky, however, speaks only Greek.

Ann Swindell writes and teaches creative writing West of the Windy City, where she lives with her husband and daughter.

She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Seattle Pacific University and is an avid fan of coffee and macaroons. Read more of her writing at www.annswindell.com.

Laura Carpenter Truitt received her MFA in painting from Colorado State University in 2012. She received her BA from Goucher College in Maryland and has also studied at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Chicago Art Institute. Her current work focuses on architecture as representative of social systems, as well as the juxtapositions and contrasts that are inherent in painting and drawing space. Laura is represented by the William Havu Gallery in Denver and has shown her work at the Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, The Painting Center in NYC, the Denver Airport, and with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver.

Hope Wabuke is a mom and writer based in Southern California. Her poetry has been featured in the North American Review, Kalyani Magazine, Fjords Literary Journal, Potluck Magazine, Literary Mama, Weave Magazine, Cease Cows, Split This Rock, and joINT Literary. Her essays and criticism have been featured in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, Gawker, The Root, Ms. Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine, The Daily Beast and Kirkus Reviews. She has won fellowships from the New York Times, Voices of Our Nations Foundation, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women Writers. Follow her on Twitter @HopeWabuke.

Melissa Weinman received her MFA from the University of Southern California in Two-Dimensional Media in 1984 and has seventeen years of college teaching experience. She began her career at the University of Richmond, Virginia, then taught at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and before coming to Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, she taught at the University of Puget Sound. She has been represented by Tortue Gallery in Santa Monica, Soma Gallery in San Diego, Linda Hodges Gallery in Seattle, Tatistcheff Gallery in NYC, and is currently represented by Gail Severn Gallery in Ketchum, Idaho. Her solo museum exhibitions include the Frye Art Museum in Seattle and the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira, New York. Her 1999 solo show at Tatistcheff Gallery was reviewed by Eleanor Heartney in Art in America magazine. More info at www.melissaweinman. com and www.gailseverngallery.com.

79

LAST NOTE/ 34 THOUGHTS ON KEEPING THINGS WHOLE FROM THE CONTRIBUTORS IN THIS ISSUE

I like the

idea that below all fragmentation, rising up through it, collecting its meaningful elements to something distinct, authentic, and enduring, is the promise of wholeness.

I seek wholeness. Grace comes when wholeness finds me, most often in a look from my wife, in the way my daughters hold my hand, and in the surety of light. I’m reminded of that old sacred verse about God: He knows what lies in the darkness and light dwells with him.

Shann Ray

POET RY

After I’ve made breakfasts and sack lunches for my family and gotten the kids off to school, I take a walk through a nearby botanical garden. This spectacular place is the inspiration for so many of my paintings. It is here that I pray and meditate as I walk, giving thanks as I go. Every beautiful thing inspires gratitude, and when I begin my day with gratitude it is much easier to see my life as an integrated whole with purpose instead of a fragmented assortment of tasks that I must struggle to piece together.

Melissa Weinman

VIS UAL ART

The last time

I heard Mark Strand read, he shared his often-anthologized translation of Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s “In the Middle of the Road,” a poem that both encounters a disruptive wholeness (“In the middle of the road there was stone . . . ”) and then fractures that whole beneath the jackhammer of the poet’s “retinas.” It’s worth considering, I think, not only if our art seeks to be cohesive, but also precisely what relationship our poems might have with deep coherence. Art, at a minimum, may attempt to embody the whole, to outline its limits, or simply gesture in the whole’s direction. Perhaps the “whole” poem only points; perhaps it respects a wholeness by refusing to fracture or chisel it directly with our language.

George David Clark

P OET RY

I can’t remember exactly what my therapist said, but it was roughly this: “Just do one thing. Think about your feet on the ground, how your toes feel in your shoes, how whole, unequivocal, and reliable the earth feels when you walk. Keep bringing yourself back to this when your thoughts become untethered.” I don’t do it. It is so very hard to do.

Holly Virginia Clark

80

P OET RY

I’ve been rereading Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads for the first time in years. He termed the phrase “organic sensibility”—the recognition that body, mind, emotion, and memory compose our psyche. When each is integrated, balanced, and charged with the others, the result is that sense of fullness or wholeness in which you seem to touch and be in touch with everything else. The more in touch you are with who you are, the more selfless you are. This paradox for me is a clarity and a given. It works. T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative,” in which an object embodies the truth of experience and emotion, is the twentieth century’s reduction of organic sensibility. The center cannot hold. In the twenty-first century, it seems so.

Roger Desy

P O ETRY

“Is not the

tissue of family always a movement between harmony and distance?” Terry Tempest Williams writes. To this I would add “the tissue of art-making.” For me, keeping things whole feels tidal. And that’s freeing. In conversations and creative endeavors, my energies surge and recede, eddy and stagnate. Timing feels crucial. When I let the mental whitecaps settle and emulate a country well, reflective and stilled, spiritbreathed being takes over. My opinions and responses brim from a deeper source. It’s as if, having paused before meeting the next current, nuanced adjustments arise along a thinning continuum: seeking harmony and honoring the gifts of distance—whether aesthetic or relational. God nudges my arm toward the oar. Hope launches its dinghy.

Laurie Klein

P O ETRY

The sublime is

a wonderful, slippery thought. It simultaneously makes us feel small and brings into focus the whole, larger group to which we belong. If we can hold on to the sublime, put ourselves into perspective, perhaps we’d be less brutal, less driven, and more present. On my more cynical days I think our culture will be remembered for our stadiums and airports. On other days I think we might just have a future if we can remember that while we are only specks on a spinning rock, we can see billions of light years of time in a single glance, and the light from our civilization touches the dust of other planets.

Laura Carpenter Truitt

VI S UA L A RT

Melissa Weinman. Seeds of Mercy. Oil on panel. 16 x 16 inches.

Laura Carpenter Truitt. Before we figured it out. Oil on canvas. 60 x 82 inches.