Issue 37: Being Known by Ruminate Magazine

P OET RY on marrying ourselves, fog at dawn, and belonging to secrets FROM DERRICK AUSTIN, CINDY KING, AND JOHN ESTES

F I CT I O N

on never knowing whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in a house and being deaf in every language FROM WILL JONES AND ELIZABETH KAYE COOK

ISSUE

W I N T E R 2015-16

V I S UA L ART on desiring to remember and being found and altered FROM MARIANNE LETTIERI AND DOUG CALISCH

2015 William Van Dyke Short Story Prize judged by Amy Lowe

First Place: Maybelline in the Tower by Doug Cornett

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 Marianne Lettieri. Rose Window. Pin cushions, wood, plaster cloth,

acrylic sheet, hand etched mirrors. 52 inches diameter. OPPOSITE PAGE Marianne Lettieri. Emptied and Consumed. Hutch, silvered food jars.

Temporary installation at Woodside Village Church in Woodside, California.

STAFF/ EXTRAORDINAIRE

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Brianna Van Dyke MANAGING EDITOR

Kristin Norton MARKETING AND OUTREACH DIRECTOR

Keira Havens SENIOR EDITOR

Amy Lowe POETRY EDITOR

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

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

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Kristin George Bagdanov

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

VISUAL ART EDITOR

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

Stefani Rossi

GENERAL INQUIRIES

REVIEW EDITOR

Paul Willis ASSOCIATE READERS

Laura Droege John Patrick Harty Erika Lewis Diana Small GUEST READER

Nicola Koh

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

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

FRIENDS OF RUMINATE This issue was made possible by the Friends of Ruminate, whose generous donations through the Art Matters campaign gave us the financial support helped to make this issue of Ruminate possible. Thank you so much to all of our donors during this campaign. To become a friend of Ruminate, visit www.ruminatemagazine.com/donate.

INTERN

Paula Weinman PRINT DESIGN

Give Creative Co. WEB DESIGN

Katie Jenkins

CONTENTS / 37

NOTES Editor’s Readers’ Artists’ Judge’s Contributors’ Last

4 5 16, 56 34 78

POETRY

Derrick Austin Colonized Self-Portrait as Saint Cecilia

FICTION Doug Cornett Maybelline in the Tower

John Poch Our Bed

Will Jones The Shed

Vivé Griffith Carrión de los Condes

Elizabeth Kaye Cook The Body in Silence

Micah Chatterton Condolences

John Estes Poem for My 43rd Birthday

Chris Campanioni Dear Valued User

Z.G. Tomaszewski Kingfisher

M. B McLatchey Empirical God

Abayomi Animashaun Standing in the Ruins of Gomorrah

Tyler Gobble Autobiography [Metathesis]

Aaron Brown Via Negativa

Rebecca Lauren Ave, Grandfather

Cindy King The Recovery Stroke

REVIEW Rita Jones Review of In the Middle of Many Mountains by Nahal Suzanne Jamir

VISUAL ART Marianne Lettieri Rose Window Emptied and Consumed Desire to Remember Series Doug Calisch The Biography of Objects Series Mixture 79 Sittings #4

Front Cover

Inside Front Cover 17 - 24

57 - 64

Inside Back Cover Back Cover

EDITOR’S NOTE / 37

I’m still pondering Father Gregory Boyle’s book Tattoos on the Heart, the collection of essays I mentioned here in the fall editor’s note. (If you haven’t read this book yet, you must!) It’s about Father Boyle’s journey, and the stories of the men and women he’s worked with during his twenty-five years of running Homeboy Industries, a gang-intervention program located in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. In the preface to his book he writes: “There can be no doubt that the homies have returned me to myself. I’ve learned, with their patient guidance, to worship Christ as he lives in them.” And then he goes on to say, “Perhaps, together, we can teach each other how to bear beams of love, persons becoming persons, right before our eyes. Returned to ourselves. ” When I heard Father Boyle speak at a church in downtown Denver last month, he came back to this theme. He talked about kinship and how other people return us to ourselves, referencing the African proverb “A person becomes a person through other people.” I love this and find it be so true! Ruminate exists because of kinship, because of its people—the more than 700 writers, artists, and poets published in our pages, the readers who treasure each of the 35,000 copies we’ve sent out to subscribers, and the volunteers who have given countless hours to make the magazine over the last ten years. Together, we have made Ruminate a place of common hospitality, a home for the arts. As many of you know, we recently hosted a gutsy campaign to help save Ruminate from closing its doors. We asked you all for help, and you said yes, we see you, and what you’re doing matters. One reader shared that money is incredibly tight, and they couldn’t donate until their next paycheck, but they just wanted us to know that a small/huge check was headed our way. A contributor asked if they could donate their contributor payment back to the magazine. Another reader said their subscription to Ruminate had traveled around the country with them and helped them feel at home. A poet told us his book wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Ruminate. An artist said that Ruminate gave her a community and helped her know she wasn’t alone. Hundreds of stories, hundreds of donations of just $15, hundreds of people saying yes. We turned to you—our community, the people who have shown us what kinship means. And together we raised a total of $40,000 in just ten days. Your support and encouragement has decided it—Ruminate will continue! And we will be taking a significant step in compensating our staff—three of our staff members, myself included, have agreed to work on a part-time basis and volunteer basis as we continue to fundraise for full-time salaries and a sustainable balance for our staff and for Ruminate’s future. Personally, I’ve been so encouraged. l’ve had my dreams, my work, my calling to nurture a community chewing on the mysteries of life, faith, and art affirmed by you all. It’s my privilege to open the door, turn on the lights, and crank up the heater so that this brave community can come in and meet and learn and inspire and point us all toward the light. You all are helping me know who I am. You all have returned me to myself. May we all do this for one another, over and over again,

READERS’ NOTES/ 37 THOUGHTS ON BEING KNOWN FROM RUMINATE READERS

“To be known,” was the movie heroine’s reply

cope with, which contributed to him losing his to the question, “What do you desire most?” I can’t way. By this, I am able to hate the act, not the person. recall the movie’s title, but that answer stayed Perhaps to know another human being means with me. It deeply impressed me because of how recognizing and honoring the essence of that it made me feel: a deep sadness. I wondered if being—an innate spirit everyone shares. In this anyone can completely know and love us. manner, we can know another incompletely, yet It’s said that in order to love, one has to know, love him completely. and in order to know, one has to understand. But everyone can only know another to the limits Victoria G. Smith DES MOINES, IOWA of one’s understanding. Many of my family and friends think they know me, but they know Fame does not equal success. It may be the only fragmented elements of me—the parts they greatest lie of our time, perhaps of all time. We understand, the parts easiest for them to occupy are willing to do almost anything to be known as extensions of themselves. Most people’s publicly, to brand ourselves for recognition, conceptions of others are egoistic. I am not being while we are unwilling to do the real work of cynical. It just is. vulnerability to be truly known and understood Rare is the person who can adopt the divine in our souls where we fight sleep each night. mind in understanding another. Even when we try Fear teaches us that a façade will protect us to “put ourselves in another’s shoes,” we almost while allowing others to admire us. Fear is a always interpret the way the shoe fits from our powerful teacher. We make ourselves into lovely subjective perspective. Which begs the question, mannequins, beautiful and empty. “What does it mean to adopt the divine mind?” The only real way to be known requires an This would require me to write an entire book to exchange in skin. It requires two people. explain this—and I am indeed writing such a book, I must first be willing to see both the mask but here’s my short answer . . . and the revealer in myself at once, accepting When I meet strangers, I play a little internal both parts—heart and shell. Then, I have to be game. I examine their adult faces and try to willing to reveal that acceptance to another imagine how they must have looked as children. listener, one who is able to receive my feeble I see the innocent child within them, and I am understanding of myself and participate in the already partly in love with them. This helps to exchange anyway in mutuality. start our encounter on a positive note. This is Let us strip ourselves of our masks and see especially useful when I am tempted to hate each other with soft eyes and tenderness. The someone for his evil act. alternative is harrowing—cold lifeless mirrors Thus, when I see a mugshot of an alleged cannot love. To be truly known is the greatest criminal, I imagine the blameless child he began measure of our courage and the only hope for life as, and this enables me to feel compassion for the preservation of our humanity. him and the life challenges he must have had to Sue Larkins Weems BLYT H EWO O D, S.CA R O LIN A

READERS’ NOTES/ 37 THOUGHTS ON BEING KNOWN FROM RUMINATE READERS

If ever I had a coming of age, it was surely the summer of my nineteenth birthday. My grandmother died that summer. I felt the ground disappear from beneath my feet, and I started feeling isolated, as though I were looking at people through a glass wall. Every time I tried to reach out, my fingers hit the pane. I began to feel a permanent ball in my throat, which had numbed my voice, and there was a hunch in my shoulders, giving me a constant sore neck. I had lost a pillar of my childhood, and my circle of trusted allies and confidants were all eighteen and nineteen, like me, which meant they were of absolutely no help. Don’t you see me, I screamed from behind my glass. Don’t you know me, I tried to ask through my muﬄed cries. No, they replied, laughing and waving at me, tapping on the glass wall, hoping I would turn and smile back. Of course I couldn’t. I had a chink in my neck and a growing lump in my throat. Turning and smiling would not be possible. Three weeks after her death, I left for a year of studies abroad, landing in France. I got on my bike one afternoon, a few weeks after I arrived. I still had that pesky lump in my throat. My shoulders still hunched. I still felt like I was hidden behind the glass, wondering who could see me. And I rode. I was in the countryside, and I took a wrong turn. After about five minutes I knew I was lost. But the sun was breaking through the clouds, and I could smell sweet grass after the rain, so I continued. I rolled down a path that led me to the top of a hill. And then I saw it. Beauty. The most wonderful view of green vales, wildflowers, surrounded by stone walls and lavender gray clouds with sunbeams. I had wandered into a Whistler painting. My bike picked up speed as it rolled down the ridge.

ISSUE 37 Winter 2015

My voice released an exalted cry, “Oh! Oh!” at the beauty of what I was seeing, and the glass pane shattered. It was pure, timeless, free. I was lost, but I was home. I see you, I said, to the scene. And I reached out my fingers to feel the long grass.

Jenna Smith QUE B EC, CA N A DA

Life is overfilled with expectations, demands, and work. We live in a time when these fill the crevices like water in the spaces within a jar of rocks. How sweet it is to savor that often unexpected moment of being known: sitting atop a picnic quilt just gazing upon the beauty of a landscape, peering into the beautiful whorls of a loved one’s eyes, sipping sweet warm chocolate—the mug cozied in your palms, losing your thoughts while creating a work of art, allowing silence (which you normally try to fill) to seep into your soul and minister to those hurting places. Times in which I take a step away from the frenzy and embrace the serenity, I am knowing and being known.

Sarah Kohrs M T. JACKSON , V I RGI N I A

The poet Rumi has taught me the most about being known, about waking up to myself and to others, about not going back to sleep. Rumi writes: “For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself. / From within, I couldn’t decide what to do. / Unable to see, I heard my name being called. / Then I walked outside. / The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. / Don’t go back to sleep.”

B.J. Jones SA N D I EGO, CA L I FO R N I A

I remember being a little girl, twirling a pencil in my hand, and writing out my deepest thoughts because I thought a journal was my only place to go. No one else would understand. I felt too abstract and too much. I thought I had to settle and get comfy with the feeling of being misunderstood and miscalculated. Surely, something must have happened when my brain and body was wired and woven. My deepest desire to be known ran deep; so deep that it became a hindrance. It was a lonely and exhausting feeling, always looking left or right to figure out what type of mold I should fit myself into to be understood. My innocent hope quickly turned into a repeated lie: I had to change who I was in order to be accepted. I started to believe the lie that I would never be known. Thankfully, I’m not good at settling. After some discovery, I realized I wasn’t acting known. I wasn’t acting like I wanted to be found out, accepted, and loved. I was hiding myself out of fear. If I hide myself, how can people know me? I’m not giving people the opportunity to know me. Vulnerability breeds intimacy. If I wanted to truly be known, I had to open myself up. Take my make-believe mask oﬀ. I had to show up. Let’s start acting known and allow the truth to trickle down in our hearts, transform our relationships, and flow out into our communities.

Meg Prellwitz R I P O N , W I SCO N S I N

I think for most people you wake up, you do

ago—when I started writing—that I discovered life is so much more. There is more than your dreams, your loves, and your life. And, believe it or not, it takes a long time and a lot of thought to process that simple fact. Believe it or not. Now, I can say this; it was a very diﬃcult time for me when I started figuring all this out. I had a lot of conflicts of faith and ideals because when you really find yourself and the things that make you feel alive, it will rock you, I promise it. Before that time, I never really thought about what I wanted in life, and until you think about what you want tomorrow to be, not what you hope it will be, you won’t understand what I’m saying. There is nothing better in this world than to know who you are. If you don’t, then how will anyone else be able to? I think we often spend our whole lives trying to be known by the world, rather than by ourselves and the people we love. A child doesn’t pretend to be someone they aren’t, so why do we? I don’t blame this urge to be loved on anyone. Honestly, I think it’s human nature. For years I told myself I was being the person I wanted to be, until I found out I wasn’t. But you don’t have to do it alone; you don’t have to make these choices alone. There are people out there for you, people who will help you on this journey. Even if they aren’t in your life yet, I believe they will be. For me it was my wife, and I wouldn’t be here without her. But, ultimately, it’s up to you to decide.

J.D. Mraz JB E R, A N CHORAGE , A LASKA

this thing called life, and then you go to sleep and repeat until tomorrow. It wasn’t until about a year

SEND US YOUR NOTES FOR ISSUE 38. WE LOVE HEARING FROM YOU!

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RUMINATE PRIZES

2015

F I R ST P LAC E

S ECO N D P LAC E

Doug Cornett Maybelline in the Tower

Will Jones The Shed

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

F I N A L I STS

Elizabeth Kaye Cook The Body in Silence

David Abrams Mason Boyles Annie Dawid Stefanie Freele Becky Hagenston Madeleine Mysko Roz Spafford Liza Nash Taylor Michael Tuohy Christopher Yates

JUDGE Amy Lowe (Judge remarks on page 34)

S P O N SO R E D BY Van Dyke Charitable Foundation

ISSUE 37 Winter 2015

D E R R I C K AUST I N

Colonized

The live oak’s branches catch the breeze and if one stood near it, there would be a sound like rain from its wind-whipped leaves, its beards of moss, and under the tree is a ring of bleeding hearts, and bees cart pollen to concoct their wild honeys like alchemists taking base materials from the earth to create gold. Their hum is a hymn. They pay us no mind. You lead me to their empty hive, tell me to eat of their comb. What would they make of us thieves—one black, one white—as I eat through your palms, mistaking them for honeycombs? Loving you, I’ve learned there is violence in description. My mouth is full of stingers. Even my longing for God is colonized. They would kill us both.

D E R R I C K AUST I N

Self-Portrait as Saint Cecilia

I would marry myself, myself in spring, if I could. Petals by the window, white on red on deeper white, tremble under gold bodies. The queen bee clutches her mate, his entrails and phallus torn away. I fear this is all of carnal knowledge. The obliterating pitch of pleasure. In paradise, the beheaded hum and comb their own hair: Praise to burns, to beaten flesh that thrives. Blood makes its own music, the valves of my heart like a trumpet’s. I chose its cadenza over the seal of a man’s lips.

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JOHN POCH

Our Bed I drop the straw on the stream and run beside it over banks, over boulders the shapes of sleeping dogs, through warming snowmelt under willow thickets the color of dirty dollars and around a turn, its eddy pushing me away, the straw drawn in. When I write, we are these distances, especially this cool pooling water, my shoulder bent at the edge of the bank like an old tree root, my hand underhand reaching, my mouth pinched as if to draw to me this piece of straw. From behind my open hand, this looks like the arrow of my death just missing me.

VIVÉ GRIFFITH

Carrión de los Condes —Camino de Santiago, 2014

It was the way the nun’s eyes looked straight into yours. It was the ancient incense smell of the church. It was the other nun translating slowly, laughing at her mistakes. It was the priest— China, South Korea, Japan— naming countries of the world. It was the hands going up. It was Pamela in her purple glasses, Pamela who had worked at the Met and cropped her hair close to her head. It was that from here on for you it would be buses and trains to the end. No more walking, no more churches. No, it was the priest— Mexico. Costa Rica. Nicaragua. Colombia. It was the pilgrims gathered around the altar. It was the hands going up. Chile. Argentina. It was the little paper stars the nuns cut out and colored one by one, paper stars they oﬀered to each of you. It was Nieve, who drew you into her backyard and filled your hands with grapes, figs, apples, before pulling a chair into the shade. It was how hard you worked to talk to each other. It was the priest—Australia, New Zealand. It was the hands going up. A couple from South Africa. A group of Canadians.

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It was how many steps it took to get there. The fields of shorn wheat, of turnip greens, the vineyards just about ready for harvest. It was the deep clay of Rioja worked into the grooves of your shoes. It was how little the rest mattered— blisters, the wicking clothing, the question of top bunk or bottom. It was the priest— for 700 years pilgrims have stood before this image of the blessed virgin. It was the nun and her halting translation. It was hands in the air. It was the nun in her white habit making the sign of the cross on your head, the nun who insisted on meeting your eye. It was the priest— France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Germany. It was the woman who saw you crying and wrapped herself around you, stranger with her hands in your hair, that made you cry even harder.

M I CA H C H ATT E RTO N

Condolences How awful. I’m so sorry for your loss. I can’t even imagine. If you need anything, please don’t hesitate to call. Forgive me for asking. How old / what of / is, or was, he your only? Oh, you’re so strong. He was so brave / so strong / a fighter / a saint, almost. At least he’s in a better place now / at least he’s at peace / at least there’s no more pain / at least, but then— You’ll see him again one day. You have to believe you’ll see him again one day, don’t you? What’s the point if— I think God must love some souls so much he wants to keep them for himself / take them back for himself / make them angels to watch over the rest of us— You know, how energy never dissipates, just transforms. He was never quite of this world, was he? He’d become perfect enough on this imperfect plane / he was ready to transcend / be transformed. You’re handling it so well. I would just die / fall apart / never wake up again. My grandmother / grandfather / father / mother / brother / sister / family spaniel died last year, but there’s no name for parents who outlive their children. Still, historically / biologically / as points on a cosmic timeline, this has only recently become an unexpected event. A tree will bend, but not break, will scar against wind. You’re still young.

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After all wars people rebuild their homes and churches from the bricks and wrack of the old. You have a whole life ahead of you. Try to hold on to the good times. Remember only good things, what he was / what he said / what he did / how he laughed at his own jokes / remember the very last day before he held his hands to his head. But, won’t it be better when you’re able to forget? The book says, to everything there is a season / a reason / the Lord works in mysterious ways / original sins / only begotten sons / Abraham bowed and raised his knife hand / not for us to know his will / but, still, David gnashed his teeth, wept, and tore oﬀ his clothes to save his son from fever, forever lost to God’s punishing thumb. Praise Jesus. At least now you have something to write about.

ARTIST/ NOTE

MARIANNE LETTIERI: DESIRE TO REMEMBER I create mixed media constructions and art installations that investigate shifts in individual and cultural values associated with everyday objects. Central to my art process is transforming the material castoﬀs of society into images that call attention to the preoccupations of life and a shared human desire to remember. I am attracted to disappearing relics of the past. Common tools of domesticity and manual labor, once central to daily rituals and work routines, are imbued with a deeply physical sense of humanity. They provide tangible evidence of individual identities and cultural worth. The patina of wear and visible traces of human personality form a poetic bridge to my imagination. Viewed in the context of art, the objects’ functional aspects are metaphorically intertwined with their spiritual and visual qualities. Through the selection, arrangement, and presentation of discarded artifacts, I seek to return mystery to the ordinary everyday and call attention to life’s brevity and mutability. These artistic compositions mark my presence and my intervention in the world.

ISSUE 37 Winter 2015

Marianne Lettieri. 27,000 Breaths. Sewing machine, table, 27,000 inches of red twill. 84 x 45 x 16 inches.

Marianne Lettieri. Skeins of Time. Bird cage, crochet thread. 16 x 13 x 10 inches.

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Marianne Lettieri. The Sisters of Biscuits and Pies. Rolling pins, dish towels, twill, pegs. 72 x 88 inches.

Marianne Lettieri. Hierarchy. Ironing boards, irons, organza, tatting. 65 x 54 x 14 inches.

ISSUE 37 Winter 2015

Marianne Lettieri. Cradle with Bedrock. Antique cradle, river rocks, crochet, glass spheres. 30 x 48 x 96 inches.

Marianne Lettieri. Milkmaid. Mixed media collage on wood with butter knives and dairy scale. 48 x 36 x 6 inches.

ISSUE 37 Winter 2015

Marianne Lettieri. Maker Reliquary. Sewing machine drawers, tin snips, metal pulleys, wax. 18 x 12 x 3 inches.

Marianne Lettieri. Buck Saw Ace. Buck saw, canvas gloves, red dirt. 72 x 42 x 3 inches.

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D O U G CO R N ETT

A secret: off of Highway 323, a hundred miles or so outside of the city, there is a dirt maintenance road that meanders into a heavy forest; three hundred feet north of a particular bend in that maintenance road there is an overgrown meadow; and standing in that overgrown meadow, long forgotten, is an old fire-lookout tower. At the top of this tower there is a room in which, on the first Saturday of each month, a pale woman strokes her long dark hair with a tortoise shell comb and plucks an out-of-tune harp. A faded, threadbare dress hangs like a crooked picture from her shoulders and hips. She sings melodies that are part medieval dirge and part Madonna, gazing out the window until a knight announces his arrival by the clap clop of his oatmeal-haired horse. The knight is draped in loose chainmail, and he waves a replica longsword over his head. He shouts assurances in a bright, rangy voice, and while he climbs, the woman in the tower fawns like a precious and wounded sparrow, relating the sad story of how she came to be locked in her prison. There is an odd kind of grace to their movements, but mostly it is a jangly affair. If there were witnesses, the knight and lady might look like two out-of-sync dancers scurrying through a hackneyed routine. But there are never witnesses. Eventually, the woman is freed, and they ride off together on the oatmeal-haired horse, into the forest, away from the tower until next month. He drops her off on a dirt service road, and she walks the quarter-mile to her parked Hyundai, which she drives back to the city to her studio apartment on the east side. She boils water for ramen and sings along to Nebraska, the only Boss album she’ll admit to owning. She combs her long black hair and peers down from her fifthstory window at the city’s lurching movements below. The bodies of the passersby seem to her completely random and unpredictable. I am that woman. My name is Maybelline Blau. I receive my payments in cash because my knight wishes to conceal his real identity. His helmet, which doesn’t quite historically match his armor, obscures all of his face save for a narrow window across his eyes. I only know his first name—Greg—but not his last or what he does for a living. For some reason, I picture him as a dentist. I don’t know what he looks like, except that he is a bit pear-shaped in his chainmail armor and somewhat duck-footed. At times I want to tell him: our arrangement is not fair. You know my name and where I live. Aside from the faded dress and occasional dandelion garland in my hair, I wear no costume. But you are a

mystery. I want to ask him: What do I care who you are? I am in no position to gather stones for casting. But I get the feeling that he is a vulnerable man. His voice has that telling waver, even as he praises my ivory skin, my raven-black hair. He sends me an envelope with a few neatly folded bills each month, which I magically alchemize into groceries and cat food. In return, I never ask him to lift his visor. On the weekdays, I exist in an ordinary world. I work the box-oﬃce window for one of the big theaters downtown, selling tickets here and there to plump tourists in neon hats. The box-oﬃce booth is a small room with too much in it, but I’ve made it my own. I used to have

photographs of astronauts all over the walls—your Buzz Aldrin, your Wally Schirra, your Gus Grissom (who, if he had lived to his sixties, would have been the spitting image of my father). But my supervisor wanted to know why I seemed to be obsessed with astronauts, and since I couldn’t give her a good answer, I oﬀered to take them down. I think it has something to do with how amazingly far they’ve been away from everybody they’ve ever known. I also watched entirely too many episodes of The Jetsons as a child. Now it’s just a three by five of old Gus holding a model rocket in his hand, leaning in close to an American flag. He is smiling, kind and wise. This is not the career path my successful attorney mother had hoped for. I have not shod myself in heels and followed in her clicking footsteps; I have not carved a name for myself, nor taken the world by its balls. I try not to think of the fact that when she was my age she had already finished law school and was working uptown with a patent law firm. Before she died of breast cancer last August, when she was still a bullet train of ambition, she came to visit me once at my box oﬃce. I still remember the way her eyes avoided the astronaut portraits on the wall and the cartoon cat doodled in my notebook between us. We chatted about Dad, and my apartment, and when a customer came along and asked me about ticket prices, my mother stepped to the side and gazed intently across the street, taking care not to watch as I swiped the credit card and slid two crisp tickets through the arched opening of the Plexiglas window, as if I’d be embarrassed. To her funeral less than ten months later, I wore a pair of brand new heels and a black pantsuit that she’d handed down to me herself. Once a month, as a perk, I receive a free ticket to whatever play or musical is up, but I’ve

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long since stopped going. These actors are impossibly beautiful and equally as talented, but they perform almost every night of their lives. Nobody, not even the best of us, can be genuine all the time. I share my apartment with Meow Gibson, a stern-faced tabby whom I inherited several years ago from an ex-boyfriend. I didn’t ask for the cat—I’m not a cat person. I suspect he only had the cat in the first place because he liked to tell people its funny name. He may have been with me for the same reason. But after all, Meow Gibson and I need each other in our own ways: because I’ve fed him into obesity, Meow Gibson is much too slow to catch his own food, and, for some reason, it makes my dad feel better that I have a pet. A twenty-six-year-old girl who lives alone is a very sad thing, he says. By choice, I tell him. A very sad thing, he repeats. Once again, I’m up in the abandoned fire-lookout tower, plucking my old harp. It turns out the harp is really not that difficult an instrument to pick up. I’ve figured out the riff from “Beat It,” and the chorus from Toto’s “Africa.” I’ve also run the comb down my hair some three hundred times. I look at myself in the oval mirror on the wall, or I look out at the forest. The comb and the dress I’m wearing came in a package to my apartment before the first Saturday in the woods. There was also a silver tiara studded with green jewels, but it ended up being too large for me, and every time I turned my head it fell over my eyes, making me look like a white female Geordi La Forge. The oval mirror and a delicate-looking wooden side table were here in the tower when I first came up, three months ago. The knight must have brought them up himself. The tower is made of steel, about forty feet high, with a spiral staircase leading to the circular room on top. On days like today, when the wind is blowing with force, the tower sways this way and that. I look at myself in the mirror, my hair lifting with every gust, and decide that I would have liked it in the Dark Ages, when you couldn’t be a beauty without being a sad beauty. I don’t consider myself vain, but I think my pale skin, dark eyebrows, and somewhat too-long neck would have fit perfectly in medieval England. In fact, I feel almost comfortable in this old dress, all alone up in this tower, waiting for someone to come along and find me. I hear the sound of a horse approaching below. I run to the window in time to see the knight and his horse slow to a stop at the base of the tower. “Ho! Fair maiden!” he shouts, his voice high but muffled as always by the metal helmet. The horse rears on his hind legs. “I have come to save thee!” I stand at the window looking down and biting my lip, trying to appear as fragile and porcelain as possible. I want to give the impression that a heavy wind might fold my bones together. My splay-footed knight gingerly steps forward to the base of the tower, grasping the gymclass style rope that hangs conveniently against the checkered steel scaffolding, allowing him a foothold for the occasional breather. “Alas, brave knight, the world plots against me,” I begin. This is when I catalogue the

cruel twists of fate that have landed me in my current prison. At first, it was the old witch who banished me here, but I’ve since become bored with that story. Sometimes it’s a leering uncle whose ire I provoked by rejecting his advances. Sometimes it’s a tyrannical stepmother possessed by jealousy and frustration. Today, a new stab of betrayal: “My own beloved father has locked me up. He says I have lost my mind!” “And why,” the knight grunts, “does he say that?” “He says I am gripped by a deranged obsession. He says my eyes wander away during conversations, and that my shoulders shrug nonstop. But I hope you will not think me so deranged, brave sir.” “I trust I will not.” “He put me here because I am not like the other girls. It is a shame, he tells me. He means I am the shame. He grows tired of the way I talk about a recurring dream that I have every night, and which haunts me every day.” The knight stops for a moment and clings onto the scaffolding. He has scaled about half his way up the tower, and from above he looks funny; the way the chainmail hangs loosely off his frame, wobbling back and forth with each movement, reminds me of old women and their jewelry. “Would you like to know what the dream is?” Without tilting the blank face of his helmet up, he offers a quick nod of the head. “In my dream, I am lying in a field of flowers—white ones—and every time I pluck one from the ground, a puff of smoke comes out and I hear a tiny chime like I’m Mario. I feel magical and idiotic. My mother shows up, and she tells me I have to do something else, goddamnit. Like what? She doesn’t care what, just something else, goddamnit. So I start climbing a spiral staircase up into a dark ceiling of sky, and on the way I pass all these astronauts coming down, their helmets in their hands. They are handsome in a bygone era kind of way, with their crew cuts and strong jaw lines, and they tell me they’ve been away for so, so long. They have that deep nothing of space in their eyes, and they all want to know the same thing: has everything changed down where I am coming from? I know what they want me to say, but I just can’t bring myself to lie.” The blank visor of the knight’s helmet angles up at me. His eyes are shadowed. “What is an astronaut?” “I thought you might ask,” I say, leaning out of the window. “An astronaut is a traveler. Like a mariner, but instead of moving horizontally across water and getting swallowed by the blue of the sea, they move vertically and are swallowed by the blue of the sky. An astronaut is someone who goes as far away as anybody has ever been in order to be completely alone. It takes them many years to get there, and nobody knows what they do when they’re out there all alone. They’re very secretive about it. Then, it takes them many years to get back. When they do finally make it home, they are basically different from everyone there.” “Different how?” I think I detect a hint of annoyance in the knight’s voice. I sense that he

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prefers things to be period-appropriate, but he’s being a good sport. “Their eyes. You can tell just by looking at them. They have the usual fields of wheat and barley, the blue and gray and red skies, the sometimes slim and sometimes fat moon, like everyone else. But they have more than that, too. Something that’s almost a negative thing.” The knight makes a guttural noise, something like a cough. He’s nearly at the top of the tower now, so my voice is no louder than a murmur. “It’s an astronaut’s job to tell everyone what they’ve seen, way out there on their own. Nobody ever believes what an astronaut says, but they like to hear their stories anyway.” “Indeed,” he says between pants, “you have been treated most vilely. But now,” he heaves his torso through the window, and I help him into the room, “your salvation has at last arrived.” He bows with extravagant civility. I reach my hand out to him, and he takes it in his chainmail gloves. We sit for a minute or two in silence, the knight catching his breath. I pull the harp close to me and pluck a few random notes, trying to work around the fact that I don’t know how to play it. I

begin to hum along in a low, self-conscious voice. To my surprise, the knight seems to relax; he settles into the chair across from me and folds his hands on his lap. It is the slightest of gestures, but there is something respectful, endearingly content in his folded hands. It is the way you sit when are you are happy just to listen to someone pluck and hum, when you are not focused on anything else in the world. I pluck and hum and watch his hands, wondering just what exactly this moment means to him. Plucking and humming, I try to sense the enormous loneliness of this man. Those folded hands are a window to his sadness. Instead of pity, I feel privileged to have been shown such a thing. Can a person be melancholy and not also pitiful? Yes, I decide, for his sake and mine, that a person can. Finally, the rescue concludes by us walking down the spiral steps. On the first enactment, what seems like an eternity ago, the knight attempted to carry me down the stairs over his shoulders, but we didn’t make it more than a few steps before he had to put me down. Now, we descend the steps side-by-side and in unison, like the homecoming king and queen, or like two chorus girls in some old TV variety show. Sitting in my box oﬃce, I have a daydream about doing it with the knight. He climbs the tower, I play the harp, and then we are pawing at each other on the floor. I avoid specific images in my head, and I try not to the think of the logistics of taking oﬀ the armor. He is above me, and the funny thing is he still has his visor on. Even so, I sense he is studying my face, noticing that my

eyes are mostly green, but with the tiniest streaks of gray and red. Thin arms of ivy reach over the sill and into the circular room, intertwining with our limbs to create an enveloping embrace. He calls me Maybelline. I say Greg, this is not fair. You can see all of me. The whole thing is quiet and depressingly gentle. I wonder: since he’s paying me, would it make me a prostitute? Yes, I decide. It would.

Once again, the knight steps over the sill into my circular room. The floorboards whimper from the weight and—perhaps it’s the heat today—I get a whiﬀ of body odor. “Why are you here?” I ask him before he’s able to settle himself from the climb. “To rescue you from your prison.” “But what if it’s not?” He sits with eﬀort, his shoulders rising up and down like buoys in a gentle surf. He seems to give me a sideways look, but it might just be that his helmet rests askew on his skull. “What if what’s not what?” he asks, finally. I sweep my hand, palm up, across the circular room. It pauses at the mirror, the harp, the pair of tennis shoes near the doorway, the distant treetops through the window that wave back and forth like a receding friend. “A prison.” The Boss drones out a ghost tune from the speakers in the corner of my studio apartment. Meow Gibson has sought refuge in the cool shade beneath the futon. Water boils and gurgles

in my kitchen and a thin slant of rust-red evening light backs its way through my fifth-floor window, striping across the hair-strewn carpet to my feet, one socked and one bare. The air is oppressive, it always is in the city at this time of year, but something is diﬀerent. The water gurgles too insistently from the kitchen, the Boss is no longer the Boss but a Ghost Boss, his tune now merely a restless sigh telling of aching bones and dusty rooms, and Meow Gibson is nowhere in sight. My phone vibrates my leg, and when I take it from my pocket I am confronted by a grainy picture of my dad on the screen. His expression says what a shame it is. From the open window, down on the street, I can hear the furtive noises of a strange forest of people, cars honking, and legs scraping across the cracked asphalt. I marvel that I am so impossibly high above them.

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The walls of my studio apartment groan and crinkle with movement. They inch inward, lessening my confines. I am disquieted; I rub my eyes, tap out a rhythm on my thighs, gather my hair into a bun. Thinking only of escape, I snatch my keys from a hook on the wall and burst forth from my cell into the unknowable night. From the tower I can see far into the distance. The sky is unusually dark for this time of day: a fairytale’s brooding sky. The knight has just arrived outside, but he’s an hour late, and without his horse. He’s wearing white faded Reeboks. “Ho, fair maiden!” He sounds stuﬀed up. I remember learning in high school that people died of common colds in the Middle Ages. He stands for a brief moment at the base of the tower, as if he’s unsure what to do next. He looks odd down there without his horse. How absurd, I whisper to myself. Finally, he grips the rope and begins the climb. Today, it was going to be an invading foreign horde who ransacked our kingdom and imprisoned me here to rot. But something about the knight, the soft rustle of the chainmail, maybe, or the wave-like, feminine sway of his hips as he climbs, pierces me in the slightest way. He is so achingly earnest with his movements, so dedicated to this action. I watch his hands grip the rope, and I think about them those months ago, resting on his lap. I’m reminded that this was always his arrangement. This is his rescue, not mine. I find myself in a confessional mood. I call down to him. “Have you ever been in love, knight?” “I’m in love with you, fair maiden,” he says, weakly. “I was in love once,” I say. “In college. I dated a guy for almost seven months. He played too many video games, but he was a quiet artist type, and he treated me like a queen. My mother loved him, even though she only met him once. He opened the door for her and was always smiling.” The knight points his face mask up at me, and though it’s impossible to interpret the expression, I’m aware that I’m violating the rules. In the distance, a low rumbling of thunder asserts itself. “One night we went out to Friendly’s, and right after he ordered a banana split, I dumped him. I knew I was going to do it, but it felt like a surprise at the time, even to me. I’ve always wondered: why then? Why that moment? And if I had to give an answer, it would be the way he ordered that banana split. I know he didn’t want it, but he ordered it anyway. To be nice, you know? He was just so good-natured. I put my lips around my soda straw and sucked in, swallowed, and said, we’re through. When the waiter put the ice cream in front of him, I thought he was going to lose it. He left without eating a single bite, and to make me feel worse, he laid a twenty down for the bill. Isn’t that awful?” “Awful,” the knight says, and it sounds like he’s responding to somebody else. He rests on a cross-hatched piece of scaﬀolding. “He never acknowledged my loneliness. Refused to. That’s all I wanted, for him to look at it like something in a museum, to cross his arms and nod his head, to not ever try to touch it. But

he thought he should be able to take it away from me. That’s why I did it. My mother was the same way. It was like she was hurt by it. What they didn’t understand is that it’s my loneliness. If I don’t understand it, they don’t get to understand it either. But you can’t ever try to take it away from me. Everyone has that right. Don’t you think?” The knight is hugging the scaffolding, his chest rising and falling in great heaves. “It wasn’t until almost a year later that I realized that I was probably in love with him. He was probably the only person I’ll ever be in love with.” I hear a quick, sharp exhalation of breath and a series of metal clangs. When I look down, the knight is lying sprawled at the base of the tower. I run down the spiral stairs with dreamlike slowness, having the same thought over and over: if I stop, the earth itself will stop too. I kneel at the knight’s side and find that he is still conscious. He is breathing slowly and heavily, rolling a little on his shoulder blades. “Don’t move,” I tell him. “Son of a bitch,” he says in a surprisingly coherent voice. “I think it’s broken.” “What’s broken?” “My leg.” He sits up and clutches at his right knee. “I think I need to go to the hospital.” I push him back down firmly, thinking of the golden rule of injured people: don’t try to move them. “Are you a dentist?” I ask, looking directly at the slab of metal where a face should be. He takes a few deep breaths, then: “Attorney. Associate.” “Maybe you should take off your mask, Greg.” “Can you take it off for me?” I fumble with it for a second or two, before realizing there’s a latch down by the neck. I snap it free and lift it, surprised at how light it is. Greg has the face of a boy who has done most of his growing up, but not all. He is a lot younger than I had originally guessed, maybe only a few years older than me. A thin crop of stubble lines his jaw and upper lip. “Hi,” I say. “Just lie here for a little bit, ok?” He winces. “We’ll need to get going soon.” I know he’s right. The turn of the weather feels inevitable. “Greg? Can you call me by my name?” Greg closes his eyes hard, then opens them wide. He repeats this twice, then nods and says, “Maybelline, sure.” “Thanks.” “Maybelline,” he says, “why can’t you be true?” “That’s right.” Greg’s nostrils are red and chapped, probably from blowing his nose too much. His eyes are watery, but actually sort of strikingly green. “I thought you died,” I say.

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“You did?” “Yep. Broke your neck or something.” I smile, and he does too. Straight teeth. “I wanted to be an astronaut, too,” he says. “Every kid does.” “I don’t think that’s true anymore,” I say. “Nobody cares about astronauts.” I pick a strand of my hair that’s stuck to my cheek. “I already sort of feel like one anyways. I know that’s weird, but I really do.” Greg looks at me with a lot of concentration. He’s either giving this serious thought, or he’s trying not to pass out. His hair is short, almost like a crew cut. “Do you think I’m a sad beauty?” I ask. “Why sad?” “I’m not radiant. I thought maybe I could pull oﬀ being beautiful in a sad way.” He squints his eyes and looks me over. “Pensive,” he says, definitively. “A pensive beauty.” The first sign of rain. Big, loaded drops. “What I really wanted to be was a knight,” he says. “I wanted to joust and rescue a princess from a tower.” “And you did!” “No I didn’t. I fell and broke my leg. And I don’t even have a horse.” “But for a second, you were a real dead knight. Like you had been run through with a sword during a battle. Just looking at you lying there, you wouldn’t ever be able to tell what year it was.” His face loosens a little and his breath slows to almost normal. A small bead of snot appears from his nostril. “To answer your question: yes, I have been in love.” “Oh?” “Many times,” he says, and does his best to bury a sneeze. Still, more snot runs from his nose. I lift the frilly end of my dress and wipe it away. He smiles, almost bashful. “So many times you wouldn’t believe.” The two of us push quick clouds of breath into the cold air. In the distance the thunder repeats itself, only louder, and the pines around us shiver. Before too long, I’ll help Greg back to his car, then drive him to the nearest hospital. I’ll weave figure eights through traﬃc while he reclines in the passenger seat and stares at the car ceiling. We’ll tumble into the hospital lobby arm-onshoulders, refugees from a magical, idiotic world. We’ll let them all look. But for now, I’m thinking about what kind of funeral a fallen knight was given. I’m wondering if there was a procession through the streets, and if people threw rose petals. Would they bury the knight with his helmet on? No, I decide. They would not.

JUDGE’S/ NOTE

2015 WILLIAM VAN DYKE SHORT STORY PRIZE JUDGE: AMY LOWE WRITES:

The first time I read “Maybelline in the Tower,” I was impressed by its ability to take me somewhere absurd, unbelievable, but true to its own rules. I was moved to feel the sadness and loneliness of this seemingly disconnected girl. I thought of my own disconnectedness through social media and the consequences of doing so much work behind a computer screen. And then, on a second and third read, I found the story asking more questions, questions about authorship and readership, and about story-telling itself. Maybelline wants connection, but she also sees the value in aloneness, and, like all of us, may be a little fearful of coming down the “tower” and allowing herself to be seen. “Maybelline in the Tower” is story-telling at its finest, in large part because it invites and even compels us to respond. As the story-teller uncovers herself, we are unable to remain concealed.

Amy Lowe has served as senior editor and co-founder for Ruminate Magazine since 2006. Many of the fiction and nonfiction pieces she has worked with have gone on to receive Pushcart Prizes and notable mentions in the Best American Short Stories anthology and Best American Essays anthology. She has taught English literature and composition for ten years at the secondary and college level. And she sees it as a great honor when authors, both new and newly read as well as seasoned and recognized, entrust her with their writing. She finds great joy in connecting audiences with beautiful and important pieces and believes in the power of a good story to both illuminate and transform. And mostly she loves how a story allows you to see the world from another person’s perspective.

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J O H N EST ES

Poem for My 43rd Birthday The autocorrect for tryst is TRUST Sometimes you must push down and turn to open Some designs do not foil what they’re meant to oppose A pinch of chew they call a PLUG The ancients thought words drug-like and charmed What we feel as disorder we call SICK Not every disease can be healed by contrary What by nature was built by resistance is MODERN Nothing ever made did not overcome resistance The autocorrect for Worlding is WIELDING The layer of char in the pipe bowl they call the CAKE The last refusal is the protagonist’s refusal to protagonate A plea for advice we categorize as AGONY Physicians and critics uncover discoveries Truth-as-unhiddenness Heidegger named ALETHEIA The world belongs to those who drive traﬃc Knock a flying disc down they call that a HACK You come to the limits of all prior art You learn to live without yourself The autocorrect for Gedichte is DEDICATE A longing with no necessary limit with one exception If Rilke’s heart-soul complex turns to SCHIEßE You relearn belonging to your secrets Though that heartbreak is Herzwerk feels true enough That healing and annealing pair with ANVIL That nuptial ecstasy resolves to SKY That inward parts are built to bear confusion The autocorrect for aletheia is ANATHEMA

C H R I S CA M PA N I O N I

Dear Valued User, What the operator said When she asked me if I’d like to be Removed from the list Or if I’d like a gift That cost nothing But a small part of my time Addition of some Last minute pleas A satin bathrobe My initials stitched in between Each breast And then it occurred Like the evening news I’d never write again It had been too long I said, I didn’t have It anymore, maybe Never had it at the very beginning When all of this began When Ana died and I tried So hard to remember her In words, a selfish act

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Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s almost always about me taking Or undertaking to cradle you Like a startled fish A narrow slit to let The breath through If only to say I know no one and know no one Will save me

the shed W I L L J O N ES

By October it would be dark before my mother finally came for me, at the end of our long and separate days. She worked evenings then at a thrift store, folding donated clothes. I stayed in afterschool at Richland Methodist until she got off and took me home. I was almost always the last child to be picked up, and more or less had the place to myself for the final half hour. Counselor Mary (we called them “counselors,” like at camp) would put an edifying cartoon on the VCR and turn off the lights in the playroom before retreating to the front desk to pass the last few minutes of her shift in peace. I was expected to watch it, to not make a fuss. But in the dark all the colors on the screen ran together, hot and indistinct, until my eyes watered and stung. When I shut them, the shapes would still be there, iridescent on the back of my aching eyelids, like when I looked into the sun or at the coil in the center of a light bulb. So I would start, temporarily blinded, when my mother opened the door and called my name. The light behind her made her face seem gray and loose, like a skin about to slough. “Andy, let’s go home.” There would be a brief, wordless exchange at the desk with Counselor Mary, a fumbling with pen caps and scraps of paper. My mother’s purple winter gloves ballooned at the end of her skinny wrists and crackled when she moved her fingers. She had to take them off with her teeth to sign me out. She was a gaunt woman, who seemed more so by her habit of always wearing men’s clothes. That night she wore a heavy hunting jacket, which must’ve come from my father, and loose khakis with hems that caught beneath the heels of her tennis shoes when she walked. She waited to look at me until she had finished signing her name. Then she’d squeeze my hand and mouth “home.”

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Home was only a few minutes away, like everything else in our little town. I was six then. I sat in the backseat, the one behind hers. There was little need to say anything and little energy to say it; we were both tired and relieved to have found each other again, despite all odds. But some nights I’d catch her eyes searching hopefully in the mirror for mine. She smiled when she caught them, a sudden, glittering smile, as if she were surprised to see I was still there, where she had put me. Then the car would shake to life, and we would go. It must have been the night before Halloween, or close to it. Already some houses had jack-o-lanterns, their eyes orange and wrathful in the dark. They perched on porches and windowsills, by mailboxes, and once in the crook of a dogwood tree. Each wore a distinct shade of malice or terror or amusement. But the houses were the same. We passed rows of them on our way home, broken occasionally by churches or gas stations or derelict lots, and finally by the railroad. Small houses, crowded up against the sidewalk and each other, with chain link fences covering brown strips of yard. There were streetlights on the corners here, and we passed from pool to pool of cloudy orange light. But we lived on the weedy outer edge of town, and there were no streetlights to see by, not many lights in the windows. When she turned oﬀ the car, the dark flowed through the windows like a gas. Every night she insisted on going inside our house first. She said, “You never know what’s in a house. Not even yours.” She said people sometimes hid in the places you thought were safe. They hid, and they waited. It was better to throw light on everything first. Then you could know your options. So I waited on the porch as she lit each dim room in succession, listening to her progress through the house: the slamming of doors and cabinets, the rustle of the shower curtain. She spoke loudly to herself all the time, as if she were afraid of startling something. I didn’t mind. I liked the waiting. It made me feel each time the possibility that something was there, after all. There would be silence for a few seconds at the very end, a final fidgeting with the curtains and blinds, and voices on the television. Then she would call out from somewhere deep in the house that all was clear, and I would come inside. This was how it always was, at the end of our long and separate days. We lived then in a doublewide next to the tracks of the Norfolk Southern, which shook our walls with punctual tumult every morning and night on its way to Birmingham or Johnson City. My window faced the tracks, and the noise of it would shake me panting out of my sleep, too awake to remember the shapes of my interrupted dream. From my bed, I could see the dark shape of the train as it passed, bright graﬃti scrawls and invocations flickering on the walls of the swift railcars. The room would shiver and jar, as if there were animals behind the peeling walls and plywood floor, and I would try to hold perfectly still until it passed. I got used to it of course, and with time I could sleep through it. But several times a night the noise filled my dreams, drowning the voices of the creatures who lived there. Their

mouths would snap open and shut, but all that would come out was the annihilating churn of the engines, like the beating of enormous wings. The house had come from my father, who drove trucks somewhere now, or so we thought. We didn’t know where. He had abandoned the house and us inside it before I was born. My mother neglected it almost vengefully. In the summertime, the beige vinyl siding blistered and peeled, and algae blotted the sides like melanomas. Our yard was a thicket, growing wild and heedless and high, all the way up the side of the house, until wands of privet tapped the windows and the heavy shadows of boxwood squeezed through the panes and swept soundlessly across the bubbling gray linoleum when there was any wind. She liked it this way. In the eyes of teachers and neighbors, we were already something of an unfortunate case; “disadvantaged” was the term they used, I think. That was where my school lunch came from, and why I stayed in afterschool for free. But my mother’s insistence on living this way had more to do with pride, pride that forbade her, as the wronged party, to clean up a mess that someone else had made. Each rotten door frame and sagging gutter only confirmed the enormity of the injury done to her, the abandoned woman left with child inside a rotten house. He’d be back as soon as he ran out of other people’s goodwill, she said. He would certainly be back, and she had prepared something for him, against that moment. She’d say, “You can beg to come back till there’s blood in the Nile. We’ve managed fine without you. I don’t have time to listen to it. I have a child to raise, if you didn’t forget. He doesn’t know who you are.” She’d recite this, or something like it, on our drives, making small tweaks and amendments between versions. She’d look out straight ahead, scowling a bit—with concentration more than anger—choosing words carefully. It never quite reached a tirade. I listened to these rehearsals, a bit in awe at this hoarded fury. Then she’d look back at me and smile with a fierceness I didn’t understand and say, “We’ve got what we need right here.” I didn’t know what to make of this. Of course I had never seen my father. But I had memories of him, extrapolated from photographs she showed me and things she’d said. She would have to point out his face from a number of others, all unfamiliar, all male, all alike in expression. His eyes would be too red, from smoke and drink, she said, to tell whether I, his only son as far as she knew, had them. But I remembered the face well enough and spliced it carefully onto the few memories I had: Christmas, a trip to the lake. These fabricated memories were never sentimental or tragic. I didn’t conjure any rubbish about being tossed in the air or wrapped by strong arms, my face tickled by the bristles of a moustache. When he was there, he was grave, posed, unspeaking. Like a theater prop, moved about from scene to scene. But I had not lost him yet, not there. My mother, who had, did her best to put him from my mind. She said, “He’s gone, so I have nothing to say about him.”

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And, “He left when you got here. Because you got here. What else do you want to know?” And, “Fool me once.” He had left things, of course. A box of scratched and shining discs in the corner of a closet, covered in soft, gray dust. A pocketknife with the blade too bent to close. None of that interested me. But he had left a tool shed in our yard. He had built it himself and filled it with his things, though I had never heard from my mother that he was particularly handy. It was squat and slat-sided, cobbled together from scraps of plywood and aluminum, just big enough to park a truck and maybe stow a few tools. There were enough splinters of glass mingled in the gravel by the door to indicate that it may have also once sheltered a vice or two, but little else about it was suggestive of anything but ordinary decay. The wood had grown soft with age and webbed with fungus that spread across its sides in deep-cutting silver veins. It had no widows and only one crude door, fastened by a padlock. She said she had lost the key. “There’s snakes,” she told me when I asked. I asked her how they got there and she said, “Your father was a snake,” which seemed to settle it. I had heard this before, about any number of people and things. My mother thought snakes were everywhere, and said so—she was not the kind of woman to confine the breadth

When he was there, he was grave, posed, unspeaking. Like a theater prop, moved about from scene to scene. of her fears. She was tired, perhaps, in need of a readymade threat, an excuse to keep me in sight. That’s what I think now, at least. But if I strayed too near the shed she would call me back, pleadingly, as if she were actually frightened of what lived there, and as if my continued fascination with it caused her pain. She failed to discourage me. The shed was too near, too absolutely forbidden. It could not help but nourish my fantasies, carving inside me empty places for them to fill. Soon, snakes lived in the tall grass by the swing set, and in our house, where they thumped between the walls and rafters. When it rained they fell from the sky, worming into the dark and shuddering earth. They were in brush piles, in thickets and old swimming pools and roadside ditches. They were behind every high cupboard and every locked door. I used to imagine them inside the shed, writhing in between the rake tines, scraping their cold, poisonous bellies against green and amber piles of broken bottle glass. It was not hard for me to believe this. I wanted to. Our yard, deranged as it was with

milkweed and purple chokeberry stalks, seemed the place for them. It was natural that snakes should live in withered places. And it seemed natural that I should want nothing so much as to find one. Halloween was celebrated fervently where we lived, as it is in many small towns. There would be a festival, and almost as many decorated houses as there were for Christmas. Most houses in our town were shabby and disheveled, and a fair amount even broadcasted their hostility with signs and dogs, but on Halloween the shabby houses wore their witches and cobwebs best. It was of all the holidays the one most specifically for children, a show put on for us by the otherwise serious people who worked in shops and factories of our town. Even our neighbors, who were old and invisible on the other side of the thicket, bought a corn shock and a pumpkin, and hung green cobwebs from their porch, though I don’t suppose any trickor-treaters ventured that far out of the way. I think now this may have been intended for me,

I felt how strange we were, how strange and frail, blinking at the dark like cave animals. as a kind gesture, or at least a curious one. We kept to ourselves, and they may have wanted to lure us over to their side of the thicket, where they could get a good look at us. But there is no way to know this for sure, and they never did. Of course, each Halloween there were private people who darkened their windows, and ministers in some of the more somber churches preached sermons on witchcraft. My mother was one of these cautious ones. That year someone at work gave her a pamphlet, and she read it to me one night, her voice thickened with conspiracy. I went to school burdened with secret and dreadful knowledge. Of Black Masses and desecrations, sacrifices of cats and infants, the ravishing of virgins. That sort of thing. So it is odd, maybe, that I remember so little from the day itself. Halloween that year was on a Friday, so I must have gone to school as I always did, shuﬄed from room to room. I have tried to piece together premonitions from that day, to see if there were any. But my memories are indistinct, and the returns I’ve made to them in the years since have left them mussed and disheveled, a ransacked room. This frustrates me, though it shouldn’t. A child does not know the questions he will later ask. It is his world, after all, that memory intrudes upon, and sometimes changes. I do remember that I was alone for longer than I usually was in afterschool. The other children had all been taken much earlier to put on costumes and carve pumpkins. They left,

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nettling their parents as they went with little questions and gloats about how much loot they would bring in. I listened in quiet bewilderment, trying to untangle them from the lurid things I’d heard from my mother. Counselor Mary took a phone call and let me be, and I wandered the church as I liked, moving from room to room. It was a small church, with thick crimson carpets and a little dim circle of stained glass behind the pulpit. I could hear the whistle of the train, softened almost to sweetness by brick and distance. A frantic Counselor Mary found me before my mother did, sitting in a pew, not making a sound. It took longer than usual to drive home because my mother had to avoid the narrow residential streets, which were clogged with cars and careless children. So it was darker when we got home. It took me a moment to notice what was wrong. The door to the shed was open. It had always been closed and locked, and I had never seen anyone go near it, never stepped inside. But now it was open. I saw it as I stood on the porch. My mother was already inside our house, checking for snakes and thieves. She didn’t see it. The forced lock hung from the latch. It seemed very far away. The sky glowed gold at the horizon where the town was, but above, all was dark and unbearably cold. In the quiet I could hear the engine of a dirt bike snickering somewhere in the woods behind us, and organ music, looping on distant speakers from the direction of town, the same lunatic thirty seconds spinning over and over, reaching us in dim, staticfrayed waves. My mother called me to come inside. I didn’t move. At first she pulled at my shoulder, to coax me inside. “Come in Andy. I’ll get supper on.” When she saw that I wasn’t moving, she stopped and knelt down, putting her head on my shoulder. She had been young when she had me, and her cheeks still bloomed with acne. But now her face rested almost sleepily on my shoulder, trembling a bit with the cold and spent focus. It lolled to the side, resting in the hollow of my collarbone. Next to mine, her face was pale, her eyes bright and vacant like another child’s. I felt how strange we were, how strange and frail, blinking at the dark like cave animals. She could see no farther than I could. I had to shake her arm. She came back with a rueful nod. When she saw the door, she stopped shaking and stood up. She was quiet for a second, then called out, “Who’s there?” She spoke in a thin, high voice that seemed to neither expect nor require an answer. She took my face in her hands and said, “Hush, child hush,” though I wasn’t saying anything. Our breathing would have been loud enough, if someone was listening. Then, the train. We didn’t hear it at first, just stopped hearing everything else. The organ music, the hiss of distant cars, the dirt bike, and the courthouse bell sounding the unrevealed hour, all these fell out of the sky, silent as stars, before the train was more than a deep tremor far oﬀ. It swept the air clean before it roared, smoothing down each unruly noise. It shook out the trees, heavy with starlings, and they swirled and gathered above us in the dusk.

And it was passing now, swift and solid, its shadow flowing black and silent beside it. A man’s shape congealed out of the dark behind the shed door. He had waited for the train to make his move. We didn’t know what we had been waiting for. He carried bolt cutters and a length of wire. He was tall and thin, and wore a t-shirt knotted theatrically around the bottom half of his face. His forehead shined, white and pitted, like a chalk scratch on a cave wall. I thought “stranger” and “father,” two wild thoughts swelling together in my throat and stopping my breath. My mother was saying things now, loud and fast, but her voice was swept away. He moved slowly towards us, unraveling with mincing care the feral stabs of privet and chokeberry that clung to his clothes. My mother folded against the house. He was careful to stay out of the light. He took his time looking at us, swaying from face to face, tasting his advantage. We were fixed there for his consideration in a dim pool of porch light. It spilled our cringing shadows out in front of us, projecting them onto the driveway and the shed, over the face of the man in front of us, so we could see each flinch and jerk. He was speaking then. I heard his voice but could not catch the words. I was underneath a wave. Then he was on the porch and in the light, dropping the bolt cutters. With one hand he held my mother by the jaw, pushing her head back against the door. With his free arm he shook her by the hip, and her arms jerked loose and straight in the sleeves of her jacket. She gripped the back of his shirt with both hands, wringing it as a child might. I watched, mute and terrified, unable to look away. I felt somehow as though I had summoned this, as though this scene had always waited behind the door, patient, for my eyes to uncoil it. If I looked away or closed them, it would stop. But how could I? The train passed in a hiss, dragging behind it all the sounds it had taken. I heard dogs barking and the organ again, and the muﬄed thump of my mother’s head against the wall. She coughed like she was clearing her throat, as if she were preparing some way of explaining this, as if she were being interrupted, over and over again. He rammed his head under her chin and pried it upwards, pinning her mouth closed. I could see neither face now, just the back of his pimpled neck, his arms groping blindly for hers, her arms not fighting but twisting and shaking free, like frantic creatures snared at the shoulder joint, bent on wriggling oﬀ into the weeds. I was running then, up the steep bank to the railroad tracks in the general direction of the town. From the top of the embankment I could see the end of the train, a red light suspended there, burning back at me like a single diseased eye. It passed a bend somewhere far ahead and blinked out, and I ran after it. Trees bent over the top of the track, narrowing the sky to a thin band pocked with stars. I couldn’t see the house anymore, only a stolid row of trees and wild privet between them, stretching from horizon to horizon. There was an orange haze of light hanging like smoke just above the branches on the other side of the tracks, and I ran at it.

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I was carried in alternating currents of frenzy and exhaustion. I fell once, and then again, sliding about in the loose gravel. I had to steady myself on the iron rail of the tracks, groping along it, bent double. It was humming like a plucked string. A train was coming or had come; I couldn’t remember which. My jaw clicked, and my arms rattled when they closed on the rail. I did not know where the shaking was coming from, if I were the source or the terminus. I was chasing something, and in a moment I’d remember what it was. But with each step, the contents of my mind sloshed from side to side, emptying at the edges in sprays of hot red light, like I was running with a fish bowl. If I could just stop for a minute, it would come back to me. If I could hold everything perfectly still, for just a second. Then there was a break in the trees to one side of the tracks, and I was in a field of high grass. Ribs of aluminum curled out of the ground, rusting silently, and bits of broken porcelain studded the grass, shining like molars. The grass was already gray with frost, no

I watched, mute and terrified, unable to look away. moon to make it silver. I had to climb over a pile of old railroad ties, rotted hollow and braided through with thorns, and then I was swimming through the high grass, feeling my way forward with my feet. I passed under trees and heard the organ music again, trickling between the crossed branches. I saw the field of clipped grass, the orange streetlights, the parking lot, and the cars before I saw the chain link fence in front of me. I was standing on the edge of an empty baseball field, tracing the fence line toward the road, toward houses hung with clots of cobwebs and witches spinning on the ends of ropes, toward princesses and dinosaurs splashing in the high beams of slowly passing cars. Toward the music, which was where I suddenly realized I had been headed all along, coming from two speakers in the parking lot of the baseball field, propped up with hay bales There was a row of folding tables with adults sitting in chairs behind them. Children moved up and down the line of tables, fishing their hands into bowls and pulling them out again, glittering with cellophane. A man in overalls and a rubber horse’s head neighed at me. He wore overalls and a plaid shirt. There was straw in his pockets. “Where’s your bag, buddy?” I didn’t know. He looped a plastic grocery bag around my arm. Little plumes of steam curled out of his nose. He had not tucked the bottom of his mask into his collar, and it jiggled like a fold of skin. His eyes were blue and opaque. “You’re not wearing a costume?” he asked. I said nothing. “You live back there,” he said pointing back down the road. I shook my head, but he didn’t seem to see.

“Whheeeere is your folks?” he said, attempting a bray. It felt very important to hold the answer back. It was like swallowing an ember. If you held perfectly still, you could just manage it. I said, “I don’t know.” “Sure, son. Don’t cry.” He looked away for a moment. “You’re okay, just lost, that’s all. What’s your number?” And, “I’m sure she’s close. You’re just lost. And, “We’ll get you some candy while you wait.” He sent me down the tables, then stepped away to make the call. My eyes followed him, greedy with worry. He had to take oﬀ the mask to talk, but I couldn’t see his face. At the end of the line, someone put a book into my hands with stories about Noah and Jesus with colorful pictures and Spanish translations in small blue type. I saw my mother’s car pull in a few minutes later. He took my shoulder and led me over to it. She started talking before he was even close, so that we could hear the frantic cheerfulness

She didn’t know why we’d stayed this long, why we’d hung around in such a dump. of it before we could pick out the words. She was explaining that she had just been down the street, that I had run out of sight and she was so sorry. She had looked away for a moment and she was so sorry. She didn’t get out of the car and opened the window only halfway. He said, “It’s fine, it’s fine,” and turned to look at me. “You’re okay?” He knelt down close to get a better look. His face was red and moist from the mask, his head covered in a pelt of sweaty silver hair. Now he looked me up and down earnestly, as if he had missed something before and was trying to find it, quickly, before he lost his chance. I flinched and he frowned. “You can’t take your eyes oﬀ them for a moment,” she was saying. “You look away and they’re gone before you know it.” Her voice was flat and even, but she warbled a bit at the end, urgency seeping through the cracks. She tried a little laugh: “Boys.” “They get carried away,” he said, looking down. “Come here,” she said to me. She opened the front passenger door. “Get up and come here.” She kept her eyes down, not daring to look. He seemed reluctant to get out of the way. “What did you say your name was?” he asked. But we were gone then. When we were on our way, she started talking. “Some jerk from the high school. Some pimply jerk. Rooting around in the shed for some tools, something to sell. He must not have thought

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we were coming home.” She ventured this, not looking at me yet, testing if I would accept this. She had fixed her hair back again. She was holding it together with pins. She took her hand oﬀ her forehead. It was smudged yellow and green, the color of a changing leaf. “He didn’t hurt me. Just pushed me up against the doorframe. It was just a scare. He was just as scared as we were.” “He left almost as soon as you did. Just as fast. “I don’t blame you for running away.” We had stopped at a light, and she turned to look at me full on. She had changed her clothes, to a navy skirt and a wrinkled, cream-colored blouse. To salvage something from the mess, I might have thought later. She was talking again. There was something I needed to know, that she’d been meaning to tell me. We were going to move, she said. She wasn’t sure where yet. She’d started saving a little. Just a little. But it would add up. This was no place to live, she said. She didn’t know why we’d stayed this long, why we’d hung around in such a dump. What was the matter with us? When we got home, the door to the shed was closed. She had left every light in the house on, even the television, which was the only thing that moved behind the curtains. That morning the frost killed the sweat pea vines on the gutter, and I found a snakeskin, trailing from the privet like a tethered ghost. It was Saturday, the first of November, and the frost had fallen heavy and half-frozen on the crabgrass. Jack-o’-lanterns moldered on the porches they had lit, their teeth and empty eyeholes black with rot and candle flame. The early-morning sun cast a sallow light over the yard, too weak for anything but the palest of shadows. Our neighbors, who were old and kept a garden, had risen early to drape strips of cloth over their rows of mustards and late nasturtiums. They had not expected the frost. I woke that morning on the floor to the sound of their bickering coming thin and indistinct through the torn screen of my bedroom window. My mother was sleeping beneath a pile of afghans in front of the television, still wearing last night’s blouse. I followed their voices outside, peering at them through the brush. They held the sheets between them, pulling them tight, unfurling over their ruined plants bright new rows of muslin and calico. And there was the snakeskin, hanging in the thicket next to the shed, teasing a little in the wind. I went over to it and watched it for a minute, not daring to touch it. A breeze caught and filled it and for a moment it writhed as if trying to remember the form of the thing it held—the slick muscle and fang, the brittle bone cage and belly. Beside it, the shed. The lock neatly clipped through. The weeds mussed and flattened down around it, sharp and silver with frost. Nothing else amiss. I felt suddenly cold and clasped my hands together. This seemed to complete some hidden circuit, and I began to shake. The door was open. I could know. It seemed the only thing to do.

Something was there, something that had waited for a long time. I knew that now. And I knew just as surely that this chance would pass, if I let it. In a few minutes my mother would wake penitent and wary, more determined than ever to keep me close. Prepared to leave all this behind, if thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what it took. I could see the shadow behind the door from where I was standing, could feel the threat and promise there. Of snakes, of violence, of knowing why. Everything converged and eddied there, behind the door, where I could get at it. I stood shaking in the weeds, yearning to be terrified. But before I stepped inside, another thought came to me. Not a thought exactly, but the image of an empty room. Inside, tools hung sensibly from the walls, crumbling with rust. The walls rising sensibly out of the packed dirt floor, crooked but firm. A little slipshod room, thrown together by a man unused to such work. Nothing worth stealing or finding. Nothing to fear. I paused next to the door to let this new thought die. It seemed amazing, impossible that there would be nothing there, after all.

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Z . G. TO M AS Z EWS K I

Kingfisher I watch a kingfisher dive three times each time dividing the membrane. Three times my heart sinks and suspends. Three times I see water and the reflection of water spiral into air, light and oxygen swirling like stars navigating dark space. The universe can seem so intimate: a bird releasing sky, body cast down toward an unparalleled faithâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; this bird rising twice and on the third lifting with it another body: minnowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s scaled light like a nebula flickering.

M . B. M C LATC H EY

Empirical God So the unmovable mover is one both in definition and in number; therefore there is one god and one heaven alone. — A R I STOT L E

Start with the known, the way a child begins. A child begins by calling all men father. Then, later on distinguishes. Father: burrower, planter of unharvestable spring. Mother, first rope and ring tossed to a budding glove—a sustenance like air or love. Love, that triggering nerve that in the Greek origin myth substitutes touch for a god’s imperative: union of sky and sea, sea and earth. Luminous bodies coupling like first birds. Call it one god, one heaven when learned through its carcass and seed— Palm. Milk. Soul. Wing. Palm, fallow field surrendering its feed. Milk, an ancient man’s mother’s plan. Soul, a rusted bell ringing, striped buoy bobbing, bobbing. Wing, a triumph and sudden cold.

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A BAYO M I A N I M AS H AU N

Standing in the Ruins of Gomorrah

Here A house stood Where widows Begged alms Shared bread And kissed at night. Here A prophet Sat with prostitutes And of the little They gave He drank with joy And ate. Beside these walls A drunk rose from stupor Pushed aside bottles Swearing god spoke And he’d heard the call. And here— The night before This town was Burnt down— My father broke fruit With the same brother That for years Took his wife.

TY L E R G O B B L E

Autobiography [Metathesis] I don’t want to be an animal anymore. — GA L E M A R I E T H O M P SO N

My ancestors they were eagle farmers in Switzerland The booted eagle the lesser spotted eagle The one with the solid black head Like a doppelganger of he Who lets the rope go Releasing the guillotine And the oldest son would walk The cages with his machete Clobber the ugly ones the dumb ones The ones that didn’t puﬀ right He would yank them from the cage Carry them to the end of the barn To the open light He would hold the unconscious eagle Head in his hand Like the moment before the contest starts You show your masculinity By cracking an egg in your palm Then he’d slice through The thick weight of the body Rattling the base board That impossible plank stretched The entire three hundred feet of the barn Extending under every beak You show your masculinity By cracking an eagle egg in your palm They never let a speck of bird go to waste The eggs for breakfast the feathers for pillows

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Stitched with the family crest One for each newborn The beaks for the toddlers to dig in the dirt The meat for the sandwiches The talons looped with string Worn like a sheriﬀ’s badge The most beautiful birds Pristine feathers and fiercest screeches Were sold for a handsome fee To unhandsome men in dull blazers I am told these men flaunted Their eagle on every street corner Until a family was begun A woman stepping forward Stepping onto the curb Terrified by the power of the beast Enchanted by its incalculable charm After a year of marriage The man would release the eagle It would glide across the fields Past the blacksmith’s shop Over the sheep pastures Beyond both of the town’s rivers Before he went away to the university I am told the oldest boy had to go fetch All these eagles I am told the boy took the machete with him Just in case Nothing had truly changed

AA R O N B R OW N

Via Negativa You are not the wind scraping branch on pane or the continental plate strike-slipping beneath a valley of bones drought brittled and baked. You are not hurricane clouds circling around an ever-turning eye, slow-moving and a mile wide, surrounding surging sea, framing bound the heaving heavens looking down on swirling earthâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;nor are you the grass fire spread before the rains come cooling brush, and keeping calm what you are not. But maybe you are somewhere close, not the land but the dust, not the sea but the wind making waves or the deep dark pull of lunar longing, wanting the vastness between us shrunk to nothing.

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R E B ECCA LAU R E N

Ave, Grandfather Tonight before my mother carves, we remember the turkey— how it arrived shrink-wrapped in the same Cryovac my grandfather peddled in the forties to roomfuls of Armenian women who braided Ave Maria into string cheese dreams that drooped from ceiling hooks. Last summer, he started getting lost on Ocean City beaches. Shell shard castle windows sand wisps in the wind, legends of white-winged terns spiraled inside a sea whelk, a gull’s abandoned clump of seaweed. Not to mention sandpiper, avocet—my grandfather had forgotten names by then nursing home man reaching for strangers’ hands, ornithic whistle door to door, wattled call call calling each woman by her unpronounceable patronym clear wit to kiss whom he thought was his wife. Transparent world white gown of plumage my mother unnests the cold insides of the Thanksgiving turkey from plastic wrap while he rests and naps. We prattle, pace, preen in wait for frost to fade clean away, but he wakes and calls me by her inevitable name— never enough downfeathers, never enough flying south this empty winter for our flapping skein of memory.

ARTIST/ NOTE

DOUG CALISCH: THE BIOGRAPHY OF OBJECTS SERIES My sculptural

process involves collecting, modifying, and assembling found

materials. These rescued materials merge as new layers of association, metaphor, motifs, and narratives. That each collected article shows signs of natural wear or past human activity intrigues me and suggests each sculptural assemblage has an expansive history beyond my involvement with the materials. It is not unlike archeology. The work becomes collaborative, combining my actions with acts previous to mine. Within this context, I strive for the delicate balance between preserving an objectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s history and creating new ways of looking at and thinking about these materials and forms. Visualize a bronzed baby shoe tied to a chessboard or sealed inside a mason jar. The relationship of these objects invites us to re-examine our associations with, and perceptions of, these thingsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;each of us generating our own response to the new combinations. The works draw on a variety of visual sources including architecture, shrines, signage, tools, games, scientific illustrations, refuse, the human figure, the lack of the human figure, natural artifacts, and our natural environment. This visual vocabulary suggests thematic connections between the natural and scientific worlds, between observation and understanding, between instinct and knowledge, between order and disorder. Beyond the formal considerations of composition, color, texture, and craft, the nature of foundobject sculpture also suggests that we consider the disposition of a society that leaves these materials behind. The work invites the viewer to ask questions and encourages selfreflection.

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Doug Calisch. Rock, Scissors, Paper. Found and altered materials. 41 x 21 x 5 inches.

Doug Calisch. Homeland Arcade. Found and altered materials. 31 x 48 x 7 inches.

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Doug Calisch. Mixed Blessings. Found and altered materials. 52 x 44 x 6 inches.

Doug Calisch. Empty Nest. Found and altered materials. 34 x 26 x 10 inches.

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Doug Calisch. Wood Cutterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Refuge. Found and altered materials. 42 x 23 x 8 inches.

Doug Calisch. Phases of the Equinox. Found and altered materials. 36 x 24 x 20 inches.

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Doug Calisch. Sticks and Stones. Found and altered materials. 43 x 33 x 11 inches.

Doug Calisch. Square, Level, and Plumb. Found and altered materials. 50 x 32 x 7 inches.

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E L I ZA B ET H KAY E CO O K

I am in the Catedral de san Antolín in Palencia, Spain, clutching my chillpricked arms and sitting before El Greco’s first portrait of St. Sebastian. He has an arrow in his ribs and one arm rope-bound to the tree. His skin is yellow-blue with shadows, his legs muscled by fast, exaggerated brush strokes. I cast my mind back to my high school art classes: This is Mannerism. I dream of becoming a mermaid, sprouting gills and a greenscaled tail, or the chance to die twice for God. When I quit my job at the water park in Weeki Wachee, Florida, I could no longer hear the ocean shaking its weight against shells and sand, or the low, pulsing groans of alligators calling their young. The doctor says he could put an ossicular replacement prosthesis in my ears, a successful surgery for many patients with temporal bone fractures. I don’t want surgery. I want my life.

Working as one of Weeki Wachee’s mermaids, I shrank to the strength of my lungs and the slink of river weed against my arms. Above the surface, children yelled and beat each other with inflatable toys, while their moms complained about dental bills and their dads nodded to sleep with portable radios slung about their necks. I stayed under as long as I could, listening to the limestone’s echoes and the river’s clicks and creaking. I had profound faith in my body. My breathing tube trailed behind me like a strand of DNA. I sifted mud through my fingers to find arrowheads and still-full soda cans buried in the silty bottom. Sodas tumble out of drunk boaters’ coolers, sink, then nestle in the mud, until I pluck them out and flick snails from their sides. They are the perfect coldness for drinking. No one minded what I did in the Mermaid’s Lagoon, so long as I surfaced every thirty minutes to wave and coyly toss my sloppy wet hair from shoulder to shoulder. The sudden noise and hot press of air were sharp like a car crash, an assault of sound.

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St. Irene cuts the ropes around his wrists, then bundles up the body. She heaves her weight around until Sebastian is precariously balanced in a wheelbarrow, then carts him home, avoiding bumps and potholes. Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s still alive. He bleeds and breathes in shallow rattles. Her neighbors help her heave him up on the table. She plants one foot on his chest, grabs the arrowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shaft, and tugs. When it slides loose, she stumbles back and topples a crock of oil from the windowsill. I am just imagining this. He is frozen in his frame, eyes cast up in holy assurance, body straining against its bonds. I worry about the way I sound when I speak, so I stay silent.

I studied abroad in Spain when I was nineteen. I trotted up and down olive groves and sunflower fields where the dust was alive with grasshoppers and their great insect thrum. I sat on the steps of every art museum I found, eating bocadillos with fried baby squid and sipping Coca-Cola. After a museumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cold stone corridors and sallow Madonnas, the sun on my skin unfurled me back into life. I was golden and charming. University students brought me to their homes, or took me dancing. They told me where to buy los mejores churros (San Gines in Madrid), and how to jump bonfires on San Juan. Bartenders gave me drinks. I caught a taxi home from the club one morning before sunrise, and the driver said, Mi mama hablaba Valenciano cuando era una niĂąa, pero Franco dijo que las otras lenguas eran ilegales . . . I spoke with the gitano boys on the beach and the Korean ladies who walked up and down the shore, crying Masaje? Now that I am deaf, I am deaf in every language.

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I use the hostel’s sticky computer to read more about St. Sebastian on a Catholic website. His biography is thin and sandwiched between advertisements for rosaries and medals. It notes that St. Sebastian “healed a deaf-mute,” but what I have learned from pamphlets, online forums, and my Introduction to ASL community group is that this term—deaf-mute—is now considered rude. You are LDA. Late-Deafened Adult, our community group leader writes. I am also LDA, but look at me now! I do not look at him. During group meetings, I clutch my hands together and tie my fingers into unreadable knots.

My mother told me that I sound fine, that even she can’t hear a diﬀerence in my speech, but I turn my head away from her words. I feel the empty air when she leaves. I know I must sound like a girl underwater. Later, I find my mother crying in the bathtub with her clothes and shoes on. You are grieving, my community leader writes on my notepad. One night, I post to an LDA forum under my mother’s name. She’s better dead than deaf, I write, and let the pummeling begin: fierce, poorly-spelled replies, rich with unshakeable loyalty to the writers’ own dead ears, or the dead ears of their late-deafened daughters.

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I go to the cathedral again the next morning, but there’s mass, so I sit outside and eat my omelette bocadillo. A gitana girl leans against the stones a few feet away, staring, blowing a great pink bubble of gum. It grows so large and transparent that I can see her features through its skin. A silent pop, and sticky film coats her cheeks and chin. She sends up a dark shadow of pigeons when she runs away. The crowd spills out the door, little grandmothers waving their hands, pinching and smacking rowdy children, everyone’s mouths flapping open and shut. When I slip back inside, St. Sebastian looks bored to see me. I step close and press my pretty-scallop ear against the grooves of his brushstrokes. I listen to his dark hair, his torso stretched long and thin by pain. I don’t do any of this. St. Irene made a mistake when she bound up Sebastian’s wounds. How disappointing, to leave a new body and to awaken in the old—a body now all torn to pieces, with little arrow holes for curious children to stick fingers into.

My mother says I woke up a week after the car accident and started screaming. I dreamed something was stuck inside me. I gouged my fingernails into the ache and tried to split open my ribcage. I thought I would find pomegranate seeds inside, clinging like fat ticks to caverns of fat and bone. Now, in the cathedral, I know I can’t shake the world apart with my yell. Something glitters behind St. Sebastian’s eyes—a sunfish at the mouth of a cave, or a soft-shell turtle sliding just below the surface. I am so tired. I stretch out on the cathedral floor and put my face against the cool stone. St. Sebastian, St. Sebastian, I’m being martyred every day, jotting notes on napkins and shaping slow letters from my hands.

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C I N DY K I N G

The Recovery Stroke The willows weep their limbs on the surface of the lake. A moth falls in, kicking and spinning where I am learning to swim in cut-oﬀs and t-shirt, gray, property of the school’s gym. My mother says, you are not its twin but in the moth’s dim thoughts might I be? From the lightest, twice-burned ash, the moth seems made. The match will not catch fire to send it back to the hearth of light where it was born. Kick, kick. Forget your body. And I am fog at dawn, rising up from the flooded valley, crowded with trees over which the water is cold and high, and on my back, all the rest is sky.

REVIEW/ 37

IN THE MIDDLE OF MANY MOUNTAINS by NAHAL SUZANNE JAMIR P R ESS 5 3 , 2 01 3 reviewed by RITA JONES

During the final months of each planting season, my mother would venture to the garden departments of various superstores, requesting to purchase the final bulb and seedling stocks for extremely reduced prices. Each time an errand would bring us near strip malls, we would park our decrepit blue van outside the gardening department of a Fred Meyer. I would remain in the car and curl my body into the blue cloth of the front seat, trying my best to imagine the door handle as a pillow. Forty-five minutes later my mother would emerge from the cavern of the outdoor gardening center, pushing one grocery cart before her and wheeling another behind. Milk crates of small brown masses with fishnet packaging and bright paper labels would be stacked high in her carts. “Five cents a bulb!” she’d say as I tottered out of the car to help. “Five cents a bulb, and their planting season is almost over.” Planting hundreds of bulbs so late in the season was a gamble of its own, paired with the reality that half the bulbs had already started their delicate green shoots, and the rest had begun to mold or dry rot. My mother’s erratic planting has always been a mystery to me. As we anticipated the burgeoning tulips, crocuses, and daﬀodils, what was it about? Their survival against the odds? Their salvation from the waste bin? Mere frugality? Nahal Suzanne Jamir’s short story collection, In the Middle of Many Mountains, contains its own reflections on garden upkeep. In “Exact Warmth,” a husband stands at a kitchen window, overlooking where his wife has planted tulips. “I never understood her aﬃnity for tulips,” he ruminates. “Tulips are vague. They go into the ground and return months later according to no precise schedule.” He remembers a certain spring in which his wife had forgotten to expect tulips, “and the surprise caused her to sit on the grass in the yard and cry. . . . All she would say through her sobs was I love remembering like this.” This surprise of remembering is what makes Jamir’s collection so remarkable. It calls the reader to turn to their stories with a precise and gentle inquisitiveness, embracing what cannot be understood as much as what can be. For Jamir, the bulbs that do not surface, still shrouded in darkness, may be just as beautiful as those that find the light. In the Middle of Many Mountains is a debut collection of eleven stories, with voices male and female, young and old, single and married, immigrant and native-born. Nahal Jamir channels these voices from her own unique heritage: though her mother was born in Iran, Jamir herself has never been able to visit the country. Her stories echo with that mystery, the unknown of

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land and space from which your family has come, one you may never fully know—the locked secrets in the memories of parents and loved ones that only come through the sieve of your questions. Jamir’s portrayals of close friends and family are layered with stories beyond the family, of distant hillsides and heritages, of afterlives and the strange territory of sickness. As such, her tales contain a new magical realism of their own—Persian princes, Norse gods and goddesses, birds that drink at bars, musky creation stories, suicides and ant farms, lovers caught in time travel. What I found particularly striking about this collection is how it challenges the way that children, adolescent or adult, are “supposed” to feel about their parents. It highlights the frustration, the resentment, the confusion, the deep and infuriating differences that rise like weeds between your heart and theirs. Yet, amidst this suffering swarm of feeling, it’s also about a transcendent desire to understand. Such is the tension in “Stories My Mother Told Me,” in which the father is distant and unknown, while the mother only speaks in stories, some fiction, others fact, with no clear delineation between the two. Slowly and delicately, Jamir summons the courage of thoughts like, “It’s myself I’m unsure of, my love for my parents I’m unsure of.” Perhaps, in the maze of growing and being grown, love is not the right word for how one feels toward a parent, and distance isn’t either. One word does not serve a purpose, but maybe a story does. Nothing in Jamir’s text smacks of angst, or drawls with entitlement. Self-understanding, especially in her work, is not about withdrawing inward, but about the beautiful and painful stretching to know the other. By knowing the other, we can know ourselves. This is a journey of questions, and Jamir’s questions are crafted with lightness, with a precise image, with a metaphor that journeys from the page and finds a roost in your chest. In “Doors of a Cold Season,” for example, a man reflects on his love for his wife: I had everything to offer her, moon and stars. . . . The moon is movement, watery death and love. . . . Then, stars. Ah, stars are self-sustaining but radiate out into the far reaches of space. You can tell all from a star’s light—tell its age and composition. Moon and stars. I had everything to offer her, but it’s all about mirrors. A diamond is a mirror. I offered her what I thought was the mirror of her beauty, and I hoped that she would offer to mirror me in return. The sentences of her work take shape to echo the collection’s title—rising and falling like mountain ranges, crafting a rhythm that pulls the reader with her, with all these memories, all these stories, all these aging mothers and delusional professors. The reader is brought to her valleys, the soft and haunting asides at the end of each image and each chapter. Returning to the husband from “Doors of a Cold Season,” after his meditation on the firmament and his attempts to love his wife, he concludes, “Or perhaps I offered nothing and believed in nothing,” and later, “My heart is like a mountain, frozen in prayer.” And my goodness, there is such craft in those moments, those soft valleys of analysis. They do nothing less than leave you breathless, wanting to clutch the book against your chest for just one moment. Tell me more, you want to say, tell me more about the tulips, and I’ll tell you more about what has been forgotten.

CONTRIBUTORS / 37

Abayomi Animashaun is the author of two poetry collections, The Giving of Pears (Black Lawrence Press, 2010) and Sailing for Ithaca (Black Lawrence Press, 2014), and the editor of Others Will Enter the Gates: Immigrant Poets on Poetry, Influences, and Writing in America (Black Lawrence Press, 2015). Derrick Austin is the author of Trouble the Water, selected by Mary Szybist for the 2015 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize (BOA Editions, 2016). A Cave Canem fellow, he earned his MFA from the University of Michigan. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2015, Image, New England Review, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, The Paris-American, Memorious, and other journals and anthologies. He is the social media coordinator for The Offing. He is also a RuPaul’s Drag Race aficionado. Aaron Brown’s prose and poetry have been published in or are forthcoming from Transition, Tupelo Quarterly, the Portland Review, and Dappled Things, among others. He is the author of Winnower (Wipf & Stock, 2013) and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Aaron grew up in Chad, Africa, and now lives with his wife Melinda in Hutchinson, Kansas, the birthplace of William Staﬀord. An MFA graduate from the University of Maryland, Aaron is an assistant professor in writing and editing at Sterling College. More at www.writingtheinbetween.com. Doug Calisch has recently completed his thirty-fifth year of teaching at Wabash College. He exhibits his work throughout the country and has had over twenty-five solo exhibitions since 1990. His work can be found in over fifty public and private collections. Noted public commissions include an installation for Purdue University, a work for Ball Memorial Hospital in Muncie Indiana, and an outdoor sculpture for the city of Osaka, Japan. He has received four Indiana Arts Fellowships, a Lilly Open Faculty Grant, and a McLain/McTurnan Research Fellowship, and he has been the keynote speaker at the Art Education Association of Indiana. Chris Campanioni is a first-generation Cuban and Polish-American. He often writes about celebrity and pop culture in an attempt to re-evaluate and re-contextualize these concerns. He has worked as a journalist, model, and actor, and he teaches literature and creative writing at Baruch College and Pace University and journalism at

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John Jay. His “Billboards” poem, which responded to Latino stereotypes and mutable (and often muted) identity in the fashion world, was awarded the 2013 Academy of American Poets Prize at Fordham Lincoln Center. Find him in space at chriscampanioni.com or in person, somewhere between Brooklyn Bridge Park and Barclays Center where more than half of what he earns goes toward his intense appreciation for food. Micah Chatterton’s poetry and prose has appeared in a number of online and print journals, including Kindred Magazine, Slice, and Coachella Review. His work is also anthologized in The Cancer Poetry Project 2, Best New Poets 2013, and The Burden of Light. Micah earned his MFA in creative writing and writing for the performing arts from the University of California, Riverside, and now works as the librarian of an elementary visual and performing arts academy, teaching students to love words and paper as much as he does. More at micahchatterton.com. Elizabeth Kaye Cook is currently an MFA in fiction candidate at the Inland Northwest Center for Writers in Washington. She passes the time by reading Nabokov and trying to convince family, friends, and professional acquaintances that her dog, La Bamba, is actually just a hairy human baby. You can find her avoiding conversation with strangers on various forms of public transportation throughout the city or eating noodles and complaining about the cold. Doug Cornett lives with his wife in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches English and history at the Northwest Academy, an independent middle and high school. He earned his BA from Skidmore College and his MFA in creative writing from Portland State University. His writing has previously appeared in Vestal Review, Superstition Review, Propeller Magazine, and elsewhere. He is currently finishing up both a literary mystery and a middle grade novel. Some of his favorite things: nachos, hard bop, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, ping pong, and rooting for the Cleveland Cavaliers. John Estes writes, “I am author of three volumes of poetry— Kingdom Come (C&R Press, 2011), Stop Motion Still Life (Wordfarm, forthcoming), and Sure Extinction, which won the 2015 Antivenom Prize from Elixir Press—and two chapbooks: Breakfast with Blake at the

Laocoön (Finishing Line Press, 2007) and Swerve, which won a National Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America. I live in Canton, Ohio, where I live with my wife, two sons, two dogs, and a three-and-a-half ton granite boulder that reminds me each day of what it means to say that love is real but can’t be taken with you.” Tyler Gobble is the host of the “Everything is Bigger” reading series in Austin, Texas, where he is a poetry fellow at the Michener Center for Writers. His first book, More Wreck More Wreck, is available from Coconut Books. He likes disc golf, sleeveless shirts, porches, and bacon. More at tylergobble.com. Vivé Griffith lives in Austin, Texas, where she directs Free Minds, a program oﬀering free college humanities classes to adults living on low incomes. A graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, her work has appeared in The Sun, Oxford American, Gettsyburg Review, and elsewhere. She is committed to community education, big pots of soup, and very long walks. She blogs daily(ish) at picsandparagraphs.com. Rita Jones is a Puget Sound native now residing in Santa Cruz, which seems to be as close to the PNW as one can get in California. She is currently a fourth-year PhD student in the UCSC history department. Her extracurricular interests include passage meditation, memoirs, personal letters, and wellness studies. Rita can be found in the classroom practicing aromatherapy and deep breathing with her students, while also teaching them about ancient Egypt. Will Jones lives with his wife, Juliet, in Dayton, Tennessee, where he develops jackets and long underwear for an apparel manufacturer. In 2014, he graduated from Bryan College with a BA in English literature. After graduating from college and reading a great deal of Richard Yates, Virginia Woolf, William Maxwell, and Alice Munro over the summer, he decided to take up the disagreeable business of teaching himself to write stories. In his free time, he bakes desserts and plays board games and rugby. This is his first publication. Cindy King was born in Cleveland and grew up swimming in the shadows of the hyperboloid cooling towers near the shores of Lake Erie. At twenty-three, she escaped the Rust Belt and has lived most of her life south of the Mason-Dixon. Though she enjoys Texas and teaching at the University of North Texas Dallas, she sometimes gets homesick. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, North American Review, River Styx, Black Warrior, American Literary Review, Jubilat, African American Review, and elsewhere. It can be heard at weekendamerica.publicradio.org and at pankmagazine.com. She received a

Tennessee Williams Scholarship from Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Agha Shahid Ali Scholarship from the Fine Arts Work Center. Rebecca Lauren lives in Philadelphia and teaches English at Eastern University. She serves as managing editor for Saturnalia Books and hopes, one day, to own a llama farm, though city zoning regulations don’t quite allow for it yet. Her poetry has been published in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Mid-American Review, and Prairie Schooner, and she is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her chapbook, The Schwenkfelders, won the Keystone Chapbook Prize. Marianne Lettieri’s artworks are in the collections of Oracle Corporation, City of Palo Alto, California, and San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. Recent solo exhibitions include House/Work at Peninsula Museum of Art in Burlingame, California, Relics and Ruins at Telegraph Hill Gallery in San Francisco, Evidence of Life at Doug Adams Gallery in Berkeley, and Changing Context at Azusa Pacific University. She has an MFA degree in spatial arts from San Jose State University. Marianne has served on the CIVA Board of Directors since 2011. M. B. McLatchey is a 2015 Florida Poet Laureate Nominee and recipient of the 2011 American Poet Prize. She is the author of two books of poetry, The Lame God (Utah State University Press), for which she won the May Swenson Award, and Advantages of Believing (Finishing Line Press, 2015). Excerpts from her recently completed memoir, Beginner’s Mind, have been published in Memoir and were awarded the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Journal, National Poetry Review, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is a professor of humanities at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. More at www.mbmclatchey.com. John Poch’s fourth collection, Fix Quiet (St. Augustine’s Press, 2015), won the 2014 New Criterion Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in Poetry, Agni, Paris Review, The Nation, and other journals. Born in 1989 and currently living in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Z.G. Tomaszewski is a poet, rambler, handyman, and musician, as well as co-director of Lamp Light Musical Festival and a founding member of Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters. His first book All Things Dusk, selected by Li-Young Lee as the 2014 International Poetry Prize winner, was published by Hong Kong University Press.

LAST NOTE / 37 THOUGHTS ON BEING KNOWN FROM THE CONTRIBUTORS IN THIS ISSUE

Even misanthropes want to be known. We’d

Reading is like sending sonar pulses to your

all like to be understood, our glories and frailties, and loved. Love. To be known is love. Not merely sexual love (remember “to know” as carnal?) or easy romance, but love outlasting disagreements, rage, and selfishness, love that can part but return. Lastingness. As a black, queer man, in the midst of a sociopolitical revolution (#blacklivesmatter) there are days I feel it’s impossible for this country to know me. My body has been written on by racism, colonialism, white supremacy. Is it legible anymore? Who am I asking? When I am in the world, who sees me? I’m thankful to have found a tribe where I find my wine, my bread, my rest.

soul—the words, their ideas, cast inward, and we can discern the contours of our spirit by listening for what echoes back. These echoes are rare, but when we hear them they might bring joy, melancholy, laughter, or embarrassment. More than anything, we might feel exposed; here it is, that part of ourselves that we’ve protected as private and infinite and unknowable, laid bare for all to see. These echoes are the reason I read.

Derrick Austin POET RY

Knowing yourself is trusting yourself. That complete sense of trust means you are engaged without doubt, without baggage, and while living in the present. For me, it is a rare place, but I find it most often in the studio, deep in the creative process. Distractions drop away. Decisions are eﬀortless. Time fades. Focus expands. There is no right or wrong. Is it a sacred place? Is it a sustainable place? Can I call for it? Where does it go? I have more questions than answers. While it may be counterintuitive, knowing oneself is also collaborative—in relationships, with materials, and moving through life. Ironically, knowing yourself is about finding ways to connect yourself. Douglas Calisch VI S UA L A RT

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Doug Cornett F I CT I O N

In a seminar on creative writing my sophomore year of college, my professor pulled me aside and talked to me about my work. “I see you’ve written about your mother’s death,” he said. “I’d like to introduce you to some pieces you might like.” That year, I read personal essay, after memoir, after novel, poem after poem—all from women whose mothers had died. I couldn’t get enough. Before that seminar, I read to explore, and after, I read to be known. I read for the echo of myself, that connection, that lucid moment of crushing empathy. And the more I read the works of these women, I began to speak with their power in the face of any grief, to say out loud, “I hear you. It’s awful, and I am so sorry. Yet, there is transcendence in your story, and so many good questions to ask.” Rita Jones REV I EWS

We as human beings often struggle and claw

Emily Dickinson famously said, “If I feel

our way to some understanding of the divine. We get caught up in the questions: Is there a God? What does God think of us? And in our humble attempts, we struggle to even begin. Often, we can only figure out who God is by the so-called “via negativa.” Call it some high-minded mysticism or another, I cannot help but see the truth in this: that discovery of the divine means knowing and claiming all that God is not. If he breaks down and transcends the labels we place on him, then maybe the way—the only way of knowing God and being known—is seeing him beyond the limitations of physical and, dare I say, spiritual experience.

physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” and the process of knowing the self is a similar slice, a desired uncapping. The best utterances and kisses, the enlightening jogs and chats on the porch all know this. But of course, us being these tumbling selves, it is a temporary peek—an uncertain scratch in the marble, a split second sniff of what really is cooking in the kitchen. And then, POOF, back into the world/the whirl, filthy in unknowing, thank goodness, because to leave the top off once and for all, that sounds like a nightmare, for me and for you.

Aaron Brown POET RY

Tyler Gobble P O ET RY

It is impossible to know oneself without the

Being known is like trying to hold water in

presence of others, the people with whom we live and work, those who pass us, unknown, on the street. In every human encounter, we learn to know ourselves. Whether through the recognition of similarities or the awareness of diﬀerences, we grope our way toward an understanding of our shared humanity. In the absence of others, we are strangers to ourselves.

your hand: you feel it, then it passes through your fingers. Left with almost nothing—the echo of a moment, the shadow of a thought.

Cindy King POET RY

Grief, even born from a shared tragedy, is an utterly solitary experience. Pain blurs any imagination of yourself as a member of the world as it now exists, one person short. The first time I went to church, years afterward, I ran out sobbing, panicked during the final chorus, as the congregation lifted their hands, filled their chests and lowered their heads together to praise God for giving his only son to die. I threw a metal chair at the side of the building. I had lost the most profound expression of my childhood faith, the huddling of like-souled people together, singing their shared gratitude for a sacrifice, and I have no idea how to get it back.

Z.G. Tomaszewski P O ET RY

There is something uncanny in the process of writing a story. It can feel like lurking, to sit at the same desk each day for months and observe people’s lives. Like spying even. It makes little diﬀerence that these are imagined lives, lives you’ve built from pieces of people you know. Or that the way you’ve come to know these lives is by writing and erasing them many times. It is still prying, to shuﬄe through their thoughts and motives, to find metaphors for their clothes, their faces, their vanities. It is from these furtive exertions of watchfulness, these violations, really, that fiction lets us see another soul. No living person would consent to this level of exposure. Real souls are cannier, and more opaque. Will Jones F I CT I O N

Micah Chatterton POET RY

LAST NOTE / 37 THOUGHTS ON BEING KNOWN FROM THE CONTRIBUTORS IN THIS ISSUE

In an age in which it is so easy to be

While cooking dinner, I belt out old-time,

misrepresented—or misrepresent yourself—on the internet, “to be known” might be the mode de vie of our culture. The utopic possibilities that exist on a blank page, and the communion and connection that writing and reading allow us, have never been more important and more ignored. We grasp outside of ourselves by being able to imagine other worlds and all the perspectives that live there, beyond our own. I think that’s one of the greatest things about poetry; we can overcome this distance in a single line or a single word that breaks one line from the next. The tension that exists within that threshold is our striving for intimacy.

twangy hymns and stir the roux. ‘Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus. Unlike this media-savvy world where you can “unfriend” someone with a click, gospel reflects a quest for intimacy: Just a closer walk with thee. When my grandfather succumbed to dementia, I began to wonder how we could truly know another: he’d call me by my mother’s name, then nothing at all. But Thursdays at the old folks home, a woman plucked hymns on the piano, and everyone remembered the words: Amazing love. How can it be? None of us were sure, but at that moment, gripping our walkers or leaning over a skillet of scalloped potatoes, we knew and felt known.

Chris Campanioni POET RY

Rebecca Lauren P O ET RY

Just to prove how much I don’t want to be known, I wrote several pieces about being known, and I deleted each, bristling at what people would think about what I think about being known. I haven’t deleted these sentences yet, but I want to. I also want someone to say, “I felt that,” or “I find those words hit me hard, too.” Auden: “It is the author’s aim to say once and emphatically, ‘He said.’” I’m an introvert, mostly, but gaining my income from being a teacher, I have to act like I’m an extrovert. I’d rather be watching college football or a cooking show than be known. I write poetry, which is artifice. I want to delete this. John Poch PO ET RY

ISSUE 37 Winter 2015

For many of us, what we are called and how we are known will shift with fresh milestones, and with past or recent misdeeds. Redeeming as the former might be, the latter is often troubling. Troubling for what gets revealed. Troubling too for how we might be remembered in history. That Lot’s wife, who, in my imagination, was the best dancer in all Sodom and Gomorrah and the handiest with the tambourine, should be known as the woman who “looked back” is humbling and terrifying. Abayomi Animashaun P O ET RY

Doug Calisch. Mixture 79. Found and altered materials. 44 x 42 x 4 inches.

Doug Calisch. Sittings #4. Found and altered materials. 6 x 6 x 2 inches.

Issue 37: Being Known

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