Issue 35: A Loss For Words by Ruminate Magazine

P OET RY on lost and found words, alzheimerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, aphasia, and waiting centuries for breath FROM ESTEBAN ISMAEL, SKYE SHIRLEY, JASON TANDON, AND CHRISTOPHER YATES

ESSAYS /M E MO I R on hearts open to the world, the words we carry with us, and naked silence FROM D.L. MAYFIELD, ELIZABETH DARK WILEY, AND SHANNON HUFFMAN POLSON

ISSUE

S U M M E R 2015

V I S UA L ART on fictitious structures, imaginary landscapes, and making a visual language FROM ZAHRA NAZARI AND EUNICE CHOI

2015 VanderMey Nonfiction Prize judged by Scott Russell Sanders

First Place: Blessed are the Pure in Heart BY D.L. MAYFIELD

WHY/ RUMINATE?

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

FRONT COVER Zahra Nazari. The World is Beautiful before it is True. Acrylic on canvas. 48 x 84 inches. OPPOSITE PAGE Zahra Nazari. City #79. Acrylic on canvas. 73 x 68 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

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.

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PROJECT MANAGER

Kristin Norton ASSOCIATE READERS

John Patrick Harty Erika Lewis Benjamin Myers Diana Small GUEST READERS

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Anne Pageau

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

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

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

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WEB DESIGNER

Katie Jenkins

CONTENTS / 35

NOTES Editor’s Readers’ Artists’ Contributors’ Last

POETRY

4 5 16, 56 78 80

10 11

12 13

NONFICTION D.L. Mayfield Blessed Are the Pure in Heart

Elizabeth Dark Wiley “If You Want It To Last . . .”

Shannon Huffman Polson Naked: A Triptych

Melanie Springer Mock Listening for Madeliene by Leonard S. Marcus

VISUAL ART Zahra Nazari The World is Beautiful before it is True City #79 Fictious Structures + Imaginary Landscapes series Points of Departure series Eunice Choi Family Tree series Family Tree #10 Family Tree #12

Jeremy Windham Swallowing the Body

Kevin Weidner In My Family We Don’t Talk Politics

Kevin McLellan Empathy

Esteban Ismael Alzheimer’s Ode Getting A Life Sentence

Brent House from The Heart Pine Imprecations

Inside Front Cover 17 - 21 & 24 22-23

76 57-64

Inside Back Cover Back Cover

Tania Runyan And They Sang a New Song The Babylon in My Body Sarah Wetzel Roman Holiday Nostalgia

54 Front Cover

Jessica Piazza False Idols Into, Again Skye Shirley Impetus Aphasia

REVIEW

Jason Tandon At a Loss A Dream of Departure

Christopher Yates Off the Yard Above the Walled Garden after the Wedding

EDITOR’S NOTE/ 35

There are no words I tell my dear friend whose husband has been in an accident. It’s silent for a few long moments on the phone. Then I ask how I can pray. She tells me: prayers for hope and joy to keep the discouragement at bay, prayers for a soft heart, for the damn neighbors to stop parking in the handicapped spot, for energy and endurance. And then she pauses, tucking into the other prayer requests a kind of neon blue one. She tells me that her husband has asked her to pray for healing, to pray for a miracle. I’ll join you, I tell her, a little breathless because of their courage. I’ll join you becoming the three most sacred words I’ve uttered. * In her collection of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Marilyn Robinson writes about how much she loves what she calls “the frontiers of the unsayable.” . . . as a writer, I continuously attempt to make inroads on the vast terrain of what cannot be said—or said by me, at least. I seem to know by intuition a great deal that I cannot find words for, and to enlarge the field of my intuition every time I fail again to find these words. . . . The frontiers of the unsayable, and the avenues of approach to those frontiers, have been opened for me by every book I have ever read that was in any degree ambitious, earnest, or imaginative; by every good teacher I have had; by music and painting; by conversation that was in any way interesting, even conversation overheard as it passed between strangers. . . . We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself. Robinson also points out that science, too, is ambitiously exploring the unsayable through “dark matter, dark energy, the unexpressed dimensions proposed by string theory, the imponderable strangeness described by quantum theory.” She says that the science articles exploring these topics might as well be titled “Learned Ignorance” or “The Cloud of Unknowing.” I agree! What a great cloud of curious and compassionate folks reflected in all of these disciplines. I love picturing poets alongside scientists and musicians and strangers earnestly conversing—all of them humbly reminding us to imagine the reality of the great unknown, all of them saying there is so much more than we can ever say, and we must still try. I love the mystery that is implied in the phrase a loss for words. It means we’ve come to the end of ourselves, which is both frightening and good. It means that no matter how much talking, examining, or even deep pondering we give, some things are simply imponderable. This is certainly true in our response to tragedy, as we are often rendered silent before the painful mysteries of our world, to be still, to remember how small, how inadequate we really are. And then sometimes we get the chance to act, to say I’ll join you to those suffering. The poet Christian Wiman writes: “Silence is the language of faith. Action—be it church or charity, politics or poetry—is the translation.” Yes, we live on a little island of the articulable, and sometimes howls or groans are all we can utter. Which is just fine, because Saint Paul tells us that we have a God who knows about groans too deep for words. And sometimes silence and then a few small and sacred words shared between friends are just enough. With hope,

READERS’ NOTES/ 35 THOUGHTS ON A LOSS FOR WORDS FROM RUMINATE READERS

The funniest line

at my father’s memorial was delivered by the pastor. He told how my father had said from his hospital bed, “I have to go. I have to go.” He took it as a given that my father, a man of tremendous faith, knew his destination, so he pointed upward and said, “I’m quite certain he meant Heaven,” and I, in my grief, tried not to laugh. You see, Dad never understood the catheter in his penis, no matter how many times we tried to explain, and in his weakened state, he needed help to get out of bed. “Please,” he’d say. “Please. I gotta go. I gotta go.” In his obituary I wrote: “George was renowned for his cavernous belches, explosive sneezes and infectious belly laugh.” But for such a loud person, there were often silences between us, of both the comfortable and uncomfortable varieties. Much of what I know about him, or think I know, came from observing myself turn into him over the past twenty-five or thirty years. I have been able to reinterpret many of those silences using the dictionary of my own introversion, and I have come to believe that he loved me as much as I loved him, except that the accompanying emotions were too big to fit through his mouth. What came through instead were lefthanded compliments (the smartest boy on Bryant Road [also, the only boy]) and wry insults (Mark has two gears: slow and stop). Multiple myeloma released calcium into his bloodstream, which built up in his brain, depriving him of the ability to make much sense, so for a month or two before he passed, he would speak utter nonsense at great length and with deep sincerity. On one of his more cogent days, he said, “Mark, how much earlier should you talk to your grandmother and tell her to take her finger out of her ear?” I waited for the sense that didn’t come, then asked, “Out of her ear?” He shook his head, frustrated by my fixation on irrelevancies. “Out of anyone’s ear.” When he’d reach out his hand, wanting to stand to relieve his bladder, I was never able to deny him. I’d squeeze past well-meaning sense talkers to take his hand and lift him to his feet. “Mark always knows what I want,” he’d say.

Mark Eddy Smith

TAM WORT H, NEW HAM P S HI R E

I will never

truly be able to write about the meteor shower. I will try, of course, but ultimately I will fail to convey it. I will tell you about the cold December night that I lived in the country. I will tell you that my husband was traveling and that my mother had come to help me with the kids. I will tell you about the meteor shower predicted, that it was to be a rare, historic event. I will tell you about the plan we hatched, my mother and I, to wake the kids at midnight, to lay out the sleeping bags on the deck, to turn out the lights in the house and to wait for the shooting stars. Though the children were not keen to wake, my mother and I still spread the sleeping bags, still turned out the lights, still waited on the porch, staring up at the sky. We lay there a while, talking about parenting and husbands traveling, about injury and illness—then a star shot across the sky and we both exclaimed. We were silent, still waiting, until another came and we gasped. The sky suddenly became streaked with them, streaming like time-lapse photos of light, flowing like sparks from a distant sorcerer’s fingers. We were watching, shivering from the cold. There were tears in my eyes from the beauty, from the sacredness, from the silence, as my mother took my hand, and squeezing hard, whispered, “I will never forget this.”

Angela Doll Carlson

CH ICAG O, IL L IN O IS

In a post-dinner twilight, we drove homeward, words between us drained as the last of our meal was scraped from our plates. The week was long, our absences stacked higher than the moments we spent together and within the familiar walls of our favorite restaurant, we drew each other back to our shared reality. Side by side, in the purple of a fading day, I was grateful for his attention to the road as my eyes sagged against the fatigue, mesmerized by the passing landscape. In one lucid moment, as I lifted my hand to reach for him, his fingers slipped across my leg and gently squeezed, a smile spreading over his tired face. No gesture, in our thirteen years together, ever spoke more plainly than this simple touch, a silent evocation that perfectly conveys the gratification of a shared life.

Kathryn Selner

L IN O LA K ES, M IN N ESOTA

READERS’ NOTES/ 35 THOUGHTS ON A LOSS FOR WORDS FROM RUMINATE READERS

Please. Sit. He

nodded his head toward me and motioned to a worn chair in the small living room. I smiled and looked around at his wife and seven children— five girls, two small boys, all seated on the faded, used furniture my friends and I had scrambled to find just days ago. After being in a Syrian refugee camp for several years, they had finally arrived in the States, toting one suitcase each. How do you pack your life into a single suitcase? I wondered. But they did bring tea. Soon a cup was delivered to me on a plate. It was strong and sweet and I inhaled the warm, strangely spicy scent, a spice I later found out was cardamom. Wide, dark eyes watched as I slowly sipped the tea. I did not know what to say, not sure what they could understand. Smiling between each cautious sip, I wanted to make them feel at home in a home that was neither theirs nor mine. Now what? I wondered. Where do we go from here? I did not want the cup to be emptied. They had come this far, left home, family, and all things familiar, and then shared with me. I was grateful. And so were they. Strangers and sojourners, all of us. The silence did not seem awkward, just full of possibility. It was the first of many cups of tea.

Denise Vredevoogd

GRANDV I LLE, M I C HI GAN

We sit across from each other on our gray tweed couch: the one I saw at IKEA months before, the one that I’d spent hours scouring Craigslist to find, that you drove two hours both ways in rush-hour traffic to pick up, somehow managing to fit it into your hatchback and make it home in one piece. I nervously pull at a loose thread on its arm, forcing myself to avoid your gaze. When I look up, the tears have already started to form. “How long?” you ask. I inhale raggedly and let out a long, dramatic sigh. “A few weeks,” I confess. You cannot feign stoicism any longer, and I watch the man I have known for over five years, who has never cried in my presence, finally weep.

ISSUE 35 Summer 201 5

“What did I do wrong? What could I have done differently?” you stammer, expecting an answer you know I cannot give. I immediately want to cradle you, pet your head, and tell you that it’s “just a phase” and everything will be alright in the end. I can’t. It is a realization that came as hard and fast as my alarm on a Monday morning, and I resent it almost as much. I am not in love with you. I meet your eyes with mine and place a hand on your shoulder. We sit in silence for a few minutes, and I know that no one will ever love me the way you did. And maybe in the future this will be okay, and we will meet someone else who will love us better than we ever could. But for now, our hearts just really hurt.

Name Withheld

LOS A N G E L ES, CA L I FO RN I A

I could tell you about the time that my mother sat in the chartreuse velour chair, her hair disheveled from days upon days spent lying in darkness. I could tell you how her words cut me wide open, so wide that the pulse of my heart was burned into my eyes. I could tell you about the morning we lost our first baby, how the blood spilled down, swirling with the water as it ran down my bare back. My husband tried to drive the speed limit—they told us there was nothing they could do. We sat in the stifling heat of the car and cried until we couldn’t anymore. I could tell you about the first time I ran, desperate to be free from the fear that had kept me sedated for days, months, years. I could tell you how my lungs felt like powder, like a floor caving in on itself, and how I pushed that fear back, beat it back, until my legs could carry me no further. I could tell you what it felt like to lie in the arms of a man for the first time, as time slowed and crept through the dark, sacred hours of regeneration. The crepuscular rays brushed against his arm. His breath tickled my ear. I could tell you of these things, but I am at a loss for words.

Stacy Bustamante

FO RT CO L L I N S, CO LO RA D O

The OR buzzed with activity: nurses set up the baby’s station, orderlies stacked supplies in back, technicians monitored machines that went ping! My wife lay still in the center of it all. She smiled at me. Her surgical cap matched the half-curtain that blocked the view of the rest of her body. The doctor on the other side of the curtain wore gloves to her elbow, a face shield, and a soldier’s look in her eyes. She had been here with us before. She was cutting, I supposed, but I (mercifully) couldn’t see for sure. I kissed my wife and sat to her right, as directed. The practiced casualness of the room struck me. The technicians and surgical nurses joked with us, saying things like, “We’re gonna get this baby out soon,” and “This little girl seems to have a mind of her own.” But their laughter felt forced. We found out later that this same surgical team had performed our emergency C-section the year before, the night we lost Benjie. They hoped now with all their collective might to make this delivery successful. They sought redemption. All at once our doctor’s steady cutting quickened. Her sudden urgency snapped the room into silence, rendered all words profane. The doctor pulled and tugged with such violence that it seemed impossible she was working with my wife’s living flesh. For several minutes, everyone in the room bowed forward under the weight of exquisite, expectant stillness. I closed my eyes. With the first gurgling cry the room itself seemed to exhale and then explode. Livie’s voice rechristened the space for words. My wife said, “She’s crying,” her voice thick with her own tears. A nurse ran out to the waiting room and told our family, “She’s screaming!” meaning, yes, the baby’s alive. She had to tell them several times, the words too heavy to hold all at once. I put my lips to my wife’s forehead, a long, quiet kiss. I found myself with surgical shears in hand as our nurse offered to let me cut the cord. I had not planned to do it—I had not cut the cord with our first child Scottie—but in the bliss of that particular moment, I said, “Yes, please.” Then someone said, “Would you like to hold her now?” I nodded. My words were smothered again.

Aaron Housholder

The hike at the end of the road in Denali National Park was an arduous one—straight up, or so it seemed. The scenery was good, but not amazing; the surrounding hills blocked the spectacular views of the Alaska Range we had seen on the flight in. Our goal was to see Denali and if we were lucky, to see Denali’s peak cloud-free for a few minutes. I hoped the burning in my legs and lungs would be worth the effort to say, “I saw Denali’s peak!” I rounded the last curve, but didn’t see only the peak. All of Denali loomed into the cloudless sky, dwarfing the mountains of the Alaska Range, which stretched away in two directions as far as I could see. Even now, words fail as I try to articulate the view I never expected to see. The snow-covered mountain was blinding white in the sunlight, its mass dominating the skyline even though it was miles away. We sat in silence and munched granola bars. The smaller peaks of the Alaska Range—which would overpower any other skyline but this one—stretched as far as we could see, but our eyes were drawn back to Denali: strong, silent, a witness to eras that have no human memory. Even now, several years later, the memory is difficult to put into words because there is no common experience with which to compare. Denali overpowers and silences conversation. The mountain’s size is an anchor for the range, an anchor resting on unstable ground. Part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, the mountain sits on shaking land; its bulk gives the illusion of stability, strength, power. I don’t know how long we sat there in awe of the scene in front of us, at a loss for anything beyond “wow.” Even now, several years later, I find it hard to write about because words cannot convey the feelings or memories of snow-covered Denali against the blue of a cloudless Alaskan sky.

Cheryl Russell

N EW P H I LA D E L P H IA , O H I O

AND ER SON, I ND I ANA

SEND US YOUR NOTES FOR ISSUE 36. WE LOVE HEARING FROM YOU!

RUMINATE PRIZES

2015

F I R ST P LAC E

S ECO N D P LAC E

D.L. Mayfield Blessed Are the Pure in Heart

Elizabeth Dark Wiley “If You Want it to Last . . . ”

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

F I N A L I STS

Shannon Huffman Polson Naked: A Triptych

Rebecca Eckland Patrice Gopo Laura Green Ming Lauren Holden Raphael Kosek Ian Macrae Mollie Murray Jeremy Paden James Silas Rogers

S P O N SO R E D BY Dr. Randall VanderMey

JUDGE Scott Russell Sanders

ISSUE 35 Summer 201 5

SCOTT R USS E L L SA N D E R S W R I T ES :

“Blessed Are the Pure in Heart” offers us insight into the trials and aspirations of a family of Kurdish refugees from Iraq who have come to America, like millions of other immigrants, in search of a better life. The narrator has come to know this family through her work as a teacher of English and life skills for illiterate women, mostly immigrants from East Africa. Her sympathy and compassion, her candid self-reflections, and her effort to understand people scarred by the horrors of war and genocide shine through on every page. Her portraits of individual family members are vivid, especially of the daughter who cares with dignity for the ailing mother, and the younger son who is mesmerized by videos of Michael Jackson dancing. The narrator acknowledges the vast gulf between her history as a privileged, well-educated American, and theirs as uprooted survivors from a strifetorn Middle East that America has violently destabilized. Yet she also discovers, in her time with the Kurdish family, the shared human potential for generosity, affection, and wholeheartedness, as illustrated by the character of the younger son and by her own fouryear-old daughter’s uninhibited joy. The ability to see beyond barriers, as this essay does, is among the chief gifts of imagination.”

Scott Russell Sanders is the author of twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, including A Private History of Awe and A Conservationist Manifesto. The best of his essays from the past thirty years, plus nine new essays, are collected in Earth Works, published in 2012 by Indiana University Press. Among his honors are the Lannan Literary Award, the John Burroughs Essay Award, the Mark Twain Award, the Cecil Woods Award for Nonfiction, the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2012 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His latest book is Divine Animal, a novel, published in 2014. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University, where he taught from 1971 to 2009. He and his wife, Ruth, a biochemist, have reared two children in their hometown of Bloomington, in the hardwood hill country of Indiana’s White River Valley.

JASO N TA N D O N

At a Loss What can I say to my friend up the street who lost her baby boy one day after his birth? I script and rehearse. There’s a leak in my attic down the chimney’s face. Grubs have browned the lawn. Months go by.

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JASO N TA N D O N

A Dream of Departure By the side of a dirt road my father removed his pants. Threw them into an overgrown pasture. My mother hung her stockings over an electric fence. There were others, all strangers, like a tour group bound for Hawaii or Greece. I began to ball the socks clinging to the thistle. The bus trumpeted. The door accordioned open. “Please,” my mother called, “leave the mess.”

J ESS I CA P I AZ ZA

False Idols The first art was birds as they rose in curves, in lines spinning skyward, serpentine. When magnetized by horizonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s black margins, I picture the virgin averting her eyes.

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J ESS I CA P I AZ ZA

Into, Again A carnival of teeth, all colors. The biting they do: through cheeses that yield, marrow they feel when they crack sallow bone, lone salted taste of menâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s many-hued skins. Each morning prism and primal. Each evening a prayer to tackle. A crackling of leaves like confetti, but better than that for the compost. The biting that frost does undoes the trees and under its grieving the shoots come. The God I found is a hole in the ground that maybe Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll fall in and die there. Or a well, oh well, its groundwater, glacial. A meltdown, an ease. A please, a please. No hell but the fear of the flooding of seas. Biting at knuckles, hugging knees. No hell but a hounding month. No hell but held down by a mouth. I beg, I breathe. Weaken. Plead. No hell but that all shall be well now.

S KY E S H I R L EY

Impetus An apple may have fallen to the ground or was maybe ripped from a branch, still green. I know the difference between a fox and a thief, though both are hungry for orchards. The red barn either had the door bolted or it didn’t, the night the wolf entered easily and left so full he could hardly push through, a tuft of gray fur on the wood. Breathless in your open hand, a dead bird— your eyes wild and feathers at your feet, you did not say whether the whitethroated warbler was found that way, whether it wasn’t. Strange how little depends upon intention; it’s done, it’s done. We were born with fevers or we caught them in the first arms that held us. Either way, our bodies became kerosene. Either way, we burned.

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S KY E S H I R L EY

Aphasia Objects are substitutedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;fork for knife, table for lamp, smoke for pipe. The patient understands only through substitutions. you say her not me hungry for bowl not food stand at the top of a ladder not stairs not leading to our hive not home it takes a calendar not a year to make orbit not clockwise but counternot the oven you ask for the slipper not the foot the hammer not the nail the virgin not the girl and I say yes to the full wavering buzz of a nocturnal rotation spent bare and building some cavern that will be not a child, not the hymn, only not your lullabies of not sung not unsung, pigment not bleach, lion not courage, you touch the fist, not the doorknob, say her not me, from the shutters, I mean window, call me honey not love.

ARTIST/ NOTE

ZAHRA NAZARI: FICTICIOUS STRUCTURES + IMAGINARY LANDSCAPES Residing in Iran I was influenced by journeys to ancient ruins. Moving to America resulted in a series of paintings containing metaphors for the unsettled sensations produced by living in a very different cultureâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a combination of feelings for ancient and modern architecture along with floating and shifting environments. As a result, my work reflects fictitious structures situated in imaginary landscapes. Middle Eastern kite traditions have also inspired my process. I see fascinating connections between kite constructions and architectural skin and styles. I adapt these architectural elements, integrating them in the company of other forms of imagery. I view the shapes and surfaces of architectonic kites as living forms, escaping links to gravity and moving into a spiritual process of transforming into new forms and energy.

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Zahra Nazari. Journey #86. Acrylic on canvas. 48 x 25 inches.

Zahra Nazari. Spacious Views. Acrylic on canvas. 50 x 44 inches.

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Zahra Nazari. Site #28. Acrylic on canvas. 50 x 47 inches.

Zahra Nazari. Outpost. Acrylic on canvas. 55 x 60 inches.

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Zahra Nazari. Landscape #18. Acrylic on canvas. 53 x 94.5 inches.

Zahra Nazari. Points of Departure Installation; 29 Architectonic Kite Forms and Shaped Canvas Structures. Acrylic and ink on canvas and asian paper. 60 x 35 inches to 18 x 40 inches, 100 x 73 x 30 inches and 73 x 210 x 30 inches.

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Zahra Nazari. Points of Departure Installation; 29 Architectonic Kite Forms. Acrylic and ink on asian paper. 60 x 35 to 18x 40 inches.

Zahra Nazari. City #58. Acrylic on canvas. 73 x 68 inches.

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J E R E MY W I N D H A M

Swallowing the Body When I was eight, to taste forgiveness was to stand in line. Hands clasped and wavering under my parentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; stare, all I could do was blink away beady candlelight. A stiff blazer and matching black slacks, a glow-in-the-dark rosary wrapped around my left hand. Its plastic crucifix dangled over my own double-knotted dress shoes. God, enough time has passed. Why did I ask to receive You for the first time on my tongue? My hands were lifted. I swear to You, palms raised, I have it all on tape.

D.L. MAYFIELD

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Michael Jackson is my life, he said, and his eyes were wet with tears. He had been trying to explain what it was like to grow up Kurdish in Iraq. He had been trying to tell me about watching grainy videos of Michael Jackson on YouTube, trying to explain the electrified feeling in his spine he would get as he watched the man dance. Young and brown and boyish and singing his guts out; older and smooth and pale, gliding around in top hats and one-handed gloves. Sexual and cherubic, so foreign and yet familiar, gender-bending, making you the slightest bit uncomfortable even as your world was expanding with the possibilities of what it meant to be you beyond the boundaries of what was expected. He tried again, but the English wouldn’t come. Michael Jackson . . . he said, and there was a long pause. He is my life. Hammudi looked classically Arab: dark, deep-set eyes above a hooked nose and olive-colored skin. He was so young, so handsome, so shy. I had just met him, sitting on the couch in his family’s apartment, struggling to relate over our respective language barriers. Over cups of perfumed tea, we were all eager to communicate: his mother and father, his older brother and younger sister. All of their eyes were on me, and all of them were so bright. Hammudi was twenty-one that first day I met him. He had not been in America long—a few weeks or months, I can’t remember. I had met his family earlier, through a fellow English teacher. I was teaching at a large high-rise complex comprised almost exclusively of immigrants and refugees in the Midwest. Most of my students were from East Africa, and I taught a class specifically for those who had been denied access to education—non-literate people, all women. My teacher-friend told me about a family of Kurdish refugees who were all alone, and who were desperate for friendships. I dutifully went to their apartment on the fifth floor and was introduced. The father, Kadir, was a poet and a former journalist who talked my ear off, reeking of stale cigarette smoke. His poems were all slightly misogynistic, funny, poignant, and full of nostalgia. His wife, Maryan, was sick. She sat and smiled from her recliner chair, dark circles under her eyes, never speaking. Zeynab, the youngest in the family, was a bright and beautiful teenager. She took care of her mother, but she dreamed of going to college here in America and becoming a journalist. Mohammed, the oldest brother, had an awkward bowl cut and was excessively friendly to me. They had all arrived in America together, but Hammudi for some reason had to wait longer in Syria. They could not explain the delay to me. It just was what it was. Before he came, he would call his family in America, crying into the phone. Finally, finally, he got on a plane. It was his first time flying, and there was terrible turbulence. He tried to explain it to me, but his words failed him. Zeynab translated for him: He

thought, no, no, no, I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t die. I just want to see my mommy again. When he was young, he wanted to be a soccer star. But he broke his leg, and it never healed correctly. When he was young, he never knew that he would find himself in a small apartment in America, surrounded on all sides by other refugees, so different from himself. When he was young, he just wanted to be Michael Jackson.

// I start to bring my daughter to visit them. They go bananas over her. If she even looks twice at one of the stuffed animals perched on the large wood TV cabinet, they give it to her. She is shy at first, but is soon running laps around the living room, dancing on her tiptoes for them. Mohammed woos her with his cell phone, showing her Tom and Jerry cartoons and then switching to videos of Kurdish weddings in Syria, North Dakota, Australia. She loves the music, loves the dancing, and they love to watch her as she sits, enraptured. Hammudi is sitting on the couch, wearing sweatpants, curling into himself. I try and coax some conversation out of him, but he just smiles and nods, ducking his head down, blushing. Kadir looks at him and then at me, shrugging his shoulders as he tells me that Hammudi is simply someone who is not brave. No courage, he says, gesturing at his youngest son. This one has no courage. The rest of the family laughs, and they tell me the stories of his lack of courage, how he is too shy to go to English class, how he is nervous and trembles about everything. His hair is black and thick, but there is a large shock

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of white in it—speaking volumes to me, even as he cannot. I try to imagine the things Hammudi has seen, the places he has lived, what it was like to be twenty and alone in Syria, borrowing a cell phone to call your mommy and cry to her, the constant rumors of war and beheadings and who might get to come to the US next. It is too much for me; I cannot imagine. I turn to the relentless present, and I frown at Kadir. I try to make clear my disapproval. I think Hammudi is very brave, I say. English is hard. America is hard. Being a refugee is hard. They all look at me, silent. I have said the most obvious thing of all. It barely registers being said.

// They cook us food every time we come over. At first we sit at the table, but after a few visits they spread a cloth out on the floor and we sit cross-legged as we eat. My daughter shovels in the rice and bread and chicken and lamb. She is Kurdish, the family crows, and I start to realize how important this is to them. Yes, she is Kurdish, I smile, and I watch as they show her how to dance, as she inhales the YouTube videos of more Kurdish weddings, see her eyes light up at the fabrics and fake flowers and heavy kohl-lined eyes. She is small and sturdy with blonde hair that sticks up everywhere. She is four years old, and she would like to live with these people who so obviously adore her. They buy her dresses. Brand-new, but from a store I do not frequent. They are the dresses that so many little girls in my neighborhood wear—Somali, Guatemalan, Ethiopian, Mexican—dresses with bright blue leopard print and bedazzled English phrases, large bows and characters from cartoons. The little Muslim girls wear them with long pants and sparkly hijabs; my daughter wears hers with tights and snow boots. They are the brightest items of clothing that she wears, these gifts that are always being given to her. I myself am inclined to purchase muted, understated, licensed-content-free clothes for her; I had dreams of a wardrobe in charcoal gray and black with whispers of genderneutral colors. I have been influenced by the aesthetic of the tasteful, of the iPhone instagrammers, a rough-hewn wood table set with a few spare apples, an artfully composed bowl of seasonal, local vegetables. There is a beauty in simplicity that I am drawn to, but I can never quite swallow the sterility, the sparseness, the disconnect with the loud and chaotic world that I actually inhabit. Everything is so much more colorful, so much more terrible than I could ever have imagined. The truth is, I cannot afford these ideals anyway. We shop at thrift stores, and the racks are crammed with clothes that everyone in our income bracket and below wears: pink and

purple and princess. Color and splash and cheaply made. These are the choices we are given. My daughter views it all as a gift, and I try to be more like a little child myself. At home, in our quiet house, I watch my daughter stare at herself in the mirror, see as she tries on a myriad of personalities. The dresses given to her by our friends, a Somali skirt turned into a long headdress, a Minnie Mouse shirt bought at Salvation Army. She carries more presents under her arms: a plush Tweety Bird with a nightcap on, a bear holding up a valentine heart. She dances on her tiptoes in the mirror and asks me to put on Kurdish music. She thinks she is beautiful. She thinks she is Kurdish. She thinks that because our friends all adore her that the world will too. She does not yet understand that not everyone is so generous, so in love with color, so wholehearted. I wonder when she will understand. I wonder how she will choose to move on, and I wonder what her life will be. When she was little, our refugee friends from Bhutan would buy her clothes from the Asian grocery store. Adorable little outfits, with bedazzled martini glasses on them, the English lettering large and saying â&#x20AC;&#x153;cocktail hour.â&#x20AC;? My husband and I would laugh ourselves sick and then dress her in the clothes when we made an appearance at a wedding or birthday party for one of our friends. She would sit like a chubby baby Buddha and let everyone fawn over her, kiss her cheeks, stroke her fine hair, fuss over the clothes that they themselves had given her. If I turned my back for even a moment, she was whisked out of my arms and passed from hands to hands, strangers kissing and pulling, circulating her around the entire room. Eventually her face would get red and the fat tears would roll down her cheeks, sobs growing louder as she searched for me amidst the sea of colorful saris and kindly old gentlemen. As I struggled through the crowds to get to her, someone would inevitably be shoving dollar bills into her clothes or another full-size candy bar into her little fist. I would sweep her into my arms and take the gifts they were bestowing on her, embarrassed by the attention and generosity. She was always being showered with love, and the deficit felt too real. I did not know how to interact with people who were so materially poor and yet who gave so freely. I did not know what to think of all the garish colors, the fake rhinestones, the candy bars and orange soda and spicy chips sitting next to the traditional lentil soups. I did not know what to do with the color, the spice, the cheaply purchased excesses of poverty in America. So I learned to smile, to say thank you, to receive it as graciously as I was able. Which was hard, when you grow up believing that you must always earn what you are given.

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Sometimes Zeynab and her mother stop by my English class. I encourage this because I want them to get out of the apartment. The winters here are cruel, borderline tortuous for those not accustomed to the wind and ice and temperatures that can freeze lungs and cause permanent tendon damage to ungloved hands. In between the high rises here, this place so commonly referred to as “little Mogadishu” or “the ghetto in the sky,” the wind gets sharper and faster as it cuts between the buildings. Maryan, due to her disability and the lack of access to a car, hardly goes out. And since Zeynab is her caregiver—paid by the state to be her personal care assistant, but also bound culturally as the youngest, unmarried daughter to cook, clean, and fulfill the relational needs of her mother—she herself is housebound. It is for Zeynab that I continually go up and knock on the door of the apartment, sit and drink tea and eat sweets, where I ask question after desperate question about her future. I see her options getting smaller and smaller with every polite smile and refusal to go out. I wonder if she sees it too. She starts to wear pajama pants, all the time. Her beautiful hair, usually curled and dyed red with henna, becomes lackluster, messy, hastily put under a hijab if my husband is visiting. I start to dread our small talk. No, there will be no college, for now. No, there will be no outside job, for now. No, there are no Kurdish people nearby, so there is no one for her to befriend, no way to meet people if she is inside all the time. Zeynab is wise and good and sturdy; she is not the type to live out romances or friendships over Facebook, as so many in our diaspora-filled world do. She takes care of her mother, and to me it appears that she has accepted her fate with dignity and a small smile. I myself am desperate in the face of so few options, as so many privileged people are. So I do what I always do, and I tell her to come to my class.

Sometimes Zeynab and her mother arrive late, slipping in the back. They do not want me to register them, they do not want their names on a roster. I do not know if this is hypervigilance or paranoia, but I let it slide. They can come whenever they want. The other students are friendly and interested, and Zeynab becomes a well-liked tutor, murmuring translations in a low undertone to her mother. I pass out reading assignments that discuss depression, an issue I suspect affects most of my students but which we are never allowed to speak of. Instead, we read and talk about weight gain and insomnia and crying jags and lack of decision-making abilities. We talk about exercise and eating healthy and seeing a doctor and having tea with friends. I do it all for Zeynab, desperate to see her eyes brighten, to see her long for more than what she is beholden to. But deep down, I wonder if this is the more cruel approach. What is the point of offering options, of the manic glow of the American dream being broadcasted large and wide, if it was never going to be yours in the first place?

// When I was young, I was never allowed to listen to Michael Jackson. He made the conservative Christians in my community uneasy, nervous. It was also unspoken, but underlying: how dangerous it was to live by passion. How unseemly to give oneself over to dance, to sequins, to microphones and glitz and glamour. So I am unprepared when during one of my regular visits to see Zeynab and Maryan, Hammudi brings out

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his laptop. He shows me an Arabic TV program in which a young boy imitates Michael Jackson for the heavily made-up judges. All of us watch in rapt attention, my daughter included, but nobody watches as intently as Hammudi himself. And I see it, for the first time: Michael Jackson was like a child, the pure of heart who we are promised shall one day see God. Being loved by the world was his life. Like so many before and since, he did it badly. But he did it in the way of the courageous; he did not scorn the gifts he was given. And so his songs and videos ripple and move on and out amongst the blandly satisfied, reaching instead to the farthest corners of war-torn Iraq, to refugee camps in Syria, to high-rise apartments in the Midwest. For awhile, there was a large flat-screen TV in the apartment, the sticker still on it. Now, it is gone. They have a new couch. There are plastic flowers in plastic vases scattered throughout the room. I can hear people in the halls. They tell me it is generally quiet, but at night drunk men congregate near the elevators. I am grateful they live on the fifth floor. The building goes up thirty stories, and my vertigo goes into overdrive even as I imagine crawling that close to the clouds. Even here, on the fifth floor, it is hard not to imagine the crush of bodies surrounding us, on top of us. We are in the most crowded block in our city right now. We are all surviving as best as we can. We talk about the TV, and what they watched on it. Zeynab prefers Bollywood movies to everything else, the romance and the songs and the dance routines. Or, she tells me, Egyptian soap operas that she streams on the computer. These she watches with her mommy. Maryan nods her head and positively beams at this. Maryan says something to Zeynab and the girl turns to me. My mommy says she loves the James Bond. Do you ever watch the James Bond? I admit that I do not, but I am tickled to think of Maryan watching the antics of an international spy. Later, Kadir tells me that he grew up going to the cinema down the street from his home once a week. Would you believe me, he says, with the air of a man who has told this story before, if I told you that I have seen 10,000 movies? What can I say? I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t believe him, and this is a part of his charm. Kadir loves Westerns, he loves John Wayne, he says he will watch any action movie ever made. Hammudi is too busy to watch movies, he is too busy to even think about Michael Jackson anymore. He got a job at hotel near a large, tourist-destination mall. He sinks into the couch and declares how tired he is, but he is smiling. His bosses love him, he tells me. It is hard work, he says, and he shows me with hand motions how physical it is to clean the rooms. He stops by my class sometimes, always to tell me about this job. One time he found diamond earrings and turned them in; another time he found a laptop. And so, so, many people leave their iPhones. He tells me this while shaking his head ruefully. His manager is impressed; his manager asked Hammudi if he knew how much those earrings or that laptop were worth. No! He says, throwing up his hands, I do

not know! I will just do my job. The managers are very impressed by this. Hammudi comes into the apartment when my husband and daughter and I are visiting. Â He is wearing a dark gray work shirt, a name tag over the front pocket. He has lost a bit of weight, and he moves with energy. His English is so much better; he looks you right in the eye and asks you questions about yourself, your family. He goes to the large cabinet and picks up a framed certificate. Here, he says, handing it to me, you will like this very much. I read the certificate aloud, because I understand this is what he wants me to do. This award certifies that Hammudi Abdul has received the employee of the quarter award for excellence in guest services. He is beaming, and I look up to see that we are all smiling. There is talk about him getting a promotion, about him maybe one day being a supervisor. Everyone loves me, he says, the Hispanic people and the Somalis and the bosses. He is the lone Kurdish boy, wandering the hallways of a midsize chain hotel. The scrupulous, proud housekeeper breaking his back while scrubbing the tub, sweeping under the bed for lost technologies, finding lost treasures that he would never dream of keeping. Being the best employee is his life. Doing well in America is his life. Anything he ever set his mind to is the thing that takes up all of his attention. He is sitting on the couch, smiling wide. Hammudi, I find myself saying, you have such a good heart. You are a wholehearted person. I do not know if he understands what I mean by this. I am only starting to understand what it means myself, what it means to be pure, a heart open to the world just like a child, able to experience the blessings of a kingdom hidden in such plain sight. So I tell him again, you are a wholehearted person. He just smiles and nods, and turns to my daughter to try and make her laugh with a small joke. She laughs, of course, and we all sit on the couches in the apartment in the sky, drinking tea and experiencing the joy of a child. We devour her and her innocence, desperate to soak it up ourselves, desperate for just a bit of that blessing to rub off on us.

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K EV I N W E I D N E R

In My Family We Don’t Talk Politics Today a commercial aircraft is shot down and a powerful country invades a weaker one. It is just one of those days and there is nothing anyone can say to change anything. For a long time I have wanted to say, really, everyone only wants to be loved. But it’s like when you find a shirt, finally, that fits. The collar hugs your neck and the pattern flatters your body and matches your eyes, and so you buy it, of course, bring it home from the store and the first night you wear it you find the shirt has no breast pocket and so in your hands you hold your pen, your pack of cigarettes, your spare dollars for the scratch-off machine, whatever. Your hands are full, is what I’m saying. You have nowhere to put anything.

TA N I A R U NYA N

And They Sang a New Song God is not the author of confusion. There’s a way to hear the myriads sing when you lie addled on your couch. Wood chippers: Worthy is the lamb. Diesel engines: Weep no more. Don’t say it isn’t beautiful. Everything above, on, and under. Garters, voles and fruit bats hallowing your yard with slither and gnaw. Hallow my yard with slither and gnaw, all you garters and voles and fruit bats. Everything above, under, and on! Don’t say it isn’t beautiful, diesel engines. Weep no more, O wood chippers. Worthy is your lamb. When I lie addled in this church, there’s a way to make the myriads sing with you, God. Stay. Author my confusion.

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TA N I A R U NYA N

The Babylon in My Body â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Revelation 18 In one hour, all this wealth has been laid waste. The cinnamon and myrrh under my skin sizzle with fever. Flute players suffocate, knock their metal against my bones. Love me, world, I moaned all along. Lay with me; take body shots among my pearls. The ships unload my emeralds of words. My laughter unrolls like silk. And then it was just the smoldering edges of a soul once wrought with stars. All my delicacies and splendor lost, the vultures whisking my nerves with their ragged songs.

SA RA H W ETZ E L

Roman Holiday 1. Prologue She needed a new protagonist— or at least to change her name. To raise the stakes, to raise from the dead the girl who’d lain so long on the gurney. A girl named Tiffany, she thinks, can never be a heroine. She’d saved the article that described terroir, how grape vines transplanted to a cooler climate, to different soil can yield a wine more complicated. Every living cell expires, turns itself over. Why not also the self? 2. Afterword When she opens her eyes after all that time on the table, when the doctor shows her her heart’s graph, she remembers the beach she’d visited with her father, the fortress they’d built from sand. For a while she’d forgotten all his words for blue—periwinkle, sapphire, cobalt, cerulean. Cerulean. When the door closes behind the last Italian cardiologist, the silence sounds like every other silence. Outside, the sky turns blue, then bluer. The clock on the wall still reads noon.

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SA RA H W ETZ E L

Nostalgia I keep writing the name, Mary Shelley, who stored her husbandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s charred heart in a drawer of her desk. I see her pull the drawer open, spring swollen and sticking. I see her unwind the yellowed napkin to reveal the singed fragments. With one finger she touches his flesh. With the tip of her tongue, she tastes him.

REVIEW/ 35

LISTENING FOR MADELEINE: A PORTRAIT OF MADELEINE L’ENGLE IN MANY VOICES by LEONARD S. MARCUS Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012

reviewed by MELANIE SPRINGER MOCK

About halfway through Leonard S. Marcus’s Listening for Madeleine, I had to ask myself: would I ever want such a book written about me? In Listening for Madeleine, Marcus has curated interviews with many who lived within author Madeleine L’Engle’s vast circle: her family members and friends, literary agents and editors, fellow writers and folks she mentored. A number of the interviews reflect the tremendous role L’Engle played in others’ lives; her influence was wide and deep, her strong religious faith and her love for words transforming those drawn into her world. And yet, not all the interviews are particularly flattering, providing a perspective that sometimes challenges the carefully constructed persona L’Engle herself created, in her life and, particularly, in her autobiographical works. Thus I wondered: would I want such a posthumous collection created for me, especially if what people said contradicted my own life stories? The question is purely academic, of course, as I am not the award-winning writer Madeleine L’Engle was, nor do I have a vast oeuvre of published work to my name. L’Engle, who died in 2007, was perhaps best known for her young adult fiction, especially A Wrinkle in Time, which won the Newberry Medal in 1963, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, published in 1978, which received a National Book Award. L’Engle also wrote poetry, adult fiction, and several memoirs, including her

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Crosswick Journals series and Two-Part Invention, which narrated her marriage to the actor Hugh Franklin. Additionally, L’Engle’s Walking on Water is one of the finest meditations on the intersection of faith and art still in print, clearly reflecting L’Engle’s religious orthodoxy and her significant knowledge not only of literature, but also of art, music, history, and Scripture. Marcus begins Listening for Madeleine with a brief biography of the author, covering L’Engle’s lonely but advantaged childhood; her education at a Southern boarding school, Ashley Hall, and at Smith College; her brief career in theater; and her much longer, far more successful, vocation as a writer. The introduction also explains Marcus’s own connection to L’Engle, detailing an interview he had with her in June 2002 at Crosswicks, one that seemed initially unsuccessful until L’Engle seemed to revive herself, having an “animated conversation” with Marcus where before she had responded with “perfunctory” answers. Subsequent sections collect interviews from people who knew L’Engle in her early years, including a childhood friend and a companion at Smith College; those who knew her primarily as a writer, including fellow author Judy Blume and those who worked for her publisher, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; and those who knew her as a matriarch, including a daughter, a former son-in-law, and a granddaughter. Later chapters in the book feature those who knew L’Engle as a mentor, as a friend, and as an icon. Perhaps the most notable among these voices is the poet Luci Shaw, whose long and enduring friendship with L’Engle ultimately led to the creation of Walking on Water. Taken as a whole, this body of interviews offers readers a much more complete— and more complex—image of L’Engle than might otherwise be afforded in a traditional biography. We hear firsthand how others experienced L’Engle, from those who feel indebted to the author for her encouragement and mentorship, to those who have a somewhat more alloyed view of L’Engle, whose relationship with her family especially may have been more complicated than the author suggested in her autobiographical works. Indeed, as someone interested in life-writing, I found this aspect of the interviews most intriguing: both that L’Engle’s written representation of her marriage and family might have been far more favorable than what others remembered; and also, that sometimes L’Engle conflated her written representation with “real life,” assuming that an event had occurred as she had written about it, even though others remember it having happened differently—or not at all. L’Engle’s oldest daughter, Josephine Jones, says that her mother “would make up

a narrative to confirm what she thought should have been.” Jones offers an example in which L’Engle narrates her granddaughter’s serious injuries after being hit by a truck. “It happened here in Connecticut,” Jones recalls. “Mother, I think, was in New York at the time. She was nowhere near. Yet Mother built a whole scenario as to why Lena was hit by the truck, and the other day Lena was giving it forth to me as fact. So I said, ‘Lena, that was Gran’s interpretation. That’s not what happened. At least, we don’t know that it is.’ Mother was convinced that she did know. She did that kind of thing all the time.” Jones suggests L’Engle also idealized her father’s early death; while L’Engle has written that Charles Camp died of mustard gas poisoning from World War I, Jones believes he was probably an alcoholic—something L’Engle could not face or admit. Jones also resisted being a “character” in the Crosswicks books, finding it annoying when strangers would argue they knew something of Jones’s life because they’d read L’Engle’s memoirs. She would remind inquisitors that her mother wrote fiction, and that sometimes she portrayed events differently from how they really occurred. Likewise, others interviewed hinted that the ideal love story and marriage of L’Engle to Hugh Franklin, portrayed in Two-Part Invention, was not so ideal after all. Her former son-in-law, Alan Jones, remembered that L’Engle’s marriage to Franklin was “really a clash of values and of different worlds. . . . I don’t think her marriage was at all disastrous, it was complicated, and Two-Part Invention was a tremendously idealized picture of marriage. I always thought the title was suitably ironical.” Some interviews also illumine L’Engle as a complicated person whose public persona did not always match her private life. She was enthusiastic and encouraging, supporting other writers in their own publishing endeavors; L’Engle was extraordinarily well-read, and was deeply committed to her faith and to the church, especially to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where her spiritual advisor, Edward West, served as the canon sacristan. Several interviewees mentioned that L’Engle collected people, drawing them into her orbit, giving them a family and a home. One of L’Engle’s friends, Barbara Braver, said, “Madeleine believed that what is at the center of the universe . . . is love,” and that L’Engle acted on this belief in her many relationships, affirming that love “is the essence of God.” At the same time, those Marcus interviewed also acknowledged that L’Engle was a complex person, rigid in her writing discipline, someone who longed to be needed. Her granddaughter Lena Roy admitted L’Engle “could be vulnerable at times,” and that she was “no stranger to insecurity”—though Roy believed these insecurities made her a stronger artist, more connected to others. L’Engle sometimes had trouble

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with boundaries, and was estranged from her daughter Maria, whom she adopted in 1956. According to a friend from Goshen, Connecticut, the village near Crosswicks, L’Engle never fully included Maria as a family member and resented having adopted her. Listening for Madeleine obviously avoids becoming a kind of hagiography. By offering the perspectives of multiple people, all who related to L’Engle in different ways and in a variety of roles, Marcus provides readers with a nuanced portrait of L’Engle, one that avoids demonizing her in her weaknesses, but also does not focus exclusively on her strengths. By carefully selecting his interview subjects, Marcus allows us to see a multifaceted L’Engle rather than the monolith that might arise from a much less skillfully prepared collection. For L’Engle fans especially, Listening for Madeleine is an important book, giving insight into the complicated creator of beloved texts. For the rest of us, Marcus’s collection of interviews might also evoke the uneasy question about what others—our friends, family, work associates, neighbors—might say regarding how we live. And, more significantly, whether our movement is always toward love, a goal for which L’Engle, despite her weaknesses, consistently strived.

“If You Want It To Last . . .” ELIZABETH DARK WILEY

. . . but because simply to be here is so much and because what is here seems to need us, this vanishing world that concerns us strangely— us, the most vanishing of all. — RAINER MARIA RILKE, “9TH DUINO ELEGY” (TRANSLATION, MACY)

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We come to write on wooden beams. My brother David, his wife Sarah, and their three children are showing me the renovations in progress at their one-hundred-year-old house while I’m in Nashville for two days to attend my cousin John’s memorial service. Walls have been torn down to make two rooms one. New frames are in place to make one room four. Some walls remain intact, stripped down to expose the original wallpaper, but most walls have been demolished down to the old beams. New wood has been nailed into old wood to create sturdy supports. This coming week new walls will be installed, but before they are, we come as scribes, the beams our parchment, to write phrases and poems on the foundations of this house—other people’s thoughts we hope to embody and make permanent within ourselves as well. To start us off, David writes Ezra Pound on the entry to what will be the study: “Poetry is news that stays news.” We’re both inside and out, as the roof covers us from a summer shower, but gaps in the home’s sides bring to us the outdoor smells and sounds of the soft downpour. We mourn the loss of the pole in the kitchen where the family recorded the heights of relatives and visitors, big and small. Our friend Will, who died last summer, had remained the highest entry, well over six and a half feet tall. Sarah says she tries not to dwell on the absence of the pole: “It was a good thing, one we’ll remember, but we’ll come up with another good thing to replace it.” We work in silence except to check each other’s memory of a particular phrase or to call others over to see what we’ve written where. Not once do we stop to wonder why we’re taking this time out of a quick weekend to write words on beams that will soon be hidden from view.

Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. — RAINER MARIA RILKE, “II, 29” FROM SONNETS TO ORPHEUS (TRANSLATION, MACY)

This is the third time in just over a year that death has led me back to Tennessee from my current home in Ohio. Last summer my friend Will died, last fall my grandmother Zilpha died, and now it is my cousin John who has died. Late thirties, cancer. Early this morning, I flew away from my husband and daughters in Ohio before the sun had risen, and I landed in Nashville just as light signaled the day’s beginning. I was greeted at the airport by my mother and Terry, John’s widow. Had it been a regular visit home, my husband and daughters would have joined me. We would have driven the eight hours in our van together, and we would have entered the suburban ranch house of my childhood, where my mother would have had warm food waiting in the kitchen and gifts on our bed pillows.

Instead, I stepped out alone onto the curb just beyond baggage claim, backpack over my shoulders, to be greeted by my mother, who was playing a part. As I approached the parked car, she threw her arms up and waved them in the air while offering loud greetings in an unusually high, chipper tone. She was being silly, and it worked. Terry cracked a smile. I come from a highly adaptable mother, and I mean this as a high compliment. She knows who she is. She is quiet, introverted, content in solitude, and happy to sit on the edges of engagements, watching, listening, perceiving. But when a need becomes apparent, when it comes time for a wise word to be uttered, she leaves her natural state and transforms herself into whatever shape is necessary to meet that need or to boldly say that thing that could change a life. And I suppose as this transformation occurs naturally, it also is, in fact, part of who she is. To insist on remaining removed, unmoved, would be a betrayal of her hospitality, and thus an instance of not being true to her natural self. She grew up in a home where one acquired a keen ability to penetrate a situation and recognize the unspoken needs of those present, and regardless of one’s supposed temperament, it was considered cruel to perceive these needs and not budge to meet them. Naturally, she brought us up likewise, considering insecurities as luxuries not to be indulged. They were excuses to be self-absorbed. They let one off the hook of paying attention to others. Though I, being my mother’s daughter, should have gathered that an opportunity to practice these skills would be waiting for me upon arrival, I had not prepared for it. On my early morning flight, I looked forward to a calm hug from my mother at the baggage claim and a quiet Saturday in my childhood home with slow pockets of conversation among my immediate family, the people who formed my identity. I am also an introvert, content in solitude and delighted to practice it in the company of those who have known me the longest. But as soon as I saw my mother’s waving arms at the airport, and Terry smiling behind her, I knew what I had to do. Deep within my foundation, a natural instinct was triggered, and I adapted.

. . . through this place of love move . . . — E.E. CUMMING, [LOVE IS A PLACE]

At the ranch home of my childhood in Nashville, John’s family gathers, and my brother, his wife, my mother, and I act as a team shifting and rotating our roles among the mourners. John’s sister, Judith, needs quiet conversation with spaces for the sadness to surface. Paul, Judith’s husband, needs light banter and help with their children, who need outright goofiness and outlets for stored-up energy after long travels. They need permission to be loud and people who will be loud with them. Terry needs to tell stories. All kinds of stories, most of them involving shock or humor. She needs responses of wide eyes and gaping mouths. I fatigue

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myself by the number of times I hear my voice responding, “That’s hysterical” or “That’s insane.” She tells me about John’s cremation. How his remains now rest in an urn whose outside inscription reads, “May the force be with you always.” John was a huge Star Wars fan. Terry shares with me details about the packages offered by varying cremation companies. She explains the added fees for various documents or for delivery of the urn to your house if you choose not to pick it up. We wonder about the strange placement of business dealings atop death and mourning. My mother recounts the harassing calls she received from the funeral home after the death of my father. As the months passed and she hadn’t yet selected the gravestone, the calls increased, and the man on the other end eventually said, “Ma’am, this is how I make a living, and I have children to feed. It surely would help me if you would make a decision about your husband’s gravestone.” Other than her mourning and her resistance to being pushed around, my mother can’t quite explain to Terry and me why it took her so long to make up her mind about my father’s gravestone. She said she simply had more pressing things on her mind. She was well aware of the impermanence of a seemingly permanent thing, and in the midst of mourning, it just didn’t seem to be important enough to think about. Of course she was right. My father died just over fifteen years ago. I’ve been back to visit his gravesite a handful of times, but I cannot tell you the first thing about his tombstone, except that my mother’s eventual purchase of it fed someone else’s family for a meal or two. Oh, and it sits near a tree.

To be ill-adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown. —JEANETTE WINTERSON, WHY BE HAPPY WHEN YOU COULD BE NORMAL?

My Ohio home is about a mile from the Kokosing Gap Trail, an asphalt path that used to be a railroad line. For a few years now, I have maintained a fairly regular running routine on this trail. To get to the trail, I run along the west side of Philips Park, a slightly tired public space with ball fields, covered picnic pavilions, and restroom facilities. Its gravel parking lot is to my right, and just beyond the parking lot is United Precast, Inc., where large, loud machines make large, loud precast concrete products like parking blocks, manholes, barriers, culverts, and retaining walls. The company’s motto is, “If you want it to last . . . call United Precast.” Each time I pass, I marvel at the size of the stacked concrete objects. So long and so high, so solid in appearance. And all just a stone’s throw from the park. No doubt United Precast made the giant barriers that try to suggest where the recreation ends and the industry begins. A thin border of tall trees, woods, and wildflowers stands just before the parking lot, but it only serves as the foreground of a sparse, expansive scene made primarily of cement, noise, gray, and metal. The activity and appearance of the park on my left changes with the seasons, but other than a winter covering of snow, the scene

at the concrete company never changes, and this seems to be the point—to be and to make something unmalleable. To precast something is to set it into its final shape before placing it in some permanent position. The goal is to take something that is fluid with movement and make it solid, unchangeable, enduring. “If you want it to last . . . ” I carry this motto with me as I run. What lasts? And what of value is worth preserving? How do we ensure that what is good endures? These are often the questions bouncing in my head as my feet pound the cracking asphalt, as I pass other lone path goers with other thoughts in their heads. I wonder how they would answer my questions if I asked. But trail etiquette doesn’t get us past a wave or a nod of recognition. Only with a few regulars have I ever ventured to exchange words—such as the man on the path with the bushy white hair. For months we’d smiled and waved at each other, but then one day our relationship slightly deepened after I witnessed his halting to observe the expanse of a giant cobweb suspended between a low branch and the ground, almost as big as the man. Something about our shared awe at this web pushed me outside of myself, and I started a conversation: “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” And now, when we pass he always throws out something like, “How far you running today?” Some days I wish I’d never commented on the cobweb. I want things to go back to the way they were before I’d engaged him. I’m not comfortable with this new pressure to temporarily leave my solitude when I begin to approach him. But deep down, there’s that trigger, and I know it’s a good thing that these exchanges happen. I also regularly pass a walking widower with a large scar across his nose. It seems unfair that I know his story as well as I do. We live in a small town, and tragedy draws attention. He is still fairly young, but ever since his wife died, he has been slightly unstable. Alone, he dwells in his sadness. I wonder what of his wife lingers with him and carries him through his days. I don’t know what her occupation was or what she did with her time—I think maybe she was a bank teller—but I do know she was warm and generous, gentle and kind. I imagine it’s her influence or the remnants of what they were trying to be together that enables him to conjure up the energy to engage every single person he passes. He always wants to talk, always wants to encourage, and always in two phrases. And because he is slightly unstable, I receive his comments as prophetic, similar to, but carrying more weight than, a fortune from a cookie: “You’re doing great! Keep it up!” “A storm is coming, but you’re going to make it.”

. . . to make a gift of something to someone is to make a present of some part of oneself . . . to accept something from somebody is to accept some part of his spiritual essence, of his soul. — MARCEL MAUSS, THE GIFT

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The last time I came home to Nashville alone was almost a year ago. It was for an overnight stop before heading to my mother’s childhood home in West Tennessee for my grandmother’s funeral. She died two months after her one hundredth birthday. By the time I landed in Nashville, my mother had already left for West Tennessee to put things in order and make funeral arrangements. One of my brothers had picked me up at the airport and left me to settle in at the house until morning when I, with the rest of our family, would drive the three hours to the tiny town of Guys, Tennessee, where we would join my mother for the service. It was strange to be in my childhood home alone, without my mother. It was even stranger to consider my mother also in her childhood home without her mother. I was supposed to be writing an essay on Beethoven and working on a eulogy for my grandmother, but I couldn’t settle into any particular task. I wandered the house, looked in drawers, and looked through boxes of old family photographs. I stared into the faces—some stoic, some smiling—and looked for signs of my self staring back at me. I have the crooked nose of my grandfather’s people and the full cheeks of my grandmother’s, but I sought more subtle similarities. The next day, upon arriving at my grandmother’s, I learned my mother had also spent the evening before with old family photographs. She’d propped them up throughout the house. Many of them wouldn’t be considered anything special—just people standing out in yards or fields—but as my eyes studied theirs, I thought of them imagining me in the future as I imagined them in the past, and I felt a faint connection to their being. I wondered what of them remains in me beyond fleeting facial features. The service was nice—small town and Southern. My brothers and I spoke, each of us highlighting memories of our grandmother, not so much rooted in specific moments or events but rather in her warm ways of being. Her ways of serving and discerning. Her ways of loving and receiving others. Her strong and gracious presence, which she brought to every situation. As one story goes, when my grandfather was still living, he and my grandmother would try to wake up before each other. She wanted to wake up first to make him a big breakfast before he set out to work in the fields, and he wanted to wake up first to keep her from making such a fuss over him. This had them out-waking each other, out-serving each other, in the dead of the night. How does one keep up this kind of focused momentum over time? And when does one sleep? I’m too selfish to have come from these people. I thought of this as I watched my Great Aunt Ruth, in her nineties, trying to out-serve my mother in my grandmother’s kitchen where we were setting out the food that friends and relatives had prepared for the gathering after my grandmother’s funeral. Casseroles, fried chicken, pies, and sides of vegetables filled the kitchen and dining room tables. I was the youngest, the most agile, the one with the steadiest hand, but I was almost useless here. Even while mourning, Mom and Aunt Ruth were old pros at this high level of consideration. Though I feel quite adept in my own home, I realized that here, in the epicenter of this

particular form of goodness, I was still only a novice. The magnitude of needs was so great, and I could not perceive them quickly enough. Eventually I was able to work my way to the sink where I washed sets of dishes that have remained in the family for generations, all now needed to feed the many gathered in the front parlor. I washed teacups and saucers and imagined the many hands that had offered these very vessels, filled with warmth, to countless others with needs they couldn’t utter. Then I caught a knowing glance between my mother and my Great Aunt Ruth. They knew I needed this task.

We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great. — ROBERT FARRAR-CAPON, THE SUPPER OF THE LAMB

There has been a staying power to much of what is foundational to this family. My grandmother’s burial took place in the newest of five family cemeteries scattered about the hundreds of acres of farmland that have been passed down through family hands over the years. This newest cemetery, located atop a small hill, was established in the late 1800s. For years my grandmother was the only family member who remained in this tiny town. The inherited skills of planting, growing, rotating crops, killing and preparing cows and pigs and chickens, canning and preserving, building homes, raising barns, all were lost within a generation, when my mother and uncle, at the wishes of their parents, left the country to find a new kind of life in the city. There was a permanence of place and practice with this way of life for a long time in my kin, but none of that has lasted in my generation. None of us will return and revitalize the family farm. We’ve chosen other occupations. These coming years will be about giving land back to the people who still live here. Other families. We’ll level the barns my grandfather and uncles and great grandfathers and great uncles built, we’ll sell the rentals that once housed different branches of our people, and finally we’ll sell my mother’s childhood home, which was also my grandmother’s childhood home. The same room in which my grandmother was born was the room in which she died. The tombstones that now surround hers are the ones she played around as a child. For many of those buried on this hill, she was last living witness of their burials. Hers is a companion tombstone. She selected it when my grandfather died thirty years ago. And for thirty years, upon every visit to his grave, she saw her name and birthdate already in place, just waiting for the death date to be added. But what does any of that say about her? What do these chiseled facts say about any of the people whose bodies decompose below them? And how long before these slabs of stone begin to decay as well? The other four family cemeteries are all but forgotten. One remains somewhat easy to locate because of the collapsing wrought iron gate that surrounds it, but the headstones are weathered down, words and dates indecipherable. If you want it to last, don’t set it in stone.

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Every “I” is a fiction, finally. — DERRICK WALCOTT, OMEROS

After writing on the beams at my brother’s house, we return to my mother’s suburban ranch house as dinnertime approaches, and we resume our engagement with John’s family, who are also at the house. Judith and Paul had taken their children to a local park for the afternoon, and Terry had allowed herself a few hours at the spa. We put out food for everyone, and make space around the kitchen table for people to come and go or sit and stay. We want to create the space for them to do what they need to do. John’s oldest sister, Sarah, has finally arrived from Florida with her husband, Bob, and my mom has settled in the living room to converse with them. Though it is getting late, there is a hesitancy to call it a night. The reason for tomorrow’s memorial begins to set in again, and John’s immediate family shifts from talking to us to talking with each other. Tones become quieter, words become softer, and we offer privacy by slipping away to the playroom where we act ridiculous to keep Judith’s children laughing as their fatigue sets in. Eventually, Judith and Paul pack up the kids to head to their hotel, and Sarah and Bob leave to settle in at a friend’s house for the night. Terry retreats to the bedroom that was once mine. Mom cleans up the kitchen while David, Sarah, and I put away toys in the playroom. We share humorous moments from our evening with the children, but we can sense one another’s fatigue, which feels like a confession of a character flaw. Exhaustion doesn’t seem to be allowed. Any hint of complaint seems like a betrayal of our heritage. Even so, and certainly because our mother is out of earshot, David asks, “Liz, you got any whiskey?”

“I feel there’s nothing more genuinely artistic than to love people.” — VINCENT VAN GOGH, FROM A LETTER TO THEO (#682)

I had to leave John’s memorial picnic celebration early to catch my plane back to Ohio. On my flight back, I imagined everyone who had gathered scattering and carrying on without John. Soon Judith would fly home to Boston with her family, Sarah and Bob would return to Florida, and Terry would drive back to Knoxville. I imagined what it would look like if our thoughts left paths more permanent than an airplane’s vapor trails. And I began to question words associated with death: words like “remains” and “passing” and “closure.” What do I want to leave open? What do I want to remain? And how do I want to take part in passing on? I return to Ohio where a chair from my grandmother’s living room now sits in mine. Some cloth napkins my mother remembers using as a child now wipe jelly off my daughters’ faces.

I now possess some of the teacups and saucers I washed on the day of my grandmother’s funeral. And these are nice things to have, nice reminders of where I came from. But what I want to remain isn’t solid or tangible. It actually feels quite fragile and undetected. I want that resistance to a fixedness that prevents me from pushing outside of myself. I want that attentive way toward others—the one I’ve seen played out for me my entire life. I want that hospitality that goes beyond extending a warm cup of tea to another person to perceiving with uncanny accuracy the crucial need of the hour. And I want to inhabit it so thoroughly that my daughters perceive and adopt it as well. This is something that must last. A few days after my flight home, I go for another run. I pass United Precast with all its concrete monuments. I think of cemeteries and gravestones with words so carefully chiseled to say almost nothing of lasting import. Then I think of those words we wrote on wooden beams. Words of poetry pointing us toward a way of being. Words we absorb and carry with us, hoping that their underlying sentiment will endure and transform us into something useful for the world around us. Words now covered up by walls. But the words are still there, within the internal frame of the home, passed by every day undetected. Their existence is known only to a select few of us who are trying hard to internalize them and adapt accordingly as we live out our exterior days. At the end of the park, more solid concrete barriers try to block the trees and weeds and bushes from encroaching upon the gravel parking lot. But the concrete is already breaking down; the steel rods are protruding like broken bones. These structures will not last. Vivid green weeds and vines encroach upon the hard surfaces, all but hiding them from our view. I then reach the asphalt trail that runs along the river. The trail is also cracking. Weeds have worked their way through the tiniest crevices. Leaves and wild berries are scattered about the trail’s surface, most of which have been trampled upon by feet running or walking over them or by bike wheels spinning across them. Bugs crawl. Deer walk. Birds land to grab a twig and then take off in flight; the trail is being overtaken by stubborn signs of life adapting. Then I see the walking widower with the scar across his nose. Walking toward me at a brisk pace, he offers another two-phrased exhortation, another one I’ll internalize: “Keep up the hard work. You’ll be glad you did.” I smile and nod in reply and then move along.

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K EV I N M C L E L LA N

Empathy a friend of a friend drives you far away to a diagnosis / here in the waiting room a gesticulating woman says “your brother’s unresolved past caused this cancer” / you believe her and via payphone call your only sister to say I feel for you / barely able to hear her from her unreliable rotary she says “our brother . . .” / then the sudden dial tone / yet here an empty coin slot and stretched cord you continue to cradle the receiver

EST E BA N I S M A E L

Alzheimer’s Ode I want more the beauty in this where waking with strangers in the house that look exactly like you years before tight eyed and recognizable as the mirror facing the open window at the other end of the room, sunlight that’s either falling or in rise leading you into the bathroom, wash your naked back the way a mother might rub a wound on a child’s head, soft-handed strangers that manage to force their way into your house with a key—which is also someone else’s house you don’t know too well even though they own everything in your closet, drawers; the walls and picture frames with family portraits of your three sons, vacation photos of you standing in places more foreign than the pink sun in the backdrop, in cities you have never seen gold buildings crowded with people that must be tourists or these strangers beautiful as voices clattering with the dishes, the unfamiliar slam of the door and heavy-footed walk of someone that for no reason will stop at nothing to keep the floorboards together from splitting, falling into the open creak that waits in the center of the living room which the carpet tries to disguise as a run in the upholstery, a leg of the antique sofa.

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EST E BA N I S M A E L

Getting A Life Sentence Yes, but what of the body? And of words, the worlds trapped in consonants, in cages built like pretty rooms? And what of these worlds spinning in skin: under the blank pages of earth-formed flesh, the arranged tectonics of it all, wet spray of lungs and its rage, soft music. All these beautiful orbits and their sad dance in this small space. No, age doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t matter. The spin in a lock is its own jury. Stalled keys like a gavel. Endless cells. The heart sentenced behind bars of bone. This (same) verdict in a single word: each syllable a threat, the cancer hot as piss, your body the deepest snow.

ARTIST/ NOTE

EUNICE CHOI: FAMILIAR + ALIEN My studio work focuses on the idea of a fantasy world that inverts reality. I use an interdisciplinary approach to simultaneously think and problem solve both two- and three-dimensionally—incorporating painting, drawing, and sculpture. Through these various media, I develop a unique visual language of forms, shapes, colors, and texture. Using sculptures and photographed images as source material, I create environments and creatures that are both familiar and alien at the same time. My interest in creating a fantasy world derives from adapting to two contrary cultures and surroundings. I was born and raised in Korea and then have spent years living in the Midwest and East Coast of the United States. Over the years I have sought out spaces of intersection between these two cultures and have found comfort in their commonalities. Through my artwork, I question what would happen if we ignored common expectations and if we broke the rules of the “known” physical world. I explore unique interpretations of the landscape of alternate realities. Furthermore, I attempt to spark a dialogue between nature and human-made culture and to question our reliance upon habitual comforts. I am continually amazed at how quickly we, as humans, can adapt to new situations, and I explore this pattern within nature and the animal world.

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Eunice Choi. Family Tree #11. Colored pencil and graphite on paper . 20 x 18 inches.

Eunice Choi. Reproduction. Watercolor on paper. 13 x 11 inches.

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Eunice Choi. Family Tree #4. Colored pencil on paper. 7 x 7 inches.

Eunice Choi. Family Tree #7. Colored pencil on paper. 10 x 18 inches.

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Eunice Choi. Family Tree #8. Colored pencil on paper. 14 x 24 inches.

Eunice Choi. Family Tree #9. Colored pencil and graphite on paper. 28.5 x 40 inches.

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Eunice Choi. Family Tree #5. Colored pencil on paper. 14 x 11 inches.

Eunice Choi. Family Tree #6. Colored pencil on paper. 11.5 x 11.5 inches.

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B R E N T H O US E

from The Heart Pine Imprecations 129. Many a time have I sought the snipe of myth & measure have I left the child on the fencerow with a gunny sack & on a porch watched the drunk ponder your straight ways & grow righteous in emptiness that yearns for moonlight shadow as cattle fall to their knees to eat grass grown from seed spread too far. Many a time have I drained the wick by firelight have I slivered lightered brought up by plow & plowed field to bury seed waited for the break of cotul from harrowed soil & prevailed on remnants of summer many a time have I buried seed in open furrows & waited for promises of brokenness. Many a time have I tightened a cord & rid morning of its floxen mist to redeem the land of clay houses where grass in heat shall wither before it grows have I circled in a promise empty with deliverance in a sperate darkness in a lack of flight & in a passage we hold as a rite. Many a time have I bound the work of man with a playlome have I desired & made a way for flightless birds to escape into the night to escape into the bend of a dream so god will allow seeds to bury into soil & birds to fly into a confound of erratic stars.

Naked: A Triptych SHANNON HUFFMAN POLSON

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1 Before I climbed the highest mountain in North America, I’d never followed such a specific protocol regarding my feet. I wear a thin white sock closest to my skin and over that a plastic “vapor barrier” sock. On top of the vapor barrier sock is one and sometimes two pairs of wool socks, inside of heavy, hard-plastic boots with a thick synthetic liner. Above 14,000 feet, I pull on another layer of neoprene overboots. These boots will carry me up twenty-six miles of glacier to the summit of Denali, if I’m lucky, though the reality is that they won’t carry me anywhere. I have to move them, attached to snowshoes from 7,500 feet to 11,000 feet, attached to the metal daggers called crampons above 11,000 to 20,320 feet, covered in overboots above 14,000 feet. I need to move them, place them, swing them out and away from my opposite leg on each step forward, so that the crampon blades don’t tear the Gore-Tex pants I’m wearing and leave me exposed. At night, which is never dark on this mountain in interior Alaska in the middle of June, I will take them off so that my feet don’t freeze. The protection so critical during the day would restrict circulation at night. In subzero temperatures, this means my feet would freeze. Each night, I climb into my sleeping bag with my boot liners and bottles full of water tediously filled by melting snow, the heat of my body keeping everything from freezing. I am nineteen years old, the youngest member of our six-person team by fifteen years and the only woman. I am determined to succeed, to pull my own weight, to push to the summit. Our clothing worn and carried protects us from the brutality of the elements at altitude. I wear a layer of lightweight polypropylene, a layer of heavyweight polypropylene, a layer of fleece, a layer of Gore-Tex. In my pack is a huge down parka, large thick mittens, an extra hat. The day we do the single carry, when the slopes are too steep to pull the sleds, my backpack is so heavy my guide has to put it on

my back. I crouch down as he heaves it over my shoulders, and I buckle the waist belt while leaning over to ensure that it is secured before I stand. It rests fully on my hipbones over the harness I wear that connects me by rope to the other three members of my team, and the weight and friction as I move up the glacier rubs the skin off of the protruding part of the hipbone. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d cut precious inches off my foam sleeping pad and duct taped it to the waist strap of my pack for extra padding, which seemed only to spread the area of friction. In my pack is my share of food and fuel for our expedition, planned for two weeks, and clothing carried in anticipation of the conditions. Our team follows procedures designed to minimize vulnerability. Traveling across the glacier or even going to the bathroom, we tether ourselves to the rope and each other. This reduces our chances of tumbling into an unseen crevasse or losing

I see this simple white beauty through the haggard lens of exhaustion, aware of something I no longer have the energy to process. our footing on the icy terrain and falling. Each of us holds an ice axe in the uphill hand, ready to self-arrest if someone falls. We had started climbing the west buttress route of Denali at the Kahiltna Base Camp, tucked on a tributary glacier feeding into the vast Kahiltna Glacier. Our team started with six, but by 14,000 feet we had lost two, one to being overwhelmed, the other to acute mountain sickness. The assistant guide shuttled those climbers down the mountain, leaving us three. Our head guide, John, guides me and the remaining client, Keith, with calm and good humor, his short and stocky body accustomed to the climb, the cold, and the inadequacies of clients. We acclimatize for three days at 14,000 feet in beautiful weather warm enough to sit outside of the tent and write postcards in a T-shirt.

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The morning we set out for the upper mountain, we break down tents and pack up in the shadow of the mountain, and the deep cold slices through my many layers. My rented neoprene overboots contract and stiffen in the frigid air, and it takes thirty minutes to wrestle them over my boots. Roping up for the ascent, clipping in icy loops of ropes to frozen carabiners, I swing my arms in wild circles trying to get blood to my hands, swing my legs back and forth to get my circulation moving in my well-clad feet. We move forward, squinting into air hung with ice. I am relieved by our movement, depending on it to keep me warm. Shortly after we leave camp, Keith tells John he is starting to not feel well. We clip jumars, climbing devices meant as backup safety, onto the fixed rope up the 2,000 foot, 60-degree headwall, and begin our ascent. Keithâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s malaise slows our ascent to a maddening crawl. Marginal momentum would help each upward step, but forced to stop every few minutes while Keith rests, I grimace and scream through my teeth into the wind, willing my muscles to hold me against the steep ice. The wind is so strong, and the distance between us on the rope far enough that no one can hear. I feel the weight of the pack pulling me down, the slowness of our upward movement exacerbating the effort required for each step. At the top of the headwall Keith confers with John; he is feeling worse, but wants to continue. I cannot hear their discussion through the cold and the wind, but John gestures to me to take off and open my pack. He divides the main contents of Keithâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s pack between the two of us, and we start up the rocky ridgeline toward high camp at 17,200 feet. On the ridge, our halting steps make for a maddeningly slow pace. Each step requires specific placement among the rock and ice on the narrow path, but we are missing the momentum of movement. The white-blue glacier stretches out on both sides several thousand feet below. Behind us, Mt. Foraker rises to the level of our next camp against an ice blue sky. I see this simple white beauty through the haggard lens of exhaustion, aware of something I no longer have the energy to process. By the time we arrive at high camp, navigating 1,000 feet of uphill ascent along the ridge, the wind hurls snow at us horizontally, and I have passed the point of exhaustion; my body starts to shiver uncontrollably,

and my eyes are crying beneath my goggles, though I am not aware of this. It is the kind of thing where a person should do something to change the situation, but I cannot understand that. Mountain medicine considers anything over 18,000 feet to be extreme high altitude. The body reacts differently to the reduced oxygen load, a 50% reduction of the oxygen molecules inhaled with each breath. Hypothermia is independent of, but worsened by, the demands of altitude. The Mayo Clinic defines hypothermia as a medical emergency in which the body loses heat faster than it can produce heat, leading to death if untreated. The short explanation is that hypothermia is no joke. John sees what I cannot in how my body is responding, and he finds a place for the tent, efficiently directing its set-up through the wind that will not stop. I move sluggishly. He orders Keith and me inside, unrolling sleeping mats and pulling off my outer layers, and directs Keith and me to lie down on top of one sleeping bag, covering us with his own thick bag. Then he disappears for some time—I’m unaware how long—and emerges again with a thermos. I’m in the tent, but outside of my body, beyond the point of helping myself, and Keith lies next to me with the sleeping bag over us while John pours thick, hot Tang between my lips. By the next morning, my body temperature has stabilized. I marshal the part of me that believes I can take care of myself, that I can protect myself with enough fleece and down, but everything has changed. I will not be able to escape the knowledge of a vulnerability as deep as shame, a rawness of bodily failure leaving my spirit unmoored, open, and forced to accept help. I will not get beyond thinking of this vulnerability as failure. The next day Keith’s headaches are worse, and he descends with another team. John and I make an unsuccessful summit bid, wait a couple of days, and then make it to the top of the mountain, the pinnacle of North America, for a few clear and shiny minutes before stumbling down ahead of a storm. I didn’t make it there myself. I made it there because two people saved my life. Two people helped me for the hours I could not help myself. There is something in this knowledge that darkens those moments at the summit. And then that darkening and the brightness fades into memory, and like all memories recedes into the haze of time.

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2 Ten years later, after college, after one career, I am on my way to the elevator, scrolling through my BlackBerry, when a man stops me just in front of the cardiac-care center reception desk. “Excuse me, Miss?” I guess him to be about my father’s age, though his hair is grayer. He wears a plaid flannel shirt neatly tucked into khaki pants with a belt, and his body is open, turning toward me while trying to stay oriented toward a woman sitting in the rows of chairs behind him. “Yes?” My mind is already ahead of me, wondering where I’d put my parking garage ticket, whether I should grab a Diet Coke on the way out, thinking about what I needed to do before my next appointment. “My daughter needs some help—would you mind?” “Sure,” I say. I hadn’t expected his request. “What can I do?” I wrestle to slow my thoughts and calm my impatience. “She needs to use the restroom, and I can’t go in there with her,” he says. “I was hoping you might be able to help.” I glance at the woman behind him. She might have been my age, about thirty, but age is impossible to discern in a profile so gaunt I seem to be looking at her skull. Brittle dark hair hung to her shoulders, and her eyes took up too much space, large dark orbs. “Of course,” I say. “I think there’s a restroom just around the corner.” I know where all the restrooms are, each turn in the halls of the hospital where I come every day to sell equipment meant to regulate heart rhythms, lines that snake down into the heart from a cut just under the collarbone connected to palm-sized devices delivering shocks to keep the heart going, speeding it up or slowing it down. I know where to grab a drink of water or a quick bite, how to take the shortcut upstairs when the parking lot is full and I am running late. The man turns back to his daughter sitting in the chairs and takes her arm, supporting her to stand. She smiles at me, her smile lines folded together like an accordion by a lack of any subcutaneous fat. Her dark eyes are warm.

“Thank you,” she says. For a moment I can’t reply, as her voice seems so unlikely from the collection of angles comprising her body. “Of course,” I say again, embarrassed for my previous hurry, embarrassed that I ever hurried. The woman’s clothes hang loosely on her slight silhouette: black polyester pants, thick-soled black shoes, and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with scallops around a scoop neck, folds hanging straight down, not softened by an interruption of flesh. Her collarbones jut out dangerously. I follow the father and daughter to the bathroom door. She seems fully supported by his arm, so when I put out my hand I prepare to take on her body weight, but there is almost none to receive. I swing open the bathroom door, heavier by far than she is, wood with a metal kick plate, and we make our way into the bathroom and into a stall. I wedge myself between the toilet and the cold

It is impossible to allow her privacy, impossible to facilitate modesty that I wish for her and for me. metal wall of the stall, holding her arm as she turns her back to the toilet. I wait for a moment, and she says, “Can you help me with my pants please?” I am frustrated by my inability to anticipate her needs. I put one arm behind her back to hold her body upright, and use my other hand to unbutton and unzip her pants and pull them down. She is wearing plain white panties that stretch between sharp hipbones. I slip my finger under the elastic at the top of them and pull them down too, as though they are my own. A sense of discomfort fills me in one instant, like a flash flood in a slot canyon. I use my right arm to lower her onto the toilet. It is

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impossible to allow her privacy, impossible to facilitate modesty that I wish for her and for me. Her dark and wiry pubic hair, sparse as the hair on her head, seems only to mark a space between bones. It occurs to me that I have never before seen the actual bones of a person’s upper thighs outside of a classroom skeleton. She sits and urinates, looking forward with no particular look on her face, no shame or worry. The urine streams for only a second or two, and then trickles in drops. I see her hands, a thin layer of skin covering bone, hanging slightly curled from tiny wrists. When she finishes, I take a wad of toilet paper from the roll. “I can do that,” she says with a small but real smile, and she wipes herself, and drops the paper into the toilet. I see it disappear below the bones of her pelvis. I help her stand, and pull up her pants, my arm around her spine as though she is a small child, and feel the vertebrae pressing sharply into my arm. I button and zip her pants and reach behind to flush the toilet. I open the stall door and we walk to the sink to wash our hands, and then head back out of the bathroom. “Thank you,” she says, and she smiles and her eyes have a kindness and a wisdom and even a happiness that I can never deserve. In the waiting area I help her into a seat, and her father thanks me, and I smile and say of course, and feel like I should be the one thanking them both, as though I have been permitted into a grace and an intimacy unexpected. I go on with my day. I go on with my life. But I never forget this woman. Years later, when I am not rushing to my car, not checking my BlackBerry, when I have a few minutes to think, I wonder about her. I think she likely did not survive the year. Working in the hospital, reminders of mortality were all around. It was not presuming her death that stayed with me. It was the grace of her vulnerability, a possibility only after releasing all semblance of control. There is something beautiful in that acceptance that I have not known. I think of the mere hours I experienced this kind of vulnerability, high on a mountain, and now instead of a shadowed memory, the summit is somehow brighter and deeper, all at once, illumined by the glistening of life, with the understanding that what I had thought of as weakness was instead somehow a gift.

3 It is years after that night on a mountain and the minutes in the hospital when I go with my husband to church three days before Easter. After the gospel and the sermon is the washing of feet. I have not attended this service before. This year I am sitting in a hard pew in our small stone church, the stained glass muted against the darkness outside, lights inside dimmed so that the altar candles persist as hard, bright points against the darkness. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve worn a blouse with khaki pants and low heels, a shawl around my shoulders to take off the spring chill. My shoes fit well enough, but I find it difficult to remove them, to walk up to the front of the church in bare feet. As I wriggle them off under the pew, I am immediately aware of their absence, and think suddenly of how much I hide inside of them. This ritual is not about this; it is meant to show Jesus turning social structure and convention on its head, demonstrating servant leadership for his disciples to learn from and emulate

This is a long process. There are a lot of bare feet in this little church. when he is gone. Instead, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m aware of my bare feet, my chipped and fading pedicure. Others stand up slowly from their pews and walk down the aisle. I know most of these people: teachers, lawyers, doctors, housewives. They seem to me confident in a way I am not. They take turns sitting on a chair, placing their feet in the white ceramic basin. The priest pours water over their feet, and then lifts each foot out of the basin to dry it with a towel. This is a long process. There are a lot of bare feet in this little church.

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I’ve never particularly liked my feet. It’s rare that they are exposed to the public, outside of beaches and summer flip flops in places where I assume everyone’s had a margarita or two. But they’ve carried me a long way, these feet. A friend recently had an accident in the course of a normal day; he can no longer feel anything from the navel down. Fading pedicure or not, I’m glad I have the use of these feet. And yet exposing them in church makes me uncomfortable. I get up and start toward the altar. I pull my shawl closer around me. Feeling the cold against my skin reminds me somehow that I have not been praying enough, not reading my Bible. I think of the annoyances I feel toward priests sometimes. I wonder if people are thinking that we should not have our son out so late, even at church. All of these things hidden away spill out of my shoes as I walk forward on naked feet. The foot-washing chair faces the congregation. I am glad that the lights are dim. The roles that define me are back at the pew along with my shoes: mother, wife, writer, daughter-in-law, parishioner, friend. Without them, I am exposed, only me. I do not remember when I have been only me. I sit down awkwardly, step my feet into the cold white basin. The priest pours cool water from a white pitcher, and it curls around the flesh and bone of me. Then the priest picks up my feet, one at a time, and pats them down with a towel. She looks at me and smiles. I smile back at her. Suddenly I do not want to stand up. I see the clear water, and my cold white feet, and her hands, and I am embarrassed by the simple beauty of it, because I and my thoughts so often are neither simple nor beautiful. And it seems to me that the naked reliance to which I succumbed on a mountain is nothing compared to the grace of vulnerability given to me by a woman whose name I never knew in a hospital bathroom stall. There is succumbing, and there is acceptance, though there is the possibility of grace in both. I understand that there is nothing in this gesture, this ritual, that I deserve. I stand and walk back to my pew. I think my face must have worn a quizzical look; I felt quizzical. I put my cold feet back into my shoes and I kneel and instead of praying, I stay there kneeling, and feel my feet cold and clean.

C H R I STO P H E R YAT ES

Off the Yard And we were at that stage when one awaits something of a right triangle from which to allocate the rest. Like the angled firmness of a fieldstone hearth. And in the pasture a frost encircled a fire, and the long flakes of locust bark wished to burn slow and solemn. Like arcing miniatures of Orionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rise. And off the yard were lights strung through the willowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s branches and the fence line where horses bucked on brittle hillside mud. These armored hooves, mooncast limbs. And I went down through their watch to try the strange tone of stones upon the frozen pond where mass melts not in the sweeping skip. This echoed score from rim to rim. And with morning the flame had settled into the cherry knots and sounded the light paper wrinkle of embered wood in sleet-footed rain. The words of a priest waiting centuries for breath. And I warmed my boots on winter ash and wondered whether beauty might rest in the half-worn measure of things.

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C H R I STO P H E R YAT ES

Above the Walled Garden after the Wedding It comes clear to me: this wrought iron and brick and the garden down the slope where the reception spun. Clear as this lamplight on the patio and the holly leaf in the spiderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s web. As the dim distance from others which I do not pretend to be a private privilege. A clear cast of people, ceremony and this frame of mind that makes one strange. Or makes one mindful of long delay. Old cause of old ache. Yes, I know I look older: more worn, you wonder. Are you too on pace to die poorly? Can we speak of things once vital?

CONTRIBUTORS / 35

At fourteen, Eunice Choi immigrated to the United States from Korea. In the process, Choi experienced and adapted to a new lifestyle within a culture very different from her own. Always curious, she has never stopped asking herself, “What would have happened if I stayed in Korea?” This sometimes leads her to think that maybe there is another “Eunice” living in Korea without her knowledge. Of course, this idea has roots in her being a fan of sci-fi films, Japanese animation, and fairytales. These genres have influenced her interest in alternate realities, connected with her bicultural experience, and thus influenced her work as an artist. Her additional work and professional experiences can be viewed further at her website: www.eunicechoi.com. Brent House, an editor for The Gulf Stream: Poems of the Gulf Coast and a contributing editor for the Tusculum Review, is a native of Necaise, Mississippi, where he raised cattle and watermelons on his family’s farm. Slash Pine Press published his first collection, The Saw Year Prophecies, and his poems have appeared in journals such as Colorado Review, Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly, the Journal, and Third Coast. New poems are forthcoming in the Kenyon Review and elsewhere. Esteban Ismael is a National City native, but he usually cites San Diego as his hometown since it’s only two blocks away. He currently teaches creative writing as an adjunct instructor with the San Diego Community College District. Having survived a stint in the Riverside desert and a few years of Michigan snow, he spends a good deal of his time drinking organic coffee in the sun and documenting the gentrification of his neighborhood. He is currently putting the final touches on his first manuscript of poems and getting back to work on a long-delayed novel. His poems are forthcoming or have recently appeared in H_NGM_N, Rhino, Crab Orchard Review, and Verse Wisconsin Online, among others. D.L. Mayfield loves to write about theology, refugees, gentrification, and pop culture. She has written for McSweeneys, Image Journal, the Other Journal, and the Toast, among numerous other publications. Her book of essays, tentatively titled Dispatches from the Stateless Wanderers is forthcoming from HarperOne in 2016. She is constantly just pretending that she is not overwhelmed by this earth.

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Kevin McLellan is the author of Tributary (Barrow Street, 2015) and the chapbooks Shoes on a wire (Split Oak, 2015) runner-up for the 2012 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry, and Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010), a collaborative series of poems with numerous women poets. He has recent or forthcoming poems in journals including: American Letters & Commentary, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review Online, the Puritan, Thrush Poetry Review, Western Humanities Review, Witness, and numerous others. Kevin lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Melanie Spinger Mock is a professor of English at George Fox University, Newberg, Oregon. She is the author or co-author of four books, including most recently If Eve Only Knew, due out in July 2015. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Nation, Christian Feminism Today, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Mennonite World Review, among other places. She blogs about (and deconstructs) images of women embedded in evangelical popular culture at AintIAWomanblog. net. Her primary interests include making her thirteen-yearold sons take showers already, watching good (that is, awful) reality television, and taking long naps, on her office floor if necessary. Growing up surrounded by archaeological excavations, antediluvian structures ,and artifacts in the ancient city of Hamadan, Iran, Zahra Nazari received a BFA from the School of Art & Architecture in Tabriz, Iran, and her MFA from the SUNY, New Paltz, New York. Awards and grants include a Summer Residency Fellowship from the Cooper Union School of Art, a Ruth Katzman Scholarship from the Art Students League at Vyt, and a residency grant from the Vermont Studio Center. Exhibitions include Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, New Jersey, the Masur Museum of Art in Monroe, Louisiana, and Dorsky Museum of Art in New Paltz, New York. Zahra will exhibit at the Spartanburg Art Museum, Spartanburg, South Carolina in 2016. Jessica Piazza is the author of two full-length poetry collections from Red Hen Press: Interrobang—winner of the AROHO 2011 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize and the 2013 Balcones Poetry Prize—and Obliterations (with Heather Aimee O’Neill, forthcoming), as well as the chapbook This is not a sky (Black Lawrence Press). Born and raised in Brooklyn, New

York, she holds a PhD in English literature and creative writing from University of Southern California, where she now teaches for the writing program. She also teaches online for the MFA program at the University of Arkansas at Monticello, and in 2015 she started the “Poetry Has Value” project, hoping to spark conversations about poetry and worth. Learn more at www.jessicapiazza.com. Shannon Huffman Polson lives and writes in a mountain valley in northeast Washington with her husband and two young boys. North of Hope: A Daughter’s Arctic Journey, her memoir of adventure, grief and hope, was published in 2013. Polson writes about borders and interstices, places of transition and transformation. Her essays are in High Country News, Huffington Post, Cirque Journal and others. Polson is finishing her second book, an anti-memoir of flying attack helicopters in the U.S. Army. When not writing or chasing her boys, she works as Artist-in-Residence with Methow Arts in Okanagan Schools and gets outside in the mountains and away from screens whenever possible. She never misses her morning coffee and refuses to convert to Kindle. Tania Runyan is the author of the poetry collections Second Sky, A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air, which was awarded Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature in 2007. Her book How to Read a Poem, an instructional guide based on Billy Collins’s poem “Introduction to Poetry,” was released in 2014. Her poems have appeared in many publications, including Poetry, Image, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Christian Century, Atlanta Review, Indiana Review, Willow Springs, Nimrod, and the anthology A Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare. Tania was awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship in 2011. When not writing, Tania plays violin and mandolin, gardens, hoards chocolate, and chats with other poets on Facebook. Actually, she spends most of her time on Facebook. Skye Shirley is a poet and Latin teacher at an all-girls school in Boston. Her work has appeared in Post Road, Dallas Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Best Undergraduate Writing of 2009, and Susquehanna Review. She spends her summers in Rome and her winters walking around Walden Pond. She loves used bookstores, black tea, and dead languages. Jason Tandon is the author of three collections of poetry, including Quality of Life (Black Lawrence Press, 2013) and Give Over the Heckler and Everyone Gets Hurt (Black Lawrence Press, 2009, winner of the 2006 St. Lawrence Book Award). His poetry has appeared in Esquire, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner,

Spoon River Poetry Review, and on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. He teaches in the writing program at Boston University. Kevin Weidner lives in Vermont and received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama. Other writing is or will be in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Southeast Review, StorySouth, The Hairsplitter, and others. Sarah Wetzel is the author of River Electric with Light, which won the AROHO 2013 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Red Hen Press, and Bathsheba Transatlantic, which won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and was published in 2010 by Anhinga Press. With homes in Tel Aviv and Manhattan, Sarah currently teaches at the American University of Rome. Despite the jet lag, Sarah considers her time spent on planes jammed between the bulkhead and the passenger sleeping beside her some of her most creative. You can read more of her work at www. sarahwetzel.com. Elizabeth Dark Wiley is an adjunct professor of writing and creative writing at Mount Vernon Nazarene University in central Ohio and a contributing editor for Windhover. Her work has appeared in Curator and Blue Bear Review. She is pursuing her MFA in creative writing at Ashland University. In her spare time, she likes to think she notices things. Recently featured in Best New Poets 2014 and recipient of a Best of the Net nomination, Jeremy Windham holds a BFA in creative writing and violin performance. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The Portland Review, Steam Ticket Review, The Lake, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Cider Press Review, Rainy Day Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, and Spillway, among others Christopher Yates is a writer living in Charlottesville, Virginia. He teaches philosophy and art theory through the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Arts, a low-residency PhD program for professional artists and creative scholars (idsva.org). His comedic screenplay, No Time to be Lost!, appeared in book form with Rota Fortunae Press and Wiseblood Books in 2014. His dead serious work of philosophy, The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling, appeared in 2013 (Bloomsbury Academic). Yates’s professional and personal interests lie at the intersection of phenomenological philosophy, art, and literature.

LAST NOTE/ 35 THOUGHTS ON A LOSS FOR WORDS FROM THE CONTRIBUTORS IN THIS ISSUE

I was visiting Vancouver some years after having lived there, and was retracing the walk I used to take near my old house off Commercial Drive. It was all at hand again, though illuminated in that peculiar light that falls on a place one reenters as a former dwelling. Present, no longer tacit. There at the intersection by the bus stop, just as before, I recognized a man I had never known but had often passed. The same white hair, granite face, work shirt. And out of some habit that had no real origin I began to raise my arm and utter a greeting, but faltered. What does one say? Hey, we were strangers once. Remember?

Christopher Yates

POET RY

A thick fog

settles over this beach. I sprint down the boardwalk to the water’s edge, gulping the fog along the way. Now on the sand, I’m thrilled to enter this disorientation. I want the fog to surround me completely. Zero visibility. I dig deeper into its density, but the thickest fog is always a few feet away, its greatest concentration never where I am. Always at an observable distance. I want to lose my bearings and experience the outward manifestation of an inward state. I don’t want clearly defined lines. I want borders to be blurry. I don’t want to know exactly what I’m looking at, exactly where I’m going. I don’t want to know exactly how to describe this.

Elizabeth Dark Wiley

NONFI CT I ON

I teach Latin

and am always immersed in a language separated from me by both place and time. Even when I speak English, there is now a distinct difference between a singular or plural you and a constant awareness that one man in the room could turn all the women “masculine.” There are words that don’t exist in Latin, like New World foods such as tomatoes and chocolate, and modern technologies like a ceiling fan, which I refer to as the “god of wind.” This speechlessness cannot be expressed in my poetry, and so it is communicated simply through the absence of language, which can surprisingly say more than any word.

Skye Shirley

POET RY

For me, language is often migratory; I acquiesce to silence much like the great egret flies south for winter. I’d like to think it’s an instinctual knowing, a little internal understanding urging me to relocate my expression in a way that best serves

the moment. Admittedly, as a human, I’m apt to grow tired of myself. All of these continuous, disquieted thoughts propelled by surges of various emotions, fears, and desires—it can be exhausting. So, I go out walking along the seawall or I sit somewhere comfortable and sink into myself. Completely void. I enter a solitary place of urgent grace where I don’t want anything. When I’m speechless, I’m the most thankful I can be.

Jeremy Windham

After living in different countries, there is a space between my memories, evoking events that have occurred decades apart and thousands of kilometers away. It has not been easy to describe those emotions and effects through words, so I depict them through colors and gestural marks that symbolize the different stages of my life. In my work, slippery space combines with floating images where anything goes and meaning becomes detachable. Painting represents stories and emotions where images can be more powerful than words.

Zahra Nazari

VI S UA L A RT

As I was listening to a dear friend sob, I also felt the need to say something, anything, to lessen her sorrow. Nothing I said seemed helpful. She had miscarried. I would soon realize that I couldn’t take away her pain. I would soon realize that she needed to move through her pain in order to begin the process of healing. I would soon realize that what she needed from me was not my own words, but for me to listen to hers and to witness her grief. Learning the role of silent witness also meant being close to her pain, so this was a difficult lesson. I hope that I learned to recognize the occasions when the-everything-in-not-saying is appropriate.

Kevin McLellan

P O ETRY

Silence is often as haunting as words, isn’t it? On March 24, 2015, Germanwings Flight 9525 crashed into the French Alps, killing all 150 people aboard. The co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, deliberately flew the plane into the mountain after locking the captain out of the cockpit. It was suicide. It was murder. He left no note, no explanation. The cockpit voice recorder captured what happened in the minutes before the crash: the captain pounding on the locked door begging Lubitz to open it, the screams of the passengers, and Lubitz’s silence.

Sarah Wetzel 80

P O ETRY

Eunice Choi. Family Tree #10. Colored pencil and graphite on paper. 28 x 19.5 inches.

Eunice Choi. Family Tree #12. Colored pencil and graphite on paper. 22 x 30 inches.

Issue 35: A Loss For Words

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