Issue 40: Nowhere Near

NOWHERE NEAR / 40

Fall 2016 $15

ru’mi-nate: TO C HE W THE C U D ; T O MU S E; T O MED I TAT E; TO THI NK A G A I N ; T O PO N D ER

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 deep reading, contemplative activism, telling stories, asking questions, and doing “small things with great love,” as Mother Teresa said.

P LEA S E J O I N U S .

Front Cover GARETH DAVIS III. Alone. Digital photograph.

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.

SUB M ISSION S

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 ruminatemagazine.org.

S UBS CR IP TION R ATE S & SE R V ICE S

Subscriptions are the meat and bones of this nonprofit and what keep the printers printing and the postage paid. Please consider subscribing to Ruminate by visiting ruminatemagazine.org.

If you receive a defective issue or have a problem with your subscription, please email subscriptions@ruminatemagazine.org. Send all subscription orders and changes of address notices to subscriptions@ruminatemagazine.org. Library subscription services are available through EBSCO and WT Cox Subscriptions.

GE N E R AL IN QUIR IE S

We love hearing from you! Contact us at editor@ruminatemagazine.org, or visit us online at ruminatemagazine.org. or via social media @RuminateMag. D ISTR IB UTION

Ruminate Magazine is distributed to bookstores by Publishers Distribution Group and through direct distribution.

Copyright Š 2016 Ruminate Magazine. All rights reserved.

friends

YOU R G E N ERO US D O NAT I O NS

allow us to keep the lights on and the fire going for the artists, writers, and readers of our community.

This issue was made possible by the Friends of Ruminate, whose generous Summer 2016 donations gave us the financial support to make this issue of Ruminate possible.

From the bottom of our hearts, we thank you!

B EN EFA CT O RS

Darwill, Inc., Steve and Kim Franchini, Kelly and Sara McCabe, Janice Van Dyke-Zeilstra, John Zeilstra PAT RO N S

Grace Presbyterian Church, Ryan and Katie Jenkins, Nicola Koh, Walt Wangerin Jr. S PO N S O RS

Lynda Smith-Bugge, Phyllis Bussard, Judith Deem Dupree, Jennifer Fueston, Michael Ford, Sophfronia Scott Gregory, Jessica John, Katie and Tim Koblenz, Robyn Lee, Raymond G. Otis, Terry Minchow-Proffitt, Stefani Rossi, Cheryl Russel, Travis Schantz, Evelyn Lloyd-Smith Ruminate, V I S I T ruminatemagazine.com/donate

T O B E C OM E A F RI E N D O F

staff E DI TO R- I N - CH I EF

Brianna Van Dyke M A NA G I N G ED I T O R

Kristin Norton OU TR E A CH D I RECT O R

Keira Havens SE NI O R ED I T O R

Amy Lowe P OE T RY ED I T O R

Kristin George Bagdanov VI SU A L A RT ED I T O R

Stefani Rossi B L O G ED I T O R

Renee Long R E VI EW ED I T O R

Paul Willis E DI TOR I A L A S S I S TA N T

Scott Laumann A SSOC I AT E REA D ERS

Laura Droege John Patrick Harty Paula Weinman G U E S T REA D ERS

John Estes Anneli Matheson Carly Joy Miller Brent Newsom Katie Pryor Dana Ray Michael Wright P R I N T D ES I G N

Abby Mitchell W E B D ES I G N

Katie Jenkins

contents

NO T ES

Editor’s 8 Readers’ 10 Artists’ 32, 56 Contributors’ 76 Last 79 NONF I C T I O N

Jeremiah on the Plains, Tony Lusvardi 18 Labyrinths, Jenn Koiter 44 The Stone Nose, Brian Doyle 80 FICTION

Rainy Season, Angela Doll Carlson 52 Whatever Sells, Cara Bayles 68 VI SU A L A RT

Alone, Gareth Davis III Front Cover Inland Northwest series, Gareth Davis III 62-64 In|Dependiente Series, Crystal Latimer 33-40 We Want Our View and Eat it Too series, 57-61 Tammi Brazee Bison Traffic Jam, Tammi Brazee Back Cover

PO ET RY

Yellow, Melissa Reeser Poulin Small Implosions, Barbara Ellen Sorensen Deer Apples, Sally Thomas The Lord, Walking in the Evening, Michael Schmidtke 30 The Lord Considers the Subject, Michael Schmidtke 41 As a Girl I Practiced Death, Cornelia Hoogland 42 Letter to My Daughter Perhaps / Someday, Mark Wagenaar 49 Then: soon after that: next in order of time, Kristina Moriconi 54 Poem for All That Has Been Lost or Will Be, Thom Caraway 65 Jinni Passing, Aumaine Gruich 66 :Flotsam, Sam Gilpin 76 imbroglio, Lary Kleeman 77 Xenoglossia, Megan Merchant 78 Soundstripe, Jess Williard 79 The Kingdom of Heaven Makes a Brief Appearance, Stephen Hitchcock 26 27 28 29

2016 VanderMey Nonfiction Prize SP ONSOR E D B Y D R. RA N D A L L VA N D ERMEY

F I R ST P L AC E

S E C O N D P L AC E

TONY L U SVA R DI

J EN N K O I T ER

Jeremiah on the Plains

Labyrinths

HON O RAB L E MEN T I O N VI CT O RI A BA N K S

Teeth F I NA L I STS H E ATHE R C OR R I G A N

BET H A N Y MA I L E

PATR I C E G OP O

H EI D I N AYL O R

NA SE E M J A M NI A

BET S Y W EI N RI CH

HE I DI NAY L OR

J U D GE M A RI LYN MCEN T YRE

6

2016 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize SP ONSOR E D B Y K I M A N D S T EV E F RA N CH I N I

F I R ST P L AC E

S E C O N D P L AC E

M E L I SSA R E E SE R P OU L I N

BA RBA RA EL L EN S O REN S EN

Yellow

Small Implosions

HONOR A B L E M E NT I ON

H O N O RAB L E MEN T I O N

SA L LY TH OM A S

MI CH A EL S CH MI D T K E

Deer Apples

The Lord, Walking in the Evening F I NA L I STS

TH OM C A R AWAY

L A RY K L EEMA N

SA M G I L P I N

MEG A N MERCH A N T

A U M A I NE G R U I C H

K RI S T I N A MO RI CO N I

STE P H E N HI TC HC OCK

MA RK WA G EN A A R

C OR NE L I A H OOG L A N D

J ES S W I L L I A RD

J U D GE A L I CE FU LT O N

7

editor’s note

for something. This happened recently when I was reading Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk. Macdonald writes about really knowing a plot of land and having specific markers—the wood ants’ nest, the newt pond, “a huge, red underwing moth behind the electricity junction box.” She writes, “naturalists call this a local patch, glowing with memory and meaning.”

I LOVE D I SC OVE R I NG A NEW NA M E

As soon as I knew there was a name for intimately knowing a bit of land, I immediately found myself longing for “a local patch.” And then I quickly decided I’d never had a local patch, and not only had I never had one, I’d also never given my kids the opportunity to have one. Yep, that’s where my brain went.

Except that’s not true. I’m not a naturalist and my “local patch” may not be like Helen Macdonald’s, but there is a circle of dead and fallen cottonwood trees behind the house I grew up in, and this spot glows with memory and meaning for me. It had a history—I remember my dad telling me he used to play among the trees in that very same spot when he was a boy. In elementary school I tested my strength and my courage and my balance on those trees. And when a friend and I were playing near the trees and became frightened by a new horse rearing her hind legs, neighing and stomping, we ran and hid behind one of those huge trunks, thinking we were invisible. When my husband proposed to me, it was in the snow and the presence of those fallen trees.

And here, now, my kids are making their own local patch—the street corner where my son fell off his bike into the cactus, the irrigation ditch where they catch crawdads and frogs, the tumble of green where strawberries always grow. These landmarks are being etched onto their hearts. Even now, years later, when we pass the street corner with the cactus, my son will mark it, saying, “That’s where I fell off my bike into the cactus.” When we pass the tree where we once saw an owl take flight, without fail one of them will say, “Look, the tree where we saw the owl!”

Yes, we all need the gift of landmarks and groundedness—to mark our wonder, our places of fear and pain, our discoveries, our abundance, our wholeness. I know I long for this.

And I think my longing for a local patch is rooted in this question: Will I ever feel truly at home in my body and mind, in my relationships, on this earth? On my cynical or low days, I’d probably say no. But on my lighter days, I can hold both my squirmy uncomfortable feelings of not belonging as well as the little glimpses of feeling truly settled and whole.

8

Maybe claiming a local patch is ultimately an act of hope and imagination—that we can and will experience glimpses of coming home to ourselves, our community, our God, and our earth. And this claiming also involves paying attention and noticing the spot where we saw a red underwing moth, because it matters.

So now I pick up a new truth—that we’re all moving toward our truest homes inside the God in whom we live and move and have our being, facing the scariest lies we tell ourselves and the hottest desert sun along the way, holding our longings and feelings of isolation and belonging, and naming our local patches. Yes, together we’re moving, expanding, healing, breathing our way home.

With hope,

9

readers’ notes ON N O W H ERE N EA R

For two years in late elementary school, I played softball: family rule. Small and skinny, I would walk to the plate, place the bat over my shoulder, square my feet to my arms, bend my knees, bounce. The ball would arc toward me. I’d jump back. Strike.

It had flown straight over the plate. Next time, I’d swing, catching only air. Strike. I was nowhere near connecting with the ball.

I’d return to the dugout, pants as white as pants can be when they never come close to dirt. Face as red as shame.

Now I wonder what went through my mind on the walk from the batter’s box to the plate. Inside the box, I swung and swung and swung and prayed the inning would end before I was up. I was begging God to put me out of my misery, fast, but I always walked straight into it when the coach called.

Madeleine L’Engle, and other people, too, say a person is all ages at once. I am three; I am ten, eleven; I am twenty-six. I am thirty-nine and afraid of almost everything.

Yesterday, I spied an acquaintance in the grocery store. My pulse pounded, blood shot into my face, anxiety got the best of me, and I turned my cart down a side aisle.

Flight instead of fight. Where is the girl who walked up to the plate when it was her turn?

I remember her pleading in the batter’s box for the game to stop. But what was she thinking as she stepped bravely through the terrifying dust of the softball diamond? I should know her. I am her. But I can’t recall her. She is too far away.

REBECCA D . M A RTI N, LY NC HB U R G , VA

Somewhere between Ohio and Kansas, I lean my head against the window and watch the Midwest pass by at seventy miles per hour. This stretch of I-70 is so flat that, given a good enough pair of binoculars, I’d probably be able to see my destination. A light rain whispers to me through the glass of the Greyhound bus. It’s the middle of March. I am completely alone.

Across the aisle is a man on the phone, his New England accent strong enough to cross the threshold of my headphones. I can smell cigarette smoke on the woman behind me. From the back of the bus, a mixture of arguing and laughing makes its way to me. Soon I will arrive in Kansas City where a friend will pick me up from the station and take me to his house; only then will I begin to feel at home. I guess feeling far from home is more a function of the people than the physical place.

And yet the people, these people on the bus, fifty-five strangers, are held together by our collective destination: all heading west on this gray spring day, all with somewhere we’d rather be. Trapped in between, this eternal nowhere; neither here nor there, wanting nothing more than to just arrive. I’m suddenly comforted to know that at least we are all alone, together.

BREN T S CH N I PK E, D AYT O N , O H

My last year of high school, I declared myself, for all purposes, alone. A boy in my class had sexually assaulted me at the beginning of the year. I kept it to myself.

10

I wanted to graduate peacefully like everyone else; I wanted to enjoy my last year of high school; I wanted to sit next to anyone other than him in my English class, but these were not things I was allowed.

Keeping this from anyone who would force me to do something about it may have been my way of taking the situation back into my control—a situation where control was the currency we were dealing in; a situation where control over my own body was stolen from me.

I didn’t see how much I had isolated myself that year until I left for college and began to heal (perhaps because we can only truly see our deep isolation in retrospect).

However, my healing began first with a period of ignoring the damage completely.

I just wanted to move on.

Leaving home, I had a chance to be somebody whose body didn’t go rigid every time there was a scene of sexual violence in a movie. I believed that everyone would love that new, unafflicted person more than what I currently had to offer.

But I failed to realize that there were people who had been robbed of the opportunity to love me, through no fault of their own. I began to heal as I realized I was surrounded by people who would’ve done anything to be there for me before, during, and, now, after I’ve shattered.

OLI VI A SC OF I E L D , A Z U SA , C A

Night has fallen, and the mountains begin to blur into the evening sky. The bustling street from the day is hushed now. We walk past tea shops and restaurants and cafes, but the storefronts are dimmed. Even the newly blossomed cherry trees seem quieter now. At a crossing light, we see movement

11

at the bottom of the hill, so we follow the faint music and laughter.

Kyoto rewards our curiosity. A narrow brick street leads us toward a group of temples, food carts, and shops—alive with laughter and chatter. Bright lights and enormous paper mâché parade floats surround us. A canon fires in the distance, its boom echoing through the bamboo forest.

We learn it is the last night of Hanatoro—a light festival that illuminates the vermillion gates and gilded temples of Kyoto. It is the festival of light and flowers and the coming of spring. Red paper lanterns hang from temples and storefronts. The sakura trees delight in their spotlights lining the walkway.

We wander through a small pedestrian square filled with handmade luminary bags—tiny shadows flickering behind the handwritten messages we cannot read.

The sound of a booming drum beckons us, and we climb the wide staircase to the top of the overlook. We follow the sound and lose ourselves in the growing silence. At a temple, we step out of our shoes and pad quietly along the soft wood floors until we are in a garden. A crowd is gathered on their knees, kneeling to watch a light display. The drum sounds again—a welcome—and the light scatters into a dazzling explosion.

I watch the people around me—eyes focused on the show. Colors swirl among the gravel garden and maple trees. We sit together in silence, all of us, absorbing each particle of light.

W H I T N EY G . S CH U LT Z, PA RK V I L L E, MD

Like the masses of other vacationers, we were crazed that morning, heading east on 84. It’s not often that I get to drive the VW camper van, the hubby’s baby. I was enjoying the sense of freedom and the

readers’ notes

vistas of the Gorge.

The brief calm was broken by a feeling of fear. Stephen Hawking speaks about parallel universes. Mystical traditions recite stories of invisible dimensions and ladders to heaven, but this was no angelic vision.

A huge sadness flooded me. A movie was loaded into my mind—from where I don’t know.

I was picturing our lives’ end; it felt so close I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t happening. A tractor-trailer was next to us, and I could see just out of reach that the semi would nick us and the van would get tossed around like a sardine can, a pure accident. As it smashed, we’d be thrown out, our bodies broken on the next lane, to be hit by other vehicles that couldn’t stop in time.

Our little dog smashed like road kill.

The feeling whipped through like a cloud on a windy day temporarily blocking the sun. The movie ended. My hands were still firmly on the wheel, and the sun was out.

We were safe. I didn’t dare tell my mate— that would be bringing the thought too close to earth.

DARLEN E Z I M B A R D I , P ORTL A ND, OR

In the early 1980s in Garba Tula, Northern Frontier District of Kenya, after sunset, our sprawling boarding school is an oasis of light in the desert, but only while the generator is on. And we dutifully shut it off by nine, making the nearest electricity eighty miles away in a small town where solitary lightbulbs dangle in shed-sized stores and three table eateries. Ethiopia

is north, Somalia east, and “real” Kenya south. Here, I am nowhere near anywhere.

As a teacher, I have generator duty during the holidays when dorms are empty.

The chatter of five hundred kids is replaced by a hundred camels, a few noisy zebra, the occasional hyena, once a lion, once a leopard. On these nights, I love the ritual of turning off the lights. Approaching the diesel generator is like confronting a dragon—so loud! My teeth rattle. But then I throw the switch and the beast dies fast.

It is as though I’ve stopped the world. Dead silence. Full stop.

Now there is nothing but stars. In flipflops I slowly stroll home, no flashlight, no rush. It’s a path well known, even in a world turned off. I walk nowhere near anything current, trendy, modern, or cultured. Yet I walk somewhere very real.

Am I touching something out of time and place? Or is the God behind nowhere touching me?

DAVID WEINMAN, PERTHSHIRE, SCOTLAND

I was nowhere near ready to be seventy, to accept the word could apply to me. I still felt the passion of hours spent on picket lines, in demonstrations, in hushed strategy meetings throughout the turbulent 1960s. Research reports, short stories, poetry kept pouring from my computer like they once did on spiral pads before anyone imagined that computers could sit on your desk or your lap. When my husband expressed shock at a woman's micro-mini, I reminded him of the dress I wore on our

12

first date that only covered the first couple of inches of my thigh. I have accepted the loss of those great legs but have traded stilettos for only moderately sensible shoes.

I was stunned when an email urging my class to attend our fiftieth anniversary referred to us as septuagenarians. It was as if I had been punched in the stomach, and all the enthusiasm I felt for what I could accomplish each day and in the years ahead had been knocked out of me. Was I living in a type of denial; had decades passed by so swiftly that the changes had been unnoticed, or worse, not acknowledged? I did not feel like the ingenue of fifty years ago, but despite all the complex experiences and gains in knowledge of all those years, I still felt like the self I had always been. I try not to think of the number, though it still vaguely haunts me, but then I remember the clearest way in which I have not changed: resilience.

DI AN E D E A NDA , P L AYA D E L R E Y, CA

The sky was black when we woke up.

My body didn’t want to leave the bed my sister and I had shared. But it didn’t want to stay either. It was our first day at the new school. She was going to fifth grade, and I’d be in second. I’d spent the days before—the placement test, the enrollment—clutching Mamãe’s hand.

I attached myself to her and detached myself from my surroundings: the bare trees, the sharp cold, the wide streets—I was not a part of them.

Massachusetts in January was a different planet when compared to Brazil.

School, I’d heard, lasted all day. I’d never have time to play again. You went to school

13

in the dark, and left school in the dark.

When I watched Rugrats, I hung on to tone and inflections, not knowing what else to grasp for. My mother’s rice tasted like plastic seasoned with garlic now. Our apartment sat beside a Portuguese bakery, but even the bread felt wrong.

What had I brought with me? Whatever I’d packed wasn’t enough to make me feel like me.

Maybe I’d left the important stuff behind— my cousins, my street where I'd played handball and jumped rope, my school. On our walk to school, my sister and I would pick blackberries and stain our fingers blue as we ate the clusters of tiny globes.

We got a ride that first January day. I wore two pairs of sweatpants, the outside one a light pink with a dog pattern that matched my favorite pink sweater.

I let my tears fall, creating warm, shallow rivers on my cheeks as I held my mother’s hand. We walked into the school. A bright orange carpet welcomed me. I took deep, shaky breaths and thought, “Not long. This won’t last long.”

A L I N E MEL L O , AT L A N TA , G A

In November one year, I drove a van to Alaska on the Alcan Highway. Between Ft. Nelson and Watson Lake in the Yukon lies the Laird River. It was frozen over. It and the mountains in the distance were white.

The road was white. The sun lit them up so much it hurt to look at them. There was also blue—a sky so brilliant I could hardly look at it too.

The brilliance of snow and sky is why natives wear snow goggles to protect their eyes against snow blindness.

Somewhere along that road that day I stopped to get a picture of the river and

readers’ notes

mountains and sky. I got out of the van and walked to the front to take pictures. I had no light meter, so I bracketed shots through all the F-stop positions and various shutter speeds to be sure I got at least one at the correct exposure. Finished, I looked over the infinite silence. For those moments, there was nothing on earth but the white river and the mountains and the road and me. My pulse quickens in the writing of it.

DOUG ELW E L L , G I L B E RTS, I L

It is the first full moon to land on the summer solstice in seventy years. A blue moon, a strawberry moon. I expect it to rise up behind Cultus Mountain any minute. I made a special trip outside to the south field to watch. It is the shortest night of the year, a turning point, a standing still.

I am waiting in the weeds. Young, light green leaves of calendula are ensconced in deeper shades of unwelcomed green. I have to weed this delicate crop by hand, and I am behind. The vibrant orange flowers, used in lotions and teas, will be ready to harvest and dry by mid-July.

The night is ripe for moon gazing, despite a few lingering clouds. I feel my stomach, concave and loose, the space where a little soul used to live. Now my round-faced baby sleeps upstairs, and her nightlight faintly shines through the upstairs window.

Still no moon. The field is illuminated by a heliotrope glow. I bend over and start to search through the weeds, my fingers soothed by the cool, moist earth. I pick up pace, clearing space for this medicine to flourish.

It is hard to do all the physical work that this farm requires of me. I tread cautiously as if I am still carrying her inside me. My body has changed more than I anticipated and in unexpected ways. My back tires quickly. Hips are tight. I need a map to my center.

The citrine arc ascends into the sky. I forget about the weeds and this unfamiliar body landscape. I am another new mother bowing to beauty.

J ES S I CA G I G O T, BO W, WA

The Talking Heads' David Byrne sang, “Home is where I want to be / Pick me and turn me around / I feel numb, born with a weak heart / Guess I must be having fun.”

As the melody flowed out of the tinny stereo, tears welled in my eyes as I pined for home, for even any of the taken-forgranted creature comforts of home out there in Iraq. It was sweltering, at least 120 degrees, and we were preparing for a mission outside the wire.

As we readied to leave the Forward Operating Base, checking that all our magazines were full and all our gear was ready, I clicked off the CD, wondering if I'd ever see home again.

Out there in the hostile, unforgiving desert full of camel spiders, snakes, and insurgents, I was nowhere near the warmth of human affection or anything I could cling to.

Our Stryker armored vehicles rumbled out of the gate. I fastened my K-Pot strap and clutched my M-4 carbine tightly,

14

praying an IED wouldn't rock our convoy, that a sniper wouldn't drop one of the sergeants standing out of the hatches so he'd tumble down with a terminal neck wound that we'd have to treat, even though it would make no difference in the end. I prayed we wouldn't come under fire when the ramp descended, that we wouldn't make any enemy contact at all on this patrol.

I prayed Our Fathers until I tired of them and grew doubtful of their efficacy, and then I prayed Hail Marys. I prayed and prayed. As we dismounted the vehicle, I scanned the rooftops, hawk-eyed. Home was where I wanted to be.

JOSEPH S. P E TE , G R I F F I TH , I N

I got up at four a.m.— I don’t say “woke” because I’d barely slept. My flight was at six, and my brother was coming to drive me to the airport.

I dressed and went to the kitchen for juice; I knew better than to put food in my nervous-flyer stomach. My aunt was asleep on the couch, and my dad was stirring in his bedroom.

Mom was dying, but she had made it through another night. After many phone calls, my husband and I had decided: If Mom was still alive when the time came for my flight, I would go home; if she had died, I would stay. With two kids, I was needed at home. I was needed here, too, but other family members were present.

(It would be my oldest brother who would find Mom dead, next to Dad in their bed, eighteen hours later.)

In Mom and Dad’s bedroom, I sat on the blue armchair we’d moved from the living room to her bedside. Dad sat on the

15

edge of the bed. Mom was deep in sleep, her breaths shallow but steady. Her face was thin and sunken; the mom I knew seemed barely to exist anymore.

“I can’t believe this is the last time I’ll see Mom on earth,” I said to Dad. He nodded and held my hand.

It was time. I leaned over and spoke to her, and she woke. I told her I had to go, that she had been the best mom, that I’d see her on the other side. Wide-eyed, she moved her mouth to speak, but no words came.

It was calm and starry when my flight took off. As earth slipped away beneath me, I was awed by how close one can come to death, yet still feel nowhere near the depths of its mystery.

J EA N N I E PRI N S EN , K I N G S T O N , O N TA RI O

Outside it is 118 degrees. People say, how can you stand it in Arizona? In the desert heat? But they don't know better.

They don't know what it is like to stand in the noonday sun in this desert wilderness where it is so quiet, so exquisitely quiet.

I cannot feel the slightest movement of a breeze or hear the sound of a single leaf falling. All the animals have sought shade and cover. No one breathes but me. I see no snakes or lizards or even scorpions. The noon sun has become a red inferno, and its waves of heat undulate like siren arms pulling me into them. What a strange land this is, with its strange plants—saguaro, creosote, and tumbleweed using every defense they have, shriveling up their leaves into needles and contracting like decaying bodies against this hellfire heat.

Jesus went to the desert wilderness to find his Lord.

I can see for miles and miles and miles.

readers’ notes

In the far distance is a mountain range cracking puzzle pieces against the sky.

Mine is the only consciousness in this vast place, and I feel so alone that I hear the rocks singing to me.

JANE ST. C L A I R , TU SC ON, A Z

I participated in my first sponsored bike ride on the same day my daughter interviewed for a job a thousand miles away. It was hot. At 7:30, the air was already so heavy that my skin could no longer absorb the humidity. Surrounded by a cornucopia of colored jerseys, I was alone walking toward the registration table. Alone as I studied the map routes and considered my ability to complete them. Alone as I dismounted my bike and secured my helmet. Alone as I pedaled down and took off, deciding at the last minute to turn toward the farther route.

The initial roads were companionable, as I had biked them many times, but midway the direction changed towards a six-mile trek against the blazing sun, oppressive humidity and west wind. As I pushed myself to go further than I’d ever gone before, my mind contemplated my hurt and fear and a future nowhere near what I’d envisioned.

Finally, I turned the corner to a welcomed canopy of trees that shaded the road. I began to believe that I would finish, to accept that I would sacrifice anything but my daughter’s happiness to keep her near, to realize that I am strong enough to weather this road before me.

Four years later, she and her husband are happy parents of a little boy in Dallas.

I have biked many miles. My husband is often with me. Together, we are mapping out this age of retirement and grandparenting. I am not alone.

A N N E S CH MI D T, MA S O N MI

In New Orleans, on the eve of Mardi Gras, it’s five-dollar night at the d.b.a., a local music club, and we’re awaiting Glen David Andrews, renowned singer and trombonist. At the appointed hour, the band takes the stage, but without Glen David. Music commences. We listen, patient, swaying like gentle waters.

And then, from behind us out in the street we hear a sound. A knotted trombone warble, bell aimed high toward the waxing crescent. The band responds.

Another warble from the trombone, with a violent trill pinned at the end. The band mimics, trill included.

The trombone soars, tail-feather shaking. Call. The band saunters, secondline strutting. Response. Geln David Andrew’s trombone erupts in a blaze of melody, and the band mirrors his flame.

He enters the bar, pied-piper trombone still upraised, like the staff held aloft

by Moses in order to keep the sun from setting.

Glen David winds between us his notes alternating between birdsong and belch. The mercury climbs, as does the crowd’s anticipation. Our pulses quicken.

16

Our eyes widen.

By the time he takes the stage, he glistens bright with sweat. A slurring, smiling diamond for all to see. Then, with heart and soul most beautiful and blazing, he rears back and unleashes all Heaven, Hell, and High Water. He sings of ghosts and Jesus. His trombone roars and proclaims resurrection.

He leaps into the crowd and twisterspins. We can’t help but funnel toward the eye of the hurricane, yet we must also remember to duck the valve whirling about and lightning-striking about, lest we get clocked upside and find ourselves waking up prematurely on God’s electric shore.

My Redeemer Lives, children, and he doesn’t need seventy-six trombones to save our souls. He needs but one, and he plays it mean and clean and full of Love.

DOMI N I C L A I NG , P ORTL A ND , OR

Scientists tell us we use only ten percent of our brain’s capacity. We have to wonder at how much more might be contained there. Touring Iceland on horseback is like that. As much as you can see, there is so much more that your senses simply cannot grasp. You must see it with your soul because if you tried to take it all in—the lush green mountains, the vast glaciers, the volcanoes and waterfalls—you wouldn’t be present

for the small miracles that occur every day: the protracted “ahhh” when you return to the farm and slide into the geothermal bath, the clean taste of sliced cucumbers brought in from the garden for breakfast, the neat row of shoes lined up in the doorway signaling reverence for cleanliness both in the landscape and the home.

And of course, there are the horses.

Traveling on horseback gives you a connection to the land unlike any other. You feel every step—a stone in the road causes your horse to stumble and recover in a split second. The stone’s vibration reverberates through your own body. You feel the difference between the concrete roadways and the soft earth of grassy pastures as your horse’s gait shifts ever so subtly to accommodate the changing surfaces. And when the wind sends spirals of red dust into your horse’s nostrils, you too breathe it in, gasping and coughing, and feeling the grit on your teeth.

And when in the distance you can see what remains of a glacier that has receded more in the past decade than in the past one hundred years, it is not your senses, but your soul that you feel melting and shrinking and dying under an unbridled climate that threatens even these deepest wells of ice.

G L O RI A H EF F ERN A N , S YRA CU S E, N Y

SE ND US YOU R NOT ES FOR I SSU E 4 1 — W E L OV E H EARI N G F RO M YO U !

ruminatemagazine.com/submit/flash-nonfiction

17

jeremiah on the plains TO N Y L U S VA RD I

TH E RECTA NG L E OF M Y P HONE

glows through the pocket of the pants crumpled on a

chair across the room.

“Calvin and Marla’s baby died. Can you come?”

I’m kneeling next to the chair in the dark. I’m not sure who Calvin and Marla are. Theo, who is calling, is a regular Mass-goer. “Of course,” I say. He hangs up, and I have to call back to ask him where they are.

It’s a forty-minute drive to Winner, one of the reservation’s border towns. I’ve never been to its hospital, but Winner is not a big place, and I look for the blue “H” off the state highway. There is no one at the front desk, but a young man with jeans worn mid-hip and baseball cap worn sideways points with his lips down the corridor when I ask for Calvin and Marla. The extended clan has spilled into the hallway outside the room.

Marla’s parents are sitting next to her, stroking her hand, and I recognize them; her dad is an usher at church, quiet and decent. He looks up and mumbles a thank you. I touch Marla’s shoulder, as lightly as I can, and say softly, “I’m so sorry,” but she stares blankly forward. She is crying without any sound at all. Sniffling is the only noise in the room.

“Will you baptize her?” one of the aunties asks. There is a family resemblance among the women, but I’m not sure how everyone is related, not sure who Calvin is either, if he’s there at all. Reservation family structures are as knotted as Old Testament genealogies.

“We can only baptize while someone is still alive,” I say gently and explain that the Church gives us prayers for babies who die before baptism, too. “I’ll use those.”

The baby is in a clear plastic bassinet at the foot of the bed, not much more than a wrinkle in the pastel blankets. I put my hand—which seems enormous—over the baby’s torso, covering the little body completely, and pray for a long while in silence. I think of God’s words to Jeremiah, familiar from pro-life placards, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.”

As I turn to the family, I realize I don’t know the baby’s name.

“Jamie,” the grandfather says.

Only when I am in the middle of the prayers do I realize I don’t know whether it’s a boy Jamie or a girl Jamie, and I temporize with variations on “your precious child” when I come to a pronoun. Every circumstance seems foreseen in the ritual book: A parent A deceased non-Christian married to a Catholic One who died by suicide A stillborn child I find this comforting; the ritual saves me from saying foolish things—“God wanted another angel in heaven”—and reminds me I’m not just praying for myself. I don’t think anybody notices my ignorance of the baby’s gender. When I get to the end, I add a Hail Mary. “Mary knew the pain of losing a child, too,” I say. “Let’s ask her to be a mother to little Jamie and to help Marla.” I’m jolted as everybody joins in emphatically; it’s like the rush of air you felt exiting the old Metrodome in Minneapolis due to the sudden shift in air pressure. Even the teenager in baggy jeans suddenly appears in the doorway and knows the words. Nobody notices that my own voice quavers.

19

I run into Theo in the lobby. He is affable, asks about funeral arrangements, talks about Marla and Calvin, starts talking about losing his own daughter several years ago to a drug overdose, being angry with God—“You still gotta pray, even if you’re angry, that’s the only way to get through it, God can take it if you’re angry, not gonna hurt him, but you gotta pray”—and then he gets a call, and we promise to touch base on Sunday. At my car I pause to take in the night’s bracing beauty. The stars from the plains are breathtaking; the Lord’s promise to Abraham is never so impressive in the city.

“It’s so sad,” I say to God, and that’s it. I’m not angry or confused or worried or doubtful because I do believe God will take care of little Jamie, whose gender I am too embarrassed to figure out, so it’s just sad—the death of a child—the purest kind of sadness there is. that I would choose that sadness over a good night’s sleep, and I have trouble explaining it. At a conference for Jesuits in Chicago the following week, I’m prickly and abrasive, even toward my friends. I picture myself as a little green cactus sprouting from an armchair, but I can’t help it.

“You know what needs to happen out there . . . ” He really means well, I tell myself, really is a friend, but the scheme involves nuclear waste dumps, and I’ve given up thinking about how the system can be fixed. I start to explain that the reservations should be thought of as internal refugee camps made permanent, but I soon give up. The cactus sprouts more spines and a second vodka tonic.

“Oh, I just read an article about mascots in the New York Times,” somebody else tells me. “That must really bother you.”

“Of the things that bother me, the name of Cleveland’s baseball team is number 9,742,” I say. I think instead of Derek, a meth addict at the tribal treatment facility who I’m preparing for baptism. “What if I want baptism because I’m afraid of the things I’ve done, not because I love God?” he asks me in our last meeting.

“Fear of hell isn’t where we want you to end up, Derek,” I tell him, “but it’s okay as a first step.” On the way out, I’m delighted because his question shows a conscience working.

Then the psychologist who runs the facility hints at some sort of misbehavior within the program, so by the time I get to Chicago, I’m worried.

“You’re doing great work out there on Pine Ridge.” Somebody else pokes the cactus.

“Wrong reservation,” I say.

I don’t know how to explain it, but I really do love the Rosebud, my reservation. I love my parishioners, I love the unpredictability, I love the challenge, I love that St. Bridget’s puts me in the dunk tank for the parish carnival and Laverne Stands, the wife of the caretaker, sinks me three times in a row, as if she’d gone to spring training in preparation.

I love wearing cowboy boots and telling people they’re to protect my ankles from rattlesnakes, when so far they’ve only protected me from the Jesuit community’s overly frisky cat; even at the funerals, I love the way all the men pitch in to fill the grave after I have sprinkled it with holy water while drums pound and a Lakota mourning song thunders, more sound than words, inchoate and primal as grief itself.

I love the job, but it is like a dirt road after torrential rain. On Monday, back in the office I talk to a volunteer who has, so far as I can tell, spent his summer on the reservation wanIT REALLY I S QU I T E ST R A NG E

20

dering around taking pictures of dandelions and prairie grass. “Do you feel like you have enough work to do?” I ask him.

“Oh, I didn’t come out here to work,” he replies. “I just came out here to be. To be with the people . . . To love the people . . . ” “He’ll only be here a couple more weeks,” our pastor tells me when I ask if we can send him back to California.

“We’ve got enough crazies here already,” I mutter. “We don’t need to import them.”

I call the caretaker at the church in Parmelee, the reservation’s most destitute community, about a funeral that keeps getting rescheduled due to some ancient feud I can never hope to comprehend. One of the relatives involved runs a kind of female gang in Parmelee and is threatening the caretaker. The funeral is for a teenage boy, killed in a traffic accident; I don’t ask, but assume drunk driving. I call the funeral director to strategize. “We’ve gotta get this kid in the ground,” he says. “It’s hot.”

In the evening, a Jesuit friend I saw at the Chicago conference calls. “Oh,” he says, “I just thought I should check in.”

The South Dakota reservations have a reputation as an undesirable assignment, but I insist that I like being on Rosebud. “For one thing, I’ve never felt so close to Scripture before,” I tell him. “Like the prophets—I never really got them until now. You read Jeremiah, and you start picturing his life and you start to realize the parallels between Israel and the Lakota—” “Jeremiah?” he says. “You do have a similar disposition.”

“Ha. Ha.” Point taken.

“You have duped me, O Lord, and I let myself be duped”—my favorite line. He tells God he can’t take it anymore, will no longer deliver the pessimistic prophecies of Jerusalem’s destruction that have made him so unpopular, but then the word becomes a fire “burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones.”

“I grow weary holding back,” the prophet says, “and I cannot.”

He has, at times, a weakness for self-pity—“Cursed be the day on which I was born”— but since I am the one comparing myself to Jeremiah, the same charge could be leveled in my direction as well. I’ve begun to understand something of that fire imprisoned in the prophet’s bones, a love so deep but so camouflaged it seems a curse. It is hard to overestimate the excruciating difficulty of Jeremiah’s mission. He delivered a message—the impending conquest of his people—that made him seem not just a killjoy, but a traitor, and then, worst of all, his prophecy came true. Parents ate their children during the siege of Jerusalem; Judah’s young king had his eyes put out by the Babylonians after watching his own children’s throats slit in front of him. Little wonder Jeremiah told a rival prophet, Hananiah, that he wished the latter’s optimistic forecasts would come true. Hananiah, peddler of attractive fictions, dropped dead. Jeremiah’s proclamation of violence and outrage persists.

And yet the strangest thing about this prophet of doom is that, despite the severity of his message, all that he saw and foresaw, despite his friendlessness and the adversity of his life—in spite of everything—his prophecy contains some of the most remarkable words of JEREM I A H HA D A N U ND ESI R A B L E ASS I GN ME N T.

21

hope found in Scripture, hope distilled down to its essence, hope as pure and crystalline as the night sky on the prairie. dug for Calvin and Marla’s baby is half the size of a normal grave, but it still seems gaping. The coffin can be carried by one man under his arm, but even that seems immense when I think of the tiny dollop of humanity beneath my hand in the hospital. It’s a small party, a simple graveside service. The grandfather gestures for me to toss the first shovelful of dirt onto the coffin, and as I do one of the men behind me begins a Lakota dirge, his solitary voice muted intermittently by a drizzly wind.

There’s a muteness in all of reservation life, like a phone conversation with bad reception. The philosopher Jonathan Lear, in his meditation on the destruction of the Plains Indian way of life, quotes a Crow grandmother saying of the reservation, “I am trying to live a life I do not understand.” More telling are the words of Plenty Coups, the last Crow chief, recounting the story of his life decades after he had moved onto the reservation, won agricultural prizes, and traveled to Washington to represent Native veterans at the dedication of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. When he reached the point of the narrative when the buffalo “went away,” Plenty Coups stopped.

“After this,” the chief said, “nothing happened.”

The psalmist recounts the silence and rage of the Hebrew exiles on the banks of the rivers of Babylon: “How could we sing a song of the Lord in a foreign land?” Lear points out that the cultural disruption the Plains Indians underwent as the American nation engulfed the continent was so extreme and so sudden as to render life literally incomprehensible.

The categories in which Plains Indians thought, the way they understood themselves, the concepts that rendered their lives meaningful, suddenly simply no longer meant anything.

Even the Babylonian exiles did not face a conceptual change so drastic as that from the buffalo hunt to the railroad. The Babylonians may have been unusually ruthless (their armies were known for torching cities, populations and food supplies included, instead of simply plundering them) but the rise and fall of empires—Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian—was something that ancient, near-Eastern people at least understood, probably all too well. I imagine the Native World War I veterans whom Plenty Coups traveled to Washington to honor: how utterly alien trench warfare, artillery that altered landscapes, and poison gas would be to men taught to count coup in horse raids.

The psychologist I work with at the reservation’s meth rehab center speaks in Jungian terms of a collective unconscious formed by cultural trauma. A Jesuit friend with a PhD in physics tells me about studies in the field of “epigenetics,” the idea that certain experiences—especially traumas—can alter our biology on a cellular level and that those changes can be passed on to future generations. One of the more disturbing threads of Old Testament thought is the idea that God visits the sins of fathers onto their children—though perhaps such an idea merely recognizes the reality that dysfunctional families produce wounded children, that strands of violence and perversity grow into webs that strangle the young, the vulnerable, the future. I imagine a cultural PTSD constantly renewed by alcohol, domestic violence, and gangs. A woman at parish bingo tells me how glad she is that a cousin is joining the Army. I think immediately of Iraq and Afghanistan.

“At least he’ll be getting out of here,” she says.

TH E H OL E I N T HE E A RT H

22

is Radical Hope. For me, the reservation has been a school in hope. Lear calls the hope that allowed Plenty Coups to persist after catastrophe “radical” because his generation had lost the conceptual categories to know what it was they should hope for. The content of their hope could only exist at the edge of their imagination. Another philosopher, the Thomist Josef Pieper, says that faith allows us to believe something not because we’ve seen it or tested it, but because we trust the one who tells us.

Hope is faith projected into the future.

Most people confuse hope with optimism, looking on the bright side, taking a can-do approach to life. Optimism sees what is positive in life. Hope asserts there is more to life than what we see. Against the implacable sadness of a lost child, optimism folds into delusion. For an addict whose life simply is meth, the only hope is radical hope.

Both Jeremiah’s greatness as a prophet and his unpopularity stem from his unrelenting assault on optimism. When Hananiah breaks the wooden yoke Jeremiah wore around his neck as a melodramatic sign of impending Babylonian enslavement, Jeremiah returns with a yoke of iron. When other prophets and priests assure the king that Jerusalem’s temple would protect the city, as it had under Hezekiah, Jeremiah mocks them like a teenager, “The temple of the Lord! The temple of the Lord! The temple of the Lord!” It will all soon be rubble, Jeremiah says, with birds and jackals picking at your corpses.

I am reminded of the ghost dance and the medicine man Wovoka at the turn of the twentieth century. The dancers thought their ghost shirts would protect them from Union bullets. At times, optimism must close its eyes to reality. Hope demands the fiercest truth.

But hope can also break through reality, can rupture the web; it is Jeremiah who first rejects the deterministic proverb, “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” No longer will the sins of fathers be visited upon their children. He is followed in this judgment by Ezekiel, the great prophet of the exile, and both prophets foresee vast valleys of ash and corpses restored to life and made holy. “Son of man, can these bones live?” the Lord asks Ezekiel.

“You alone know that,” the prophet replies.

TH E TIT L E OF L E A R’S B O OK

to guard his hope from optimism. “I will make a new covenant,” God promises him, “not like the covenant I made with your fathers.”

God will write this covenant on his people’s hearts; he will gather them from among the nations, restore their fortunes, never cease doing good to them. “You shall be my people, and I will be your God.” But this restoration will come seventy years in the future. Moses’ rebellious refugees wandered just forty years in the desert, and that was sufficient for the entire generation to perish. Restoration in seventy years is the promise of a future at the edge of the imagination. Jeremiah himself will never see it.

JEREM I A H G OES T O G R E AT L E NGT H S

Calvin and Marla appear in baptism classes with a new baby. We talk about marriage—things do not always happen in quite the right order—but I am transferred to a new assignment before we start preparation.

Later in the summer, the glowing rectangle summons me out of bed again, though before I’ve fallen asleep. It is Derek, calling to tell me not to pick him up from the rehab center for A FEW YE A R S LAT E R ,

23

Mass on Sunday because he’s been kicked out—not his words, but that’s what I surmise. I ask where he is, but he’s evasive. “I’m going back to Fort Peck,” he tells me. It’s the reservation he’s from in Montana. I toss and turn that night; for meth, the relapse rate even for those who finish the recovery program is over 90% within a few months. I’ve seen enough to know what relapse means. I picture rotting teeth and hollow eyes, families destroyed. I believe in the devil, and it’s been a good night for him.

Sunday, I’m still in a bad mood but try not to show it. Laverne Stands, who drenched me at the carnival, asks about “that young man you’ve been bringing.” She’s taken a shine to Derek in a motherly way, always prompting him to have seconds at the breakfast the parish Ladies Society hosts after Mass. I hesitate and grimace; I haven’t told the parish where Derek is coming from, but Rosebud is a small place, so they’ve figured it out. She pats my elbow.

And then, during Mass, I see him in the back row. He’s late, and he forgets to take his hat off, but somehow he’s made it there on his own. Afterward, I tell him I’ve already called the parish in Fort Peck and talked to the priest there. I give him the number and address.

He says he knows where it is. It turns out their religious education director is also a drug counselor.

Derek is diffident. “I don’t know,” he says, “maybe I’ll check it out, after a while.”

“No,” I say, putting a finger on his chest, trying to channel my inner Jeremiah. “Not maybe. Not after a while. You’ve started down a new path here, stay on it.” And I add all that I can—that he is cared for by the people here at St. Bridget’s, by me, by God; I tell him not to walk the path alone and not to turn back.

We’d been planning a blessing for those preparing for baptism later in the summer, but we decide to do it then, before he leaves. Laverne and her husband and one of the other Jesuits and I gather around him. He’s twenty-one years old. He already has a kid, maybe two.

His body and his mind have been poisoned by chemical evil. The odds are 90% against him, worse even. In a few hours, he will get on a bus, and there will be nothing more I can do for him. We won’t see each other again.

We use the ritual we were planning, but I switch the reading to Deuteronomy. “I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse.” I look up from the book, pause until he looks up, too, and meets my eyes. “Choose life, then, that you may live.”

24

2016 VanderMey Nonfiction Prize

F I NA L J U DG E MA RI LYN MCEN T YRE W RI T ES :

of a priest who serves parishioners on a South Dakota reservation and begins with a night-time phone call that signifies the irregular rhythm of need-and-response that governs his working life. With skillful understatement and flickers of gentle laughter at his own stumblings in situations of complex sorrow, the writer reflects on how the prophet Jeremiah provides help in hard times. He offers readers a lively vision of what hope looks like in bleak places. His unsentimental and deeply compassionate look at life on the reservation—harsh and spare and laced with drugs—finds its grounding in the prophetic text that he recalls with the unpretentious specificity of an invested reader and the informed gratitude of one who has gone there again and again to find what he needed in order to keep an open heart and focus sustained attention, one by one, on those whose stories happen at the margins.

“JEREM I A H ON T HE P LA I NS” I S T H E ST O RY

M A R I LY N M C E NTY R E , formerly professor of American Literature at

Westmont, now teaches Medical Humanities at the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program, offers writing workshops and retreats, and finds that her happiest days are those that include a little quiet time, a few hours of writing, a conversation with one of her kids, and a walk with her husband. Her books include Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, What's in a Phrase?, and most recently A Faithful Farewell, and A Long Letting Go—the last two written for people who are dying and for their caregivers. Reading Brian Doyle is her idea of a good time.

25

MELI SSA R E E SE R P OU L I N

Yellow I am making you a kimono, yellow as the ordinary things of the world you do not know. There are dandelions here, sunlight on the butter dish.

There is melting and gold and cling peaches in juice.

You move now freer than I am: naked and weightless, swimming.

I am making you clothes, though they bother me: tags and edges, buttons and zippers keeping me in.

They say this dress will make things easy when you’re new. Open and fold, snap, snap, you’re ready—yellow as a young duck, a phone book, the creek after rain. The yellow of canary and caution. Slow down.

The birth that waits for you is real as a lemon or leaf, hard as the soap on the sink ledge.

I am pressing out seams, wanting to soften the blow. Picturing rupture and light tearing in, torrents of sound. The everyday walls leaning toward you. So many things I can’t explain. Subtractive, starting with light. Most visible color. The yellow of Judas, yellow stars, yellowcake.

I am sewing so slowly.

26

BARBAR A E L L E N SOR E NSE N

Small Implosions I fold blue and gold origami paper into birds, one each for each child who gathers around me, pulls at my skirt.

Fretful light erodes the moon, and morning sparks yellow in the once arable fields of Haiti.

Somewhere on the long road to Port-au-Prince, a child’s mother is carrying a dress I gave her as a gift.

The dress is folded into a tight square and she intends to trade it for a small cabrit. She left when the light was still mist and dust.

This morning, the sun resembles corn silk yet begins to heat the island as meanly as a curse and rises to its staid point in the sky. The children pull citrons from the trees and suck on them, their faces pinching.

A tiny girl sits on my lap.

She is one who never speaks; she has been beaten so many times. She whispers: what is it?

I can think of nothing to say.

I can think of nothing but how hollow sympathy is, how empty its architecture.

27

SALLY THOM A S

Deer Apples While you’re still wondering what happened to the spring, In cool moonlight and the crickets’ whispering The season turns. No more bridal lace.

Purplish heat flushes the shifting face Roadside dogwoods wear this hurried day.

Back home, you’re chopping apples to put away In the deep-freeze for the winter: soft, bruised windfalls— Deer apples, people say—the fruit stand sells Six dollars for a twenty-odd-pound box, To bait hunters’ stands. Worm-bitten Gala, Cox, Granny Smith, some little ones whose name You don’t know, all together breathe the same Ripe smell, almost fermented, as you cut The grainy flesh right down to the chambered heart, Rigid as cartilage, where the black seeds nest.

You fill ten Ziploc bags, but mound the best, Least-bitten apples in a bowl. It used to be That passing children ate them up immediately.

Who’ll eat them now, before they liquefy Inside their loosening skins? A waste, you’d cry, Except that in this moment they’re a feast To look at, heaped together in the last Off-kilter light—curvaceous, red, or gold As pollen, wax-cheeked, radiantly cold.

28

MI CHAE L SC HM I DTKE

The Lord, Walking in the Evening and the serpent said, Ye shall not surely die. —Genesis 3: 4 Shadow of a crow falls down a brick wall and into the dream of grass, a new century of need. I take light like glue into my hands and kneel, wanting never to be moved, though what I mean I could not say.

Insects stick to my skin and die. A grey jumping spider passes over me, wisdom seeping from her eight-eyed gaze— I’ve lost the mood for metaphor, and no one’s telling me what to do.

The day gestures to my decisions— mine, the first lie.

What of it? I will call for help but tomorrow, or after forty days and forty nights of my subject’s prayers have covered me. See how easily I betray myself. How I want any hands will have me. The bird is returning to its perch but the shadow sticks to my hands. I bend to lick. The subject always knew something was wrong. How the world woke with a start, slivered in like the wind I was and sent into the dark.

29

MI CHAEL SC HM I DTKE

The Lord Considers the Subject One day the air will finish erasing him.

For now, I breathe white scent of rice, winter light puncturing the cold in our home that turns his going to vapor.

It fades impossible into the quick moment combing its fingers through me.

30

2016 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize

F I NA L J U DG E A L I CE F U LT O N W RI T ES :

as the winner of the 2016 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize. I initially was attracted to the poem’s tone and imagery, which delicately suggest a mother’s hopes for her unborn child. It’s hard to avoid sentimentality with such a subject, but an important swerve toward the end saves this subtle, beautifully crafted work from an excess of sweetness. At the start, the speaker is sewing baby clothes and considering some “ordinary things”—dandelions, sunlight on the butter dish, cling peaches—that her child will experience in the world. These exemplars of yellow create a seductive materiality, but things darken as the speaker contrasts the utopian freedom of the womb to the confining garments she’s sewing and imagines the upheaval the baby will experience at birth. In the final tercet, the connotations of yellow widen to imply betrayal, genocide, and apocalyptic disaster: “. . .The yellow / of Judas, yellow stars, yellowcake. . .”

“Yellowcake,” a surprisingly rich choice, suggests nourishment, a comforting domesticity, but it’s also a uranium powder used in the preparation of fuel for reactors or weapons.

With one gesture, the speaker’s optimism is conflated with her fear, and the trope of time, incubating throughout, is enlarged. These threads resonate in the powerfully understated last line in which the mother’s sewing slows as if her needle were heavy with dread on behalf of her child who must enter such a grave new world.

I’M H AP PY T O SE L ECT “YE L L OW”

A L I C E F U LTON ’s Barely Composed is the most recent of her nine books.

Her book Felt was awarded the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress and was selected by the Los Angeles Times as one of the Best Books of 2001. Her other books include Sensual Math; Powers of Congress; Palladium, winner of the National Poetry Series and the Society of Midland Authors Award; and Dance Script With Electric Ballerina, winner of The Associated Writing Programs Award. A collection of essays, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry, was published by Graywolf Press.

Fulton has received many honors and awards for her work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In 2011, she received the Literature Award from the Academy of American Arts and Letters “to honor exceptional accomplishment.” She is the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English at Cornell University.

31

artist’s statement C RYS TA L L AT I MER: I N| D EPEN D I EN T E

Costa Rica, and felt like I was experiencing that moment in late autumn when you realize that all the fiery reds and oranges had faded and fallen to the ground. My life had been a staccato of visits to my mother’s native Costa Rica, and I felt, in that moment, that I was experiencing the dilution of a vibrant culture.

My paintings explore the hybridity of Western and Latin American identity and critiques the Western influence over marginalized society. Like painted poetry, every choice of color, pattern, and stroke is laden with metaphorical intention. The reference to Latin American folk arts conceptually grounds the work in Latino culture; however, entwined in these traditions are fragments of silhouetted historical painting, white pigment, gold and silver gilding, and corporate logos. As part of my metaphorical language, these referents allude to the colonization of Latin America, and its continual role as “colony” to Western society.

Through the tools of paint and brush, my paintings provide a succinct historical background that portrays the ubiquity of westernization in Latin America, investigates the ongoing acculturation process within the region, and critiques the sustainability of marginalized cultures within a modernizing and westernizing world.

I STO OD AT A WA L M A RT I N ESCAZU,

32

CRYSTAL LATIMER . Another form of nature that needed to be tamed.

Acrylic, spray paint, metallic gilding, porcelain tile on panel. 48 x 48 inches.

33

CRYSTAL LATIMER . At the hands of the Mexica. Acrylic, oil, metallic gilding on panel. 30 x 30 inches.

34

CRYSTAL LATIMER . They crave gold like hungry swine. Acrylic, spray paint, metallic gilding on panel. 48 x 60 inches.

35

CRYSTAL LATIMER . But the caballeros took off with the diamonds. Acrylic, spray paint, metallic gilding on panel. 48 x 48 inches.

36

CRYSTAL LATIMER . The Spaniards even swept out the seams with brooms. Acrylic, spray paint, metallic gilding on

panel. 36 x 48 inches.

37

CRYSTAL LATIMER . Sarchi Y Puebla Claimed. Acrylic and spray paint on panel. 24 x 24 inches.

38

CRYSTAL LATIMER . Sarchi Y Puebla Claimed, 2. Acrylic, spray paint, metallic gilding on panel. 36 x 48 inches.

39

CRYSTAL LATIMER . The return of the Gods. Acrylic, oil, spray paint, metallic gilding on panel. 30 x 40 inches.

40

CORNE L I A H OOG L A ND

As a Girl I Practiced Death I grew up next to a graveyard where I practiced death in the weighty silence of black limousines, their tires rolling through the cemetery gate smooth as water striders.

Even the puddles squirting up from the tires said shhhh.

The only sounds were umbrellas opening, hard heels, high heels, water. I listened for crying.

The first time I heard a mourner wail, the sound fell seismic– a rock– a thousand metre descent– into the No River.

Chasm of a woman’s grief.

Once, nobody around, I tried moaning but it scared me.

I stopped.

O it’s quiet. Even the rain is hyphens.

41

MARK WA G E NA A R

Letter to My Daughter Perhaps Someday It’s the little things that matter, the gurus & diamond companies keep telling us. Too often I look through my shoelaces into the earth, & miss the semaphore of bows & loop-de-loops before I walk out, today, into a too-early spring day with you, sleeping in one arm.

Secret language of shoes, those little boats you tie up to unmoor, what conspiracy will it be today, where are they plotting to take us?

Knots, language in which you can untie yourself from the world, from the likely & the possible, words you can cut in half.

Maybe there’s a knot that could stand in for robin in Inupiat, language of the Alaskan Eskimos, since there is no word for robin, they’ve never needed one: lariats & trefoils in horsehair or blue ribbons for nape & tail feather, a Portuguese bowline for hollow bones (is it true they walk out into the next snowstorm when it’s their time to go?).

Last night I dreamed a knot of your hair drifted on a river, just beyond my reach. A perfect despair. A perfect circle of hair, though that might be impossible, even electrons have rough edges, even the circles of the underworld, & the gold record borne on the Voyager spacecraft that drifts forever, like the Hunter Gracchus, through space, even that record with one hundred hellos scratched in one hundred languages has its flaws. Scratched like your face, when you Houdini out of your swaddle straightjacket & jab yourself with your fingernails when you startle awake. Love is the dream of the dying, I want to tell you, or maybe just another dying, some bloodknot of light that weaves us to each other, but you’re beyond language—or yet to recognize it

42

in your thirty days upon this earth. You wrap your hand around my finger—a circle, if the diameter is all the days I’ll be missing you, & even in this circle there is an infinite pi that holds our lives somewhere in its sea of decimals—as it begins to snow on this lonely avenue.

Snows right through my chest when I watch you sleep. What does your tomorrow look like? What do your dreams look like the day after?

Forgive me my failings. My lack of ambition. I thought my shoes would take me somewhere. I have no way to tell you what your hair is like in my hand, on this day, one of the last days I’ll have more hair than you. You may as well be in space, where the earth is a bluewhite circle far away, a rounded lily, a boutonnière on the lapels of space. And tomorrow, or a day far hence I hope, a perfect flower on my dark suit, when I’m laid out, when you let go of my hand.

43

J E NN KOI TE R

44

of Georgia O’Keeffe taken by Alfred Stieglitz just after her first long trip to New Mexico. She sits in the back seat of his car and smiles inscrutably.

Her heart is divided; she is sad and sly. She knows she has found a place she has to know, which will take her further and further away from New York, away from him. She is giddy inside. She grieves.

O’Keeffe was one who understood distance. Her pet name for northern New Mexico was the faraway, the land that offered a clear vision of nowhere near. With that landscape, she spoke another language. Words did not move her, so she looked to color and found it almost adequate. She thought song the most perfect form of expression. She said, Since I cannot sing, I paint. On the back wall of the back room of Santa Fe’s O’Keeffe Museum is a painting of a shell, seaweed curled and flared around its base. I stood in front of the painting for an hour when I first saw it; the shuffle and mutter of the museum patrons muffled and far away. The painting pulsed. It absorbed me like a dream.

According to the poet Craig Arnold, it is not our first memories but our first dreams that make us. It was a dream that first taught me distance. As a small child, after nightmares, I would pad down the hallway in my footed pajamas and climb into bed with my parents and sleep again, safe. One morning, curled between them, I dreamed again. A man was chasing me; I perched on the car’s back bumper; the car would not go fast enough to bear me out of reach. I startled awake. I saw my father’s arm outside the covers, beyond it the yellow room, yellow sunlight through yellow curtains. I had nowhere left to go for comfort; in my parents’ bed the dream still found me. The morning itself was pure as clarified butter. I was the only cold, the only profane thing.

So now I am a traveler. I walk a labyrinth whose turns I cannot predict or understand, offering only glimpses of the center. I prefer to travel alone. Better to place myself in a land and a language where I expect to be alone, where even the smallest connection is a gift, than to stay curled in bed, fearing that loneliness will find me again in the heart of home.

Even in Austin, Texas, where I now live, I watch the people as if I were in another country, loving them the way a traveler loves the lands and peoples who will never understand him, alienated as they are from the language and culture he inhabits. Always in a foreign country, writes Egyptian-French poet Edmond Jabès, the poet uses poetry as an interpreter.

I seek out O’Keeffe’s paintings wherever I travel, if they are there to be found. I stand in front of them and watch her watching the landscape. She looked with the same clear eyes at everything. She saw shapes and curves repeated: echo of a shell in the skunk cabbage, curve of New Mexico’s hills in the trunk of a tree. Nothing is less real than realism. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things. To her mind, claiming to paint things “as they are” would be dishonest. She pares down. She holds her distance.

There is a photograph of the artist with one of her paintings, an abstraction, it seems— except that beside it is a stick, forked and oddly twisted, the exact same shape as the abstraction on the canvas. She was able to separate herself from the stick as a stick, to see pure form. She painted what she saw so precisely that it became abstract.

And yet, the distance she held from her subject also permitted immersion in it. Intimacy only seems like the opposite of distance. Without the expectation of a stick, or a flower, TH ERE I S A P HOT O G R A P H

45

or a pottery shard, she is nearer to it than anyone. She has pulled her gaze back from the curves and curls in which the rest of us are caught and seen the pattern they make. She called her ability to make abstractions out of what she saw that dream thing I do. She accepted what is, as in a dream.

Visiting Colorado Springs, my childhood home, I watched the sun set behind Pikes Peak, the sky glowing coral over two shades of purple mountains, clouds passing in front of clouds, their colors brash and absurd. If I painted it, no one would believe me. Even the blue Colorado sky is hard to believe. As a child, a class field trip took me to the Fine Arts Center to see an exhibit of paintings of the West by East Coast artists. The docent pointed to a painting of Pikes Peak from the mid-1800’s and said, We know that this picture was painted after the artist returned home, either from memory or from a photograph. Look at the sky, how pale it is. This is as blue a sky as he could remember. As if the artist mistrusted his travels. As if he could only have dreamed something so clear.

I have lived and traveled many places since. I prefer to travel alone. If I am not alone, my companions and I are a bubble that floats on the surface of a place. Alone, I can slip in, like a particle in water, immersed, but not dissolved.

I traveled to O’Keeffe’s home at Ghost Ranch to see what she saw. In her adobe house, she was literally immersed in New Mexico; adobe is earth, is ground, is grounded. O’Keeffe’s house was simple, almost ascetic. The wind could blow the desert dust through it, and not much would change, not the color or the shape. Her house rose from the earth like a bluff or rock or shrub, a given thing, as if the earth had burped up a house, and it dried where it stood. For her, adobe was an extension of the landscape, a form worth whittling to its most basic shape. She painted adobe structures with the same intimate distance as the shell or her favorite mountain, Pedernal.

Inside her house, I took off my shoes. The window’s old glass offered a distorted view of the hills she painted, a glimpse of Pedernal above the porch’s adobe wall. She was good at glimpses. Glimpses, and long steady looks, which in turn promise glimpses of something further away. Even her flowers hint at something hidden, something buried where the petals meet or swelling behind a leaf. Her roses and rose abstractions fold and curve toward the center, like a labyrinth. She well understood that what is hidden is most interesting, that the beautiful is that which draws the gaze further in, further away. The edges are defined, but they also seem to curve behind themselves, creating and transcending boundary at once. She saw something beautiful that was beyond the landscape, and the only way to get at it was to paint around it. Her forms are pregnant with meaning. Where is it? Oh, where is it? My longing pulls me further and further in.

I love the landscapes O’Keeffe loved, in no small part because she taught me to see them. When I look at her paintings, I tumble into her perspective. I recognize her immersion in something she is not part of. She is my medium; I experience landscape through her. Looking at one of her landscapes is like watching someone pray.

I do not make that comparison lightly. Few things move me like other people’s prayers.

My own prayers are so often frantic and false; God seems much nearer with someone standing between us. When I travel in Europe, I seek out cathedrals that still live, and I find prayers there: prayers written out in the guest books just inside; candles burning

46

prayers in absentia before statues of saints; petitioners scattered through sanctuaries and side chapels. At Chartres Cathedral, as I followed the bas relief of the life of Christ around the sanctuary, I saw a pregnant woman and her husband approach a black Madonna on a recessed altar and kneel before her, holding hands. I turned to give them privacy and blinked back tears.

I had come to Chartres to walk the labyrinth. With all my doubts and misgivings, a labyrinth is a prayer I can always pray. It is not a maze, not intended to trick or trap. A single path bends and turns, filling the circle with intricate curves, then opening into the center, a symbol of the self, or of life unfolding.

Inevitably, there comes a moment in the labyrinth when I am certain that I’ve made a mistake, wandered onto another section of the path, that instead of moving toward the center, I’m headed back out. Labyrinths are sacred, but not private. I realize how visible I am to everyone around me. The misstep I fear would be public. I am embarrassed, as if anyone were really watching, as if I’d made a real mistake with real consequence. I fight the impulse to go back and start again.

I am not alone in that sudden lostness. I once watched a grandmother bring her grandson to the labyrinth on the plaza at Museum Hill in Santa Fe. They entered together, and the boy raced ahead. About one-fourth of the way to the center, the woman became convinced, as I always do, that they’d somehow taken a wrong turn. She ushered the boy back to the beginning of the labyrinth to start over. He didn’t mind in the least. He ran the whole labyrinth like a game, the rules of which he didn’t have to understand.

I, on the other hand, can only travel the twists of my heart slowly, resolving questions usually left to dreams. I walked the labyrinth at Chartres twice, following the bent and incomprehensible path to a center so still even a whispered prayer brings an echo. I cried the entire time. I was staying in Paris with my ex-boyfriend, who had a new girlfriend. I hadn’t been to Paris since I had left him two years before, and I had not expected, was not prepared for, the sorrow and longing that surfaced as soon as I walked up to his building, intensifying as the week wore on. I came to the labyrinth to grieve; it is like grief, the labyrinth, the constant turning back and turning away.

I’ve begun to record my dreams, for dreams, like labyrinths, are a landscape of the self.

But even in dreams, my landscape is not constant; I don't continually return to the same places, as some do. I enter a new land every night: bland, or reassuring, or terrifying. Even within my own heart, I am a traveler.

My most memorable recent dream is a forgotten one, which left behind it a sense that something had been resolved. Borges wrote about such dreams, claiming that they are glimpses of our place in the divine order of the world and that the understanding they impart can never be recovered, because the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of men. Such dreams play out our movement through the world; dreaming them is like walking a labyrinth. And leaving a labyrinth is more than a little like waking from a reassuring dream.

Borges wrote about labyrinths as well, though he often used the term to mean maze, or layered the two meanings. One of his characters imagines a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some

47

way involve the stars. Elsewhere, he writes of himself, A man sets out to draw the world. . . . A short time before he dies, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face. Perhaps at the end of my life I will understand what I’ve made and who I am; in the meantime, traveling, I can only trust my lostness. Borges certainly seems to have done so. After meeting him for the first time, one scholar claimed, the poet looked lost, a condition he was used to and accepted with interest.

For Borges, the labyrinth is that which locates the expansive world in the self and the solitary self in the world, whichever is more unexpected. I have entered a labyrinth expecting to find comfort and instead retraced my grief. I have walked a labyrinth expecting to find space for my sorrow and instead found joy. I walked the labyrinth at O’Keeffe’s estate at Ghost Ranch expecting solitude. I tend to walk carefully; I tend to look down when I walk. Instead, the Ghost Ranch labyrinth held my eyes up, directing my gaze from the mountains to the trees, the rocks, trees, mountains. While walking my self pulled me out of myself.

I never thought much of Georgia’s paintings of Pedernal, which she dearly loved. It belongs to me. She wrote, God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it. But when I saw it from her window at Ghost Ranch, I realized the heart of a mountain can be on the outside. My feeling is that she never quite got Pedernal right, that she painted it over and over precisely because she could never quite capture it. This is either a great failure of art or art's most perfect metaphor. Or both. Here is Helene Cixous: Painting is trying to paint what you cannot paint and writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written . . . It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet. O’Keeffe did indeed go blind. Then she sat each day for an hour on her roof, hoping for a cure, head tilted up, blind eyes open to the sun. But as long as she could see, she raised her eyes to Pedernal, time after time.

I walk the labyrinth, time after time; slowly, I grow accustomed to losing myself in the pattern. I trust I will find home somewhere, perhaps beyond the next turn, or the curve beyond it, though I have a growing suspicion that the path is home to me. I travel, I pray, I write as O’Keeffe painted: immersed and alone, facing up to what is, like holding my hand to a fire I can’t see. Like Rabindranath Tagore, I have had my invitation to this world's festival, and thus my life has been blessed. I stand for an hour in front of O’Keeffe’s dark painting of a storm over Lake George. The clouds are black and deep gray, the wave swells, the mountains are their own silhouettes, and light is here, and here. Look. Light is here.

48

KRI STI NA M OR I C ONI

Then : soon after that : next in order of time For Kim I didn’ t know your choice or how by then you had no choice. —Adrienne Rich We meet in the middle of one another’s madness, bond over men who bring too much into our lives: loud angry sons and ex-wives with the same first name.

We laugh and seek out ways to survive: lunches of Chardonnay and hours trying on hats in second-hand stores.

She is fine and then, without warning, she is not.

There are diagnoses and treatments, half-moon incisions where the full moon of her body is whittled away.

I am holding her hands, then I am not.

We see each other for the last time in the beauty and wellness aisle at Wegmans.

I wish I’d known it would be the last, as perhaps I would’ve lingered longer beside the cotton swabs, searched for something more to say, as if a word exists to mark this kind of sadness.

49

THOM CA R AWAY

Poem for All That Has Been Lost or Will Be Hold on to goodness even if it vanishes.

Hold on to the moonlight through trees even if it vanishes.

Hold on to this song, these notes as they materialize quite from nowhere.

Hold on to Priest Lake half in shadows the first year of our marriage. Hold the cedar, wet in late fall, the fish as they rise.

Hold on to our daughter’s cries deep in the night, the times we rose together to soothe her.

Hold on to these rocks. We used them in fences and walls. Later, our son would break them open, find gold and obsidian, whatever names he had learned.

Hold on to fire, to the wood we burn, birch and ash, cottonwood that smolders three days. Hold on to the kindling and paper, the match that lit them.

Hold on to mother wasps, the cicadas they feed their larvae in shallow burrows. Hold, too, the jackrabbit just out of reach, the prickly pear. Here is where God golds the air as the sun sets, the assembled world awash. From up the hill, you see the Santa Fe valley, among the oldest cities in the hemisphere, a thin place, eager and aged, holy and scarred. His song is light, is air, is scant water cutting the surface of clay and granite.

Hold on to pain, the burn on your hand, in your knees and hips.

The ache of what cannot be seen. There is no blessing to name, there is no purpose to be called to, but your body is holy, even aflame.

50

Hold on to the North Dakota sky, and all that was under it, our first tribe, the old light, the sea floor, the racing wind, the sadness of our love then, our absences.

Hold on to anger, fear, the strange skip in your heartbeat, the misfiring circuitry which you are sure will one day kill you.

Hold on to this heat, the wilting crops. Even the maple and rose suffer. We will never be pure, but blessed.

51

A N G EL A D O L L CA RL S O N

52

It’s been going on for weeks, and that’s not typical for this time of year, nor for this part of the country. Our roads don’t know what to do with all the wet. Our streams are now rivers, rushing over the edges of the banks and running down the streets. Back East we had storm sewers. We don’t have those here. The rain falls every day, light but steady. It’s not flooding everywhere, only in low areas. It’s not like the floods in South Carolina that we saw on television last year, with the raging waters bulldozing neighborhoods. No, this is a quiet creeping in of water, a little under the door one day, then nothing the next.

There are plants springing up in strange places. I dream sometimes that when I wake I am in a jungle and plants have taken over the yard, they cover the house and push in through the windowsills and doorframes. I dream and feel the humidity, the cold sweat on my warm body. It’s surprising here, out of place and out of time. I wake to see the sun trying to break through the cloud cover. It isn’t raining now, but it will rain. I can feel it coming. My Eastern upbringing assures me of this. It’s like a long forgotten, unused power that rises up again. My knees hurt. My fingers tingle. I think that this was what brought me to the desert in the first place—that, and the desire to leave everything behind.

The desert has charms that exist nowhere else. It is not as barren or desolate as people might believe. It is clean and ready. I liked it from the moment I stepped out of my car and breathed in the warm, dry air. I coughed for a month, not used to that air. I didn’t mind the coughing. I was drying out, and I needed that drying. In the years before the desert, I was a wet rag left too long in the bucket near the garden. Each morning the dew would settle in me and lift the mildew from my skin, remind me that I was left there un-minded, remind me that I was awake, but just barely.

He said he was coming back. I believed him.

After that I could not meet the eyes of my neighbors. I could not meet the stare of strangers who came into the shop. They didn’t mean anything by it. I was probably drinking too early, too often. I had an excuse they didn’t know about. Sometimes as I sat behind that counter and sipped from the teacup that held whatever blend was handy, mixed with a little scotch and honey, I would read the papers and look for evidence of him.

I would wear his sweater and try to connect with the smell of him. If a customer happened in, I might smile. I might wave. I might lash out. I might stumble and fall. I might hit my head on the counter. It would happen like that sometimes. It didn’t take long for things to die, for the shop to fail, for the bills to mount, for the bank to call. Foreclosure felt good, strangely enough. It felt like decision making.

Here, the flowers are usually delivered on Wednesday, and I’m left waiting in the evenings. But everything closes just after seven, and I watch as shops’ lights go out one by one and the streets empty of cars. I need the flowers first thing in the morning, though, so I wait for the truck. The first time the delivery came I was nervous being alone with the driver. I was new there, working part time. I offered some small talk. He returned with small talk. He handed the boxes down. I lugged them into the back room of the store. It took about twenty minutes. He left. My hands hurt. I should have worn gloves. I knew better. I’d done this before, back East.

After that I got into a rhythm on Wednesdays. Often I went in later than usual to make TH E RAI N I S T O O M U C H.

53

up the lost personal hours, not that those personal hours consisted of much more than sitting and waiting for sleep to take me over. Since the rains began, the trucks are coming later and later now. It was nearly nine the last time. The flowers are brighter. The plants are hearty. The driver is surly. The gloves get wet right away. My hands are wrinkled and puckered with the wet. With the constant moisture in the air, little puddles around the doorway, slippery spots on the floor, the wet bleeds through everything. My hands don’t hurt anymore after the delivery, but my knees hurt because of the wet. I am hobbling around as though I am elderly. I imagine what I will feel like when I am elderly. I pretend for a moment that I am the octogenarian owner of that shop. I pretend that one day after a long and productive life I simply crumble to the floor at the end of a day, right there in the backroom of the shop, surrounded by the blooming plants and cut flowers.

The rain is too much, and I think after the weeks of it that I ought to look for dry land again. The smell of mildew wafts before me like those days years before. Each time the smell hits me, I am transported there. I am returned to the time and place and circumstances, even though I am fully aware that my life is different now. Or perhaps it isn’t. I am unconvinced now. The rain is too much and overwhelms the roads and the gardens and senses and certainties. The soil is not made for this. It bubbles up, the soil gives way to sand and sand gives way to clay. My shoes are caked with the stuff. The ceramic flooring in my cottage kitchen is stained with it, red and rippled. I am returned to the place I left, and I wonder why it has found me again now after all these years.

Have I stagnated? Left myself open to discovery?

No. I have been hidden here.

I have been closed and careful like earth that is baked dry, like the desert bluffs that have turned to stone over time. I think I am turning to stone but the rain betrays me now. The water does not simply run off my hunched back, forming me over time into the beautiful, colorful, carefree nature-made cairns I see around me. I am too young; I am still earth, mud, sickly and red in the newfound rain. I am revealed by the water.

I wait for the flowers to come, but it is already close to ten. There is no sign of the truck, no lights deep in the distance giving me notice that he’ll arrive eventually. The roads are closed off for flooding or mudslides or darkness. I think of the driver in the rain, wheels stopped by the mud. I wonder if he will find a way to be released from the traction that holds him, that stops him from moving forward. I can see his hands on the wheel, gripping and unsure of whether to press on or turn back. I see the lines on his face, around his mouth. They are cracked deep into his brown, parchment-like skin. I noticed them the last time he came. It was the first time I looked at his face for more than a moment. I was feeling brave.

At the sound of thunder, I jump. He won’t be here tonight. I won’t get a call from the warehouse or distribution center. They’re all gone for the day, long gone. The driver will edge and rock and pull away, or he will wait there in the storm until the morning. The roads will wait. The flowers will wither but not die. The floods won’t come to the higher elevations of the desert where the highway rushes in. On my quick dash to the car, I think I see lights flickering in the black road ahead. For a moment, a brief moment, the rain stops.

It is like magic, like the universe has placed a cartoon umbrella above the small shop, the

54

strip, the whole town. I think I see flashing here and there. I close my eyes and breathe in the damp air, cool now, like standing on the rocks at the edge of the Atlantic. I forget I am in the desert, and I reach my hands out to my sides, opening myself to the elements. I am made of mud. I am melting in this puddle water, drifting deep into the sand, standing and not running, a reminder that I was not made for this weather.

55

artist’s statement TA MMI BRA ZEE: W E WA NT OU R V I EW A N D EAT I T T O O S ERI ES

of inspiration for me. With the figure as subject and paint as medium, I probe the depths of how we relate to the natural world, to each other, and to ourselves. Photographs of family members, friends, and strangers taken at various moments in history serve as a reference, which I interpret for my own purposes. The narrative that I create around the photos inevitably reflects how I observe and understand relationships, which can be both delightful and thorny. The process of painting is also delightful and thorny.

On some days, the painting and I cannot find each other. On other days, we openly and freely interact; the painting speaks to me, and I speak to it. Relationships give our lives substance and meaning, which is why I repeatedly address this topic in my work over and over again.

RELATIO NSHI PS A R E A N I NEX HAUST I B LE S O U RCE

56

LEFT: TAMMI BRAZEE. Son. Acrylic, oil, and thread on stretched fabric. 38 x 20 inches.

RIGHT: TAMMI BRAZEE. Invisible. Oil on stretched fabric. 11.75 x 9 inches.

57

TAMMI BRAZEE. Hoola Hoopin Western Theme Park. Acrylic on linen. 72 x 120 inches.

58

TAMMI BRAZEE. Performing Purple Bears. Acrylic on canvas. 72 x 144 inches on four 72 x 36 inch panels.

59

TAMMI BRAZEE. Parking Lot Paddling. Oil on canvas. 12 x 12 inches.

60

TAMMI BRAZEE. The Call of the Screen. Oil on canvas. 12 x 12 inches.

61

GARETH DAVIS III. Miller's Tale. Digital photograph.

62

GARETH DAVIS III. Sundown Flowers. Digital photograph.

63

GARETH DAVIS III. The Watchman. Digital photograph.

64

AUMAINE G R U I C H

Jinni Passing dragged my myth out by her teeth ill fit—labor of loss shrugged armless when she hit me eyes don’t cry no more though foot bones protrude howling the restaurant industry blues he said in the mountains they gather to pray and sing he said work is not the same as toil and I dreamt a road without signs found my myth tied to an olive tree for support kite string held her though wind rushed and lightening interrupted with eyes closed she danced and there was rain in Oakland I woke bed shaken the earth rolling like laughter underground what force moves beneath us? I think it pushes us closer to each other met what was left of my myth under a full moon her eyes swam and she spoke: I remember.

I know.

I need.

I don’t want to.

I will.

James Baldwin said Amen the moment death left the room I just packed my bags and came home

65

SAM GI L P I N

:Flotsam theres no ear for that: only the sound

off the docks: wood on wood

—

wood on water

is it finite

or can you feel the echo of the sun through the pine on your face:

ripple & pin creek & gradual awareness running through

it is so hard

your mind:

to listen for

that cloudless sky

so bereft

—

so embered:

66

thrashing

you said you said

& blunting

i understand i am the soft petal

thick wild grass:

sweet

(rosemary soap

67

& the endless movement arrowing onward

nothing of illness stepping out of its image

poppies coming into view:

smell of hay

on counter)

CA R A B AY L E S

68

of new inventory: pickups so tall you’d need a stepladder to crawl inside them and vintage sports cars with fins like black blades. They sat under cheap flag banners, which clapped their plastic applause in the wind. I was taking it all in and sucking down my first cigarette of the day, feeling dizzy and leaning against my scratched-up Camry for support. I’d quit smoking when I was twenty-two, and now ten years later I’d started up again because it gave me something to do while the world was going to shit around me.

I’d been calling on all my clients that week, trying to prove I still had a spine to hold my head up, even though everyone hated the Observer for the story it’d run. It’s a terrible thing, trying to sell advertising in a newspaper you don’t believe in anymore. I mashed the Marlboro butt with my boot, tucked my shirt into my slacks, and stuck the manila envelope under my arm. The sun was out, lighting up the strip mall with a harsh glare, but the breeze still had that February chill to it. You could smell hickory smoke and meat— someone nearby was roasting a pig. Two girls working the lunch shift at the Hooters next door were sharing a cigarette by the dumpster. I waved at them, but they pretended not to notice. Even in the cold, with the big rigs howling past on the highway, even with the stares I got from anyone who knew where I worked, I thought: hell, I love this town. I stuffed my hands into my pockets and walked into the wind, toward the dealership.

When the bell on the showroom door rang, all the salesmen looked up from their desks, mouths gaping with a hunger I recognized. Then they saw it was only me, and I could relate to their disappointment, too.

I ran my finger along the hood of a slick two-seater. “The reverend in?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“Sure is,” said one of the salesmen, a scrawny guy with limp wrists who looked like a ferret when he stood up from his office chair. “He’s in his aquarium.”

Reverend Gary was pacing around his glass office in a circle, prattling into a cordless phone. His secretary stood against the wall, sorting paperwork and ignoring him.

I crossed the room and felt all those glassy salesmen eyes on me. I gave the door a hard knock, though I knew the reverend had seen me. He gestured for me to come in and sit down.

“All right, boy,” he was saying into the receiver. “Okay. Bring her down this afternoon and we’ll see what we can do for you.” He put the phone back in its cradle. “Now, I don’t like to engage in sinful talk. But there’s a man in this parish? Drives around drunk all the time. Always calling us up about repairs,” he said. “Makes the best damn barbecue sauce down the bayou, though.” And I knew he was talking about Ted Theriot, who owned Sticky Ed’s Grill.

Reverend Gary was a part-time Methodist preacher in a parish full of Catholics, but he had a sense of humor about it. The display ads he took out in the Observer said his used cars were “born again,” and they all featured his motto: “Baptism by tire.” His best friend was Father Jerome over at Saint Francis. They were awful gossips and would try to best each other with their flocks’ most titillating secrets. I knew Reverend Gary was in the habit of talking, so I tried not to give him anything to say about me. I’d laugh at his jokes and sell him ads at an honest price, and I didn’t go to church or confess a thing. Nobody had anything on me. I kept my nose clean.

“Well hey, Jimmy,” the reverend said, as though he’d just noticed me sitting there. “Hey TH E LOT WAS FU L L

69

there, boy. How you been?” He shook my hand. “What brings you in today?”

His secretary was busy going through a filing cabinet behind him, rolling the doors open and banging them shut. With only three drawers on the thing, you would have thought she’d run out of options, but she went on like that, sliding and slamming. I’d been having these dreams about finding a little boy’s severed head in my desk, and each time she shut a drawer, I had to fight off a wince.

“You don’t mind if Deborah stays, do you?”

“No,” I said. Another thump. “Not at all.” It was distracting, but I didn’t want to let it show. “I’m just here because it’s never too early to start thinking about renewing your contract. We’ve got some exciting new rates for the next quarter if you sign up now.”

Reverend Gary lowered himself into his chair. He was a slim, tall man, and seemed to fold himself up every time he sat down. “Interesting time to lower your rates, with the paper being sold,” he said. “That’s either confidence or desperation.”

“Confidence.”

Deborah shut another drawer.

“Definitely confidence,” I said. “Our new owners represent a new way of thinking. A new direction at the paper.”

“Now, that is precisely what I wanted to talk to you about.” He picked up a copy of the Observer. “Jimmy, what in the hell is this?”

For the first time since I’d walked in, Deborah looked up from her folders. The reverend was holding Sunday’s paper away from him, pinching it so it touched as little skin as possible. The headline said, “Tyler’s Last Day.” I sighed and sunk my head. I’d been practicing the gesture all week, while clients hollered at me about the article. I’d been outraged too when I first read it. When I stomped into the newsroom, Gordy just said, “Whatever sells. You sell ads. I sell papers.” Well, I told him that our receptionist was in tears, so many angry calls were coming in. But Gordy just said, “Do you know . . . what got . . . the most page views . . . on the website . . . last year?” He said it slowly, like he was talking to an idiot. “That wet t-shirt contest slideshow . . . and the mug shot blog. If it bleeds, it leads. Now, you tell me: how was I supposed to know . . . our readers . . . had grown a sense of decency . . . all of a sudden?”

In the past two weeks, bad shit had gone down. Everyone in the Observer office had broken it down into The Three Terrible Things. The First Terrible Thing was the paper being sold. News Inc. had owned us for decades, and then one day they announced that we were the property of a new investment company that had ideas about “increasing the profit margin,” and we couldn’t be sure that we’d all still have jobs in a month.

The Second Terrible Thing was an eight-year-old kid in Larose named Tyler Douchette had been chopped up by his older brother.

The Third Terrible Thing was the Dispatch crime reporter was on vacation in Pensacola when it happened. Some gal, the business writer, was covering for him, and she missed the arrest. The editors were mad as hell that the local TV stations had scooped them, so they got hold of the police report and made that girl write it up. The front page centerpiece featured all the gory details—how the brother fetched a hacksaw from his toolbox and then put a plastic shopping bag over Tyler’s head, and how he started with the boy’s neck, and

70

when that was finished, he set to work on Tyler’s knees, and then how he left the parts all over the house—one in every drawer and cupboard—for his Momma to find.

The editors wanted to run exclusive content to make up for the story they’d missed. But there was a reason no one else had written up step-by-step instructions for butchering a little boy. By lunch on Sunday, the tri-parish area hated us almost as much as the murdering brother. The reporter who wrote the article was getting nasty phone calls—people would scream into the receiver about how much fire and brimstone she was in for—until the editors fired her. And we were feeling the hurt, because people wanted to stop their subscriptions and pull their ads, and a salesman can’t afford to lose a client when a new owner blows in talking about trimming the fat.

So I was sitting there in Reverend Gary’s office, hanging my head down and waiting for him to finish his sermon on the evils of journalism. I’d been at this all week, and it hadn’t gotten any less miserable. The worst part was when they got to reading the article out loud. I’d heard it so many times, I had the damn thing memorized.

“This,” Reverend Gary was saying, “is a family-oriented used car dealership.” He was getting into a cadence now, and his eyelids slipped down. “I,” he said, “am a family man. And this,” he flapped Sunday’s Observer a few times, then dropped it on his desk, “is not a family newspaper no more. Now, I’m not saying you can’t cover a tragedy. But—this article?” He stabbed at the paper. “They say the devil’s in the details. Well sir, he’s all over this.”

“I know,” I said. “I know. But listen, Reverend, the person who wrote that has been fired.

Reverend, I was just as horrified as you when I read that article. That’s why I came down here, because I know you’re a man of conscience. But I’m telling you: we’re fixing it. We’re on it. It’s already fixed. And we value you as a—” “Son, hating your paper is something cats and dogs can agree on these days,” he said.

“Why would I pay to keep advertising in it?”

“Well,” I said, reaching into the manila envelope, “I’m glad you asked that. We have these new ad rates, and—” He sighed so loudly it cut me short. “Deborah,” he said. “Sugar, would you go get Mr. Landry some coffee?” He watched her shut the door, then shook his head and rubbed his temples. “I won’t say who, so don’t ask me. But somebody in this office has a real bad gambling problem,” he said. “That person makes a mean cup of coffee, though.” His gossip usually followed this formula. A blind item, then some revealing praise. “Now, listen, Jimmy. I like you. I like playing golf with you. I like being in the same rotary club as you. But you can’t shit a shitter, and I’ve sold some real shit in my day. I know about lemons. What you’re trying to sell me—this newspaper?” He shook his head. “It’s a lemon, Jimmy.”

“No sir. That’s not true, Reverend.”

“No sale. I’m sorry. I’ll see this quarter out, since I signed my name to a piece of paper saying I would. But after that—” “But you’re one of my best customers. We helped you develop your campaign when you were just starting out. April in our marketing department came up with ‘Trial by Tire’.”

“And I sure am grateful for all of that. But I can’t let y’all drag us down with you. I got mouths to feed. And that’s the end of it.”

We sat there for a good minute. I couldn’t believe he was shutting me out, and not even

71

letting me say my piece. The second hand on his wall clock seemed to slow, and the beat between the seconds got longer and longer. I tried to keep my breathing steady, and he tried to muster the nerve to look at me.

“Well,” he said finally, without raising his eyes. “Unless you’re fixing to buy a car . . .”

“You know,” I said, a wild panic that fired inside my brain making me talk before I knew what I was saying, “I am.”

That got him to look at me. “Be serious,” he said.

“I am! That’s the other reason I’m here today,” I said. “I’ve been thinking. I’ve got no family, no mortgage, no debt.” The publisher wouldn’t feel so bad about canning me, I thought. “I figure it’s time I committed myself to something.”

He leaned forward on his elbows and threaded his fingers together in front of his face.

“That a fact?”

“Can we take one out for a test drive now?” I could feel the blood pumping at the back of my neck.

“Which do you like?”

“That.” I flung my hand behind me, then looked to see which one I had picked out. It was an old Corvette convertible.

He squinted at me. “Jimmy, don’t forget who you’re talking to. I can figure about how much you make a year. That’s from our vintage collection. She’ll put you out $55,000.”

“You ain’t my accountant, Reverend. I make a fat commission, and I’ve got nothing to spend it on,” I said. “C’mon. Take me for a ride.”

Deborah came in with a coffee in each hand.

“Darling,” he said to her. “Get me the keys to the ’65 Stingray.”

I hadn’t driven a standard transmission in a few years, and the car spasmed and stalled out when I first tried to back it out from the parking spot. The reverend bit his lip, but he was all professionalism. He didn’t say a thing. I tried again and reversed in little jerks, giving it just enough gas.

I pulled out onto La. 24, heading north toward Dupre. We drove behind a truck that belonged to Toups Seafood LLC, a local processing plant down in Marais. Inside it, there were probably a hundred rattling jars of oyster meat headed for New Orleans. Maybe I could move there if I was fired. But nobody made fried oysters like they did in Caillou Parish.

“I don’t engage in hateful gossip,” said Reverend Gary. “So let’s just say they used to have a girl working there at Toups Seafood, and rumor had it she was a les-be-an.” He cleared his throat. “Her Mama’s very involved in her church though, according to Father Jerome.”

I nodded and focused on pressing my left foot on the clutch and shifting to third. I was leaving damp handprints all over the leather interior. I couldn’t help thinking about what the reverend would say to Father Jerome if I crashed that antique Corvette into a rail guard: That boy lost me as a client, then went out and wrecked my car. He had to try, though.

“She got a 425 horsepower engine. Hear her purring like a housecat?”

“Sure do,” I said, patting the dashboard as though the car could hear our praise. “You know, I was gonna give you a new rate on four-column display ads. They’re a steal compared to what you were paying for two columns.”

He looked at the fields of sugarcane blurring past outside the window.

72

“Now, I’ll be honest with you, Reverend. That’s not the paper, that’s me. I feel so bad about all that’s happened with Tyler Douchette, I’m eating into my commission to offer those rates. Only for loyal customers like yourself.”

We were passing a plantation house, with wisps of Spanish moss hanging from the oaks out front. “There’s a man lives around here, only got his fancy job because he got the boss’ daughter pregnant and had to marry her. He’s done a lot for the business community, though.”

I pushed the car into fourth, and we were really cruising by all the old trawlers on Bayou Blanc. A tire hung from a cypress branch over the water. It had been there since I was a kid, and we’d swing out and dive into the warm murky water. Then we were cruising past my Momma’s house. My sisters and I would still come over for dinner every Sunday. Momma dressed the kitchen table with old copies of the Observer and we’d crack open crabs with our hands and let the newsprint soak up the juice that dripped down our arms.

“Did you see this little glove box? Got a cup holder inside.” Reverend Gary pulled something, and it creaked open. All I could think of was Tyler Douchette’s leg lying inside.

Blind terror took me and I pumped the brakes once, so we lurched back and then picked up speed again.

Reverend Gary didn’t say anything, and I didn’t look at him.

We were in Arsenault now, passing all the little creole cottages with the flat yards in front. We passed the Magnolia Diner where I got my morning coffee, and the AHS bleachers, where I’d tried my first beer. There was the Jack Snake, the bar I met my friends at every Friday night until they closed up and we stumbled home.

“You live around here, don’t ya, Jimmy?”

“Sure do,” I said, drumming my hands on the steering wheel. I was thinking about all the things Reverend Gary might say about me the next time he drove past my house with a customer. There’s someone lives in this neighborhood? I’m not interested in spreading rumors, so I won’t say who. He used to have a job at the newspaper, but now he’s on unemployment. His sisters are all wonderful schoolteachers at Dupre Public, though.

“Now, if you think she’s a little threadbare,” Reverend Gary was saying, “we can redo the interior, in either leather or cloth.”

Now, I’m not a gossip. But there was a person, used to live here, all alone, but then he got evicted. “ . . . Though I don’t know why any full-blooded man driving a beauty like this would want a cloth interior.”

There was a man who used to live here, and then when he lost his job—it was the only thing he had—he took a lot of pills, and passed out in the bathroom of the Chevron station on La. 1. By the time they found him, a bunch of nutria had eaten off half his face.

“Did I tell you that our subscription numbers for January were up compared to last year?” I asked him. “You’d have more readers seeing your ads than—” “Aw, hell, Jimmy. You’re not fixing to buy a car at all, are you?”

I didn’t answer him, and we were quiet the rest of the way back to Dupre, just listening to the green cardboard air fresheners knocking together and to the engine growling until I shifted to a higher gear. When we were about a mile from the dealership and could see the

73

big, revolving Ford sign, I tried to level with him.

“I’m sorry about this, Reverend Gary. It wasn’t fair to you. It’s just been a tough time for me.”

“Don’t let it worry you, boy,” he said. “I know what it is to lose a sale.”

The only choice I had left was to beg for mercy, which was not my favorite sales tactic.

“This Tyler Douchette thing—it’s just been horrible. I know everyone thinks we’re only in it to sell papers. But it’s been hard.” I tried to drop my voice, make it creak a little, make it tremble. “You think you’re upset about it, but you should come by the paper. People are just crying at their desks.” I turned on the blinker and pulled into the lot. “And, April— you know April. She said she actually fainted when she read the article on Sunday. Just blacked out right there at the breakfast table.” I was starting to feel a little lightheaded myself. “And I’ve been having these dreams. Well—” I decided not to get into all that. I took a deep breath as I pulled up the parking brake. “I just don’t know what I’m gonna do, Reverend Gary. The new company that bought the paper made us all sign a no-compete agreement that says we can’t work in advertising in the parish, even if we’re fired.

But there’s also a lot of talk going around about layoffs.” My voice was thick. My eyes felt rheumy and hot. “If I lose my customers, I’ll get fired for sure.”

I didn’t want to leave Dupre. It was the only place I’d ever lived. I could drive the back roads drunk and blindfolded, I knew them so well. I knew just about everyone in town.

I probably wouldn’t be half the salesman I was here if I went anywhere else. And being good at selling page space was all I had.

Even with the top down, I could feel sweat prickling my upper lip, and I knew my armpits were stained. My voice had a tremor in it now. “And I’ve signed this no-compete, so if I try to f-f-find work selling ads somewhere else in town, they won’t hire me, because they d-don’t want to be liable for a lawsuit.” The more I tried to hold in the sobs, the harder it was to breathe. “And I-I don’t want . . . to move away.” I wheezed for air. “It’s a real . . . hard time—” I felt like someone was stabbing me in the chest from the inside. Darkness framed the edges of my eyesight. “It’s a real . . . hard time . . . to . . . to start looking . . . for a n-new j-job. But I know it’s t-t-terrible what we all d-d-did to that little b-boy—” I’d stepped outside of myself, almost. It was as though I was sitting on my own shoulder, watching myself go crazy and die in that nice car, while Reverend Gary sat there asking, “You okay, Jimmy? You all right?” over and over, until he said, “Hey, hell. I’ll renew my ad, okay? Can you hear me, Jim?” while I put the empty manila envelope to my mouth and wheezed into it.

My breathing slowed, and my pulse crept down from my temples, and the black at the corners of my vision faded away. And I sat there in the Corvette with Reverend Gary, exhausted. My eyes still tingled. Each time I inhaled, I felt my lungs cooling down, like the ticking hood of the Stingray.

“Hoo boy, you really scared me there,” said Reverend Gary. “Put the fear in me good.

Christ almighty.” He wiped his forehead, then put his hand on his heart as though he were taking an oath. “I thought you were gonna kick it right here in my car lot, and I would never forgive myself.”

74

In the rearview mirror, my face looked pale and damp.

“Here,” he said, shoving the contract into my hand. “Four-column ad. You scared me so bad, I signed your damn papers, you lucky son of a bitch.”

He was hysterical with laughter. I was so relieved, I started chuckling too. And we stepped out of the car and both walked into the showroom, and I laughed all the way to his lavatory, where I threw up.

Then I bent over the sink and splashed some water on my face, and I stared into the mirror. I knew that the price of my pride had been a small commission. But the next time Reverend Gary took someone out on a test drive, they’d speed past my house and he’d say, “Someone who lives in this neighborhood had himself a fit right in front of me. Nearly died in my car lot.” And then he’d say, “He’s a pretty good salesman, though.”

75

LARY KLE E M A N

imbroglio were it but homespun, were it but seedling (corkscrew new) & not huddled as in taking cover, as in knowing the ineptitude of structure, just so, we sit without talking because gusts lift the flat-leaved remnant of faith, faithful— not given or proven but peripheral as grain elevator or tap water—a kind of blaze, insouciant, indifferent to you or you or walking at forest’s edge unaware of the seriousness of being left to your own imagination—between the red of brick & red of hurt—we might acquiesce to keep the distance, its respectful afternoon as small birds flush from under foot (winter’s here & we sit without talking because)

76

MEGAN M E R C HA NT

Xenoglossia First the raven, dark as oil slick on the gravel drive-clammed beak that would take an arrowhead tip to breach. Then feathers drifting in carpels of air, riding the loom of an approaching storm.

My mother’s call with a premonition that the surgeon will nick the tendriled rope of her body with his blade, and she will not be able to rise and clear his table.

Today, a house finch netted into the corner of the chapel, noon drunk, wings warping darned feathers. The wild pumping of its chest arrhythmic, as if the heart finally unhooked its corset ribs and flooded every nook, crushing bones like nipped shell. The second before stiffening, the bird curled into itself to make a neat package of death, ready to be swept into the creek.

I was the only one who saw it clawing the smooth ground as if to latch or arch for something sharp to open its skin just enough to relieve the pressure of being swallowed inside out.

It must have sensed my presence, watching over with useless hands while it flailed, as the heart must do before it can overwhelm and speak to its own living.

77

JESS WI L L I A R D

Soundstripe Set to the timbre and time signature of something happily confused, set to set some scene and pitched in the hopes of summoning that shivering animal in each of our stomachs, my dad improvises the soundtracks to our wrestling. We tumble in the grass.

Lining the left of it all is the actual audio, coded just enough for us not to know how it trails us.

He lets me win every time. He crescendos at his own defeat. This is all to say that I’m still trying to sync up, and that as a boy I was given power enough by the humming of a man to take him down and put it all back together.

If there’s nothing else I say let me tell you that we will wrestle things and we will want music for it.

If there’s nothing else I do, know that dodging mounds of glowing snow in Times Square, I listened to the most violent music I could find and carried that anger beyond the 3G into the bedrock tunnels.

I’m not sure I’ve left.

But emergence is one indecisive letter away from being urgent and I don’t know whose feelings I’ve transcribed from the filmstrip.

The question of what to coordinate with always causes such a scene.

This is the set up: the train pulls into the station, I step out and look for the stairs.

78

STEPHE N H I TC HC OC K

The Kingdom of Heaven Makes a Brief Appearance The city’s grid is a vast surface of encounter, our feet inside our shoes trying to remember the earth, its pressures.

Who touched me? Jesus said, and the blood in her womb changed course. Virtues—peace, love, justice—rise up like steam from manholes, air vents. Sell all you have, he said. And I could swear I’ve met you before. Met your face. So this one secret I’ll tell you because in the absence of mammon, an audience of wind, and because you’re here. Outside the Vancouver Art Gallery, I saw Rodin in fingerless gloves (was he here for his exhibit?), dirt under his long nails. (Who sculpts with long nails?).

He warmed his fingertips with his breath. I followed him.

He walked up one alley, down another, enamored of fire escapes, forsaking the ubiquity of steel and green glass.

This also: I dreamt a local hero, in tiny format, exposed himself on my knuckle. It rained the entire night. We didn’t sleep.

You didn’t. Together our talk ranged the heaving grid of the city. We were perfect strangers. Together, huddling.

Stay warm. Jesus never said that, though he did give us each other for comfort, and it is beginning to rain; we could just stay. Let the water drip from my blond eyebrows, off the hem of your coat. Where two or more are gathered, there…

It cannot last. Because we cannot feel the rain on our various windshields, and there is a window for every transport.

And what cannot last is, after all, what might last—at least within the wind, under the rain. Build your kingdom there.

79

BRI A N D O YL E

80

of woods the other day, I found a stone nose in the dirt. I would stop to admire this most remarkable sentence, which surely never appeared in the world before, but there I was with a stone nose at my feet; also a phrase that cannot have graced the world all that much, even after millions of statues and billions of feet over the years.

The nose seemed to be made of granite. It was not perky or cute or a snub or button nose. It was a hearty nose, imposing, inarguable, aquiline. It seemed to be a male nose. You might say that it was statuesque. It was cleanly made and well-preserved; the only damage to it was to the rear, where it had broken off, or been broken from, its home face.

I stood there amid willows and alders with the nose in my hand and pondered how it had come to leave its face, and whose face it was designed to echo, and who carved the statue or bust or head, and when it had been carved, and why, and what ceremonies or rituals or sacraments had swirled around the statue or bust or head, and how long the nose had been on its own here in the alders and willows. Friends of mine who study these matters tell me that there have been men and women and children walking and living in these moist woods for perhaps ten thousand years; and for all we know of their lives, their dreams, their visions, their sacraments, we know very little, for here is a stone nose where no accounts of Chinookan people record statues or effigies or idols or sculptures of gods and goddesses and heroes and heroines. Yet, here is a stone nose in my hand. Soldiers and traders walked these woods three centuries ago, farmers and loggers two centuries ago, priests and professors a century ago. Did some of these, one of these, erect a statue, carve a statue, bury a statue, smash a statue, for reasons no one knows?

I stood there with the nose for a very long time, turning it this way and that, wondering what hand cut it from what stone and why. Perhaps the sculptor was a woman who loved a man and built him anew after he died. Perhaps the sculptor was carving an ephemeral god from stone as incarnation. Perhaps the statue was not carved at all but emerged from a factory in a series of stone saints. Had this nose belonged to Jesus, Francis, Shakyamuni, Abraham Lincoln? Or had it been carved by the willows and alders, moles and snakes, beavers and otters, troops of silent minks coming up the bluff from the river at night to sculpt someone they adored?

I put it in my pocket; of course I did. We are an acquisitive species: we keep, we hoard, we secrete, we itch to possess, but then I put it back in the sandy soil. It wasn’t mine; nothing is mine, nothing at all, even my own imposing and inarguable nose, which began in the river of my mother and will end by returning somehow to sand or soil or sea. No one will ever cut a statue to remember me by, for I was no saint or hero, not at all; but I would like to be remembered when I am gone. We all do, if only by a battered cap or a name on a page or the snatch of song hummed too often in the shower. We are a memorious species, composed of a dense past and a luminous future, and only a part of us lives in the present, which is why we carve statues, and take photographs, and stop to ponder such fraught mysteries as a stone nose in a tangle of willow and alder above a broad brown river.

WH ILE WA L K I NG I N A T HI N SCAT T E R

81

contributors

work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Meridian, Chautauqua, and Trop. She was a 2014-2015 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University, a Tennessee Williams scholar at the 2015 Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a finalist for the 2013 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize in Fiction. She is at work on a novel. As a journalist, she covered the streets of Boston and the bayous of rural Louisiana.

The phrase she utters most frequently is always addressed to her terrier puppy: “What are you eating now?”

CARA BAY L E S’

has been wondering about the sufficiency of language. What concerns him most are the destructive and increasingly narrow ways language has been used to strangle civic discourse. At the same time, poets have developed increasingly expansive and inclusive language to convey the many conflicts of lived experience. These two realities are in opposition, and Thom hopes the latter can eventually remedy the former. We live in an important moment.

T H O M CA RAWAY

says: “I am an avid outdoorsman with a love for God's creation, particularly landscapes with their appealing shapes and lines. Photography is my way of capturing extraordinary moments in the everyday details. My grandfather, Gareth Davis I, was a graphic designer and artist. I like to think that I have inherited some of his creativity and vision. My dad, Gareth Davis II, and my grandfather taught me to respect nature and appreciate the simple things, and I have instilled the same values in my son, Gavin. I hope my photographs inspire people to acknowledge the AN GELA D OL L C A R L SON is a poet and beauty that surrounds them. These photowriter whose work has appeared or is forthgraphs were taken locally in the countrycoming in Apeiron Review, Thin Air Magazine, side of the Inland Northwest. There is art in Eastern Iowa Review, Rock and Sling, and our own backyards. Take a moment, quiet others. Her memoir, Nearly Orthodox: On yourself, enjoy the view, and wonder what's Being a Modern Woman in an Ancient Tradiout there. ‘The heavens declare the glory of tion, from Ancient Faith Publishers is now God; the skies proclaim the work of his available. She lives in Chicago, Illinois, with hands’ (Psalms 19:1).” her husband, David, her four outrageously spirited yet remarkably likable children, and BRI A N D O YL E is the author of many her dog, Frodo Baggins. www.NearlyOrthobooks of essays, poems, and fiction, most dox.com and www.MrsMetaphor.com. recently the novel Chicago.

G A RET H D AV I S I I I

is a working artist and science geek. While her Yankee accent reveals Maryland roots, Colorado is home. A graduate education in environmental sciences and visual arts has had a profound influence and keeps her work suspended somewhere between the concrete of tangible reality and the whimsy of an intuitive, creative mind. She can often be found either wandering along a mountain trail, guidebook and loop in hand, or slinging paint in her studio.

TAMMI B R A Z E E

82

82

is a poet living in Portland, Oregon. His favorite smell comes from shoving his nose into his cat Casey's belly fur and taking a huge sniff. If he were a sound, he'd be a quiet one.

SAM GI LP I N

grew up on a little bit of land in the Midwest. In her work she hopes to investigate the dynamics of location, both physical and mental. Inspired by the depths of simple, daily illuminations like those found in the poems of Mary Ruefle, she is also interested in memory.

bees will nest next year in his boxes. Lary shares his life with his artist wife, Sue, and his ten-year-old son, Niko. Lary has published a chapbook, Negotiating a Lower Angle (blurb. com), and a full length poetry book, Hawsapple (Tattered Cover Press).

AUMAI N E G R U I C H

is currently enrolled in the MFA program in poetry at Vermont College of Fine Arts. His poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies including storySouth, Streetlight Magazine, Geez, Devouring the Green, Back Talking on the Mountain of God, and he has work forthcoming in Post Road.

Stephen lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he works as the executive director and chaplain of The Haven, a low-barrier day shelter and housing resource center.

STEPHEN HI TC HC OC K

J EN N K O I T ER ’s work has appeared in Barrel-

house, South Dakota Review, Rock & Sling, Bateau, and Nothing to Declare: An Anthology of Prose Sequences. She has been awarded a federal Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, a Money for Women Grant, and artist residencies at ART342 the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.. After years of bouncing between Los Angeles, Colorado Springs, and New Delhi, she has hunkered down in Austin, found a job, and purchased (god help us) a credenza.

We shall see how long that lasts.

Influenced by her Latina heritage and travel to her mother’s native Costa Rica, CRYS TA L L AT I MER ’s studio practice explores the hybridity and dilution of Latin American culture through paint. Crystal’s work has been featured in Fresh Paint Magazine and Dear Pittsburgh and exhibited in numerous regional CORNEL I A HOOG L A ND says: “‘As a Girl I galleries as well as in Hong Kong. Crystal was Practiced Death’ is part of a new manuscript recently selected for an Emerging Artist (Trailer Park Elegy) that explores death as Award at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Arts random, meaningful, even playful. I grew up Festival in 2016 where she was also presented next to a graveyard where I ‘practiced death’ with a Juror’s Choice Award. as a girl. I've published six books of poetry.

Woods Wolf Girl (Wolsak and Wynn) was a T O N Y L U S VA RD I has been a Jesuit for ten finalist for the Relit 2011 National Poetry years and is currently engaged in theological Award. Sea Level (Baseline Press) was studies at the Boston College School of short-listed for the CBC Literary Awards.

Theology and Ministry. In addition to his Follow me @CHoogland. www.corneliawork at St. Francis Mission in South Dakota, hoogland.net." his Jesuit training has included stints in Haiti and northeast India. Before joining the LARY KLE E M A N teaches English at Jesuits, he served as a Peace Corps volunteer Arapahoe High School in Littleton, Colora- in Kazakhstan. His fiction has appeared in do. A practitioner of wildscaping and organ- Dappled Things and the North Dakota Quaric gardening, Lary hopes that more mason terly, among others.

83

is mostly forthcoming.

She is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Gravel Ghosts (available now through Glass Lyre Press), The Dark’s Humming (Winner of the 2015 Lyrebird Prize, Glass Lyre Press, forthcoming 2017), four chapbooks, and a forthcoming children’s book with Philomel Books. She lives in the tall pines of Prescott, Arizona, and teaches mindfulness and meditation at Prescott College.

MEGAN M E R C H A NT

is a poet and essayist.

Her work has appeared most recently in Brevity, Superstition Review, Literary Mama, and Change Seven. She earned her MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, Washington, and she lives and teaches now in the Philadelphia area.

KRI STI N A M OR I C ONI

is a full-time mother and poet living in Portland, Oregon.

Her poems have appeared in Catamaran Literary Journal, Water~Stone Review, and The Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, among others. She is the coeditor of Winged: New Writing on Bees, an anthology of poetry, fiction, and essays on the relationship between humans and honeybees, benefiting pollinator conservation efforts.

She manages her local community garden and loves a good old-fashioned potluck.

MELI SSA R E E SE R P OU L I N

is from Olympia, Washington, and now lives in Portland after finishing an MFA at Eastern Washington University. His poems appear in Tin House's Broadside Thirty series, Stirring, the Cresset, and other places. He doesn't feel at home unless he's near a large body of water.

He can't seem to stop believing in God and can only rarely say what that word means.

MI CHAEL SC HM I DTKE

has an MA in creative writing from Regis University, BARBARA E L L E N SOR E NSE N

Denver. She is former senior editor of the flagship publication of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, Winds of Change. Sorensen now contributes to Tribal College Journal. Sorensen’s work has received nominations for the 2011 Colorado Book award, and has appeared on VerseDaily.com (2014), on The Poetry Foundation’s website (2015), and on American Life in Poetry (2015).

S A L LY T H O MA S 's poetry and fiction have

appeared most recently in Dappled Things, Kindred, The Lost Country, and Windhover Journal. A poetry chapbook, Richeldis of Walsingham, is just out from Finishing Line Press. Her family includes one theologian husband, one third-gradeteacher daughter, one biology-major son, two middle-schoolers, and a Plott Hound.

She home-educates her children for fun, relaxation, and intellectual stimulation, and still has last year's thirty pounds of deer apples in her deep-freeze.

MA RK WA G EN A A R ’s books are Voodoo

Inverso and The Body Distances, winner of the Pollak Prize and the Juniper Prize, respectively. His poems appear or are forthcoming from The New Yorker, 32 Poems, Field, Southern Review, Image, and many others. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of North Texas and an MFA from the University of Virginia. This year he will serve as a visiting assistant professor at Valparaiso University. www.markwagenaar.net.

J ES S W I L L I A RD 's

poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Orleans Review, North American Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, McNeese Review Online, Oxford Poetry, and others. He is from Wisconsin.

84

last note ON N O W H ERE N EA R

Before I decided to move from Boston to a rural parish in Louisiana where the land was threaded with bayous, the most exotic place I’d lived was Connecticut. Everything was foreign; not just the alligators or the houses perched atop fifteen-foot pylons, but also the wide-brim hats the postal workers wore, the Mardi Gras beads draped over low-slung telephone wires like plastic Spanish moss, or an 11-year-old sure-shot who wormed his fingers into the bullet wound of a mallard and was delighted to find corn kernels in its neck. None of this was strange, really. (A Louisianian would likely find vignettes in my native Boston I would never notice.) My eyesight sharpened. If I can describe the place vividly, it’s because it was vivid to me and nowhere near anything I had experienced.

CARA BAY L E S, F I C TI ON

It probably seemed out of character when I threw myself into travel for the first time in my early twenties. Me, the girl who had always clung to friends and family, who never studied abroad for fear of missing something, always the last to leave the dorm at the end of the year.

The thing is, it felt exactly the same.

Waiting for another moment of connection.

Nowhere near. Giving it every chance.

JEN N KOI TE R , NONF I C TI ON

Fog and kites open the morning. They wisp across the sky, billow over sand dunes at Bodega Bay. My children are still small, and I look up from my sleeping bag to gauge the

85

deep Pacific’s sound. Is it the unmistakable sound of undertow, or sleeper waves? These things I recognize, remember from my own youth, years ago, on the Atlantic coast. And from Haiti. The children there would stand still over the coral cove and gaze down hard at the blue Caribbean sea, watching, listening, and would cry out if one attempted to jump in, “Pas nager! Pas nager!”

Half-asleep, I mumble to the warm bodies of my sons lying next to me, “Pas nager.”

Incense of eucalyptus trees and someone cooking on a grill make me push back the bundle of wool blankets and crawl out of the tent. There before me is the tumultuous Pacific. Sea birds careen far above the ground.

I watch them and think how much I love their sound—a sound of wind being sliced through invisible tree branches. I turn and stumble back to the warm tent where I can pleasure in the weight of my sons’ bodies against mine for just a few more years. This realization becomes a riptide, dragging me back into a netherworld of sleep.

BA RBA RA EL L EN S O REN S EN , PO ET RY

I love to explore, to just go. My family loves road trips to places we have never been and to do things we have not yet experienced.

Living in the Northwest, I see the untouched faraway every day. Regardless of where I am, I can look out and imagine the things I have yet to discover. There is always more to see beyond every bend. Carrying my camera with me, I can see the faraway in a new angle. Every moment I can wonder and reach

last note

for what I have yet to see. There is beauty right here where I stand, but the faraway is always at my fingertips, and I will continue to seek it.

GARETH D AVI S I I I , VI SU A L A RT

The process of unlearning can be dizzying.

Laid out around you are the ideas upon which you’ve built a life, all the behaviors and attitudes and postures that you’ve used for validation. They’ve deflated. They no longer serve you. There was an event, or a passing of days. It began with a crash, then something broken, which caused you to sit very still. You examine the safety net that was supposed to eliminate the possibility of chaos, of pain. It turns out to have been faulty from the start. You lean toward the feat of release—this as the crux of new growth. You find yourself cocooned in miniscule comforts: lists, slow movement, softness around the eyes, whatever allows for balance and the time to pry yourself open. Vulnerable from all angles, you feel distanced from the old bravado brought on by costumes, rituals, flashy speak. But you are tougher for this new lack of subterfuge, for the way you’ve caved to make space for something better.

AUMAI N E G R U I C H, P OE TRY

What happens when you read Wordsworth, Adélia Prado, and James Wright alongside one another? For me that confluence of voices, sounding within the context of Vancouver’s cityscape, became “The Kingdom of Heaven Makes a Brief Appearance.” I believe

the urban pastoral, at its very core, traffics in this feeling of “nowhere near.” And when I say pastoral, I’m imagining both the bucolic and spiritual senses of the word; I think each sense informs the ever-changing nature of the pastoral form. The scale and proximity of city life can be jarring, at once thrilling and deeply alienating. In my experience, though, these conditions offer the possibility of surprising, immediate connections, especially within more marginalized communities.

My current work in Charlottesville, as it did in Vancouver, involves chaplaincy. The role of a chaplain is to provide what’s been called the dignity of attention—the practice of active listening and caregiving—to those who find themselves overwhelmed with life and circumstance. Crisis and loss, because they are common to human experience, have a way of subverting our real or perceived differences. Pain and tragedy do not discriminate. It is within that discrete space that a chaplain operates. As a discipline, chaplaincy honors yet transcends the divisions that exist between differing faith traditions and systems of belief and non-belief. It is then best understood as first and foremost an act of human solidarity. You might say I make connections for a living.

But how close can we actually come to one another? I don’t know. And how long can we sustain connection? I don’t know.

What we’re given, what we are left with, are approximations. Perhaps that’s enough.

S T EPH EN H I T CH CO CK , PO ET RY

86

When was I far away, far away? Once in Australia, when I lay abed and wept that I had gone so far from everyone I loved; once when my wife and I grew far apart, and I lay abed and wept that we might have lost all that verve and zest and yes I so treasured and nearly lost; once when a child was on the surgeon’s table; once when another child ran away into the city and I thought she would never never never come back; but she did.

When I lost my first pregnancy, I felt like I had been sucked out into space, into a black hole where I couldn’t recognize myself or my faith, where I couldn’t feel God anymore because my concept of God didn’t include pain like that. It was difficult, to say the least, to get through that time. I’m not even sure “that time” is the right phrase; it felt like a physical object, an expanse of grief and anger. I felt so alone, more alone than I had ever felt in my life. It took everything I had to start BRI AN DOY L E , NONF I C TI ON reaching for God again, and when I did, I found the Spirit was wider and more mysteEvery year, we bought those birthday cards rious than I had allowed it to be before exfor each other, the ones that said we’d be periencing loss like that. I believe that when friends until we were old women, until our we are “nowhere near,” we sometimes see hair grayed, until our skin wrinkled and through the gap into our place inside God’s sagged. We always laughed. Over lunch one vastness. I don’t claim to understand this. day, we made plans to celebrate our fiftieth birthdays together. It was her birthday lunch. I don’t mean that loss has inherent value. I know for sure that everything in me wanted Forty-seven, I believe. Fifty still seemed so to reject God, and God held me anyway. far away. But we made lists of the things we might want to do. Our dream places to go: MEL I S S A REES ER PO U L I N , PO ET RY Paris, Turks and Caicos, Hawaii, Los Angeles. Then, settling on the more realistic, we The space was a dizzying, enormous entiagreed to come back to this same restaurant ty. Thousands of feet separated me from in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, the one with the cliff face beyond and the valley below. the gingko tree outside the window. I don’t Silence ruled. No birds sang. No bugs buzzed. remember the name of the restaurant now, No engines roared. I heard only the moving but I remember the tree. I remember we of my blood and breath. Nowhere near civitalked about the beautiful yellow leaves, how lization, backcountry via a four-wheel drive they looked like tiny fans. How the gingko road that few could maneuver, on unfamiltree can live for a thousand years. I taped iar terrain, I was a speck on the landscape, one of the leaves into my writing journal that sitting in the dirt next to the monolith, day. Beneath it, this quote: I have a pretty Cleopatra’s Chair, looking across an incomgood memory, but memories are time beings, prehensible distance through Canyonlands too, like cherry blossoms or gingko leaves; for National Park. We sat stone still, Cleopatra a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and I, waiting for an epiphany, waiting for and die. My friend has been gone now for God, waiting for me. But God hid in the air, almost two years. In a month, I will turn fifty. the rock, and the silence. God was concealed, I think about going to Paris. Or perhaps going and I was nowhere near. back to Doylestown in search of the tree.

TA MMI BRA ZEE, V I S U A L A RT KRI STI N A M OR I C ONI , P OE TRY

87

last note

When trying and ultimately failing to learn Spanish, I experienced the classic frustration of language acquisition: being limited from interesting or complicated conversation based on a lack of words for an incongruent supply of thoughts. In English, I’m concerned that I have the words but may not have the thoughts. I feel well-equipped for most English-speaking situations. I have made a bad habit, however (and teaching has exacerbated this habit) of using words as a guise of assurance or understanding where there is none. That is, often vocabulary can be a deflective mechanism when I don’t actually know what to say or how to say it. Teaching, for example: when I encounter an idea I want to express, one that I understand intuitively but haven’t ever been tasked with externalizing, I fumble around.

I sputter. I offer things in the form of words, words that are appropriate and organized and sound nice, but ultimately amount to a kind of convoluted, bastardized response or explanation that, because it contains some ok-sounding words, is neither questioned nor actually understood. I’m exaggerating, of course, and perhaps my insecurity paints a more dire picture than there actually is.

But it’s this insecurity that drives me to poetry. I see it as a stage for the failure of language. Expected in poetry, and I believe required in poetry, is the reaching for something unreachable. The articulation of something fundamentally inarticulable.

Here I am comfortable; I neither expect myself nor expect to be expected to proffer something discerning and perfectly coherent. I have license to fail. It’s in that failing where the poem occurs; image-logic pro-

ducing more intuited or felt understandings, movement that has virtue apart from extrapolated meaning, sounds that don’t have to do anything but sound.

J ES S W I L L I A RD , PO ET RY

It was raining hard the day I took the shuttle from the airport to the writing workshop in Santa Fe. The woman next to me was elderly, and talkative. Between the pounding rain and her soft voice I could only make out a phrase or two. I did hear her say that I should go to Taos and see the church made famous by Georgia O’Keefe.

It was sunny and dry that day. It had been a hard week. I sat on a bench facing San Francisco de Asis, looking for magic or inspiration or miracles in the dusty, desert town. I took a photo, maybe two. I wrote a few homesick words—“Nothing here reminds me of Chicago.”

A N G EL A D O L L CA RL S O N , F I CT I O N

Working on the Rosebud Reservation gave me my first opportunity to explore the American West. I came especially to love the Badlands—the surreal shapes, the layers of stone changing color with the time of day and weather. Each of those layers represents millions of years, whole ecosystems come and gone. There’s a rough and unpredictable beauty in the land and a power in the forces that shape it—wind and water, tectonic shifts, eons and eons of time—that I came to see as something like an icon for the eternal, a glimmer of the Creator’s power, a vision, not just of nowhere near, but of things invisible.

T O N Y L U S VA RD I , N O N FI CT I O N

88

TAMMI BRAZEE. Bison Traffic Jam. Alkyd on wood panel. 48 x 71 inches.