Issue 36: Writ In Water

P OET RY a seed I cannot split, they’re calling for rain, when water presses

FROM ANDREW DELOSS EATON, MARA ADAMITZ SCRUPE, AND CARLY JOY MILLER

ESSAY water intoxication

FROM JULIA MACDONNELL

F I CT I O N an echoing prayer and raining chair parts

FROM JOSEPH REIN AND LINDA MCCULLOUGH MOORE

ISSUE

36

FA L L 2015

V I S UA L ART high water and undressing of trees FROM KAREN MOBLEY AND LYNDA SMITH-BUGGE

+

2015 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize judged by Dan Beachy-Quick

First Place: The Book of Never Saw

BY JODY RAMBO

$

15

WHY/ RUMINATE?

ru’mi-nate: to chew the cud; to muse; to meditate; to think again; to ponder Ruminate is a nonprofit, reader-supported community chewing on the mysteries of life, faith, and art. We invite slowing down and paying attention. We love laughter.

And we delight in telling the truth, asking questions, and doing “small things with great love,” as Mother Theresa said.

FRONT COVER Karen Mobley. Highwater Series. Mixed media. 22 x 30 inches. Private collection.

OPPOSITE PAGE Karen Mobley. Heron. Mixed media. 44 x 30 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

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FRIENDS OF RUMINATE This issue was made possible by the Friends of Ruminate, whose generous Summer 2015 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, Ralph and Lisa Wegner, John Zeilstra and Janice Van Dyke-Zeilstra, Dr. Randall J. VanderMey

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Copyright © 2015 Ruminate Magazine. All rights reserved.

CONTENTS / 36

NOTES Editor’s Readers’ Artists’ Contributors’ Last

17, 56

10

78

11

Jody Rambo The Book of Never Saw Elegy in Which My Mothers Learns to Swim

12

Andrew Deloss Eaton War Notes: Rome, 1940

13

Jill Reid Code Blue

14

John Blair A Philosophy of Gravity

16

Emily Shearer Reciprocation

25

Rebekah Denison Hewitt Because Longing Is Part of Belonging

5

80

FICTION Jeff Bakkensen Some of Our Stories

26

Joseph Rein The Journalist

48

Linda McCullough Moore Wills and Testaments

70

34

REVIEW Travis Biddick Pity the Beautiful by Dana Gioia

Lynda Smith-Bugge Undressing of Trees Series Walnut Ovid Breaking Open

33

Kathryn Smith Gathered

45

Clare Paniccia On Seeing the Doe

46 42

Mara Adamitz Scrupe the iris the peony the dogwood bloom (If War Comes to You)

65

Linda Malnack That I Might Know You Utterly

66

Kevin McLellan You Grip a Key

17 - 24

67

Alexandra Barylski How to Sort Tomatoes

57 - 64

68

VISUAL ART Karen Mobley Highwater Series Heron Herons Series + Highwater Series

32

Melissa Reeser Poulin What fills Imsland

30

NONFICTION Julia MacDonnell Marie and Her Sons

POETRY

4

Front Cover

Inside Front Cover

Inside Back Cover Back cover

69

Carly Joy Miller apostle apostle delivers in the kitchen

77

Mark Wagenaar Bird’s Eye Impromptu

EDITOR’S NOTE/ 36

When my son was in first grade, his Spanish-speaking friend Omar was just learning English, and my son knew very little Spanish. I remember asking him what they talked about, how they would decide which games to play during recess, or who was “it.”

“Well, he knows some English words,” my son told me.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like hello,” he said. And then he paused, smiled, and said, “But mostly when he laughs it’s in English, and I know just what he means . . . And Omar laughs a lot, Mom.” Yes. For my son, laughter is a word that transcends barriers. Laughter is written in water. * In Father Gregory Boyle’s book Tattoos on the Heart, Boyle recounts a story from his early days of priesthood. He was serving in Bolivia and was asked to give Mass at a mountaintop Quechua village where locals harvest flowers for their living. He was just learning Spanish, so he starts to panic on the drive up the mountain because he realizes he forgot his Spanish prayer book for saying the Mass. He ends up fumbling his way through it, lifting the bread and wine whenever he runs out of things to say. He writes, “When it is over, I am left spent and humiliated. . . . I am convinced that a worse priest has never visited this place or walked this earth.” Like a scene from the picture book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No God, Very Bad Day, Father Boyle then realizes that he missed his ride home. He begins the long walk down the mountain when an old Quechua farmer or campesino approaches him. He writes: I think of something to say, but nothing comes to me. Which is just as well, because before I can speak, the old campesino reaches into the pockets of his suit coat and retrieves two fistfuls of multicolored rose petals. He’s on the tips of his toes and gestures that I might assist with the inclination of my head. And so he drops the petals over my head, and I’m without words. He digs into his pockets again and manages two more fistfuls of petals. He does this again and again, and the store of red, pink, and yellow rose petals seems infinite. I just stand there and let him do this, staring at my own huaraches, now moistened with my tears, covered with rose petals.

I love this story, how it takes a defeated priest who doesn’t have the right sacred words and places him before an old campesino who is blessed by his presence and wants to bless him with rose petals in return.

Yes, our simple presence can transcend barriers, can be written in water, flowing perfectly into gaps or over barriers. When I see my life as writ in water, my stance naturally becomes more open and loving and receptive. I can remember that everyone is doing the best they can, including myself. My focus on right and wrong is lessened and my capacity for delight is multiplied. I can marinate in mystery and laughter.

Or, as the 14th century poet and mystic Hafiz writes: “God and I have become like two giant fat people living in a tiny boat. We keep bumping into each other and laughing.” Yes, with my son and Omar, and Father Boyle and the campesino, and Hafiz and the entire Ruminate community, may we all squish in close to God and keep bumping into each other and laughing.

With an infinite amount of rose petals,

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READERS’ NOTES/ 36 THOUGHTS ON WRIT IN WATER FROM RUMINATE READERS

If you go to the ocean but don’t wake before dawn to sit on the shore with your breakfast and watch the colors fade and glow and rise in the sky and remember that the earth is rolling around in the light of the stars, why go to the ocean?

And if you come to the ocean, but you do not pray and cry and sit under the last gentle sighs of a thunderstorm, then watch a pinkish smear in the east grow and collect all the colors until it turns into a full rainbow and doubles itself, if you do not turn your face to the west to see a sky as gold as all of heaven, and laugh and know that you are hemmed in mercy and majesty, why did you come? And if you don’t walk along the ocean at night and let yourself feel small and afraid in the dark void as you tread barefoot on the edge of a world totally uninhabitable to you, if you don’t consider what it was like when the waters were not separated from the waters and there was no spoken light and remind yourself that all your life is grace, why go to the ocean?

Jillian Humphrey

There is a

HARTV I LLE, OHI O

scene in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Lila where Lila tries to leave hard and dangerous things behind.

She’s picked up at a bus station by a tidy little woman in a beat-up car that can barely get them where they’re going, wherever that is. It’s nighttime, it’s pouring rain, and on the dark drive, the woman explains—all but apologizing—that her people would expect her to try to bring Lila to Jesus.

Lila says sure, the woman can go ahead and try, but then the woman decides never mind. She wonders if Jesus isn’t the thing Lila needs to hear right now, at least not from her, though maybe she, the woman driving, is making excuses for not wanting to evangelize, but the rain is pouring down and she can hardly see the road and she isn’t very good at sharing the good news, anyway.

In college, I spent a sweltering summer sharing the gospel with strangers against the backdrop of the Atlantic Ocean. I had a tract in my hand, but the only words I could manage were an awkward, tangled mess. My delivery was apologetic because I felt sorry, sorry that these people had to listen to me, a Christian who couldn’t even talk about Jesus clearly, because none of those beach-goers ever indicated to me, ever, that they were inclined to believe.

Now I think it’s for the best. In Lila, maybe the woman in the car and her church group regularly went down to the bus station to save souls. I know I went down to the ocean mostly to try and save my own.

I find I’m glad I never got any converts to hang my hat on.

Better I should rest in a baptism that didn’t come by way of me or my words or my handful of new believers. Better my words were writ in water; wash them out with the tide. May those brown and sandy-bodied girls I disturbed out of their sunbathed slumber hear a story instead that’s more like a stranger giving them a ride to a place they need to go that they don’t even know of yet, or shelter from the rain for the duration of the night.

Rebecca Martin

LY N CH B U RG, VIRG I N I A

The night before my first sonogram, my husband and I woke up to water pouring down the walls of our bedroom.

Dozens of nails in our new roof had been improperly sealed, and during the first storm the ceiling simply turned into a sieve. We carpeted the floor with towels, waiting for the rain to pass. We told ourselves that the leak wasn’t an omen.

The next day, the sonogram technician smeared jelly on my tummy. We saw our baby on the screen, but at seventeen weeks, there wasn’t much to recognize to our untrained eyes, just a still and floating little creature.

I don’t remember all the terms the OB used. Our baby was badly deformed. All of its organs had grown outside its body, the lungs were not growing at all, and I lacked a normal umbilical cord. “Your baby cannot survive. Eventually, you will miscarry,” the doctor explained to my stunned husband and me. But, I might still carry to term. In that case, birth would rupture my uterus, making further pregnancies impossible. The baby would die instantly or after an hour or two. It might, the doctor added, suffer, though briefly. There was nothing more he could do.

My husband and I drove to another state. I watched the perinatologist inject saline into my uterus. Watched the heartbeat stop. Hours later, I went into labor and gave birth to a dead little girl. I wailed.

She didn’t look human yet, exactly. She was plum-colored, her skin torn from birth. She was wrapped tightly so that only her head showed. The forms called her a “product of conception.” She was my daughter. My waters could not shelter her. My blood could not nourish her. Nothing up until then in my life could equal the magnitude of her loss.

“For we must needs die, and are as water spilt on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again . . . ” (2 Samuel 14:14). We named her Mara: “sea of bitterness.” Our longedfor child. We did the only thing we could do to help her.

Name Withheld

M ACO N , G EO RG I A 5

READERS’ NOTES/ 36 THOUGHTS ON WRIT IN WATER FROM RUMINATE READERS

It could be 90 degrees in Minneapolis, 80 in the front yard of my family’s cabin three hours north, and 70 on the shores of Upper Hay Lake in the back yard. The water of that lake has, since I was ten years old, been the oasis for my sizzling pale skin in the northern Minnesota summer heat that lasts something like eight weeks a year.

In the sunny afternoons I run through the forest, past fields of corn, down the lonely rural roads, and back to the cabin and continue down the sloping hill to the lake. I strip my clothes as I run to the dock, leaving sunglasses, a Minnesota Twins cap, shirt, socks, and shoes in my wake.

Once I’m midair off the dock, I can’t worry about the temperature; it will shock my system either way. I have to tell myself as I run down the dock: I know it will be cold—I want it to be cold—but it’ll still be so cold that it hurts. So cold that I can’t keep my head under for longer than a few seconds—long enough to open my eyes to the dirty green of the lake.

I have to surrender that mix of fear and desire to the moment of suspension. Once I get to the point of no return— sweat still dripping off of me, mixing and dissipating in the lake, hanging over the dark, murky brown on the top skin of the water—I realize I don’t have a choice; I have to get what I want.

And I feel the water suck the heat off of me and dissipate that too.

Greg Larson

NORFOLK , V I R GI NI A

Now they are sending me messages. “FURX” is stamped across several train cars stopped on the tracks by my house.

I consider flushing my crazy meds down the toilet. Again. I try to convince myself that none of it is real—that I’m still paranoid and hallucinating. I tell myself there is no “they.”

This is my second manic episode since I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Because I’ve been through this before and have come out on the other side, I can’t help but believe some part of me continues to hold space for sanity.

So this time I’m fighting for truth. Maybe if I try hard enough I can help that space expand.

I grab my iPhone and earbuds, crank up Beyoncé, and turn on the faucet. The sound of water running in the background undergirds the music. Lyrics ring in my ears; bass echoes through my body. My clothes fall to the cold

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tile floor. The water rises in the cast iron clawfoot tub.

I’m a fugitive on the run who has discovered a hiding place. Lost in harmony, melody, and rhythm, I step into a reality that doesn’t lie. I sink deeper into the hot bath. The water heightens my attention to my body’s sensations. My skin burns, reminding me I’m still here, even though I’m waiting to be found. Within minutes, as I’m surrounded by a womb of warmth, a calmness washes over me. I close my eyes, recline against the bathtub, and let go of everything but the water and music.

Charlotte Donlon

B IRM IN G H A M , A LA BA M A

You know when something happens to you that is so poignantly meaningful you can’t think about anything else? You can’t possibly be the same, not after that. But in a few days the shock fades, and there’s shampoo and cereal to buy, and your electronics have to be charged, and deadlines are still deadlines. “Wait,” you say when the week is over. “I’ve changed!” Then, life resumes its static station. People mow lawns and grow marigolds. They yap about the cracks in the driveway and Amazon sales. Wait, you whisper across the pond, and pray that normalcy is a communal lie.

Rena Lesué-Smithey

S P RI N GVIL L E , U TA H

Thoreau lauded the purity, transparency, and depth of Walden in its milder seasons, when it reflected the heavens and its stillness ran deep. But he also saw these traits persisting into winter. Walden had not shifted identities; it had only taken on a different form. Underneath its transformed surface, Walden was still clear and bright and cold. Chopping through the ice to “open a window under my feet,” Thoreau saw that Walden remained essentially unchanged. Yet Thoreau did not regard the “real” Walden as lying trapped, yearning for spring; rather, he saw in this natural phase new traits to celebrate, new facets to explore.

He praised the thickness of Walden’s ice, eleven and a half feet deep, so sturdy that “it will support the heaviest teams.”

Now that I am in my fifties, I have to admit to myself that I am a pond in winter. In my winter, I’d like to be firm ice, growing deep and solid, amassing such depth that I can

be stable and secure, both for myself and others. It would be easy to be ice that is only rigid, thick-skinned, ice like a frozen stare, having only a snow-blind perspective. It would be harder, but braver and more holy, to be Walden ice, which offered Thoreau new vistas and perspectives.

He marveled at his new vision, at the defamiliarization of the landscape and the fresh awe it awakened. In my winter, how fine it would be to be disoriented in this way, to stumble in awe, to fill up with wonder, to believe that God’s mercies are new every morning.

Colleen Warren

M AR I ON, I ND I ANA

When I was very young, I was sick, a lot. I had asthma and pneumonia, and spent weeks in bed, wheezing and coughing, propped up with piles of books and crayons and craft projects for small fingers. I was hospitalized once or twice, left alone in an oxygen tent, at a time before parents were welcomed into children’s hospital rooms. Many years later, my parents told me it was the hardest time in their life together. They were desperate and frightened.

My mother was a devout Catholic, and educated and worldly. I still puzzle at the ritual she performed to protect me. A glass bottle stood on the kitchen windowsill, from the shrine at Lourdes, labeled with a picture of the Virgin Mary in her blue mantle. My grandmother, who tucked holy cards into every book and said a rosary at the beginning of every journey, must have given it to her. I remember standing in the kitchen in my nightgown as she poured a spoonful of water of Lourdes and tipped it into my mouth, just like antibiotics or cough syrup.

I expected water from the pretty bottle to taste different: magnetic, miraculous, or at least French. But it tasted like water, remarkable only in that it was given to me by the precious teaspoon, and by my mother, whose anxious hope was concentrated in that spoonful of trembling water.

Jane Salisbury

PORT LAND, OR EGON

The summer I was twenty-three, I worked on a cattle ranch in Wyoming. One day my boss and I rode into the backcountry, where he tried to remove a large beaver dam, so that an incoming stream could reach a grassy meadow.

He planned to use dynamite to blast the collection of tree trunks, limbs, and mud out of existence. He planted it, rolled a long fuse out to the end of the dam, lighted it, and we rode away like fury. Then a flash of light and a deafening explosion blew more mud into the air than I ever imagined might exist. We rode to the scene of destruction

and found the dam hadn’t budged. The pond behind the dam, though muddy, had survived. The boss muttered, “Damned dam!” and we rode away.

I learned a couple of lessons that day. First, “Don’t put your trust in power; it’s likely not to work.” Second, “Consider ‘beaver ponding’ as a way of life.”

Now, at age 76, I’ve come to know that fresh water, the product of my daily meditations, continually flows through me, and when (not if) something pollutes me, its renewing flow lets me regain my focus. By continually ponding, I sense that all is well in my life.

John Gordon King

B U RN S, WYO M I N G

Nine years old. Straddling the back of my father’s neck, arms wrapped tight around his head, dizzy with that first high step. He walks the narrow board and balances a foot from the edge. I rise to a crouch, clutching his upstretched hands, my feet sliding on his shoulders, burnt sienna like the crayon I use for tree trunks and horses. Sunlight rockets off the water and off the beaded drops across his Coppertoned shoulders.

I straighten slowly, toes curling into slick muscle, knobby knees steadied against the thick, black crown of his head. I inhale, spread my arms wide; and from atop a great tower, like a tightrope walker, like a queen, I survey vistas far beyond the chaise lounge holding my mother with her book, beyond the backyard fence, past the sentinel row of eucalyptus with their pungent, endlessly falling gunite-staining leaves, clear across green groves of oranges to the hills, purple and gold with lupine and poppy. My father’s hands clamp around my ankles like a brace, and my head brushes the clouds.

A step, a bounce, and we shoot shrieking into the sky and come loose and plummet like two meteors into the cold blue shock, and we burst up through the surface laughing, exultant. He hoists out of the water in a single thrust, splashing chaise lounge and book and wife, and the next little kid scampers up his slippery back.

Winter. Worn tires slide across rain-slick pavement, plunging the van over an embankment, killing my mother.

Killing our mother on Christmas Eve. The pool is neglected, as is everything else in this fallingapart life. The tannin-black waters hunker down, closing over impenetrable depths of decomposing leaves and ooze.

I peek out through the blinds at my father. He stands on the edge staring into the deep, and there are no strong hands to keep his feet from sliding.

Lynn Larssen

S E N ECA , O REG O N

SEND US YOUR NOTES FOR ISSUE 37. WE LOVE HEARING FROM YOU! 7

RUMINATE PRIZES

2015

F I R ST P LAC E

S ECO N D P LAC E

Jody Rambo The Book of Never Saw

Andrew Deloss Eaton War Notes: Rome, 1940

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

F I N A L I STS

Jody Rambo Elegy in Which My Mother Learns to Swim

John Blair Rebekah Denison Hewitt Linda Malnack Kevin McLellan Clare Paniccia Melissa Reeser Poulin Jill Reid Mara Adamitz Scrupe Emily Shearer Kathryn Smith Mark Wagenaar

S P O N SO R E D BY Steve and Kim Franchini

JUDGE Dan Beachy-Quick

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DA N B EAC HY - Q U I C K W R I T ES :

More than an homage to Emily Dickinson, whose spirit lovingly haunts this poem, “The Book of Never Saw” describes a faith Dickinson also practiced: word and world are of most intimate relation. Here, imagination unfolds into experience of the most rarefied kind, where the unseen and the unlived betray their native lack and invert nothingness into a form of life. Forgive me, though, for making the poem sound merely philosophical–it’s far more than that. The language sings a plain-song of pure lyric realization, lulling and quickening at once. To read it–and it should be read often–is to become like the bird alive in it: caught up, in the midst of praise, in “the small commotion of wind” any true poem most truly is.

Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of five books of poetry, Circle’s Apprentice, North True South Bright, Spell, Mulberry, and This Nest, Swift Passerine, five chapbooks, Apology for the Book of Creatures, Overtakelesness, Heroisms, Canto and Mobius Crowns (the latter two written in collaboration with the poet Srikanth Reddy), a book of interlinked essays on Moby-Dick, A Whaler’s Dictionary, as well as a collection of essays, meditations and tales, Wonderful Investigations. Reddy and Beachy-Quick’s collaboration has recently been released as a full-length collection, Conversities, and he has also collaborated with the essayist and performance artist Matthew Goulish on Work From Memory. In 2013, University of Iowa Press published his monograph on John Keats in their Muse Series (editor Richard Roberston) titled A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work, and Coffee House Press published his first novel, An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky. He is a contributing editor for the journals A Public Space, Dear Navigator, and West Branch as well as serving on the board for Squircle Press. After graduating from the University of Denver, he attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He has taught at Grinnell College and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he is currently teaching in the MFA Writing Program at Colorado State University. His work has been a winner of the Colorado Book Award and has been a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Prize and the PEN/USA Literary Award in Poetry. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency and taught as Visiting Faculty at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in spring 2010. He is currently one of two Monfort Professors at CSU for 2013-2015.

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J O DY RA M BO

The Book of Never Saw I never saw the Sea— – E M I LY D I C K I N SO N

In the book of never saw she writes about the sea.

The water—as she tells it—is a map spread out on a table.

Each wave a zone of blue light. As she scrawls the words She feels a lightning tic at the small of her back and the Slow god-rocking of waves. She gives the sky interiors— Meaning a body dizzy with uncertainty. Occasionally a bird Appears praising. But it cannot feel its own motion— So caught up in the small commotion of wind.

She names one white—as if to grant its disappearance.

It nests stirless in a room of air. Next to passages about the Taste of salt and the whoosh of sea grasses, she makes marginal Notes about diminishing shores. When she moves her hand Across the page, her blue sleeve swerves as if for proof She were ordinary—but her fingers tangle like wings.

Beyond the stem of inland windows the sea billows wild— Washes soft as twilight around the house. Call it her blue Monotony. Handscrawl abyssal. A self of pearl or weed Drifting fathoms to a remoter bed below. When she breathes She greets the infinite into her lungs, the mind so plain a Wove of darkness—its near invisibility is a matter of the sky.

And the book—her conversation—swimming in amethyst— A sea tabernacle of desire—hallowing a watery floor below.

What would it matter if water were as opulent as solitude, If distant ships gestured in darkness toward impossible shores?

Here in this room—no need to fear the worldly. Anything can be named while watching clouds. The body—of quake and turn—bolting the door.

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J O DY RA M BO

Elegy in Which My Mother Learns to Swim

There appears a tree, and next to it a horse, still and unsaddled and she is saying something of comfort to it by way of touch. In warmth of bone the moonlight steadies on a small lake, the one in which as a child she washed her sister’s hair. She leads the horse obliging, through thicket and saw grass rough against her shins, to the water having the look of dark risk and a little loneliness.

She cannot take her eyes away from the blackest leg of the horse bending to paw the water. Nor the milklight of her own skin dipping beneath the surface. Nothing so dark as a lake bottom, so blind as branches from their high lookout above her—the imperfect swimmer—whose history is dry land, a shoreline of nervous wings. Cling she does, with her arms around the muscular belly of the horse who will teach her the word deep, ground her to water which will be her release. And into the lash of its watery mane she will speak the real names of the world, transcribed on her tongue to the taste of rain. Swift passenger now. No longer mother of fearful disposition, riding herself bareback into the darkness of her childhood and out again, loosed from the being of a body, a soul become a stitchery of wild grass, of leaf and sky—she rides free. And the horse belonging to no one, finding her warm against its back, feels her breath in a new dominion of wind, and follows the nudge of her legs ahold a horizon, its thin swayback of love.

Had I only known this night coming, I would have learned to be as still as lake water around her, to offer my hand—as a bidding, like a burning, a quench, a touch I longed for, undaughtered on this day I call morning, call loving her however I can.

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A N D R EW D E LOSS EATO N

War Notes: Rome, 1940 This Rome is a seed I cannot split [stop] I love that verse about unless a seed breaks open and falls into the ground, and recited it outside the Vatican when two friends left me holding their Navy caps [stop] I thumbed the fabric lips where each fold passes the other & some boys in the city flew past me with their kite & its red back against the cross [stop] A woman was trimming herbs on a small balcony & beside her a tomato plant hung in an open door [stop] Please tell Mother about the tomato plant in the door [stop]

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JILL REID

Code Blue I am pregnant, awkward as an egg the day nurses tear through her hospital door to calm the sirens of monitors and stoke the faint ember in my grandmother’s chest.

Wires curl around the twigs of her arms, but I find uncluttered skin on her blue feet, the muscles slack and cool to my swollen hands.

Inside my skin, my child’s limbs rub and spark against sore ribs.

For weeks, I hoped there was enough in me to light her too, that the unseen would keep her fizzing and humming a little longer, a little longer.

From the bed’s edge, I watch her blank face and remember the New Year’s sky the year after Junior died, how she took over his post, slipping away from supper to fill his lonesome truck with fireworks, how she charged through midnight, launching red stars and blue pinwheels, how each time we were sure the show was over, she sent another round into the anxious sky.

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J O H N B LA I R

A Philosophy of Gravity We only are what we deserve, coming early to be and passing away, tide in and tide out, hem and haw. The body douses its fallow granges with star dust and rot, its mitered temples enameled gorgeous with pale adipose.

Dull orphans, corruptible, clutter our heavens like every dirty corner of your childhood home where the celestial objects of a small life gather in dingy thick accretion, hair drifts and pills of mouse scat like whits of brain matter smacked from your head by your father’s open hand.

Now your mother is gone, blown some other where by the blunt inertia of blood ballooning out just west of the part

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of her brain where all the hell you made of her life lived, and space can now split from time, into rivers of forgetfulness in which your father still drowns in the long wakeful night of his dying.

We are all forgiven forever just once and perfection forms in us its last, perfect lies: that the things we are endure, that the things we were we can leave behind.

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E M I LY S H EA R E R

Reciprocation In Israel, orchards of fig trees are planted by cemeteries so mourners have something to eat when they visit their dead.

And the trees grow heavy and plentiful with fruit because they are fed, deep down in their buried roots.

If you would like to tell me you don’t believe in reincarnation, stand at the gates to the graveyard and say it with a fig in your mouth.

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ARTIST/ NOTE

KAREN MOBLEY: HERONS AND HIGH WATER The drawings reproduced here are from two bodies of work, Herons and High Water. I watch floods, movement of water, and the churning of the trees, birds, dead animals, and the changes in the light. I continue to seek imagery in the austere and beautiful landscape. While much of my work is based in nature, it is contemplative, not purely illustrative or representational.

Karen Mobley. Heron and Suns. Mixed media. 22 x 30 inches.

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Karen Mobley. Highwater Series. Mixed media. 22 x 30 inches. Private collection.

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Karen Mobley. Highwater Series. Mixed media. 22 x 30 inches. Private collection.

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Karen Mobley. Highwater Series. Mixed media. 22 x 30 inches. Private collection.

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Karen Mobley. Highwater Series. Mixed media. 22 x 30 inches. Private collection.

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Karen Mobley. Highwater Series. Mixed media. 22 x 30 inches.

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Karen Mobley. Highwater Series. Mixed media. 22 x 30 inches. Private collection.

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Karen Mobley. Heron Family. Mixed media. 44 x 30 inches. Private collection.

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R E B E KA H D E N I SO N H EW I TT

Because Longing Is Part of Belonging:

The father with his daughters’ names tattooed on his eyelids. The older daughter searching the trailer, the trailer, stale cigarettes and mange.

She grabs clothing, books, a lamp, a picture. Things to bring to the group home. To her, the world is a garbage dump. The world is white sand beaches, both are littered with the excrement of birds.

It’s suspicious that model homes and malls exist at all, isn’t it? Those museums of wanting, who belongs there?

I don’t want to keep you too long, but I do want to tell you about refunds.

How if you’re a single parent who goes to prison and your kids get taken by the state, you worry about the neighbors walking off with your washer.

The whale watch where everyone puked into the sea while the careening boat was surrounded by whales raising their tails to smack the water. No one even cared— heads down, breathing the boat’s exhaust.

No refunds, rough seas were announced before leaving the dock.

What if there was no warning?

What if you didn’t pay for this?

What difference does it make? Belongings stinking and stacked in a laundry basket, what is stolen, what remains and who pre-paid.

Her dad gave her some roller skates, then walked away with his head in his hands.

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SOME OF OUR STORIES JEFF BAKKENSEN

“You should tell me a story,” my nephew says, sitting at the desk in our spare room, mattress inflating at his feet. I’m cross-legged next to the air pump.

I ask what type.

I have the extra sheets airing out over a bookcase. I have a cheddar-yellow pillow stuffed into a pillowcase. From downstairs comes a bubble of laughter and forks touching plates.

“Do the one where you saw the bear,” he says. He means when my friends and I went camping in the White Mountains, maybe—oh—fifteen years ago? Way before he was born.

Yes, we ran into a bear, but it was about the size of a raccoon and turned tail when it saw us. I can’t keep dining out on the bear story.

“So you want an adventure story?” I ask. The pump is very quiet as it goes hmmp-hmmphmmp. It’s almost brand new.

“One with action,” he says. “And a joke.”

Action and a joke. Something not too long, so I can put him to bed and head downstairs before this stops being charming and turns into the type of evening-defining interruption that our guests will mention the next time they’re here.

“Like when you broke your arm,” he says. I nod my understanding. The story of the broken arm is exactly what we’re looking for.

But I told him that one when he was with us two weekends ago. I remember because I left out the part about why I was spying from the roof. My mission that day—solemnly assigned

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and accepted—was to look into the neighbor’s aboveground pool. My dad wanted a Polaroid of the neighbor’s daughter in her bathing suit. So I went up through a dormer window and army-crawled across the roof, and when I got to the edge, I had to stand up to see over the fence dividing our backyard from theirs, and that’s when I fell, thump. If the house had been taller than one story, well, then he wouldn’t have asked me to go up. He came running outside and found me lying in the weigela—big spongy pinkish thing—camera broken, and rushed me to the hospital. My nephew liked that part the best. I had him roaring with laughter when I imitated my dad tearing through the bushes trying to pull me out.

A story just like that. Something to send him to bed with a laugh so that he won’t resent being alone when he hears us downstairs. He is lonely in the grasping, frustrated way that boys his age are lonely, like they haven’t learned the word yet for how they feel. He tends to empty his head to whoever is nearby, and if he starts talking, I’m afraid he’ll tip some monstrous new failing on my brother’s part that I’ll feel obligated to mention when he gets picked up tomorrow. I need a story for him now or else he’ll start talking, and I’ll get dragged into yet another mess.

Maybe a prank story. My dad’s car was such a wreck that when we were in neutral, he could pop the wheel right out of the steering column. He’d have my brother and me in the back seat, and sometimes when we got to a stoplight, he’d take out the wheel and hand it back. Then when the light changed, he’d turn around and yell, “Drive, dammit! Can’t you see the light is green?” and throw up his hands to the other drivers in frustration, as if he couldn’t believe that his own kids were holding up traffic.

The mattress is almost done. I test it with an open palm. Done. I switch off the pump, and my nephew hops down from the chair and bounces on the mattress with his knees. A nice story with a good laugh; and when he hears us downstairs, he won’t think we’re hiding him here all alone. He looks at me, and I freeze, sure for a moment that he’s going to give me his take on the whole situation. The sleepovers with us, with his neighbors, his grandmother.

The view from fifty inches. I picture him lying by himself in the darkness. What does he do, when I turn off the light and go back downstairs, to make the spare room feel like home?

One afternoon when I was maybe nine or ten, my dad showed up at our house and announced that my brother and I were visiting him for the weekend. We hadn’t seen him in weeks, and he had a new car with a steering wheel that wouldn’t come out no matter how hard you pulled. Of course my mom was blindsided and pissed, but she wasn’t going to be the bad guy and keep us from going, so we packed our stuff, and he drove us up to his shitty little cabin in Laconia. We ate dinner and watched TV, and when it was time to go to bed—our sleeping bags laid out on the floor between the TV and the La-Z-Boy—he asked if we wanted to hear a story.

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Before he was in the army, said my dad, he knew a girl named Vera who gave up all her possessions and followed a group of Hare Krishnas up to their ashram in the Berkshires.

There, she met a teacher from India who promised to help her unlock the greatest secrets of the universe. In exchange, he asked for complete and utter faith and obedience.

She agreed and shaved her head and took on a new name. Her new name was Pakatisavaka, which means ordinary disciple. For several months, she studied Sanskrit, fasted, and meditated. She practiced mindfulness. She learned that every single thing she did was the most important thing in its own moment and deserved every last bit of her attention. There was nothing so small that it could be done halfway. At meals, she stood at the front of the line and ladled soup. When it was light out, she tended the gardens that lay around the compound. When it was dark, she meditated alone in her room or together with the other acolytes in the main building. Each thing she did, she did with every last bit of her attention. Everything else was swept away. Her teacher was so impressed with her progress that he took her aside one day and asked if she thought she was ready to take on the next step of her initiation. She said she was.

It seemed that this particular ashram was in possession of one of the most sacred relics in the entire Hare Krishna world: a life-sized, solid gold statue of Vishnu. He was bent at the waist, a hand cupped to one ear as if listening, and was so valuable, explained the teacher, that he was kept in a secret chamber in the very center of the main building. To one side of Vishnu was a stool, and all day, every day, the acolytes took turns sitting on the stool whispering prayers into his ear. It was these prayers, and Vishnu’s continued grace, that staved off destruction of not only the ashram, but the entire universe. If the cycle of prayers were ever broken, said the teacher, the very fabric of life would be destroyed.

The mantra to be whispered to the statue was Om namo narayanaya: I surrender myself to the Lord. With the teacher’s blessing, Vera/Pakatisavaka added her name to the schedule, and over the next few days, she practiced the mantra when she was tending the gardens, when she was ladling soup, and when she was by herself or with the others. Om namo narayanaya.

Om namo narayanaya. She practiced saying it on the in breath and the out breath so that she could go for long stretches without stopping. When the appointed day came, she was weak with excitement. She followed the teacher through a maze of doors and hallways into the very center of the main building and the locked closet where the statue of Vishnu was kept. Inside sat one of the other acolytes, fervently whispering Om namo narayanaya into the statue’s ear. Moving with practiced steps, Pakatisavaka crossed the room and tapped him on the shoulder. He rose, and she took his place on the stool. She whispered Om namo narayanaya into Vishnu’s ear. Nothing happened.

Out of the corner of her eye, Pakatisavaka saw the teacher and the acolyte disappear through the door, and out of the corner of her ear, she heard the door lock behind them. She

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settled down to spend the next few hours alone with the statue. She steadied her breathing.

She listened to her whisper echoing off the inner wall of the statue’s ear. She focused.

Om namo narayanaya. Om namo narayanaya. The first few minutes stretched into an hour.

Hours unfolded into blank time. There were no windows in the closet, nothing with which to mark how long she’d been there. Of course she didn’t wear a watch. Eventually, she began to wonder if, somehow, they’d forgotten to schedule someone after her, or if a sudden and silent disaster had destroyed everything beyond the closet door. Maybe she’d said the mantra wrong, and her punishment was to spend the rest of eternity in the closet alone. Then again, it was possible that this was all part of surrendering yourself, that whispering into Vishnu’s ear required so much concentration that time actually slowed down, and the hours and days that seemed to tick by were really just seconds, specks. She reminded herself that her whole being was supposed to focus on the task at hand. If she focused with her whole being, there was no extra room inside to get hungry or thirsty or worry or feel time pass. None of it mattered.

At this point, my dad’s voice trailed off. He stood up and pulled shut the blinds on the sliding back door.

“And what happened to her?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug that suggested the enormity of possible worlds. “I suppose she’s still there, repeating the mantra, waiting for someone to replace her.”

“That’s stupid,” said my brother. “If she never left the room, how did you meet her?”

My dad just smiled as if to say there were more mysteries than my brother and I were old enough to know.

“What kept the universe going before they built the statue?” I asked.

“That’s the thing,” he said. “Once you get the ball rolling . . . ” He touched our shoulders and turned off the lights and retreated to his bedroom. The next day, we went waterskiing and had a cookout and met the woman who would soon become our stepmother. But what I remember most clearly is lying in my sleeping bag that night, silently repeating Om namo narayanaya, terrified that Vera who was now Pakatisavaka was about to stumble or stop to catch her breath. I stayed awake as long as I could, my words our only protection, and when my eyes closed, I fell asleep resigned to die.

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M E L I SSA R E ES E R P O U L I N

What fills your hands that held me when I was new, as you were new once, too. They grew gnarled as trees, worn as the wooden wheelbarrow we loved as kids. Over and over down Daisy Lane. My shame came slowly, starting with the name you chose for the woman at the Walgreen’s counter, its cold shock against my ears. It came into the house and hovered near your chair. Your calloused palm pawed the air, sent your wife’s words scuttling into the kitchen. Into the body’s knowing, into my eyes. Where you must have seen yourself reflected, when I was new. Same blue, same where-we-begin, same brimful unbroken trust.

Astonished, as I am now when I hold a child, that oldest of circles. The o of a baby’s mouth.

What she learns just watching her mother.

Just watching my mother watch hers, I learned a circle is hard to break. It grows back.

Bernice took her two boys, fled her first match, fiery with drink. What he did with his hands.

Do we choose the words we give from those we are given? Mares eat oats and dozydotes and little lambs eat ivy, she sang. A kid’ll deedivytoo, wouldn’t you? I grew like grass.

With sugar-swollen feet and so little to do with your hands, you took it out on her, or anyone who asked for it. I asked for stories,

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and you drew up the brawling of brothers long grown and gone, the farm lost and left behind. Oats and barley tilled into memory.

Whistling when you drove past fields of turned earth, near violet. If I loved you, what does it mean? Her voice bent like a tree under snow when your body lay still: What am I going to do? With your hands there beneath the grass, your heart deep in its body. The open November sky.

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M E L I SSA R E ES E R P O U L I N

Imsland for Lyle In the overgrown churchyard, the stones lean over, grown tired of repeating the name.

The plain line of the grass farmer’s mouth never ripples, as he takes a key from his pocket, unlocks the church for you unasked. Love, you sit in the pew, in the town the name came from, as if to return something borrowed.

What else could you bring from California to Oslo, from tunnel to tunnel to Imsland, through mile after empty mile of snow?

The name is a common mirror here, seaming man to man as the fjord links earth to sky.

As the sheep follow you from the church to the inn, you trail a ghost here, hoping a shadow might linger in land as in language. In the end, you’ll leave as your ancestor left: alone, called by all he had lost.

Backward like salmon toward the scent of home, one that knows you by name.

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KAT H RY N S M I T H

Gathered In this valley, the sun is always behind us, light that can’t quite lift itself above the fence of mountains.

Keep me here, O Lord, in the safety of fog’s enclosure, where a solitary figure crosses the field, pruning saw in hand.

The gray orchard has not dreamed of spring, trees nestled in dormancy, their sap an unseen coursing beneath the bark.

This is the time for pruning.

The orchardist knows the saw’s perfect angle, the importance of a steady grip. He knows what thrives, budswell, small signals of bearing. A firm hand makes the cleanest cut. Nothing fruitless remains. Nothing’s left to break under winter’s burden, spent limbs bundled and burned in the damp morning. Smoke rises, indistinguishable from fog, from breath. I pray for necessary injuries, wounds that remind me, with each knotted scar, to whom I belong.

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Marie and Her Sons J U L I A M AC D O N N E L L

Mayhem in the morning: the show started around 7 a.m., a young mother trying to feed and dress her three young sons and get them off to school. Coffee in hand, I’d sit close to the living room windows of our Bronx apartment, in a building we’d just homesteaded through a city program, and watch as though it were an ancient drama—riveting, but at the same time, unnerving. A silent movie loaded with action that always edged toward danger, danger the audience could sense and enjoy long before it was experienced by characters on the screen. Three little boys driving their young mother ever closer to the edge.

Pulley clotheslines were strung from our building to the one next door on all five stories, striping this airspace like lines on composition paper. Tube socks, bras, jeans, tightywhiteys, lacy thongs, sheets and pillowcases hung forever on these lines, flapping like scarecrows if the wind was up. But the complex geometry of clotheslines didn’t stop my solitary peeping. That apartment did not have shades or curtains; our big double windows offered a clear view. After dark, with lights on over there, I could see their goings on as if on a big screen. But the morning show was the most entertaining.

Those tiny featherweights bobbed and weaved and feinted, as their mother, their poor young mother, chased them down, catching one, while another escaped. She’d threaten them with whatever weapon she might have close by, a broom, a spatula; most often, just her own two hands. A solid smack upside the head. Or she’d grasp a flailing arm or leg, and dig her fingers into tensile flesh. Her violence did not work. The chaos continued until she, one way

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or another, got the boys downstairs and outside to wait for the little yellow school buses that picked them up, one by one, in front of her building, to take them off for the day.

I couldn’t tell one of those kids from the other, never figured it out, not even after the mom, Marie, and I had “made friends” downstairs on the sidewalk. The boys, dark-haired, light-skinned, were an undifferentiated blur of skinny arms and legs as they squabbled half-dressed, fighting breakfast, fighting clothes, fighting the need to go to school. Red or white sneakers went airborne to unknown destinations along with the occasional Matchbox truck or superhero figure. Bowls of Froot Loops or Count Chocula (I guessed) and milk flew against the windows, leaving translucent patterns in the morning light.

From the living room, I could almost reach across the airspace to touch them. Almost.

If only I, I thought, like an angel of mercy, could fly across that airspace; I, the second oldest of eight children, pressed into child care and household service early, raised by a preternaturally well-organized (crazy clean) mother, I could help that woman get herself and her kids together. That’s what I thought, anyway, me, with my middle class ideals, my conviction that all problems could, with effort, be solved, my cluelessness. Separate them, I would have ordered her. Lock one in a bedroom if you have to. Focus on one at a time: underwear first, shoes last . . . hands, face, teeth before the final inspection, the rush downstairs for the bus. Never ever try to do all three boys at once. Oh, and lay out their clothes the night before; plus their school bags, with homework and all the other necessary items packed inside. That way, no frustrating last-minute hunts for a sock or undershirt; for homework. How could any mother be ignorant of such basic parenting routines? I wondered.

Our building had been the first to go empty on that block of Valentine, between 194th and 196th streets. Rescuing it had been the goal of the movers and shakers in our group: tenants’ rights advocates, the Jesuit chaplain at Rikers Island, assorted others in various stages of recovery and renewal. They, we, understood that saving 2674 was crucial to the survival of that block and of the larger neighborhood surrounding it.

The typical Bronx apartment building is a big double-winged structure enclosing 25–50 family-sized apartments built around a central courtyard, the kind that still line the Grand Concourse, some of them coming back to their original glory. Brick and concrete, built to survive for eons. By contrast, 2674 was one of 10 identical 10-unit buildings facing north toward the Concourse. Five stories divided by an interior central staircase, five units on each side of the stairs; five rooms in each unit, maybe 1200 square feet. Ages before, our row of buildings had been dubbed the Ten Commandments. Our building was “Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother.” The one next door was “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”

In their way, which was not the same way as in Park Slope or Williamsburg, the Upper East or West Sides, or the Village, these Bronx apartments were gems, built just after the turn of the century (the 20th, not the 21st), for a nascent middle class, mostly Irish Catholic.

Oak floors, glass-paned French doors, big windowed bathrooms with claw foot tubs, frosted

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glass panes in the door, more frosted glass on all the transoms over the interior doors, 10-foot ceilings. Elaborate plaster moldings embellished some walls and plaster medallions ringed the ceiling fixtures, originally gaslight. Windows on three sides for cross- ventilation. Big windows, especially in the kitchen, where southwestern light poured through from just past noon until the sun went down, and in the living room where I got my view into Marie’s world.

We moved into 2674 as squatters, taking over the building as though we had a right to it.

Nobody noticed or cared. It was 1977, and the Bronx was burning: Arson fires everywhere, some set by landlords eager to rid themselves of loser properties; others by tenants enraged by their miserable housing conditions. Back then, smoke hung forever in the bedraggled borough’s air. Soot peppered windowsills and residents often tasted ash. Incessant sirens, ululating sirens, created the troubling background music of that time. I could write volumes about the catastrophic cycle of housing deterioration and landlord abandonment as it occurred back then, but others have already done it. My perspective is narrower, a kind of tunnel vision, focused on family.

Valentine Avenue is narrow, and curved like Cupid’s bow, but the sidewalks, slate, are 12 to 14 feet wide. The Ten Commandments edged the sidewalk—no setbacks, no stoops. Just two white marble steps up to the glass-paned front doors. The windows of the first floor apartments opened directly onto the sidewalk. The buildings and sidewalks were planned before anyone foresaw motor vehicles as the premier choice in transportation, even though a D-train stop, Kingsbridge Road, was mere steps away. By the late seventies, cars, beaters of all makes, a vehicle in almost every family, lined both sides of the street. City buses, air brakes forever squealing, could barely squeeze through the sclerotic space left between them.

Morning and afternoon, in almost any type of tolerable weather, neighbors appeared outside with their fold-up beach chairs, the kind with aluminum frames and woven plastic strips. Everybody had one tucked just inside their front door. If you wanted to get the scoop about neighborhood goings on, that’s where you had to be. Once I’d realized my neighbor brought her boys downstairs every morning to catch their school buses, I, the nosy neighbor, went downstairs, too. Maybe I was thinking that I could give her some parenting advice, or maybe I wasn’t thinking at all, just being nosy, brainy, clueless.

All children are beautiful: one of my most cherished beliefs. I’d heard it said with great conviction countless times: There’s no such thing as an ugly child. In my family and the families of my friends, it had been demonstrated countless times that all children are, in their own ways, beautiful. No ugly children! Ugliness, this aphorism suggests, developed over time, through a combination of bad genes, bad luck, bad health, a fissured soul.

That first morning, downstairs waiting for the little yellow school buses, the boys next door, in close-up, shattered this belief. Sad raggedy-ass children in dirty clothes, yes, and with crazy haircuts—whatever their mother managed to chop off when she got hold of them—but that was not what stunned me. Rather, up close, their faces seemed blurred, misshapen. With their backpacks like turtle shells attached to their backs, they grunted and jabbered, made all

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Incessant sirens, ululating sirens, created the troubling background music of that time.

kinds of noises, but I didn’t understand the words. At first I thought they might be speaking a foreign language, but I quickly realized they had no language, not a single word, not even Mom or Mama, a fact so shocking I temporarily lost my own. Not one of the wild boys across the airspace could speak.

I hardly remember our hasty introductions. Her name was Marie. She was in her late twenties or early thirties, hard to say, just a few years older than I was. A natural strawberry blond, she’d intensified her color into carrot orange. The boys’ names were Charlie, Frankie, and Jose, she told me, proudly. They were nine, eight, and seven years old.

One after the other, the little yellow buses came and rumbled away with each boy. I went back upstairs wondering if they were victims of some biblical scourge, an affliction so frightening that it might, in other times and cultures, have resulted in its victims being shunted off to a gulag, a distant island, somewhere out of sight and touch with other humans.

In New York City, in the late 1970s, they were bused to schools, separate schools, for children with special needs.

Marie must have been pretty once—you could almost, not quite, see the fresh-faced girl beneath this overwhelmed and old-before-her time woman. Outside, she was always smiling, sweetfaced, grateful for other grown-ups to talk to. She wore dollar-store T-shirts, sweatpants bought from sidewalk peddlers, and the white canvas sneakers, Keds knockoffs, selling for $3 at the Bargain Bin around the corner. Her teeth, several missing, were edged with grayish black; her eyes an exhausted, red-rimmed green. The pudge around her middle was the kind earned by eating the greasy foods sold by the bodegas and food trucks in our neighborhood. Chorizo.

Pork rinds. Fried plantains. Todo que se puede comer! But something else was as evident as her boys’ affliction: Marie loved them, and tended to them, to the best of her ability. She was devoted to her sons.

I have no memory of when or how I learned that Marie was not a single parent. Her husband,

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Jose, the father of all three boys, lived upstairs in the apartment with them, but he wasn’t feeling well. He wasn’t ever feeling well. He wasn’t able to help all that much. So, I deduced, Frankie, Charlie, and Jose had the same two parents! And they lived in an intact family, something as rare in that time and place as a reindeer trotting down the street.

The boys shared the same two parents and shared many facial features. But they also shared features that had not emerged from any gene pool. These I had to research before I understood them: smooth philtrums, that dented flesh between the nose and upper lip; thin upper lips and small eye openings, aka palpebral fissures. All three had mismatched ears—not just jutting outward, but curiously misshapen, asymmetrical, as if stuck onto their skulls hastily, wherever the ear-maker could find a spot. Fetal alcohol syndrome, I realized with slow, seeping dismay. That’s what all three boys suffered from. FAS. Which meant that their facial distortions signaled deeper distortions within, malformations of the central nervous system and the brain, deviations resulting not only in retardation, but in hyperactivity, an inability to concentrate, to learn; poor impulse control.

Faces only a mother could love, I thought, and love them she did. But I had trouble imagining three strikes out. It was beyond my capacity to understand. So we stood there in the morning that fall, sunlight in slivers brightening the canyon of Valentine, Marie and I, and some other mothers, plus the gathering of old women in their chairs who were enlivened by watching the young, not just Marie’s brood, but others walking to the nearby Catholic school, Our Lady of Refuge. Drunks and half-mad glue sniffers wandered in and around us. Music, salsa, disco, reggae, early hip-hop blared from boom boxes placed in open windows or on the hoods of cars. I, a graduate student at Columbia, was, in this gathering, ever the geek, the outsider, a stranger in a strange land; me with my middle-class Catholic upbringing, fine education, and high ideals. Fetal alcohol syndrome, that’s what Marie’s boys suffered from.

Three in rapid succession. How could such a thing have happened? Surely, she bore deep guilt

Now I understand that I was turning away from something I didn’t understand and couldn’t bear to see.

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for what she’d caused. How could she not? But I couldn’t ask her much, couldn’t poke and prod the way I was learning how to do in my journalism program.

Well, she and Jose, the father, they’d been so in love. He was the love of her life. He’d taken such good care of her, and the boys, until he got sick.

Somehow or other, without prenatal care, with almost no understanding of or access to contraception, or the health care system, all three boys had burst forth before Marie understood she should not drink while she was pregnant.

Day after day, the boys, carried on, making their crazy gurgles and wha-wha sounds, which Marie seemed to understand. Outside, we watched them, with their melted faces, leap and jump around and punch each other while we waited for the buses, one after the other, to take them off to school. Then Marie would smile and sigh and shake her head in relief. Respite for a few hours. She smoked three cigarettes a day, she told me, all she could afford. She’d light the first as soon as that last bus departed, inhaling as if an elixir.

We did not become good friends, Marie and I. As the weather cooled, and as the work in my graduate program intensified, I was less inclined to go downstairs, either in the morning, or later, when the boys came home from school. At some point my peeping ended. I put drapes, pinch-pleated, on my living room windows. Now I understand that I was turning away from something I didn’t understand and couldn’t bear to see. Of course, I told Marie if she ever needed anything to give me a holler. She didn’t have a telephone, but every now and then, she’d open her window, and shout across the airspace to get my attention. Then I’d make a call or two for her: to one of the kids’ schools; to the welfare office; to a doctor. And when one of the men in our building was putting the required child guards on our windows, I asked him to go over and install some on Marie’s windows, too.

One time, after the child guards were installed, I saw one of the boys gnawing on the windowsill. Don’t let the boys chew the windowsills, I yelled over to Marie and then repeated it to her downstairs on the sidewalk.

Don’t let the boys chew on the windowsill. There’s lead paint under there. It poisons the blood, causes brain damage. She smiled at me, bewildered.

Lead paint causes brain damage, I continued to insist, a know-it-all, a stupid one.

As the holidays and winter came in, I didn’t ignore Marie and her boys so much as I just let them slip from my mind and from my heart. Easy enough. Before I knew it, my angel-of-mercy wings had shriveled. They couldn’t open far enough to stay airborne against so much damage.

On February 15, 1979, immediately after what meteorologists called “a significant snow storm,” the 6,000 school bus drivers of Local 1181 of the Amalgamated Transit Union called a wildcat strike. In the long painful history of strikes in New York City, theirs was a mere blip, recalled by hardly anyone. And it occurred in the midst of a rogue wave of labor unrest that roiled New York City during the late 1970s. Union workers as diverse as the corps de ballet at American Ballet Theatre, the city’s gravediggers, and bet takers at OTB locations had walked off their jobs, demanding variations on a similar theme: job security, higher wages, and better

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benefits. Milk delivery drivers, umpires at Yankee Stadium, tugboat operators. State prison guards, apartment building service workers. Employees of the New York Historical Society, the Long Island Railroad. Hard to imagine now.

The myriad strikes, marked by sporadic incidents of violence, created pockets of dysfunction in various parts of the city, mostly in the poor parts. At the same time, the strikes and job actions also began to seem routine. The New York Times ran a daily tally of where and how the work stoppages would impact New Yorkers’ daily lives. Since I was at Columbia, learning how to be a journalist, it was a great time for me and my classmates.

(The next year, at my first job, as a reporter at the now defunct Paterson News, I would cover the transit workers’ strike that crippled the entire metropolitan region.)

So, pockets of dysfunction here and there throughout the city. Among the deepest and most troubling of them was in that apartment next door, though several weeks passed before I noticed: those little yellow school buses that had arrived so promptly every morning, to whisk away, one by one, Frankie, Charlie, and Jose, no longer showed. Hence, no respite for Marie; no routine for the boys. Those school days, those crucial school days, had given shape and structure to their days, and had given hope to everyone who knew them that the children’s functioning might improve. Once those bus drivers walked, all of them were trapped at home.

Only in retrospect, only after I became a mother, did it occur to me that Marie could not take the boys out together because one of them might get away from her. She only had two hands. Nor could she leave them home, not with her disabled husband. She herself could only leave them for brief forays to the grocery store across the street (before it burned to the ground in a suspicious fire) and maybe, too, the liquor store on the corner, not for herself but for her unseen ailing husband.

Only later did I realize that parents with the wherewithal to do so could have made their way through a dense city bureaucracy to obtain vouchers for alternative means of transportation for their children, but Marie didn’t even have a telephone, let alone an advocate, and I was ignorant and very busy. Despite my clear view into their apartment, I had no insight at all.

Through the early weeks of the strike, a window or two was broken, and someone from our building went over to board them up. My window on their world closed, but I’d already closed it myself, at least partially, before the plywood covered them.

One day an ambulance showed up out front, its siren wailing and echoing up and down the block. One of the boys, I thought, or Marie herself. I got downstairs, out onto the sidewalk, in time to see Jose, father of Frankie, Charlie, and Jose, the mysterious, ailing paterfamilias, stretchered out of the building and into the ambulance. He did not return. End stage cirrhosis, I’d later learn.

Soon after that—days, not weeks—the third-floor tenants next door, the ones who lived in the apartment beneath Marie, alerted the men in our building that water was flooding down

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from the fourth floor apartment. I wasn’t home at the time. I heard the story afterward: Marie had bathed her three sons and then herself. Then she’d started drinking water and could not stop. When found, naked in the claw foot tub, water spilling out around her, she was close to death, in a state of extreme hyponatremia, water intoxication. Friends from our building called the ambulance. Marie was sirened off to Lincoln Hospital, and they delivered the boys to the city’s child protective services. Neither Marie nor her sons returned to Valentine Avenue.

Afterward, looking across the airspace to the dark apartment with its boarded windows, I was left to contemplate Marie’s meltdown. Bathing her children and herself, bathing as if to wash herself away, then drinking water until she almost burst. Water intoxication, an almost deadly form, but also, perhaps, a cleansing ritual, a washing away of all the sins and failings, the impossibilities of her life, an atonement, an absolution.

In mid-May, when the strike was finally over, Marie’s husband was dead, and she’d lost her three sons to “the system.” Marie herself, as far as any of us could find out, was being treated in a psych ward somewhere in the city. I don’t know what became of her or her boys.

As for her apartment, volunteers from the community rehabbed it. Once it again became habitable, some missionary nuns moved in.

In the decades since, I’ve held onto the memory of this red-headed mother and her three damaged boys. Or rather, I should say, the memory has held onto me, a small piece in the puzzle of my life, a piece I can’t force into place. In the years since, through all the changes in my life, and most especially since I became a mother, Marie and her sons have haunted me. Diligent, helpless Marie and her three wild, voiceless boys.

I still see, from the window across the way, their moon-pale faces, staring with bottomless brown eyes out into the shadows. I’ve wished her comfort and solace while searching for my own, and believe I could have, should have, done more. Back then, I didn’t know who I was and had only the dimmest notion of who I might become. My heart and brain occupied separate territories, a swath of uncertainty roiling in between. A ghostly patrol forever rumbled along this border to prevent any crossing. Still, the scalpel of Marie’s story cut me deep and clean, a story that stopped but did not end.

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REVIEW/ 36

PITY THE BEAUTIFUL

by DANA GIOIA Graywolf Press, 2012

reviewed by TRAVIS BIDDICK

In accessible and carefully phrased language, Dana Gioia takes what is broken and lost in human experience, along with what is whole and abiding, and gathers it all into five series of beautiful poems, which together make up his latest collection, Pity the Beautiful.

The first two series of poems deal with the perpetual brokenness, spiritual vagrancy, and incompleteness that characterize life. The poem “Prophecy” begins with the image of a child “deciphering / the future from a dusky summer sky” and proceeds to a contemplation of personal destiny. The poet likens the recognition of one’s destiny to the act of prophecy, which is an act of listening, rather than speaking; a disposition of active receptivity, cultivated by “the gift of listening / and hearing what is only meant for you.” The poem ends with these exquisite lines: In the green torpor of the afternoon, Bless us with ennui and quietude.

And grant us only what we fear, so that Underneath the murmur of the wasp We hear the dry grass bending in the wind And the spider’s silken whisper from its web.

Destiny, contrary to the self’s expectations, thus comes as a call of renunciation, not attainment; of stillness, not motion; of the strange, not the familiar.

One of my favorite aspects of the first two series is how fluidly each poem shifts perspectives: the wondrous, inner life of the soul and the beauties of the flesh hold Gioia’s attention with equal sway. For Gioia, the promise of a fulfilled life depends on an ability to recognize transcendence and happiness wherever they are met, not where we would like to meet them.

In “The Road” we hear the vague regrets of a man who “sometimes felt that he had missed his life / By being far too busy looking for it.”

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A plainspoken, direct eloquence characterizes most of Gioia’s pieces. But there are a few that venture into more enigmatic constructions. The rhythms of “Prayer at Winter Solstice,” whose form of repeated benediction follows that of the Beatitudes, effectively present a series of paradoxes and implied categories that serve as intimations of an inner contentedness, a being-at-peace with the uncertainties and sufferings that, mysteriously, touch that peace: Blessed is this shortest day that makes us long for light.

Blessed is the love that in losing we discover.

The third section of the book is comprised of one longer narrative poem, “Haunted.” It is a ghost story in the Romantic-Gothic tradition of Keats’ “On the Eve of St. Agnes,” complete with a surprise ending. In his poem, Keats, who was not Catholic, used the setting of a convent as a tonal device: images of Catholicism saturate Keats’ poem and create a fantastic and antiquated effect for his readers, but these are ultimately the background to the poem’s action. On the other hand, Gioia, who is Catholic, only briefly involves Catholicism in his poem, but its role is crucial to the resolution of what turns out to be a common and ordinary story, set against a contemporary and unmistakably secular background. In his essays, interviews, and speeches in recent years, Gioia has advocated for a kind of Catholic literature that speaks to an incarnate presence of the divine in the world, without imposing on writers any requirement to adhere to devotional forms or to affect pious attitudes. “Haunted” is an exemplum of this Catholic literary aesthetic.

In both their attitude and their form, the fourth and fifth series of poems are different from the first half of the book. Having accepted the inherent loss and brokenness presented in the first half of the book, the last two series of poems present different ways of living amidst that brokenness.

The speakers in “The Apple Orchard” and “Starting Over” look back on lost love and claim to have learned something from it. But only the speaker in “The Apple Orchard” has genuinely gained wisdom and insight; in “Starting Over,” the poet’s voice rebukes the young man for the solipsistic pleasure he takes in recounting to others his failures and mistakes in love. He does not reach, as the voice in “The Apple Orchard” does, the serious and simple conviction that “what we will not grasp is lost”; instead, he “will drift and dissipate like that smoke / in the streets of this beautiful city.”

Many of the poems in the second half are written in masterful folk meters. The first stanza of the book’s title poem is a fine example of Gioia’s control over the meter, which remains even and constant, even as the stress pattern varies greatly from line to line:

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Pity the beautiful, the dolls, and the dishes, the babes with big daddies granting their wishes.

Here the meter is put to the service of a dark irony. Elsewhere—as in “The Heart of the Matter,” for example—Gioia mixes duple and triple feet to create, as Coleridge often did, a sense of anticipation: The heart of the matter, the ghost of a chance, A tremor, a fever, an ache in the chest.

Love poems—both originals and translations from Italian poets—are prominent in the second half. These lyrics range in tone from the blasé (“Being Happy”), to the nostalgic (“The Apple Orchard”), to the downright steamy (“After a Line of Neruda”).

Through their deft and honest use of language, the poems of Pity the Beautiful reconcile seemingly disparate or opposed matters: the gap between the living and the dead, between language and experience, the loss of love and its regaining, and the scattering of memory and its remembrance. Perhaps the simplest example of this is the last poem, “Majority,” written on what would have been the 21st birthday of Gioia’s son, who died in his infancy, quoted here: Now you are twenty-one.

Finally, it makes sense that you have moved away into your own afterlife.

With each of its stanzas counting the years of life and starting with the word now, this poem strives to embody the painful reality of living at once apart from and in communion with the beloved dead “who grow in foreign bodies.” It establishes a connection with an invisible spirit, which nonetheless can be described in visual terms, and comes to know that spirit’s existence, ultimately, by its absence. In the hands of a lesser poet, this poem would be all mawkish contrivance and sentimentality; in Gioia’s hands, it is a clear and beautiful expression of life and death on this earth. I eagerly await what will go into and come out of Gioia’s refining hands next.

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C LA R E PA N I CC I A

On Seeing the Doe The legs had been spread against the hitch taut and pointed northward as if to alert some rescue

to the sudden vulnerability.

There had been no knowing except for the blood, the grey eye languid in its orbital and cast

down, almost peering through the spaces

and out to us—

The innocents.

My father moving between street sign and house, blocking what sense of death had arisen from that backyard,

that place of cessation, already aware that the fingerlings of sanguine fluid had sopped near my tennis shoes. I feared the flaying, then the opening

of body and eventual taking.

What legs would be hitched and bloodied again and again— The eyes seeing, but only just, as the trapper steals hands

into the hollow, carving out what might be worthy

and what can be cast away.

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M A RA A DA M I TZ SC R U P E

the iris the peony the dogwood bloom (If War Comes to You) Cerulean exhausts fields —

swarms the road burns the barns everything in its path on the march in the leaves the voided thumbnail scratch pod pulp behind

the iris the peony the dogwood

bloom

White ooze is what we harvest now: furred orbs sap seep silk pulp crimson ragged flag blossom twice flowering first in present affliction and finally — they’re calling

for rain

Slit leech gum powder poppy pour palm lick suck the clean the calm the holy battlefield balm banish all care plug the arse up good on the move on hindsight’s unfinished —

the iris the peony the dogwood

bloom

For argument’s sake or anecdote or something special: commemoration or celebration or frontline ordinary: dysentery, amputation — they’re calling

for rain

Flesh and swallow and bone and fury to remind us where we stood then where you stand now.

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_____

roiled up

—

Shadow lifts his head locks eyes with those among us slipped between us you’ll never see shimmery like white lies or good deeds gone nervy they’re calling Bad on an elbow table laid

—

for rain

he’s in and out of focus up stripped on a black slick edgeways head in hands he’s skinned

they’re calling

—

for rain

He’s muscled cartilaged mandibled a dumb-fuck animal shivved and shucked delivered.

_____

An oval framed photograph turns its face to the wall for what comes next is prescriptive:

the iris the peony the dogwood

Lachryma papaveris: God’s tears; soldier’s joy before the bonesaw.

they’re calling

bloom nocturnal

for rain

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the

J OS E P H R E I N

Halfway home, Miguel notices the growing number of people swarming ahead of him. Twenty, maybe more, hover in a half-circle five blocks away, in front of the only school in Guerrero. Along the street, a pack of feral dogs bark at the spinning lights of a bottomrusted police car. Other than the dogs, everything is eerily silent—he can hear, from a faraway house, the pulsing bass of an Aventura song. He thinks of his son Alejandro, of the new iPod he and Maria bought him last Christmas. Earlier that morning, the same song had leaked from headphones as big as bagels on Al’s ten-year-old head. His casted left arm thumped the beat against their kitchen table. With his right, he slung two new pencils and his water-damaged copy of Lord of the Flies into his backpack, then gave a half-hearted military salute before walking, as always, to the same building Miguel now approaches.

He passes a convenience store. In the doorway an overweight, flannel-aproned woman lights one cigarette off another. She eyes the crowd with mild interest. Miguel stops beside her. “¿Qué es esto?” Miguel asks her. “¿La escuela?”

She doesn’t look at Miguel. Instead she inhales, then mashes her teeth together as though chewing the smoke. He wishes she would say, Nothing, or Just a fight. A boy and girl caught in the bathroom. But he knows better. Not in Guerrero, not now. He knows the answer before she says it.

“Un joven”, she replies. “Fue llevado.”

Miguel closes his eyes. The image of the crowd lingers on his eyelids, a small black mountain of shoulders and heads. Something metallic hits the back of his tongue. Not Alejandro, he hears his mind whisper. Not Alejandro. He finds himself praying to a God in whom he doesn’t exactly believe.

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He opens his eyes. The woman is staring at him. He thanks her, though it is a strange thing to thank someone for. The woman just nods, the news of a taken boy no longer an atrocity. No longer the thing of nightmares.

Miguel continues toward the school. He’s still too far away, yet his eyes scan frantically.

He looks for a plain gray backpack, for curly black hair, for giant headphones. He looks for a cast. His head feels buoyant, blood-filled. Two blocks away, his foot catches a lip of the sidewalk and, face first, he falls.

Two months earlier, the mother had pounded on their door in hysterics. Her hair shone with grease. Puffed half-moons underlined her eyes. She was perhaps forty but appeared much older, gray in her roots and eyebrows, her face pocked from sun. “Ayúdame,” she nearly shouted at Miguel. “Ayúdame.”

Maria was in the middle of an after-school English lesson with a girl three years older than Alejandro. They were reviewing familial structures: papá es “father”, hija es “daughter”.

Alejandro sat beside the girl diligently, helping with pronunciation, pointing out passages in the grammar book on her lap. He let her practice her spelling of “grandmother” on his cast.

But then came the mother’s cries, “Ayúdame, ayúdame.” Maria sent the girl home and ushered in the mother.

“Se llevaron a mi hija,” the mother said. In her spindly hands she held three black-beaded rosaries. Mi Rosita. She reached into her purse and exchanged the rosaries with a weathered Polaroid. It shook in her hands.

Maria looked at the picture and gasped. The mother cried even harder. Maria turned away and hugged the mother fiercely, as though the two were kin. Between her own heavy breaths Maria whispered, “Lo siento. Lo siento.”

“Come on Al,” Miguel said. He led his son through the kitchen, to their small concrete backyard. Alejandro backpedaled the entire way, watching his mother attempt the impossible task of consoling the inconsolable.

That night, after Alejandro went to bed, Maria told Miguel everything. The mother could barely speak between dry cries, but from what Maria could gather, it began with the husband implicating a coworker in a drug bust. That very night came the first telephone threat. Then shouts and squealing tires from the streets, pictures of mangled carrion glued to their adobe walls. They lived the following weeks behind padlocked doors, leaving only for food, never feeling safe. Weeks of noise and paranoia. Of unrelenting fear. Then, just as things seemed to quiet down, their six-year-old daughter Rosa left for school and never came home.

“She wanted to see you,” Maria said. “Ayúdame. She kept saying it over and over.” Maria opened her hand, revealing one of the mother’s black rosaries.

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“That’s,” Miguel said, searching for the right word. “Unfortunate.”

Maria shook her head. Unfortunate wasn’t the right word, but then, what would be? Miguel thought of his English Roget’s on his desk, coffee-stained and dog-eared and nearly decrepit. A gift from Maria when he’d gotten his first freelance job. Unfortunate. Calamitous. Hopeless.

“I don’t know,” Miguel said. “It’s—” “That girl, Mickey. That poor girl!”

“I know. But, Maria, we have to think about us, too.”

“Ayúdame,” Maria said. “I can’t stop hearing it.”

Miguel woke in the middle of the night to urinate. When he returned he found Maria sitting up against their headboard.

“They took her child,” she said. “It’s enough when it’s their putas. Their drogas. But not our children.”

She held the Polaroid in both hands. Rosa had a large forehead, uneven pigtails, one front tooth missing. A casual, peerless smile. A smile not unlike his son’s.

“But what,” Miguel begins, but then stops himself. The question—But what can we do?— sounds cowardly even in his mind. Before Alejandro was born, Miguel had been the one inclined toward social justice. Twin cousins of his—distant relatives, yes, but he had met them— had disappeared in a border-crossing attempt. It was a common enough story: they’d saved money and paid it to the wrong person. But that it was common hadn’t seemed any reason to ignore it. If anything, the opposite. That was before Alejandro was born, before they had more to lose than their principles. More to lose than their own lives.

Miguel tried to hand the picture back to Maria. She just looked at it, said, “Oh Christ,” and rolled away from him, leaving it in his hands.

In the next weeks, Maria helped Rosa’s mother envelop the town in posters—a scanned, grainy copy of the Polaroid at its center, the headline ¿ME HAS VISTO? in bold blue, the mother’s number and email address at the bottom. Even when the mother couldn’t, Maria canvassed until her heels blistered. She postered the church, the two gas stations, the library. When she ran out of public spots, she went door to door. She asked questions to anyone. Miguel turned away one after another of her English students, causing Alejandro to sulk about the living room like a caged animal.

“Where’s Mom?” he asked one evening. He sat on the couch tossing the marshmallows from a dry bowl of Lucky Charms into the air, trying to catch them in his mouth.

“You’re picking those up, you know,” Miguel said.

“That’s not an answer.”

“Out.” “She’s out a lot.”

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Miguel walked over to the couch and lifted Alejandro in his arms. His son’s body was slack, unmoving. Miguel noticed that his feet barely hovered off the floor. He felt heavier, thicker around the shoulders. Miguel wouldn’t be able to hold him much longer. Before setting him down, he kissed the crown of his head.

Alejandro looked at him. “Okay,” he said, dragging out the O. Miguel looked out the window. “Fine,” he said with a surprising conviction. “Let’s go find her.”

But the conviction didn’t last. After a few blocks, he ambled down the sidewalk without purpose, Alejandro listening to music at his side. He didn’t want his son involved in this, but then he didn’t want any of them to be involved, wished in vain that the hysterical, rosary-bearing mother had never knocked on their door. But no, he would have to wish back even further, to those moments when he stubbornly chose journalism instead of, among other things, dentistry, auto repair, electrical maintenance. Jobs where wives and delirious strangers expected nothing of you other than to clean and pull their teeth, to enliven dead cars or wires. Jobs that you could check yourself into and out of with ease.

“Cold tonight,” Miguel said, but Alejandro didn’t hear. Miguel turned his attention to their neighborhood, where a quiet life pulsed from behind half-open wooden jalousies. He knew his neighbors well, watched their children grow as Alejandro grew: the Guinns, a family of four, with two young girls who could read well above their grade and also recite in a shrill staccato every Rihanna song; childless Felicia and her husband Jiménez, a man who migrated to Texas every year during the dry season, leaving his wife to wonder each time if this was finally the year he wouldn’t return; and Mrs. Galancia, a single mother who seemingly spent more time tending to her potted garden than her countless children. She knelt in front of them now, plucking weeds and undergrown tomatoes. As Miguel and Alejandro passed, she ducked her head to avoid them.

By now, Maria had been to her house a dozen times, had likely taken Rosa’s mother with her at some point. At the end of the block, Phillipe—the man Miguel had played chess with for nearly five years after college—also looked away. These were people who, not a month earlier, sought out Miguel to talk at any opportunity, asking him about news in Guerrero or Mexico City. Those who

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knew English liked to show off their vocabulary, words like emaciated and incandescence that even Maria had to look up. Now they looked at him with pity, or fear. The fear of association, of contamination. Pity or fear, fear or pity: anymore Miguel couldn’t tell the difference.

Before long, he realized he was walking the daily path to his office building. It was three stories, the largest on its block, though otherwise unexceptional—sparse, cloudy windows, nondescript brick. Miguel considered entering the building, taking Al up to his desk littered with email printouts and yellow Post-its, and simply watching for his wife from his office window. She wouldn’t just walk by, of course, but the thought of taking sanctuary from accusatory eyes comforted him.

But then the door opened, and a coworker, a younger female journalist who liked to be called Vicki, stepped outside. Her black hair was long and her waist thin. She had just returned from a college in America—somewhere near St. Louis, he may have overheard—and walked with the speed and enthusiasm of youth. She almost ran into Miguel before looking up.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Vicki said. “Miguel, right?” She looked to Alejandro, who smiled his ridiculous lady-charming smile. “This your son?” She shifted the folders she carried into one hand to tousle Alejandro’s hair with the other. His son leaned into the hand like a cat. “Poor little guy! What happened to your arm?”

“Football,” Alejandro said. “I was on this killer breakaway, and—” “We’re just out,” Miguel said, stopping his son from his own imagination.

“We’re looking for information,” Alejandro jumped in. And before Miguel could stop him, he added, “About the lost girl. Rosa. Have you heard? My mom’s looking for her.”

Vicki continued to smile, though her eyes moved from Alejandro to the ground.

“These things,” she said, and then again, “These things,” as though the repetition would somehow explain what she meant.

“I didn’t know her,” Alejandro said. “She was younger than me, so.”

Vicki bent down to Alejandro, her young body assuming the strange, fixed position of the old and wise.

“Have you heard of the Serenity Prayer?” she asked. Alejandro shook his head. “My mother

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taught it to me before she died, and it has really helped me. Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” she recited. “The courage to change the things I can, and most important of all, the wisdom to know the difference.”

Miguel looked at Alejandro. He stared at Vicki with an avid attention, though whether it was because of her words or her face, Miguel couldn’t tell.

“We better be getting home,” Miguel said. Vicki smiled and nodded.

“I wish you all the best,” she said. “I really do.” She reshifted the folders into both arms, cradling them like a newborn child, and walked away.

They reached their block. Alejandro finally turned to him and said, “What the hell was that?”

“Watch your language,” Miguel said. “I don’t know. A prayer.”

“I know it’s a prayer, Dad. What does it mean?”

“What does any prayer mean?” he asked, but his son just kept staring. “Okay, so . . . it’s, you know . . . it means that things happen for a reason. That God has a plan.”

Alejandro thought for a moment, then lifted his cast. “Like this?” he said. “God broke my arm for a reason?”

“No,” Miguel said. “Well, maybe. It’s just there to help people feel better, Al. That’s prayer.”

“Oh, okay,” Alejandro said. “I get it.” But as they approached their house he studied his cast, turned it over as though some answer would be written there, in plain English, for him to see.

Miguel stares at the sidewalk. His vision has tunneled—he can see only the gritty, haphazard pattern of the concrete below him, and on it, drips of his blood beading like rubies, refusing to soak in. Somewhere in his mind, behind the distant ring in his ears, he hears the echo of Vicki’s prayer.

He pushes himself up, shakes his head until his vision returns. People continue to flock toward the school, and he joins them, excusing his way forward. He looks all around—no sign of Alejandro. He fights the urge to shout his name.

At the steel gates of the school stand two officers and a teacher he doesn’t recognize.

The shorter, younger officer talks to the teacher, scribbling notes on a ledger. The larger, mustachioed officer hovers behind with arms crossed. Miguel approaches him. “¿Quién es?” he asks the officer. “¿Que joven?”

The officer looks askance at Miguel. “¿Quién eres?”

“Un padre,” Miguel says. “Solo un padre. Mi hijo es—” The officer stops him and nods. His face softens. He is, Miguel realizes, a father himself.

“No le dije,” he says. You didn’t hear it from me. Then the name, whispered in a soft voice, softer than the officer’s large frame seems capable of, so soft that Miguel almost misses it: “Guidice Espinosa.” Miguel’s breath releases itself without warning.

The officer nods again. “No es su hijo.”

“No, no.” Miguel says. “Pero, eres su amigo.”

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The younger officer calls out, so the older one pats Miguel on the shoulder as a goodbye, then points back to the crowd.

Miguel stays among them longer than he should. From what he can piece together, there was only one witness, a girl who saw a short, bald man with arms covered in tattoos. The description of a thousand men, men like his wife’s brother and three uncles. Men like many of these children’s own fathers.

“Es una vergüenza carajo,” an elderly woman says to him, shaking her head. She rolls her thumbs over a deep purple rosary. Miguel thinks of Rosa’s mother. But then a man approaches and steps in front of the woman. “¿Es periodista?” he says to Miguel. He takes a step closer, pointing now, his finger nearly poking Miguel’s chest. “¿Sí?” He repeats his words, slowly, as though talking to a child: You are a journalist, no?

A few of the people around them turn their attention to Miguel. The rosary-bearing woman shuffles out of sight. Beyond the crowd, the large officer stands watching.

“No,” Miguel says. “No soy.”

“Sí, es periodista,” the man repeats. This time not a question. He lifts his finger in the air. “¿Por qué estás aquí?”

Miguel denies again. He’s only a father. He’s concerned for his son’s friend. He’s not a journalist, not here to write a story, he swears. It’s just—it could have been his own son. Could have been any of theirs.

The man lowers his hand, but his arms twitch, brimming with a misplaced anger ready to erupt. The officers converge, whisper. Miguel quickly excuses himself past a group of teenagers and walks away, fast. He has to stop himself from running. Four blocks down he looks over his shoulder—the crowd still watches him. He continues all the way to his turn, where he hesitates, then walks five, six, seven blocks out of his way. He finally breaks out of sight, but still checks behind him nearly every step, feeling the crowd’s eyes on his back all the way to his door.

That night he approaches Maria, ready to abandon his job, their home. He has it all planned.

Tomorrow, they would keep Alejandro from school, as many parents would be sure to do.

Together, they would drive to his office, where Miguel would quietly slip a note of resignation onto his desk. Finally, they would hit Motorway 15 and go south, south south south, stopping only when necessary, never turning back. Maria’s family in Oaxaca was poor—farmers of apples only good for feed—but at least they were farther away from this, from abducted Rosas and Guidices, from men who stole children who wanted nothing more than to return home from school.

But when he tries to get Maria’s attention, she doesn’t listen, just types away on her old

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Compaq. The V key is missing, and every time she needs it—more often than usual, it seems—she pokes down her index finger as though squashing a bug.

“Please Maria,” Miguel says. “At least tell me what you’re writing.”

Half a minute later Maria finally stops. She rubs the crown of her nose.

“Someone has seen her, Mickey. I’m sure of it. They’ll come forward when you run this.”

“You’ve got to be,” Miguel says, but stops himself. “Think about us, Maria. Think about Alejandro.”

“I have.”

“I was threatened today!”

This gets her attention. She finally looks up from her paper. “What happened?” she asks.

“I was at the school.”

“And someone tried to hurt you?”

“Well, not directly, but.” Maria looks back down. He’s lost her already. So he raises his voice.

“It’s not safe to be a journalist,” he says. “Not here. We have to leave.”

“And go where?” she asks the computer. “Isn’t this why you became a journalist in the first place? Isn’t she?” Maria raises a hand to the air, as though summoning Rosa. “And now that boy.

What about him?”

“That’s different, Maria.” But what he meant was: I’m different. He puts a hand on Maria’s shoulder. “We have to consider Alejandro.”

“I do. Every day. But that boy, he was someone’s son too. I think about them, about everyone who’s been taken, and I.” She squints, sucks in a large breath of air. Tears still find their way out.

Miguel touches her neck, just below her hairline. “We can’t,” he starts. “We just.”

But he cannot find words, English or Spanish, to say what might be said.

Later that night, he wakes in a sudden start. The moon casts an iridescent blue into their bedroom. He extends his leg to touch Maria’s, to ground himself in the world again, but she’s not there. He rises, walks to their bedroom door and opens it. From the kitchen comes the dim yellow overhead light and the clicking of her keyboard. He envisions her eyes red from sleeplessness, loose strands of hair falling to her face. He feels, like a shiver, the sheer obstinacy of her resolve.

He looks across the hall. Through Alejandro’s ajar door, he sees the clump of blankets where his only son enjoys the sound sleep of a ten-year-old. And, because he can’t sleep, he closes his eyes and silently begs someone—is it Rosa? Maria? God himself?—to forgive him his weakness.

He stands in the doorway and listens as his wife feverishly types a story he will never run.

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ARTIST/ NOTE

LYNDA SMITH-BUGGE: UNDRESSING OF TREES My “undressing” of trees reveals both their beauty and their imperfections.

Bringing forth rough exteriors and exploring rich hidden interiors, I shape fallen trees into works of art.

Tree wounds and scars suggest strength and history to each piece. I invite the observer to witness the simple grace of line, texture, and rhythm created by the forces of nature. Thunderstruck was a neighbor’s cherry tree struck by lightning. The center of the sculpture is splintered, revealing the force of the lightning strike.

Each of my sculptures is a witness to external troubling times and internal graceful gifts. When my husband’s daughter had a motorcycle accident, we became guardians of her three traumatized children. Arms of St. Marks was made to commemorate this time of grieving. The split walnut vertical carries the horizontal beam of our family’s suffering. The copper tubing represents the community upholding each family member with love.

Mending is my first major work and was truly part of the mending of my soul.

As a fellow woodworker once put it, “Working with wood is not frivolous— you cannot paint over your mistakes. It calls for courage, confidence, and clarity from the artist—and few have it. Wood holds secrets—requiring the artist to be open and flexible. It is demanding work.”

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Lynda Smith-Bugge. Rain Catcher. Walnut, apple, ceramic, copper. 55 x 32 x 16 inches.

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Lynda Smith Bugge. Gnosis. Boxwood, walnut. 53 x 16 x 16 inches.

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Lynda Smith-Bugge. Thunderstruck. Cherry. 57 x 15 x 19 inches.

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Lynda Smith-Bugge. Proud Stance. Burled maple, oak. 51 x 9 x 13 inches.

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Lynda Smith-Bugge. Proud Stance. Burled maple, oak. 51 x 9 x 13 inches.

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Lynda Smith-Bugge. Exuberance. Apple, burled maple. 12 x.12 x 15 inches.

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Lynda Smith-Bugge. Divine Hand. Cypress, poplar. 14 x 14 x 12 inches.

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Lynda Smith-Bugge. Mending. Cherry, walnut, copper. 34 x 16 x 16 inches.

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L I N DA M A L N AC K

That I Might Know You Utterly Would you be so brown a shroud, so yellow-throated a species only half saved? Song in a box, captured wren?

Or are you one word uttered by Abishag —Beloved? Thunder caught in a dark sky, imprint of lightning on sand?

Beloved box of sky, throw over me your yellow scrap of half-uttered song.

Rend me with this new species of light. I am Abishag, who swallowed the dark imprint of your thunder.

I ask you, I ask me, Could it be…?

What species of yellow is this that thunders in the dark shroud of sky and captures me—half wren, half Shulamite—by the heart? Beloved, save for me the light’s last tightening, your imprint, that I might know you utterly.

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K EV I N M C L E L LA N

You Grip a Key on the sidewalk a stilled rabbit facing you / this grayish dawn / until the quick -ening / reminded of the fearcellar and safety / now in front of the moored sailboats / each numbered black / each with different colored stripes / not unlike a set of billiard balls / you recall when an ex called it off without you / when this ex put sinking-stones in pockets of the no longer shared overcoat / oh the white / the sails in wind / when you begin / begin slow-learning the exhibit / your sorrow will give way

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A L EXA N D RA BA RY LS K I

How to Sort Tomatoes

My mother picked her tomatoes according to color; she felt for cracks and sunken soft spots, making sure it did not sink in on itself as she held it, that the skin did not slide.

I uncross my arms, exposing soft spots.

I fear you’ll fold into yourself under the overripe weight of me, that my hands, under your shirt, (sorting through the basket of your ribs) will break apart your loose skin.

You explain your thinnest parts; I kiss, tenderly, your too-soon wrinkles, but your flesh still slides and splits open over me. Your hands create a cradle.

Bruised, I break into you.

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CA R LY J OY M I L L E R

apostle When water presses tightly to your ear and your body seizes, do not panic.

I do not strike in the same place twice. Hear how your breath staggers, turns manic like the twelve-year-old boy who drowned by the dock last March. His bones were not dense enough to beat up from the algaed ground.

My voice is only as steady as the fence— post cross that marks his jump. There would be nowhere safe if I did not respect the living’s space where the roots hit the edges of the creek. I take one, leave two for grieving. Now slow down your prayer, and carry this message with you: I’ve spun his body into tulips, taught him to swim and speak.

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CA R LY J OY M I L L E R

apostle delivers in the kitchen Roofs receive rain and birds in the city.

Accepts them as they are.

You wake in a fry-pan room, sun slapping your skin red. This happens to everyone. What you have longed for, yes, I will give you. Dust yourself with pollen then set yourself to shackling tongues in other mouths to understand silence. Land on the roof and be attentive: this is the hour babies sleep, the hour of pressing weight onto another for pleasure. It pleases you. Even with him gone, touch pleases you. So you walk grateful, stammer graces under your breath. Your skin marbled, the kitchen counter blue-veined. Welcome back to coolness. Rest, in it.

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wills and testaments LINDA MCCULLOUGH MOORE

My Aunt Effie’s lawyer called yesterday to tell me to stop by to pick up her last will and testament. I always thought that wills required some Agatha Christie moment with a handful of disgruntled second cousins, thrice removed, and a favored companion—newly on the scene—who gets left all the loot. But no.

I sat in my cold car and read in legalese that, with the exception of two porcelain bowls and a bronze statue, Aunt Effie leaves the lot to me, in memory of her mother who she says loved my father with a deep deep love—two “deeps” with not a comma in between them—and in honor of my own mother, whom she says was unfailingly kind to her. And that is how what happens in the world will get itself remembered: people write it down.

There’s one more thing, a codicil. She wants the executor—that would also be me—to move the graves of her mother and father. To dig her parents up and bury them again. That was the phrase my father always used to denote sincere displeasure. “We ought to dig Mussolini up and bury him again.” That sort of thing.

And this, it seems, is what Aunt Effie wants me to do. She was born in 1917, her father died in 1918—Spanish flu is a respectable surmise—and to my certain knowledge he was a man she never mentioned, not one time, in my hearing. But now that she is dead, he is the man whom—with his wife—she wants me to resurrect and carry out past the Motel 6, beyond the high school and the Lobster Hut, to the new cemetery—well, new in 1920, whisper-close to his demise. She calls him dad: “And bury us together, mother, dad and me,” the will says in plain English, making legal the possibility of change long decades after everything seemed pretty settled.

I wonder will the board of health allow it.

I wonder is there anybody I would ask executors to disinter and carry far away to lie by me? Anyone possessed of a desire to cart my carcass across the town to lie beside forever?

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But this will wait, as surely she and they have waited for so long. For the moment, I am charged only with making it through the afternoon, to wake and bury this small woman, eulogize, commit her soul to God’s own righteous hand.

My parents died in the same summer, and I came home and sold the house, and then never came back, not one time again, to see the aunt they left behind. The aunt—something of an oversight—too elderly to stand up for rights she may have been unsure were hers to claim.

She should have thought to have children—children, who feel like they must come to visit. No matter what.

It’s easy to drive here. Far too easy. I should have come to visit, instead of sending letters, flowers when guilt surged, presents when the calendar suggested that it was the thing to do.

But I’m here now.

All she has to do is die, and I come running.

I walk into the funeral weighted with my life: my brand-new divorce, my sometime desperation, beside which all depressions pale. I plop down in a middle seat. I’ve got my pick of pews. I am the first one here. My whole life may be a train wreck, but at least I’m punctual.

I figured I might sit here alone and pay tribute, but first I’ve got to come up with the person mourned today, rifle through rememberings, bits and pieces, snippets out of which to make up one whole aunt. This woman, so tertiary, almost incidental. I sit here in the empty church and think I should perhaps remind God of her story; though I am no good whatsoever at this thing. There is so much I never took the trouble to find out. The questions never occur to me until I see a person lying dead, and then my mind will pepper spray the coffin.

The last time I was in town to see my mother, I visited Aunt Effie in the nursing home. I only stayed a little while, then wheeled her down the hallway to the dining room and over to her table of assigned companions. I made a big fuss over the wobbly, fruited Jell-O and the crinkly paper, red and yellow autumn leaves.

“When are you coming back today?” Aunt Effie turned on me these hopeful eyes I knew could see now only the biggest shapes, those cast in the harshest light. “When are you coming back today?” she said. “I’m not,” I said, knowing full well that the very rocks would cry out if I did not speak the truth. It seemed to me, standing there beside her table, that no matter how many times I might return that day, the hours would still—swift—careen and stumble till no day remained. To visit again would only postpone for a few hours that same bereft conclusion.

There was hope in those unseeing eyes and a pleading I was somehow proof against. I am not proof against the facts that followed hard upon that day. Not a month later Aunt Effie crossed the line—she who could neither walk nor stand—the line between the need of one and two attendants to help her from her chair. On the day that two were needed, she was moved to a different building, to a room she was consigned to share with the bones and body of a woman no longer resident in flesh. And, once there, Aunt Effie descended swiftly from the pert and conscientiously religious woman living in a country I refused to spend one day in, to a dozing, withered woman in the land her brand-new roommate had already scouted out

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and mapped before her. My reaction then was to tell myself she’s old, ninety-two, as though this made acceptable the mean and dreadful maintenance—the bleak and dark reduction to breath and bread and pudding, diapers, dreaming nightmares: sleeping and awake.

I would pay a local woman every week to go and to bear witness. “Visit her whenever possible, just in case she ever knows you’re there.” Blood money. Dollars paid to silence conscience, bind and gag the nagging knowing I abandoned her and got on with my interesting life.

But no money has been coined or printed that might stand between the picture in my mind as I am drifting off to sleep—the sight I block and dance away from, in place of any image in its stead—the sharp true image of my aunt sitting in her wheelchair at the table asking me, When are you coming back today? The video of my reply: I’m not. Some dark nights I count the days until I hear my daughter speak those words to me.

People start drifting in, and suddenly we are assembled and begin. A young woman I’ve not seen before stands to read something she refers to as a poem prayer. I’m not sure about reading poems to God. Out loud. In public. I’m not sure how it strikes people; how it strikes God. I wonder about being God and hearing all the insipid things that people say so frequently and stupidly on His behalf. I see eternal fingers toying with the thunderbolts, feel those fingers drumming on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. I do not ever see God sitting down. He stands and listens patiently—that is: not smiting anyone—while people in overheated, over-perfumed funeral parlors read poems about Him and what He does or doesn’t want, or think, or plan to do.

I think if I were God I would have very little patience with the poetry. I’m not God, and I have very little patience with it.

I try to see God in whatever room I’m in. My new status makes it seem a good idea to keep an eye on him. My last aunt dead now—sweeping clean the universe of that whole generation—leaves the field to me, the solitary representative of their offspring. A thing like that, it gets your full attention.

The service feels too brief and easy, too spontaneously done, and not for the first time, I think perhaps it would have served us well to have some Catholics in the family. Or high church Episcopalians, someone who at least would not run screaming from a bit of liturgy, some litany that when they finally got it right, they had the sense to say, There. That’s what we will say forever now.

The preacher asks if anybody would care to say a few words and Hazel Ferguson, who’s older than the Church and probably more Christian, pulls herself up to her feet and turns to face our small assembly.

“Effie and I were girls together. We played dolls and went to school and church and downstreet, and we lived next door for more than eighty years. And now all of a sudden she’s dead. I can still remember the day the chair parts from Scranton fell from the sky; we told each other we’d been spared for a righteous purpose, and we would need to be very, very good

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and so we were. And now she’s gone, just like that.”

And with a quick thud Hazel Ferguson sits. Two more prayers—a little chatty to my taste— and we’re done.

“I’d forgot about them chair parts from Scranton,” an old woman says to Hazel walking out. I had figured Hazel was a little touched, as we used to say, but maybe chair parts is a

some dark nights i count the days until i hear my daughter speak those words to me. code these women have. Like falling off the roof, which was my mother’s phrase for monthly periods, that word about as apt as hers.

“It was the only major tornado in Pennsylvania in a hundred years.” Hazel turns, addressing me. “And furniture was lifted up and carried for a hundred miles, and bits and pieces fell out of the sky and landed on children’s heads. But not on Effie, not on me.”

And what will be the story some old woman tells the day they bury me? Will it be as unlikely, as suggestive of invention, as these two-foot splinters raining from the sky? Or will some stranger only mumble prayers, and dust his hands, instructing everyone to go in peace, with not so much as one amazing recitation?

Now I, who have lived a life made up of days and moments of unfaithfulness, made of my lack of caring and some fraction of distraction, am now to move heaven and earth—the latter literally—to carry out the wishes of my aunt. If she was alone in life, and oh she surely was, then she will lie forever on a hillside in western Pennsylvania surrounded by her mother and her father, for that is certainly the placement I will order: the daughter in the middle.

What child does not wish to lie just there?

A man answers the phone on the fifth ring.

“Hello, I have two bodies that I would like to move.” I speak quickly, fearing he might hang up and never answer the phone again. “It’s not my idea. It’s for my aunt. She just died.”

“Sorry lady, we only move furniture,” the man says. “We did a garden shed, but that’s pretty much it.”

“Excuse me?” I sound a bit more frantic than I’d like. “Is this the Oakwood Cemetery?”

It’s not.

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In fact, it seems impossible to contact any cemetery, old or new. At one point I decide my most efficient move would be a quick trip to the hardware store for a couple of shovels, followed by a drive down Main Street on the lookout for a few low-life teenagers loitering about. I would pay them fifty bucks a piece to rob the graves for me. Fifty? Or seventy-five?

We’d also need a truck and enough turf to camouflage new graves. The color would need to match. God made so many greens.

That’s the problem with committing crimes. There’s so much detail work. I’ve left a dozen messages on the cemetery answering machine, each one as I imagine a bit more winsome than the last, more likely to enlist the sympathies of the caretaker, if not his backhoe.

The last time I had to stop myself just short of crooning, “Bring out your dead.” I’ve tried everything else.

But finally, once I get a call back, it turns out all things are possible.

It’s only a matter of paperwork, long forms printed on dead trees, asking both the cause of death and occupation of Aunt Effie’s people. The only thing that comes to mind for her father’s day job is inventor. My father told me Uncle Fred invented the cow catcher, that scoop-shaped attachment on the front of locomotives that not so much catches, as flings,

that’s the problem with family history. so much wild invention, such thin tethers to the facts. the odd cow caught chewing cud upon the track. That’s the problem with family history. So much wild invention, such thin tethers to the facts. But has there ever been one time in the history of the world when a legal form did not tell at least one lie?

They only ask that I be present for the transport—a word that used to mean so many things. I’m asked if I would like to view the remains. Apparently some people do, that would be some subset of the population who digs up dead people in the first place. A person can’t help thinking of the state of the contents of the coffins. Contents. Stop yourself crossing the kitchen in the warm, yellow sunlight of the morning, and go a few rounds with that word. I who am alive and kicking—or at least, complaining—am slated one day to be contents. You, too.

The forms I must complete also express some curiosity about what prompts the move to a

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new location, like some review page on a hotel website.

The man in charge walks in and takes my form from me, and starts to read.

“Margaret. McKenzie?” He speaks my name as though he’s offering me a chance to deny it.

“Margaret McKenzie.”

“Yes,” I say.

“You don’t remember me.” The man sounds positively cheerful. “You don’t remember me.”

It seems he is prepared to say each sentence twice.

“Duane Doucher.” He reaches out to shake my hand, speaking a name that lays claim to a memory kept distinct, pristine, across more years than I can number. “Duane Doucher,” he says again.

When I was in the seventh grade, with five long years to live before the appearance of my first boyfriend, one night I got a phone call.

“Hello, this is Dwayne Doucher, and I wonder if you’d like to go to the movies with me.”

“Who is this?” I said. “Who is this really? You think this is funny?”

And this boy, this seventh grader—saddled with a name unkind enough to ride him mercilessly till he’s dead and even then provoke titters from the unfeeling who will read aloud his gravestone as they pass—could do nothing but repeat the sentence he had rehearsed to the exclusion of all others.

Only the next day would my friend Barbie Hoffman point out this boy whose name I didn’t know, in the hallway after science class, then, as today, standing patient, smiling, ready to be pleased.

“Duane,” I say. “Of course I remember you.” It is the truth, if a man is no more than his name.

“Of course I remember you.”

“You were a cute girl,” he says. Perhaps the kindest sentence ever spoken. The girl in question had a face where pimples fought for floor space with red blotches, where stringy hair hung limp or frizzed beyond explaining, and arms and legs were bony limbs I never could rely on.

“You were a cute boy,” I say. He beams.

Maybe he does not remember my stupidity, that awkward cruelty: the sorry product of my insecurity. And should I take him now down memory lane? Remind him of that phone call?

Apologize? For what? For my inability to believe that anyone could have his foolish name? That anyone would ask me to go anywhere—even to the movies, which were at that time still a sin, the thinking of my parents being that the payment of the ticket price supported the licentious living of the movie stars. Licentious was the word they used: in my mind, something terrible enough that you could only do it if you were licensed. Even at the time it struck me that the price of my one ticket would but subsidize the most miniscule of sins.

“I asked you to the movies once.” Duane speaks as though reciting some accomplishment.

“You couldn’t go. You had tonsillitis. You were taking penicillin.” And so does life provide protective coating, so does imagined penicillin kill an illness that could spread to every organ, penetrate a person and his years.

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“I remember,” I say. “I was really sick.” May this lie atone.

“So you want to change the past then?” Duane says.

I frown.

“You want to move these bodies. You want to go back and change things that was pretty much set.”

His grammar makes me feel like I’ve come home. Language alone is enough to bring me back to my beginning.

“We all would like to change the past,” I say. “A lot of it. Most of it.”

“I wouldn’t,” Duane says. He who has made of my adolescent insecurity and ignorance a throat infection, requiring seven days of medication.

“But what if we could?” I say. “What if we could change the past?”

What if I had said yes to Duane Doucher on that school night long ago? What if I had told my mother I was going to youth group and we had gone to see “My Blood Runs Cold,” with Troy Donahue, blonde and ruddy-looking even in black and white, and what if walking home Duane had held my hand and wondered out loud might I like to be his girlfriend, and then for all the years of junior high and high school he had been in charge of my defining, stripping me of the necessity of feeling every minute ugly, awkward, full of shamefulness.

Might we two have married after graduation, had three dimpled, cheerful children, then divorced for reasons no one could explain. Would I then be much as I am now—still looking to earn floor space on the planet, trying to pretend that I feel worthy?

Or . . . what if we had not divorced, but had loved through the long years that it turns out are the only thing a lifetime is?

“Why would you want to change the past?” Duane says.

“I’ve made a lot of mistakes,” I say.

“I bet that’s not true,” Duane says. “I bet you just did the best you could, even when it was hard to do.”

Imagine being married to a man who talked like that. What is is never quite as clear as what is when you put it smack up against what might have been. There was a hurricane that hit Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the fall of 1926, (you could look it up) and eyewitnesses saw sticks and slivers of the blasted furniture and clapboards flying fifty miles away. And two little girls—it is a fact—weren’t hit by wild debris. It missed their heads by inches; it took their breath away. They thought about it till the day they died: What might have been.

“So then,” Duane says, “we’ll move old Fred and Grace to a brand new final resting place.” He makes it sound like a thing a reasonable person might well do. “We’ll do it Monday morning.”

When Duane Doucher called me up that night, I didn’t even know who he was, I’d never heard his name. I didn’t know that he would be the one to one day move dead relatives for me and give me cause to wonder—once all the people in my family were dead and gone away, and I was left alone. That night he called, I thought that it could only be a prank. I didn’t know what life was like. I didn’t know how you were meant to live it.

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M A R K WAG E N AA R

Bird’s Eye Impromptu I come to thinking of the Mandaean priests-in-training, seven days & nights without food or sleep.

I come to in time for last call, for the hosannas of uplifted hands— beneath the little spotlights cups & bottles are passed to the flight attendant.

Sunlight in the evergreens some thousands of feet below,

a still rivercut valley, glassblown like the eyelids of the dead, Nantahala River a femoral green wrinkle (from the Cherokee, Land of the Noon Day Sun, for the gorge flanks & flats that see the sun once a day), that two-lane highway somewhere nearby— Trail of Tears once upon a time, but not even that long-ago sorrow is outside the mercy of God, as the Yazidis have it, nothing & no one beyond that mercy,

not even Lucifer, with more names than trees in North Carolina, more names than disappeared species, not the darkness that dwells in the voicebox (hall-of-a-hundred chords, prayer-haunted hall, now revoweled, now sparked

by the attendant’s instructions).

Spirit or axions, my God, the invisible body

passing through us, turbulence or tongues, my God, my high noon, we don’t know where, or what,

but we’re shaking.

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CONTRIBUTORS / 35

Jeff Bakkensen lives in New York with his girlfriend and, someday, a dog.

Alexandra Barylski recently packed up her East Coast life to move across the country to California. She is currently teaching middle school English, gaining immense knowledge on boy bands and soccer. Her “Eating and Drinking Poem” on Philip Levine’s Simple Truth can be found at tweetspeakpoetry.com.

Travis Biddick lives with his family in Oklahoma City. His work has appeared in the Rotary Dial, Dappled Things, and New Trad Journal.

John Blair: I have six books, and my last collection of poetry, The Occasions of Paradise, was published by the University of Tampa press in 2012. My poems these days are both formally composed (the poem in this issue is written syllabically) and generally concerned with the mashup of Buddhist, Empiricist, and Judeo-Christian thought that comprises my own sense of the spiritual. Like most armybrats, just about everything in my makeup is some sort of amalgam, so I suppose that it’s inevitable that my poetry would tend towards bricolage as well.

Andrew Deloss Eaton was raised throughout the United States, living in Las Vegas, Missouri, Virginia and elsewhere, before relocating to Northern Ireland, where his wife is from. In 2015, he completed a PhD at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, part of Queen’s University, Belfast, where his thesis was on modern manifestations of the American elegy in poetry. He is currently finishing his first manuscript, and his poems and criticism appear or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review (online at The Dock), Magma, Pleiades, and Poetry Ireland Review. He lives in Belfast.

Rebekah Denison Hewitt grew up in the midwest and now lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina, with her husband, preschooler, and toddler. She worked with children in foster/residential care for nine years before recently finishing her masters degree and becoming a librarian.

Some of her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Midway Journal, the Laurel Review, and Literary Mama.

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Julia MacDonnell has lived many lives, among them, urban homesteader, circus performer, modern dancer, waitress, antiwar activist, newspaper reporter, and seamstress for a theatre company. She is professor emerita at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey, where she taught workshops in fiction and creative nonfiction for many years. MacDonnell’s second novel, Mimi Malloy, At Last! published by Picador in 2014, was just released in paperback. She is the nonfiction editor of Philadelphia Stories and lives in southern New Jersey where she raised her three grown children.

Linda Malnack lives and writes in Seattle, Washington. Her poetry has appeared in Blackbird, Crab Creek Review, Rock & Sling, and Willow Springs, as well as in the anthology Imago Dei: Poems from Christianity and Literature (Abilene Christian University Press, 2012). Linda co-edits the online poetry journal Switched-on Gutenberg.

Kevin McLellan is the author of Tributary (Barrow Street, 2015), and the chapbooks Shoes on a Wire (Split Oak, forthcoming) and Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010), a collaborative series of poems with numerous women poets. He is the winner of the 2015 Third Coast Poetry Prize and has recent or forthcoming poems in American Letters & Commentary, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, december, Kenyon Review, Ruminate, West Branch, Western Humanities Review, Witness, and others. Kevin lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Carly Joy Miller’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Third Coast, Blackbird, Linebreak, Vinyl Poetry, and elsewhere.

She has been nominated for a Pushcart and was a finalist for the Stadler Fellowship. She is the assistant managing editor for Los Angeles Review, a contributing editor for Poetry International, and a founding editor of Locked Horn Press.

She lives in San Diego, CA. Karen Mobley is free range but not a chicken. She earned the Dabbler badge in Girl Scouts and has been working at it ever since. She is a visual artist, poet, and arts consultant. She lives in Spokane, Washington, with two cats, Ed Wild Man of Borneo Munch and Mary Mouse Cassatt. She was artist-in-residence at the Brush Creek Art Foundation in 2015. She serves as cochair of Spokane Rotary International Service Committee.

Karen is active in Westminster Congregational United Church of Christ. www.karenmobley.com.

Linda McCullough Moore is the author of three books, most recently The Book of Not So Common Prayer, and more than 300 shorter works appearing here and there.

Clare Paniccia lives in northeast Oklahoma with two cats and a bunch of unread books. A native New Yorker, her work focuses on locale as it relates to memory and the concept of “home.” She is currently pursuing her PhD in creative writing at Oklahoma State University, and you can find her poetry in the Cumberland River Review, the Pine Hills Review, and Cape Rock.

Melissa Reeser Poulin lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and baby daughter. Her poems appear in Catamaran Literary Reader, Water~Stone Review, and the Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, among other journals. She is the co-editor of Winged: New Writing on Bees, an anthology of literary work to benefit pollinator conservation. She loves gardening and could probably live on frozen yogurt.

Jody Rambo is the author of Tethering World (Kent State University Press, 2011), winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Award. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Cutbank, Gulf Coast, Quarterly West, Sycamore Review, Salamander, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. She is the recipient of four Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council. She teaches creative writing at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio.

Jill Reid lives in Pineville, Louisiana, with her daughter, Ellie, and too many books to count. She earned her MFA in poetry from Seattle Pacific University and teaches at Louisiana College. She strives to write the kind of poems she loves to read—poems that remind her how powerful the slow savoring of one well-rendered moment can be. Her work appears in places like the Missouri Review, Poetry Daily, Tupelo Quarterly, Ruminate Magazine, Rock and Sling, and Relief Journal.

Joseph Rein is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin–River Falls. His fiction has appeared most recently in Iron Horse Literary Review and the Pinch Literary Journal. He also writes short and featurelength screenplays, two of which have been produced in Hollywood. He is a father to three children under four years old, and in his free time (in the rare moments he has it) he recently did all the handiwork to finish his basement. More can be found at www.josephrein.com.

Mara Adamitz Scrupe is a poet and visual artist. Her art has been exhibited in the United States, Europe, and China. Individual poems have appeared in various print and web literary journals and her first chapbook Sky Pilot was nominated for the 2013 Library of Virginia Literary Awards. The National Federation of State Poetry Societies named her the winner of the 2014 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Award for her first book length collection Beast.

Emily Shearer has climbed to the top of Mont St. Michel and horsebacked to the base of the Grand Canyon, but she still likes calling North Carolina home. She currently writes and teaches yoga in Prague, Czech Republic. You can find her words in river rocks and the World Tree and the sheer cliff faces of Yosemite among other places such as Stirring, Melancholy Hyperbole, Bear the Pall, Twice Upon a Fairy Tale, the Grief Diaries, and the inaugural issue of Minerva Rising, where she is now the poetry editor.

Lynda Smith-Bugge’s sculptures highlight the evocative and organic shapes provided by nature. In spite of raising three traumatized grandchildren due to their mother’s motorcycle accident and working full time, Smith-Bugge managed to create sculptures and exhibit in the United States and Rome, Italy. She is a fellow of the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, a board member of the Washington Sculptors Group, and a member of Women’s Caucus for Art and American Association of Woodturners. More info at www.SculptureForTheSoul.com Kathryn Smith’s recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bellingham Review, Rock & Sling, Cleaver Magazine, the Cresset, Theopoetics, and RiverLit. She lives in Spokane, Washington, and spends her free time considering the intersection between the human and the animal and marveling at the behavior of social insects (short nonfiction pieces on these musings can be found at rockandsling.com).

Mark Wagenaar is the author of Voodoo Inverso and The Body Distances, 2015 Juniper Prize in Poetry, forthcoming in spring ‘16 from UMass Press. Recent poems have appeared or will appear in The New Yorker, The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, and FIELD. He and his wife, fellow poet Chelsea Wagenaar, live in Denton and are doctoral fellows at UNT. They just welcomed their firstborn daughter, Eloise Virginia, into the world (though the father strongly advocated to name her Gretzky).

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LAST NOTE/ 36 THOUGHTS ON WRIT IN WATER FROM THE CONTRIBUTORS IN THIS ISSUE

I grew up on the water, a phrase that means only proximity to a substantial body of water. In my case, cold, salty, tidal water. First, the Fore River in Massachusetts. After that, a half block from Great South Bay New York, and, finally, in Newport, within smelling distance of the open Atlantic. We were strong swimmers, proud bearers of Red Cross Life Saver badges, but ignorant sun worshippers. Slathered in baby oil, out in water days on end, forever chasing melanoma. High tide, low tide.

How did the moon, I wondered, make the water come and go?

Julia MacDonnell

NONFI CT I ON

Winters splinter us. Barnegat Bay freezes. Locals come under the sea’s colbalt discipline. Nor’easters flood boatslips.

Moorings snap like floss between tight teeth. Livelihoods are lost to indiscriminate tides. We are people in a thin space where God, welcomed or otherwise, presses close. Watery landscapes demand love’s yearly transformation, a full and patient knowledge of self and other. Always we begin again.

Then tourists arrive supposing they are capable of loving, with equal measure, this water.

Alexandra Barylski

P OET RY

Water terrifies me.

When I read Keats’ words (“Here lies one whose name was writ in water”), I think about legacy. Both of my poems in this issue of Ruminate are about the legacies of ancestors.

My grandfather was a gentle man with his grandkids, but he was also prejudiced and angry. Trying to reconcile these sides within my memories, teaches me a lot about love. It’s a mystery how our lives are ‘writ in water,’ how what we create or do ripples on into the lives of others.

Melissa Reeser Poulin

P O ETRY

A “name writ in water” is my birthright. My maiden name is Waters. All my life I have lived within walking distance of a body of water, and this is as much a part of me as my name. In my poem, “Reciprocation,” in this issue of Ruminate, the fig trees are watered, and the water is recirculated. I am slightly obsessed with this idea; the same water that washed the blood of the French Revolution’s victims into the Seine still runs in the backyard creek of my childhood, still streams down the Vltava River of my current summer days.

Emily Shearer

P O ETRY

I spent much of my youth on Noquebay, a large, kidney-

I was raised in the land of ten thousand lakes, but I never quite learned how to swim. Even so, my first boyfriend convinced me to try waterskiing. His only advice: “Remember to let go of the rope.” I managed to pull myself up on both skis and was doing well until I hit the wake, fell, and forgot to let go of the rope. I never waterskied again, but sometimes, I stand in the rain, and imagine myself skim-skidding across the lake, sixteen years old again and a champion skier.

bean-shaped lake in northeast Wisconsin. There I learned to waterski: to slice across wake and wave with only a rope protecting me from that stinging, bell-ringing smack below; to hang on and, more importantly, to know when to let go. There I once stood idly by, thinking my brother in jest as he nearly drowned during a game of tag. There I learned that the water I craved could give everything, and take even more. That it existed long before me, and would continue to exist long after I am gone.

Mara Adamitz Scrupe

Joseph Rein

P OET RY

F I CTIO N

I’ve always been drawn to water. One distinct part of my

There was a moment in which I became aware of water’s

childhood involves getting lost at a beach, where I spent an hour or two surrounded by ocean, thinking that I was the one controlling the waves. Perhaps this was my way of exploring man’s connection with water: how our bodies are mostly water, how we have created dams, rivers, and creeks with our bare hands. California, where I’ve lived my whole life, is experiencing a drought. I’ve been obsessed with this reality and wonder how the body—my own and my fellow Californians— will show its resilience.

Clare Paniccia

Carly Joy Miller 80

POET RY

ISSUE 36 Fall 201 5

unpredictability—in the sea’s vastness, its want for its own energy. The way blood hangs in the salinity. I’d hit my head on a rock in the Narragansett Bay—my mouth thick with metal, the current dangling my body over the scarp leading back to my parents. Water gives us spaces to think about our own mortality. Without anything to control, how do we find grounding?

The lifeguard, maybe, or the stumbling back away from what might take us.

P O ETRY

Lynda Smith-Bugge. Walnut Ovid. Walnut. 17 x 17 x 6 inches.

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Lynda Smith-Bugge. Breaking Open. Walnut, maple. 16 x 16 x 18 inches.