Issue 49: Mattering

MATTERING / 49

Winter 2018-19 $15

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ru’mi-nate: TO CHEW THE CUD; TO MUSE; TO MEDITATE; TO THINK AGAIN; TO PONDER

Ruminate is a nonprofit, reader-supported community chewing on the mysteries of life, faith, and art. We invite slowing down and paying attention. We love laughter. And we delight in deep reading, contemplative activism, telling stories, asking questions, and doing “small things with great love,” as Mother Teresa said.

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Cover: VANESSA HALL-PATCH. Kintsugi Cabin II, 2015. Photo etching, screen print, gold emboss. 22 x 25 inches.

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staff EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Brianna Van Dyke SENIOR POETRY EDITOR

Kristin George Bagdanov FICTION EDITOR

Raven Leilani NOTES EDITOR

Josh MacIvor-Andersen VISUAL ART EDITOR

Carolyn Mount BLOG EDITOR

Charnell Peters NONFICTION EDITOR

Madison Salters MANAGING EDITOR

Rachel King CIRCULATION & PUBLISHING

Amanda Hitpas COPYEDITOR/PROOFREADER

Sarah Wheeler PRINT + WEB DESIGN

Scott Laumann ASSOCIATE READERS

Laura Droege Carly Joy Miller Amy Sawyer GUEST PANELISTS

Maggie Blake Bailey Hannah Kroonblawd Cameron Lawrence Casey Patrick Hope Wabuke

contents

POETRY NOTES

Readers’ 10 Artists’ 32, 56 Contributors’ 82 Last 86

FICTION

The Piano Student, Kira Archibald 20 The Gathering, David Desjardins 72

NONFICTION

Terrible Knives and Things That Float, 44 Anne Visser Ney

VISUAL ART

The art of Kris Vervaeke The art of Vanessa Hall-Patch The art of Sarah Jane The art of Aaron McPeake

33–36 37–40 57–60 61–64

8 Mattering, Bin Ramke 16 you will dig me from the earth with your bare hands, in order to resurrect me, Paula Harris 18 Our Hands Are Bowls of Dust, Clemonce Heard 19 In This Village, Renia White 30 Dream Joy, Jessica Hincapie 31 Drawing the Wire Horse, Kendra Langdon Juskus 41 Marsyas Returning, Shangyang Fang 42 Type Two, Benjamin Gucciardi 55 Winterberries II, Kevin McLellan 65 Trying to Get My Body Back, Jen Stewart Fueston 66 City of Refuge, Matthew Landrum 67 After Your Illness, I Think of the Perseids, Emily Ransdell 68 The Queen’s English, Seema Yasmin 69 In early spring before leaves have taken place, Lary Kleeman 70 Homonyms, Jihyun Yun 81 Diane, Just a Little Longer, Rainie Oet

2018 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize SPONSORED BY STEVE AND KIM FRANCHINI

F I R ST P L AC E

S E C O N D P L AC E

PAULA HARRIS

CLEMONCE HEARD

“You will dig me from the earth with your bare hands, in order to resurrect me”

“Our Hands Are Bowls of Dust”

HONO RAB L E MEN T I O N SHANGYANG FANG,

“Marsyas Returning”

K E V I N M C L E L L A N , “ Winterberries II”

“It Was While I Was Looking at the Oldest Wooden Wheel Ever Discovered” and “Oculi” MARK WAGENAAR,

RENIA WHITE,

“In This Village”

F I NA L I STS ALLISON ADAIR

JULIA KOLCHINSKY DASBACH

CHAUN BALLARD

MATTHEW LANDRUM

GEFFREY DAVIS

LETITIA MONTGOMERY-RODGERS

CARLY FLYNN

RAINIE OET

BENJAMIN GUCCIARDI

ELIZABETH OXLEY

BENJAMIN HERTWIG

SAMUEL PICCONE

MARYA HORNBACHER

EMILY RANSDELL

KENDRA LANGDON JUSKUS

JEN STEWART FUESTON

MICHELE KARAS

SOPHIA STID

LARY KLEEMAN

SEEMA YASMIN JIHYUN YUN

2018 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize FINAL JUDGE ILYA KAMINSKY WRITES:

ON PAULA HARRIS’S

“You will dig me from the earth with your bare hands, in order to resurrect me”: “This poem is a rhapsody that can be humorous and heart-breaking, playful and emotive, intelligent and musical all at the same time. Marvelous.”

ON CLEMONCE HEARD’S

“Our Hands Are Bowls of Dust”: “Every poem I have read for this competition had something interesting to offer.

But this one also offered the fusion of form and content, the way its gorgeous sentences worked to deliver the spell of the narrative, while maintaining the rhythm of the lyric. A wonderful poem.”

was born in Odessa, former USSR, and arrived in USA in 1993, when his family was granted asylum. He is the author of Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press), Deaf Republic (Graywolf) and several other books. He has edited many collections of poems and essays, including Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (HarperCollins), which has been called “a modern classic.” His poems have been translated into numerous languages and his books have been published in Turkey, Netherlands, Russia, France, Mexico, Macedonia, Romania, Spain, and China, where his poetry was awarded the Yinchuan International Poetry Prize. His other awards include the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, The Whiting Writers Award, Lannan Foundation Fellowship, Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize. Recently, his new poems were included into Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies.

ILYA KAMINSKY

BIN RAMKE

Mattering after an image by Sarah Walko out of gloom uncoiling yet the lines are straight in a locally Euclidean sort of way the shape of a kite compels geometry the measure of the earth the earth of measurement being still so far for so available a being still in broken and disguised patterns o so broken we have become we always were so, broken, becoming

a beautiful a blue a sky blue sky remember watery sky blushing into dark continuous twilight two lights are better than none uncoiling a kite straight string

out of gloom uncoiling a gorgeous need I like lines rulers ruling the paper the point of o perspective if you like like if you speculate a point of departure order a point of blue in the kite shaped sky through windows windowing a world winnow a world

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how wide a lake a single cloud might make, how blue a shape

I knew the mind of a boy as a place but disorderly but minded his manners his matter he was blue and seemed to have a shape like a soap film within intersecting sticks as if any polygon could think imagine he was more beautiful than ice you had to be to where there was weather in there and moons too and a prim cloud of primes––twins twining.

Bin Ramke, “Mattering,” first published in Ley Lines, edited by H. L. Hix. Copyright © 2014 Bin Ramke. Also included in Missing the Moon (Omnidawn, 2014).

Reprinted with permission of the author.

In lieu of an editor’s note for this issue, we wanted to share Mr. Ramke’s stunning poem.

May we all remember that “we always were so, broken, becoming // a beautiful.”

—Ruminate Editors

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readers’ notes ON MATTERING

The school bus is poised at the end of the driveway, waiting for the boy to embark and sit, silent as a caterpillar, while the giant yellow chrysalis transports him to classes where he will be transformed into a first grader one long day at a time. But he’s nowhere to be seen today.

Slowly the bus door creaks, squeaks, closes.

Chairs in his mother’s waiting room slowly fill with clients, waiting, waiting, waiting for their clinical pharmacist to call for them, to escort them to the tiny cubicle where her charts and blood checks and medications will provide their metamorphosis to healthy life. Her patients pause—still, silent, suspended between worlds.

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, the boy and his mom circle the critter habitat in a slow dance of anticipation. They’ve just noticed that the green monarch chrysalis, with its glimmering gold spots, has become translucent; they’re looking through it at black and orange shadows.

Lunch boxes sit half-packed, abandoned on the countertop. Her hair is wet, his is still shaped by sleep. Her phone vibrates, stops, vibrates again.

Nothing else matters now.

They pause, motionless, as the tiny capsule begins to shake. A thin vertical tear

splits the shell and the boy gasps. Crumpled wings slowly stretch into thin air.

“How cool is that,” Mom murmurs as the plump black body flips back toward the top of the netted enclosure.

“How cool is that,” the boy echoes in a whisper.

“Sometimes you have to run a little late to witness these life miracles,” she explains to him, to herself.

And today, this miracle is all that matters.

BRENDA ZOOK, BELLEVILLE, PA

Bill had a theory about life and matter. We humans, he liked to say, sprang from the leftover stuff, the stardust, that sparked from the anvil of God at the Big Bang.

I met Bill in the nursing home where my mother-in-law was recovering from a fall. Bill sat at her table most mealtimes, a large Buddha-like man across from a tiny woman wearing a halo, a black metal cage that was supposed to fix her broken neck.

Bill had been a minister, but he wasn’t preachy. Even at eighty-eight, his body failing him, he spoke in clear steady tones that delivered grand ideas in familiar terms. His stardust theory was neither good science nor sound theology, but coming from Bill, who had been an Air Force pilot before his days in the clergy, it was easy to imagine God in his workshop, wielding the hammer of life.

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Nancy and I pulled up chairs and sat with her mom and Bill at lunch one day when his wife was visiting. Although close to her husband in age, she seemed much younger. Bill smiled and appeared content as she talked about the traffic, something he hadn’t navigated for over a year. She updated him on the house, the neighborhood, and all the places and things he could no longer experience for himself. I searched his face for any trace of the resentment I might feel if I were the one in the wheelchair. All I saw was love and goodwill.

That evening as we were leaving I paused at his partially open door. He lay in bed, propped up to watch an opera on PBS, tear tracks on his cheeks. I backed away quietly, beautiful music in my ears, stardust on my mind.

and yet the acrid smell of blistered skin remained.

I volunteer at a community animal shelter. The homeless arrive many ways.

Some come by car, pulled out struggling from back seats by owners who no longer want them. A few arrive like Chuck did, tossed over our fence after hours. Others are left tethered to our gate or picked up as strays. We are always full. The second one dog is adopted, another takes up the available kennel space.

What does one dog matter? Not much, to a lot of folks. But in this animal shelter, each time we place a once-discarded pet in a home, we celebrate. Each adoption builds on the hope that one day it will be different here.

PAUL CIOE, ROCK ISLAND, IL

When I was a child I used to watch my mother replace the large planters she kept on ceramic columns around the driveway of our house. At night, my father would arrive intoxicated and park the van only after a shattered pot told him he had arrived. The morning after, Mom would carry away the broken planter with her hands on the cracks to keep the soil from spilling out. She’d place an old plant in a new pot to replace the broken one. This happened many times. I didn’t understand why someone who made it part of her daily routine to water and talk to her many plants and trees would put them in such danger.

One morning, when I found her in the backyard watering the bougainvillea where my brother and I used to play hide-and-seek, I asked her why she did all

I watched her arrive in a battered Ford sedan. An animal caretaker brought her from a distant shelter where she was at-risk for euthanasia. Not enough space. Time was up for several dogs that day and she seemed an unlikely choice to save. Skeletal and covered in open, oozing sores down to her hairless tail, her breed was anybody’s guess. Her eyes were downcast. She went limp when a volunteer picked her up and placed her into a deep tub at the outdoor bathing station where we lathered her with medicated shampoo. She stood placidly throughout, never once looking up while the scabs rubbed off, exposing more raw tissue. Later, I cradled her in a worn terry towel. She was freshly bathed

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CARRYE HARRIS-FRANZEL, SPRING BRANCH, TX

readers’ notes

these things for plants. I asked her why she kept replacing broken pots. I asked her why it mattered.

Mom looked at me and said, “It matters because they are the reason why we live.” That’s what she said in Spanish, said “why we live,” not “why we’re alive,” not “why there’s life” as science books eventually taught me.

I later learned that Mom started gardening when she got married at seventeen and it took her many years to conceive. The plants became her reason to live.

Cancer isn’t an autoimmune disorder, but the immune system suffers a similar breakdown: it’s the problem of self.

With autoimmune disorders, the immune system confuses cells that are “self” with cells that are “foreign” and attacks them. In the case of cancer, the immune system isn’t attacking healthy cells; rather, it’s failing to recognize that “self” cells have gone rogue, replicating without end.

Matter is the problem. But it’s also me.

My thoughts can be the problem too.

But they are also me.

YAJAIRA CALDERON, DOWNEY, CA

MORGAN RIEDL, ATHENS, OH

I’m not a hypochondriac. I have real reason to worry. My grandmother (on my father’s side) had breast cancer. My grandfather (on my father’s side) has Alzheimer’s. An aunt on my father’s side has MS. An aunt on my mother’s side has lupus.

But my current health problem is mental, not physical. It’s the worrying.

I even worry that my worrying about my health will cause it to fail. I refuse to vocalize breast cancer on a phone call with my mom when I mention finding a lump under my armpit. I’m far less worried about catching a disease than I am about having one already inside me—a self-destruct sequence written on my chromosomes.

Both MS and lupus are autoimmune disorders; recent research suggests my grandfather’s Alzheimer’s may be too.

One morning last fall city workers cut off all the branches of the old maple tree in our front yard, then chopped down the trunk. Green winged seeds flew to the ground and bled red at their tips. I quickly rescued a heart-shaped cross section of one branch before it went into the woodchipper and put it in the front garden along with driftwood and rocks from the lakeshore.

In the spring, periwinkle explored the ground around this heart-shaped log, and a single purple crocus poked through the opening at the top. I went back to the lakeshore and collected heart-shaped rocks. I also gathered milkweed pods and planted the seeds, hoping to attract butterflies if any plants grew and bloomed. From all the seeds I scattered, only a solitary milkweed

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plant grew, but that’s a start. Have you noticed how you can draw a butterfly by interlocking two hearts?

The next time I went running on the lakeshore path, I ran up the stairs from the shore into the park, saw a heartshaped squash of mud on one stair, and ran past it eight times, eighteen times, twenty-eight times. I wanted to pick it up, wet it in the lake, reshape it, hold it because it matters, because all these heart shapes in the natural world matter, whether we notice them or not.

MEG FREER, KINGSTON, ONTARIO

When I was ten, I liked to lie on my back at night and look at the stars. We lived in a small western town and on dark nights when the moon was new, I could see the full sweep of the Milky Way. The sight always filled me with awe. Who am I, I wondered, that I can look out of these eyes and see a sight like this?

To find the answer, I delved deep into my young self, learning along the way about the constituents of matter: molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles.

I became a chemist, a “matter expert.”

Fifteen years ago, I was working at the National Science Foundation. In my quest to learn who I really was, I’d somehow ended up a government bureaucrat.

Bored with pushing paper, I attended a talk about a new discovery in physics. I couldn’t believe what I heard: 68 percent of everything in the universe is dark energy; 27 percent is dark matter. Little is known about either. Only 5 percent is the ordinary matter I’d spent my career learning so much about.

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The history of science has been one humbling corrective after another. First, Copernicus showed that earth is not the center of everything; his observations proved that our planet circles the sun.

It then turned out that the center of our solar system, our sun, is just a minor star in a forgotten corner of one galaxy among billions. Now, we have convincing evidence that even the matter that makes up everything we love is only a tiny fraction of everything that is.

How is one to respond? We keep getting knocked off our self-erected pedestals. We could say, “What does it matter?” Or we could simply respond with awe.

RAIMA LARTER, ARLINGTON, VA

A fraudulent moving company disappeared with all our earthly possessions and for a year I chanted, “Things don’t matter. It’s just stuff.”

But when the vanished movers showed up with squished boxes of pictures, a family heirloom rocker, and children’s books—more than twelve months after they packed up our apartment for our long-distance move—stuff mattered.

The pages of Goodnight Moon, worn with sticky fingers, beheld memories of my crisscrossed legs and bedtime cuddles.

The handprint Christmas ornaments I crafted each year with little fingers now growing too big marked God’s grace of time and childhood.

The solid oak hand-me-down doctor’s desk where my husband spent many overnight hours studying for his master’s was a symbol of fortitude and dreams.

readers’ notes

Maybe matter matters—maybe the physical is spiritual.

As a Christian, I think that if the physicality of body matters to God—who came to earth as substance and form— then maybe other physical things matter as well. Maybe the stones God chose for the temple where His glory dwelled among men, mattered. Maybe the incense mattered.

And today, maybe my plaster walls matter. Maybe the wood table around which people sit to receive nourishment for their bodies, created in the image of God, matters.

The crooks may have stolen our belongings for year, yet they gifted me a deep understanding of the power—or dare I say, the sacred meaning—of matter.

She hadn’t wanted heroic measures.

Her chart stated, do not resuscitate in bold red letters, a banner of submission: When Death comes, I’ll go. Leave my matter to be reclaimed by the earth, recycled into her next masterpiece, as the Artist wills.

My warm fingers slid across her wrist searching for the soft drumbeat of pulse. I continued to hold her hand, my presence with her corpse the only gift I could give this woman who’d just died without a story.

Where were the people who knew her? Did she experience great love? Was there great sorrow? Was she a mother? A sister?

Outside, a blade of grass broke through the saturated earth. A bird pecked for worms. The wind jostled a branch.

Downstairs, a baby was born.

SEANA SCOTT, PITTSBURGH, PA

HEIDI WHEELER, CEDARBURG, WI

I sensed the moment her soul flew away, leaving behind a body encased in starched white hospital sheets. There wasn’t a visible change as her once synchronized matter ceased to function in rhythm, the symphony of cells slowing to an adagio and then—nothing.

But somehow, as her nurse, present as the last breaths escaped her lungs, I’d borne witness to the anticlimactic separation of personhood from flesh and bones. Only a physical shell remained, the fragile frame an abacus of decades spent in the elements, wrinkled skin like tree rings marking her advanced age.

A Phoebe built a nest of mud and moss in the ledge under the roof of our chapel.

There, in that snug and sheltered spot, she kept vigil until her offspring hatched and fledged.

She returned the following year and revamped her deteriorating nest, once again assuming her post. I saw her mostly in the early morning as I went to the chapel for prayer. I glanced briefly at her head and tail on entering and leaving, then diverted my gaze so as not to worry her. Sometimes I spoke a soft greeting.

If I went back in the dark of night, she

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was still there—slightly perturbed by the bright light that attended me.

Once the young were hatched, she and her mate often perched on the wooden arm of the cross alongside the chapel driveway. The Phoebes maintained a close watch while tending to the rounds of feeding, and the tree crowns swelled with their insistent and eponymous calls.

The mother and her offspring inhabited that chapel eave until their aerial pilgrimage began, then it was abandoned but not forgotten. The nest remained a mattered memorial—a lingering remembrance embedded with the rhythm of return.

JOEL KURZ, WARRENSBURG, MO

It was to be a routine visit to the doctor.

We were to discuss my prediabetes, as indicated by a high A1C value, schedule a routine endoscopy, and discuss my bum ankle; an old running injury.

Since I was to be sedated for the endoscopy, the doctor ordered an EKG for the benefit of the anesthesiologist.

He came back into the room holding the chart and looking grim.

“I’ve got some reading to do,” he said.

He sat down in the metal chair near the sink, still staring at the paper.

After about a minute, I asked, “Is everything okay?”

“I’m trying to convince myself you don’t have AFib, but I can’t.”

The conversation shifted from one of routine tests and dietary guidelines to one of stroke risk, blood thinners, echocardiograms.

In medicine they call it triage.

Whenever there is a mass casualty event someone has the execrable task of determining which survivors matter most—that is, who is most likely to be saved. Who has conditions that need the most urgent care versus who can be stabilized until the worst cases are taken care of; what procedures need to be accomplished in which order.

Suddenly my other tests didn’t matter until my heart condition was stabilized.

When first diagnosed with a lifethreatening illness, one’s life is often triaged, too. One tends to differentiate between the important and the merely urgent; what one needs now and what can be put off until tomorrow. Or forever. I left the doctor’s office and headed for a nearby ice-cream parlor.

PAUL GARRETT, TRAVELERS REST, SC

She hands me a leaf, a stick, a rock. All these mementos of nature as we walk to the park. I catch myself looking at the screen of my phone. Why do I keep doing that? What am I teaching her? That important email. The urgent text. The time. She picks up a dandelion. “Here, Mommy. It’s for you.” I look at my phone once more. Then put it away. I look at the dandelion, the yellow on green. Where I see a weed, she sees a beautiful flower.

She has found another dandelion on the edge of death and begins blowing its fluffy seeds into the wind. Giggling, she watches them fly. I don’t stop enough to watch her, to wonder at nature with her. She wants to look at the clouds now. Together, we find a bunny in the sky.

KRYSTI TAYLOR, BEAUMONT, ALBERTA

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PAULA HARRIS

you will dig me from the earth with your bare hands, in order to resurrect me this will be challenging, given that I intend to be cremated, the cremains then scattered along the ridge of the Tararuas but still, you will sift through the dirt, the ferns, the decomposing leaves, the insects; you will make sacrifices of wheat and goats to the Anemoi, so that they will agree to use the winds to help you draw my scattered self to one place you will worship orishas and physics, you will learn to bend time, you will make offerings to gods and spirits that you previously didn’t even know existed you will gather the first tears of conjoined twins, the last howl of a dying white wolf, the moments between thunder and lightning, the fourth tail of an albino axolotl, a lamb’s happiest jump, a metric cup of warmth, created by sunlight hitting the point of Cleopatra’s Needle, the moment a seed breaks through the surface and becomes a seedling, five kisses from a Buddhist monk who lives in a cave high above the Matsang River, 927 grams of steel, captured from the dust of knives as they are sharpened, eleven memories of my smile you will cast spells, you will create a sacred circle, a sacred triangle, a sacred pentagram, a sacred parallelogram you will wipe the dirt, the decomposing leaves, the insects from my re-forming body you will hold my almost-formed left hand and beg me to return, you will sing me lullabies, you will tell me how you’ve missed me, how this was all a mistake

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with infinite gentleness you will wipe away the dirt water tears that slip from my still-closed eyes and all of this will be too late

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CLEMONCE HEARD

Our Hands Are Bowls of Dust North Tulsa, Oklahoma Ask the lord why he commanded us to turn all of our grocery stores into churches bestowing no fishes or loaves, but rather mite-sized wafers for our faithful migrants & migraineurs waiting in the rafters of raffles & MLK protest fans, waiting to be filled with what’s whole & holy, with a provision that prompts tongues to act out a quaking that only occurs in starvation.

Ask the lord if a food desert may refer to a fast a follower has no say in. The devout disciple led into the wilderness with a Bible & salivation, halos, hallucinations & hallelujahs, driven to the drilling rigs’ pinnacle to turn not a stone into sandwich, not a pit into olive. Ask the lord if it’s okay to swallow shadow critters bowing beneath the stones. The worms that are symbols of both catch & bait, pill bugs that represent the pea. Lord, I’ve wandered where the chosen have been pushed hungry as a pack of black sheep & all I have to show are my tennis shoes cured with sand. I’m sure that we’re the salt of the earth because of the flavor that falls from our flesh when we walk under the sun. The way our skin sears ’til we disappear. The pews may be filled with a few but we are mighty. Our stomachs growl like the lions they are, from when we enter the sliding doors ’til when we exit the tiled aisles to broil, praising our lord with the sweetest aroma.

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RENIA WHITE

In This Village in this village we measure the distance between the prayer and its mouth, the chorus and each of its pains. we know that you can’t slice a chorus into some, that, if you separate the mouth from what it yells, the yell is just an announcement in the spirit of itself. the kids know well enough to say, why I gotta die to be

a body? but then the elders say, I even died in the spirit of being alive. to which the kids reply, I am not here in the spirit of myself or something dead. I came in the thing I pray with and for. and some of the elders cry while playing the same old song anew. say finally, and at last. and in the begining.

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T H E

P I A N O S T U D E N T The Piano Student Kira Archibald

KIRA ARCHIBALD

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MA R K A R RIV ES EA RLY so Sheila can show him where to set up the television in

the dining room. He will be painting the living room a brittle green, like the stems of a certain dried flower Sheila tucks into crystal vases scattered throughout the house. For Sheila this project requires intense delicacy; when Lawrence wakes from his afternoon nap, the television and twelve-cup capacity coffee maker and leather recliner must be positioned exactly as they were in the living room. With blue masking tape she has marked the desired positions for each. Her marriage to Lawrence is defined by a man’s belief in his inherent superiority and a woman’s deep faith that small kindnesses are their own reproach.

“Job’s past Pilot Rock, way the fuck out there. Don’t have the time, but the money’s good, cash. And they’ve already bought the paint,” is how Kirby pitched the job.

He leaned over the coffee table Mark super glued back together in a moment of aching sobriety, testing the cracks with his thumb.

“Real pretty,” Kirby said, eyeing a hole in the wall as he pushed empty beer bottles and junk food wrappers off the coffee table with his cowboy boots. “They don’t care when you come by as long as the job’s finished by September. Just show up.” * MA R K L EA NS AGA INST T HE D O OR FR A ME. On the television a B-32 bomber

opens fire on a German plane.

“Sheila’s gone to get the post,” Lawrence says.

The phone rings and he answers without turning the volume down.

“Patrick!” Lawrence says.

The burning aircraft twists in the sky, and tears apart as it falls.

Mark nods at the back of Lawrence’s head and walks into the kitchen. A chest freezer in the second pantry is full of pig, each cut wrapped in butcher paper and stamped with blue ink: ham, country sausage, bacon. Sunlight ricochets off a knife sunk into half a cantaloupe. A note in Sheila’s cramped cursive pokes out from beneath the cantaloupe. Running errands. I could be an hour or more. I’m sorry, please have some cantaloupe. He cuts too big a slice and eats it down to the rind, then splashes his face and dries his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt, which smells like the apple cider vinegar he used to mask the smell of mildew.

The second floor’s shadows are precise, each maple leaf sharp on the hardwood floor, branches curving like supple dancers. Three bedrooms with brass bedsteads and patchwork quilts folded into accordions. He buries his hands between their layers, feeling the weight of a thousand hand-stitched hexagons. So much light he squints and covers his eyes. Even the floors shine. Bedrooms on the third floor, a library, a parlor.

In the smallest bedroom he found photographs of a young man, their edges bent as if

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hastily pulled from a photo album, in the bottom drawer of a bureau. He eats lunch with the young man, and a shell that whispers its longing for the sea. He’s painted the bedrooms already, comforting yellows, blues, and pinks. It is his job to throw plastic over the furniture and run tape along the baseboards, but the house seems not to want to be touched.

The fourth floor is dark and cool. He peers over the bannister.

“What the fucks are you talking about?” Lawrence says.

Mark walks to the door and traces the raised image of a sunflower on the oval doorknob, traces it once more, unconsciously holding his breath. Once he put his ear to the door as if the room might invite him to enter. He squats, peers through the keyhole but is rewarded with grey light. Again he walks to the bannister.

“Don’t be naïve Patrick, war isn’t a bloody picnic,” Lawrence says.

Mark turns the doorknob, but it sticks. He puts his weight into it and the door flings

He squatted in the cemetery gathering the frostbitten roses that fell from the bush he planted on his wife’s grave. open, bounces off the wall. He stands in the doorway giving his heart a moment to resettle. Figures emerge from the gloom, angels: fat, suffering, emaciated, gleeful, cheeky porcelain cherubs on the lintel, ghostly in the gloom. Denuded wooden angels hang on the walls, beneath them flakes of paint: carmine, yellow, blue. Angels march across a side table. Voluptuous angels on the face of the grandfather clock. Lace curtains restrict the sunlight so that only a pale wash falls on the baby grand piano, outrageous and diminutive in the midst of so many lifted hands and bent heads. His fingers skate across the blond wood, the single page of sheet music torn at one corner.

Junior is written in uncertain block letters. A single rose in a slender vase droops.

Mark woke one day, summer a dim memory, having slept through fall and the better part of winter. The world was stripped to the bare essentials: cold, water, and light.

He squatted in the cemetery gathering the frostbitten roses that fell from the bush he planted on his wife’s grave. Fumbling, shivering, cursing until he opened a bottle of something, he sat propped against a stranger’s tombstone and dreamt that his son’s bones had migrated from his wife’s belly and nestled inside her ribcage. And he woke on his back with his arms and legs curved away from his body as if he’d passed out in the middle of making a snow angel, knowing his world, every pulsing, grasping wonderful thing, was reduced to alcoholic dreams.

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* SHEILA FLUTTERS AB OUT as he moves the furniture, giving herself motion sickness.

She sits on the edge of Lawrence’s leather recliner and rubs the lobes of her ears until the spinning world retreats.

“Water?” he says. “Crackers?”

“No,” she says. “I like to sit here when the telly is off.”

She pulls the lever and sinks slowly into the chair. Mark adjusts the TV, pulls up the masking tape and balls it in his fist. It is a woman’s room, the room of angels, with that particular grace that has nothing to do with furniture: so comforting in its loneliness. * EV E RY A FT ERN O ON W IT HOU T FA IL , Sheila offers Mark a cup of tea. No matter

that he always declines—throws his hands into the air and gestures limply at half a dozen gallons of paint stacked against the wall as if to say that idleness would be unprofessional—at 3:15 her heavy-soled house slippers slap against the pine boards.

Minutes later she stands in the doorway, a tall woman with fine shoulders that slope diffidently in apology for taking up space. He is squatting when she knocks, brush plunged into a can of Gypsy Moth; indeed, like a moth flipped on its back its surface trembles in the sunlight. Hen’s Egg, Raw Sugar, Georgia Clay, she indulgently choses paints for their names. He cranes his neck to meet her gaze, pulls the paper mask away from his mouth. After living on a dozen Midwestern army bases her English accent is faded. There is dirt beneath her nails and she smells faintly of tomato stems.

During the long drives home through the mountain pass, tall pines flickering as the truck ruptures their shadows, the piano, and sometimes the angels, haunt Mark. At first he only stood in the doorway breathing in the room. He’d gone too far touching the yellowed sheet music. He would leave his brush balanced on a can of paint and climb the stairs two at a time, one day settling on the piano bench with the ivory keys cool against his fingertips. Those fading afternoons he rolls down the windows and turns the radio up, hoping his desire will be sucked out the window, but the trouble isn’t the piano, or the angels. When he leaves the room, it is as if he has surprised a crying woman who hides her face, turns away, tucks her bones until she is unimaginably small—a woman’s grief exiled to a room.

Two floors below Lawrence is plastered to the television. There is a long dirt road running through the valley, and just once, speeding through those empty miles, has he encountered another car.

“That would be nice,” he says.

“I’ll put the kettle on then,” Sheila says and frowns at her dirt streaked hands.

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He washes his hands and face with too much soap, not wanting to bring paint fumes into the kitchen. She stands in front of the sink, palms planted on the blue tile.

“There are lightning fires all around us,” she says.

“You should cut the grass,” he says. “That barn is nothing but tinder.”

“Yes, I should,” she says. “What would you like?”

“I don’t drink much tea,” he says.

“I’ll choose something then?” she says.

“Please,” he says.

“Sugar? I think we could both use a touch of sweetness,” she says.

They sit on the porch, rocking, watching the mountains. She offers him a plate of sweets, raspberry jam sandwiched between two scalloped sugar cookies. Sheila pulls a pair of needles thrust through a ball of pink yarn from a basket under her chair and shows him the pattern she is working on, a dressing gown for her youngest granddaughter’s Barbie.

“I’m almost finished with step 8, could you tell me what comes next?” she says. “(k5, k2tog, k5) color 1, (k5, k2tog, k5) color 2,” he says. “Should I read it again?”

“No, I’m a pro,” she says. “I’ve been knitting since my oldest, Terry, was dancing on my bladder.

A bird hops forward then retreats, eyeing the plate of cookies. Mark takes a gulp of tea, closes his eyes and listens to Sheila’s knitting needles click. He hopes she won’t say anything more about Terry. He is nearly convinced he can hear the wisteria unrolling, whispering against the porch and sucking color from the sun. The bitter tea and the barn, standing stiffly against the backdrop of mountains as if expecting to be photographed, are just a cup of tea and a barn. The past has no claim on them. There is a small easing; one knot in a thousand loosens. * MA R K I S EA RLY. He likes the emptiness, the blue mountains that blur as they

recede. Lawrence is parked in front of the television sipping scalding coffee, and Mark pauses in the doorway, but Lawrence doesn’t acknowledge him. He is leaning forward, attention absorbed by a woman with a puff of blond hair. Words float across the screen, a lengthy title; she is the foremost expert on General William Tecumseh Sherman. The woman talks in great detail about the General’s brutalities, lingering on the most horrific, and her shoulders perk up underneath the shoulder pads of her formless jacket, betray her solemn mouth. Here again is that particular sadness, which adorns the faces of women who deny their bristling hearts, their indecent eyes and impolite hands.

The smell of freshly cut grass blows down the hall. White curtains flare, and then the wind sucks them out the window. With the toe of his boot Mark nudges the

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door and slips inside. He presses keys at random. Each sound brings a momentary weightlessness. He is beginning to understand what his wife meant when she said it is better to be useful than happy.

At the funeral, in the shimmering rain and half-light, her brothers bowed their bald heads, afterward raising glasses to her apple cake, and to her dahlias (big as saucers and yellow, and small and pink as children’s mouths). They didn’t welcome Mark into her childhood home, but they didn’t tell him to fuck off either.

Mark presses his forehead into the piano, the sheet music dry against his cheek, and cannot differentiate the sadness nesting in his bones from the room’s heartbreak.

His fingers remember the mysteries of wood and he lifts the piano bench’s lid expecting sheet music to crumble between his fingers.

This is the room’s allure; that it receives without being asked. Not since he was a child has he prayed, but his body seeks the ground, undeniable, as if it knows a secret. His fingers remember the mysteries of wood and he lifts the piano bench’s lid expecting sheet music to crumble between his fingers. Instead his fingers fumble among thick envelopes. In Sheila’s cursive: My Terry, you have been gone for ten years.

The front door slams and he shoves the letter into its once pristine envelope and buries it at the bottom of the pile.

Sheila is standing in the living room watching Lawrence open the mail. He reads everything, even the mail addressed to her, then hands Sheila the disordered papers and torn envelopes.

“There you are,” Sheila says.

He stands with his hands behind his back, eyes downcast.

“I forgot which room is the sun parlor,” he says.

“The hot room with the plants,” she says, and he remembers silver splotched leaves falling from a ceiling beam. * MA R K L EAV ES HIS F RON T D O O R U NL O C KED. Why bother? College students

already stole the television.

Sheila’s hair was in curlers and she seemed off center when he pulled into the driveway that morning.

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“Oh,” she said, mouth partially covered by her hand. “I forgot to tell you not to come today.”

“It’s okay,” he said.

“I’m so sorry, we’ll pay you for the day,” she said.

“No,” he said. “It’s fine.”

He collapses on the couch and stares at missing ceiling tiles, a pillow held to his face, but no matter how hard he presses he can still breathe. An ancient burrito is the only thing in the freezer. He microwaves it and walks through his wife’s garden.

Everything is dead except for a kale that overwintered. He pulls the weeds around

When he was a child he would float for hours, listening to the whoosh of his breath and echo of his heartbeat. it. The leaves curl at the edges. He snaps off two and eats them, even the stems.

He hasn’t been upstairs since the college kids cleaned him out while he was at her funeral—backed a U-Haul in and loaded her up with most of the furniture. They left the bedframe and he found the sonogram where it had fallen underneath the mattress.

“Do you want to feel like shit forever?” Kirby said. “Decide what you want and I’ll box the rest.”

He heaves himself into the tub and fills it with hot water. When he was a child he would float for hours, listening to the whoosh of his breath and echo of his heartbeat. * MA R K I S PA IN T IN G the smallest bedroom on the second floor Nocturne Shade, (the

wet walls, the room looking out on the blueberry patch, are precious) because Sheila is going to be a grandmother again. Now, having watched her lopsided hips, worn from their second replacement, as she climbs the stairs, he makes a habit of appearing in the kitchen shortly before three. It surprises him that he can feel accountable to another person. She feeds him beans on toast with kippers, or with a heap of mashed potatoes hiding pert green peas and while he eats she talks about Patrick and her other son, the smart one, the one who became his father.

“Is he watching the telly?” she says.

He walks to the door, nods.

“Close the doors,” she says.

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She pulls a photo album out of the cookie cutter drawer. A baby with big ears crawls, sleeps, and sits in her arms with a fistful of her hair in his mouth. She flips pages. Now he is a little boy in tall socks. Now a boy with slicked back hair and a serious face. She traces her son’s face then closes the album and covers it with cookie cutters. When he gets too comfortable he reminds himself that eventually there will be nothing left to paint and no garden beds to dig or rose bushes to prune. * MA R K W IP ES SW EAT from the corner of his eye and leaves a blurred periwinkle

fingerprint. It is a parched July day after the holiday and the house smells like gunpowder and charred pork. Bees are busy in the garden. His wife, such tiny feet, such tiny hands, even when she was still, curled around a book in the pink armchair rubbing her belly, her body vibrated with everything she planned to do.

“Mark,” Lawrence shouts.

Sweaty men hack a path through a black and white jungle with machetes; one man’s lips curl around an unlit cigarette, another, smooth faced with lady lips, looks to the left of the camera. A bearded man in a tweed jacket appears on the screen.

“Make another batch of coffee,” Lawrence says.

“How much?” Mark says.

“Just pour it in and hit the blue button,” Lawrence says. “Did you serve?”

“No,” Mark says.

“Thought as much. My older boy did,” Lawrence says. “Not Patrick, he’s got a bad heart. He went to Vietnam but couldn’t handle it. They’ve got a fancy name for that now. I bombed the Germans. Leg burned to hell. He was a man though, tried to hide it.”

“I’m sorry,” Mark says.

“Soldiers die,” Lawrence says.

He’d never thought Lawrence capable of strong feelings. So the world can bruise even him. He longs for something familiar and solid, the wooden shaft of the paint roller in his hands, longs to be in motion, pushing the paint soaked foam up and down the wall in long clean lines because he feels tremendously transparent, both to Lawrence and to himself.

“I should finish the room,” Mark says.

But he doesn’t paint. Sheila’s letters are piled at his feet. They describe the mundane stuff of life, daughters becoming women, that his wife’s boyfriend is not a good man. Sheila doesn’t sugarcoat. He finds the first letter she wrote to Terry. Her handwriting is shaky and she’s crossed out whole sentences. As you know you pulled up parallel to the railroad tracks and shot yourself. Your father found you and we put up a cross, but someone took it down. It was awful when I found it gone, the flowers too. I will never forgive you for what you did and that you did it on Louise’s birthday.

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You know how much I hate guns? I will never forgive you but I will love you, we all will.

We just might forget that we do for a while.

He lays on his back and stares at the ceiling, which presses down, and he raises his arms to protect his face, finding it difficult to breathe. The architecture of his skull, its finely curved bones and industrious veins, feels about to implode, the way burning houses melt suddenly into the ground. * TH E LAST DAY OF J U LY is mercilessly hot, and dry leaves rub against the window.

Mark painted the last room this morning. Paint fumes burn his nostrils, but he doesn’t open the windows. He sits next to Terry, such an English boy, decent and bursting with feelings he must suspect are forbidden. Their shoulders touch. The boy’s feet scuff the floor and his hair, thick with pomade, slides across his forehead. He stares at the sheet music. Structure, harmony, melody, sequences, scales: all are torture.

He depresses a key with one finger and jarring, rippling, cracked sounds banish the angels. They rise through the roof like a flock of birds. No notes. Only sound. The lace curtains dissolve into snowflakes and melt.

The walls glow, backlit by the midday sun and Terry is swallowed by the light.

Mark’s son, a stubborn crease between his eyebrows, spreads his hands, destined to be large with prominent knuckles, until the tendons rise. Every few seconds he blows a flop of blond hair out of his eyes. He turns to Mark, his brown eyes lovelier than his mother’s, but at this, the use of the word lovely, he scowls and returns to working through the exercises. He is trying, very slowly, to play the piece of sheet music. It is jaunty and guileless, all crisp, clear notes. Mark lays his hands over his son’s. They are the first to disappear, fingers then palms melting into sunbeams, and Mark does not reach for him.

He closes the piano and walks through the rooms he’s painted. Cupid’s Bow. Lady Grey. Sailing Trip.

“Do you think we need to repaint the outside?” Sheila says.

Her hair glows against the Lemon Twist walls.

“It’s old,” he says. “Might have lead.”

“It’s too hot and there’s so much smoke,” Sheila says. “You can paint it when it’s cooler?”

“Okay,” he says.

He pulls off the road into the glowing grass and parks parallel to the railroad tracks.

Lying on his back in the bed of his truck with the pale sheet of sky above him, tears gather in his ears. He has been trying to go. Almost succeeded. Kirby picked him up

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from the police station and he grabbed Kirby’s gun from the glove compartment. Kirby punched him in the face and then the stomach when he didn’t react.

“Fuck you,” Kirby said.

“I forgot to change the batteries in the carbon monoxide detector,” Mark said.

Even if, the paramedics said, a baby that small would not have survived, and zipped the body bag over her face.

Kirby put the truck in first and drove to Immigrant Lake.

“C’mon,” he said and walked through shining dead grass.

For some time they stared at the Canada Geese resting among the reeds, then Kirby shoved him. Mark belly flopped on the crust of ice and sank headfirst. He’d never been a sure swimmer, could not orient himself or open his eyes. The air bubbles tickled his lips as they escaped.

“Did that make it better? You feel like less of a piece of shit?” Kirby said. “Get out, I’m hungry.”

He dips his fingers in the sky, glorious as it approaches the blue hour, and clouds pass through them. A can of paint, Brahms, a little on the nose, is gathered in his arm.

He shrouded the angels and piano in sheets he found in a hope chest and painted over the yellowed walls.

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JESSICA HINCAPIE

Dream Joy We move through nights the quickest.

Nervous when the prisms no longer hold hostage their light.

A star in supernova eats everything in its path.

To be the filament inside the bulb, rather than the bulb itself.

Not the gem, but that which moves through the gem.

He gave her a diamond.

With the lights off she had in her hand a rock.

Nothing dazzles in a dark room.

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KENDRA LANGDON JUSKUS

Drawing the Wire Horse After Kyle Sherrard’s “Untitled” in steel and brass wire I remember: there was a hillock of skin

over the eye of the horse that you needed when you drew

the face of the horse, before you descended

the long nose of the horse to the dark lake of the nostril.

You needed

the mound of bone beneath the tensile wires of the eyebrow:

the house of the horse’s

discrete sadness.

Silence is a space given

to stable the fragile ankles, the humming hive in the flanks,

after the gallop through the clovered grass, whether you have run

to fill the still spaces with wind or simply drawn shut

the steel door of your own loneliness.

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artist’s statement

KRIS VERVAEKE I MA DE AD INFINITUM out of some of the more than one thousand photos I took of

memorial portraits on the tombstones in Hong Kong’s cemeteries. A memorial portrait is a single, porcelain image selected to convey a whole life. Over time, in the cemetery, as the portraits are exposed to sun, extreme temperatures, and humidity, they evolve, leaving us, in the end, with the simple abstract beauty of the image as such.

I isolated the portraits from the headstones on purpose, featuring them out of the context of the cemetery and away from the idea of death. I wanted this series to expose both the strength of the individual face and the perishable nature of the individual human body. The clear images make us want to connect and know the people’s stories. The fading images reference the mortality of human life, and the limitations of our impact. Subconsciously, the viewers’ interest in the individual fades, and we are drawn instead to the beauty of the abstract image. As the faces fade further, anonymity returns and once again we become part of nature . . . Ad infinitum.

VANESSA HALL-PATCH FO C US I N G ON T HEM ES OF COL L ECT ING , recording, and preservation, I

document vernacular structures within my rural surroundings of Bowen Island, British Columbia. For years, I have observed and archived the slow decay and deconstruction of a cluster of cottages within parkland on the island. Although central to the booming resort era of the early-to-mid 1900s, with no maintenance, the structures have deteriorated over time, creating a curious abandoned presence in the hub of our small island community.

In the Japanese art of kintsugi, breakage and repair are highlighted rather than concealed; an object’s wear and tear are a welcome part of its history. Inspired by this philosophy, I created these Kintsugi Cabins, a work that documents the current condition of the five remaining cabins, while also celebrating the imperfections, highlighting the flaws, and mending the breaks with gold. I formed these works on paper by layering multiple photo-based printmaking techniques, such as etching, screen printing, relief, and embossment.

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KRIS VERVAEKE. Ad Infinitum #7, 2012. Photograph. 60 x 20 inches.

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KRIS VERVAEKE. Ad Infinitum, #6, 2012. Photograph. 60 x 20 inches.

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KRIS VERVAEKE. Ad Infinitum #15, 2012. Photograph. 60 x 20 inches.

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KRIS VERVAEKE. Ad Infinitum #10, 2012. Photograph. 60 x 20 inches.

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VANESSA HALL-PATCH. Kintsugi Cabin IV, 2015. Photo etching, gold leaf, digital, chine colle. 22 x 15 inches.

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VANESSA HALL-PATCH. Kintsugi Cabin III, 2015. Photo etching, gold emboss. 22 x 15 inches.

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VANESSA HALL-PATCH. Kintsugi Cabin V, 2015. Photo etching, screen print, gold leaf. 22 x 15 inches.

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VANESSA HALL-PATCH. Kintsugi Cabin I, 2015. Photo etching, screen print, gold emboss. 22 x 15 inches.

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SHANGYANG FANG

Marsyas Returning Last year I planted my severed ear

This year the flowers grow larger

each stretches its blood-stained veins

Last year my dog came home

This year I wash my dog’s bones

inside out like a paper bag

for this undoing takes long to finish

But look at the blooming

glistening, listening

in myself: the ear isn’t mine

I hold, since I

whose flayed skin causes a sob

are destined to listen to, pliantly

slowly through

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under the magnolia tree and more beautiful soft like rabbit’s skin with a washed bone strip his flesh It is all difficult for the dog’s blood is still hot tree, a thousand ears This little lie I planted It’s a part of you am the dog in the wind that your petals while the sweet worms screw your softest bone

BENJAMIN GUCCIARDI

Type Two

Five times a day, I prick my finger and ask my blood about its failure.

Out of its cage, it wants to discuss its better cages:

How, before it was mine, it lived inside a python near Varanasi—

the thrill of rushing when muscle snaps a rabbit’s spine.

How it wants to paint a self-portrait as the Ganges river—

in the foreground, a woman in a yellow sari cleanses her son’s limp body, his skin the color of the river, the river the color of her eyes.

That’s how holy I am, it says, as I turn the meter off,

trash the strip and choose a new tract to stick the insulin in.

The python uncoils from its catch, slinks beneath a rusty harrow.

The woman weaves marigolds in her son’s wet hair, climbs beside him on the bamboo board.

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The current ferries them off the canvas, stretched over blue tile. Marigolds spill into my hamper, crimson petals on the bathroom floor.

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Terrible Knives and Things That Float Anne Ney

ANNE VISSER NEY

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“H OW D O P EOP L E D ROW N ?” Agnes asked the morning after her nightmare about

knives. We were walking to the pond to swim while my husband drove his sister Jessie into town. Jessie did not want Agnes to be exposed to the hospice—all that death—so it was decided they would go while I took her swimming.

Our sandals poufed dust as we approached the beach. “Are you afraid of drowning?” I replied.

“No,” she said. She just wanted to know.

It was a pity that Russell’s cancer had gotten worse just as Agnes had arrived to visit her Nanna Jessie. Jessie was caught between the joy of Agnes’ eighth summer and the sorrow of her partner’s last. My husband and I had stopped on our way home to Florida to lend a hand where we could.

My part was easy; Agnes was enchanted by mermaids, and more than anything, I love the water. As we’d left the house, Jessie shouted a warning to me that Agnes could not reach the anchored swim float by herself. It had been ten years since I had last walked a child into the water, but I promised she would be safe before taking her hand for the downhill stroll to the mountain lake.

The beach was cool and damp when we arrived. The sun peeked over the firs edging the opposite bank. We put our things on a low stone wall then walked to the brink of the water, fluent glass begging for skip-stones to ruffle its surface.

The pond is a kettle lake that dropped from the continental glacier as it receded fifteen thousand years ago; the atmosphere warmed and a frozen breakaway chunk melted into glacial till, like a corpse sighing into a soft earthen caldron. Rainwater keeps the pond full while New England winters keep it cold enough to offer relief on searing July days. It is shaped like a teardrop, three-hundred to six-hundred yards wide, and half a mile long.

The narrow end hosts a small town beach where buoy lines mark shallow from deep water and, farther out, areas beyond a lifeguard’s responsibility. A swim float rests just inside the far buoy line—the one Agnes could not reach.

Agnes and I waded into the shallows where coarse sand beach cedes to softer bottom. She asked me again who I was. I said her Nanna Jessie is sister to my husband Peter, so that’d make me her great-aunt by marriage.

“And how do you know Peter?” she said. I told her we worked together on a Coast Guard ship, one that sailed across the oceans.

“Did you see mermaids?” she asked. I shrugged and told her that sometimes waves look like mermaid hair and tails swishing across the water. Then unbidden, my thoughts turned to my David, and the last time we vacationed in the Keys. Every morning for a week he whispered loudly to rouse me from sleep, as toddlers do, already in his turquoise swimsuit and begging me to take him to the pool so I could be a mermaid and he could ride on my back. Mama! Come on! Four months later he would be diagnosed, although we had not yet noticed symptoms.

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This trip, with Agnes along, I found it easy to think about David. Agnes with her swimming, Russell with his cancer, and the very month marking a decade since David was buried. I suppose I had not come to terms with the trajectory his thirteen years had taken.

“Ready?” I asked Agnes. She nodded. We stayed inside the first buoy line where I showed her how to skip stones and to stand still while minnows nibbled our calves. I satisfied myself that she could hold her breath, blow bubbles, and float on her back before we dried off and started for home.

* RUSS E L L WAS BAC K FROM HOS P IC E and napping in porch sun when we came in.

Jessie and Peter were in the kitchen chopping fresh vegetables and slicing leftover chicken for lunch. Agnes disappeared into her room with a book. I busied myself in the kitchen setting the table with flatware and plates.

“Those knives are gone after we eat,” Jessie said to me in a low voice while we worked. Her eyes darted from the chopping board toward Agnes’ room. “I don’t care what Russell says.”

The room housing the knives had, until that summer, been special for Agnes.

It adjoined the master bedroom and had a soaring ceiling, bright windows and an exterior door leading to a fern garden through which a flagstone path led to the

We put our things on a low stone wall then walked to the brink of the water, fluent glass begging for skip-stones to ruffle its surface. garage. The plan was for Jessie and Peter to move the collection from that big guest room to the garage, and then into the basement.

Jessie believed the knives had sparked Agnes’ nightmare; she regretted not moving them before Agnes arrived; but she only visited once a year, and Russell had long since grown fitful and moved into the room. “And then the knives,” Jessie had told me, her voice trailing off.

She said he started ordering them months ago from a specialized cable shopping channel. “Who knew such a thing even existed?” she’d said. Over time, as the cancer

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spread, his morphine dose was increased and the UPS truck visits became more frequent. He was not himself. His passions for art and literature and music waned.

Now it was all about his budding knife collection.

He and Jessie had shared so much in their lives together: visits to galleries, travel, good food, fine wine. He was the love of her life. And now he was dying.

Agnes helped me clear lunch while Jessie went to empty the guest room’s stash.

Jessie didn’t want Agnes seeing the knives again, not while she was having those dreams. Still, when the dishes were done, I didn’t protest when Agnes pulled me down the long hall to watch them being moved. We stopped in the doorway to the big room.

“So this is where you usually stay?” I asked. Her eyes were wide and somber, taking it in. The canopy bed ruffle was missing and its covers skewed where shipping boxes had been. Girly bric-a-brac on built-in shelves had been pushed aside to make room for weaponry. Sunlight and summer breeze danced through the fern garden door that Peter and Jessie were using to hustle boxes to the garage across the flagstones.

Agnes eased toward a red card table where a set of samurai swords caught her eye. “Will they get rid of them all?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. I moved forward with her, then went to clasp the longest katana’s hilt with both hands. I lifted it, pointing toward the high ceiling as I bent my front leg and stretched the other out behind. I tossed back my head and glared at the sword then lowered it horizontally and drilled my gaze into an unseen threat I now held at bayonet, across the room.

The sword was heavier than I had guessed but I kept the pose long enough to prove I could do so forever, if necessary. Hoping my point was made as a protector against invisible foes that haunt dreams, I lowered the sword, released the lunge, bowed, and offered the dull blade for Agnes’ scrutiny. We inspected its cheap cardboard case together, sheathed it, and returned it to the card table.

Jessie came in, caught my eye, and shot me a disapproving look. But doesn’t unacknowledged terror threaten more? When she was gone again with another box, I walked across the room, lifted a machete from the built-ins, and slipped it from its worn sheath, stamped Guatemala. I told Agnes it was used to clear jungle.

“Will they get rid of it, too?” she asked. I nodded. She then asked why Russell collected knives. I said maybe he was afraid of something, like she had been during her nightmare; maybe he wanted to protect himself. With even-toned, eight-year-old authority she said, “That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

I thought twice before I said, “You know he’s dying, right?”

“I know,” she said as Peter disappeared into the fern garden and Jessie returned.

Agnes and I left then and went to the living room to draw mermaids.

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* A F TE R D IN N ER , Peter and Jessie drove Russell back to the hospice. Much later,

long after everyone was asleep, I laid next to Peter and listened to the dark: a screech owl, a pair of night hawks, a sea of insect whir drifting through open windows. Sound floated through the night and my thoughts turned to buoyancy.

Agnes had not yet mastered the counterintuitive trick of floating: a calm demeanor diminishes the risk of drowning. Similarly, Russell had not mastered Archimedes’ Principle: like skipped stones, metals formed into knives sink far faster than those rounded into hulls. Conversely even the heaviest objects, if properly shaped, will float.

I drifted to sleep remembering our sloop Toya, her sails filled with Southeastern trade winds, heeling into the Caribbean. David, just two, reaching for wind and sky, had never expressed fear, not on the boat and not in the shallows where I first taught him to hold his breath, blow bubbles, and float back in my arms. He was like a small, brilliant fish in his turquoise-and-fuchsia trunks and neon goggles. But before he could swim alone he became dizzy.

A year and a half later we took him to the pediatrician after dizziness and headaches grew too worrisome to ignore. I offered, as though proof, that David and I had been swimming every day for weeks. “It’s an ear infection,” I said.

“It’s a brain stem tumor,” the doctor said as though he, too, had been struck. “I’m so sorry.”

“But he’s almost four,” I said, as though that made any difference in the world.

* TH E N EXT M ORN IN G Agnes and I returned to the pond hoping to swim to the

raft. We waded to the first buoy line where I coached her one more time on proper floating technique. “Lie back, fill your lungs like balloons, look up at the sky, relax.” I reminded her that it feels wrong with your face halfway submerged but that’s when you’re doing it right. I added that it might be scary out there because it was too deep to see the bottom.

“How deep is it? Ten feet? Fifty feet?” She said her friend had gone in nineteen feet of water. I said once you’re over your head it doesn’t really matter.

We ducked under the buoy line. She walked tip-toe as far as possible then swam in an awkward mix of dog-paddle and crawl. I sidestroked next to her, crooning, we’re almost there, almost there, trust the water. At the float she grabbed the shiny ladder,

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looped her arm around its middle step, and caught her breath, solemn. I treaded water and cleared my goggles. Again she asked me, “How do people drown?”

I said drowning begins with fear and panic, but I skimmed over the finer points.

“Fear makes you tense, which makes you sink, which makes you choke on water.

That’s why if you’re scared you especially have to stay calm.”

“People yell when they drown,” she asserted.

“No. People yell when they panic. By the time they drown they can’t yell at all because they have water stuck in their throat.”

“How do you know these things?” her eyes narrowed.

“I was a lifeguard,” I said.

“What’s the deepest water you ever went swimming in?”

“Way deep,” I said.

“Deeper than this?” she said.

I thought of a long-ago Coast Guard patrol I made in the Caribbean, our ship alone to every horizon. The charted depth was ten times the instrument reading, which maxed out at a thousand feet. The captain ordered swim call, the engines were secured, and the ship lolled on cyan so clear the cutter seemed to float in air. A shark

But the depth was too great, the sea too full, the water too blue and I could not begin to see to the bottom.

lookout was posted, cargo nets lowered, and the crew spent hours flinging ourselves from the high decks into the sea. Before time was up I took a deep breath and swam down until the pressure squeezed breath from my lungs. But the depth was too great, the sea too full, the water too blue and I could not begin to see to the bottom.

Agnes hung on the float ladder waiting for my answer to her question: deeper than this?

“Yes,” I said, “way deeper than this.”

Later on, as we walked back to Jessie’s, I thought about how water seems to be the consciousness on which my life floats. How, for my entire life, water has never been far from my mind.

The refrain to my mother’s lullaby was, swift as a silver fish / canoe of birch bark / over the waterways / silent and still. Ships have borne me safely across the blue

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Caribbean, bright Pacific, green Atlantic, and turquoise Mediterranean; through Gibraltar, the Panama Canal, and the Bosphorus Strait. Between sea tours, I lulled David to sleep with my song’s own nautical refrain, Barges / how I’d like to go with you / How I’d like to sail the ocean blue.

Water baptizes, water-cast bread returns, faith walks on water. Hope floats.

But Archimedes cautions that buoyancy and the weight of water displaced are equal and opposite forces; therefore, flotation and descent are two faces of single

He brandishes a long white plastic samurai sword in each hand against the Magic Kingdom’s background glow. coins the dead are given to buy passage to Hades. Indeed, it is the delicate balance between these opposing forces that gives any of us the courage to forge ahead.

The truth is that ships do sink. The abyss is littered with rusting hulls damned by accident or design. Sailors disparage malevolent ships as destined for razor blades even as they hope the one they loved best becomes an artificial reef, its flooded rooms populated by shimmering corals, neon anemones, and curious, brightly colored fish.

* TH E THIR D EV EN IN G of our visit we all sat on the deck enjoying the long indigo

twilight until the sky was black and littered with stars. Jessie’s old dog Annie snuffed the air blindly. Agnes looked for fireflies on the lawn between the deck and the further wildflower meadow before settling next to the dog.

Night sounds waxed and waned across the meadow and the dark woods beyond.

“Are there coyotes out there?” Agnes said.

“No,” Jessie said although I expect there were.

“What about bears? What about bobcats? What if Annie runs into one?” Agnes said. Three times Jessie said we were all safe.

The lawn was bordered by tall purple lupine and a shrub bearing fragrant white flowers. Two granite posts marked the end of the grassy courtyard, each one topped with a large river rock. Two more gateposts marked the entrance to the meadow;

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together the four defined a path from the house to the flowers, from domestic to wild, from softer meadow toward the dark woods beyond.

Two small trees were staked near the meadow line, one on either side of the far gate posts. Jessie said Russell had planted them, one to symbolize his life and the other, hers. I silently nodded to this expression of hope, a counterbalance to what the knives seemed to represent.

* AG N ES’ N IG HT M A R E had happened the night Peter and I arrived. She had retired

early and fallen asleep with the light on. Jessie switched it off when the rest of us settled down after it had cooled enough to sleep. The windows were open and our bedroom door was ajar, as was Agnes’ on the other side of the shared bathroom.

I was deeply unconscious when Peter shook me awake. “Hey, it’s Agnes. Do something. Jessie’s door is closed.”

“What?” I said groggily.

“You’re a mom,” he said.

“Was,” I said. But I bolted wide awake when I heard Agnes shrieking from the bathroom.

“Mama! Mama! They’re trying to get me!” her brown eyes were wide and vacant as I reached her; she was fast asleep.

“Wake up, Baby, it’s okay.” I pulled her into my arms reflexively—muscle memory of soothing fears knotted into terror by a child’s mind trying to order an incomprehensible reality. I rocked her gently. “Shh, nobody will get you. Who is trying to get you?”

“Blackness,” David had once cried after a nightmare. I asked him its source: the OR? chemo or radiation? a cancer friend’s death? “Just blackness,” he sobbed softly.

“Men with knives,” Agnes said as I tucked her back in.

The next morning the house glowed in a hundred shades of green from aspen, birch, and oaks shimmering in the early light. The wildflowers fluttered in bird song.

Over French toast and mango I asked Agnes if she remembered her dream. She stared blankly across the Parsons table before the memory returned. “Oh, yeah, the knives,” she said.

“That’s it,” Jessie said and the knives were banished.

*

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DAV I D, W HO A LSO D IED FROM CANC ER , had also loved knives: Ninja stars,

pirate’s scabbards, the Swiss Army birthday knife he received one of those good years between cancer therapies and their morbid late effects. He loved the Ninja Turtles, the Power Rangers, and Batman. He was awed by the real Toledo sword I brought him from Spain.

He grins in a photograph taken during those in-between years. His front baby teeth are missing, his adult incisors not yet in. He brandishes a long white plastic samurai sword in each hand against the Magic Kingdom’s background glow.

I confided my son’s obsession to other mothers-of-kids-with-cancer. Yes, they said, their child is the same. Still, I think that by the end, David had lost his fear; his concerns had grown quotidian. That he would never leave the PICU. That Santa would misplace his list. That his new cat would run away like the first one had.

The spring of his twelfth year he demanded that we—his parents and doctors— cease medical interventions. All of us, David included, knew they might prolong his life—but only by a few months. By then he had lost interest in his weapons and cartoon heroes as though he had chosen the certainty of letting go over the confounding anxieties of shouldering on.

I took David to the beach on Memorial Day, 2002. I held his hand to wade into the ocean for what would be his last swim. He tip-toed as deep as we dared and there we stayed for a long time. I helped him buoy over the waves rolling by as we squealed and laughed at the ridiculous ocean, simultaneously falling over and under: lifting us up, pulling us down. We stayed until the first evening stars became visible.

One month later, a radiation-scarred blood vessel burst in his brain. He died on July the second.

When I think back on his life, one day stands out as illustrating the attitudes I believe my son and I shared. We had gone early to the beach, hoping to fish before the wind came up. The water was quietly hung with the pearlescent humidity Southerners call fog. We spread our gear on his X-Men towel close to the water’s edge. Another woman, lumpy and middle-aged, and two grown daughters, arrived as David and I sat down. We exchanged greetings. The women combed the beach for shells.

Within minutes a water spout dropped from a squall line, offshore, but close enough that we felt the wind being sucked toward the vortex. “Wow,” he said, sitting cross-legged, a gangly yogi.

“Wow,” I said, feet planted on the wet sand, elbows resting on my knees. The spout coalesced and twisted toward shore like a purpled tornado, sinuous and seductive. The other mother shouted to me, her hands a megaphone around her mouth. “Hey! Hey! What should we do?” I placed her Midwestern accent and suspected she saw in the milder spout its more dangerous cousin, a tornado.

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“It’s a water spout!” I shouted back. My voice reflected from and echoed around the dance pavilion and fishing pier built out over the sea. It formed a kind of shelter where it met the dunes. She pointed and yelled, “Should we go up there?”

“Sure!” I called. Her daughters already cowered in its shadow.

“Mom?” David said.

But by then he was too long-legged to be carried; his lungs too frail to run. “No worries, Dave. It’s just a water spout. Anyhow, it could hit over there just as easy as

To swim you must forget the what-ifs, whether the water is two or ten thousand feet deep, and that all efforts are rewarded with imperfect results.

over here. Right?” So we huddled under the towel against the wind-blown, stinging sand, his warm, skeletal body pressed into mine.

The squall was beautiful. It snaked its way toward the beach like God’s hand; its finger closed to a hundred yards before veering southwest and coming ashore on the other side of the pier. It kicked the beach into a wet dust-devil of dead sea grass and then, deprived of the ocean’s watery warmth, the spout marched on until it was spent and dissipated behind the dunes.

* I RO S E EA R LY the day we were to return to Florida and slipped alone to the pond

to swim. Cool mist rose from the water, which was warm at that gray hour so I didn’t linger but dove under the first buoy line and backstroked slowly to the float, which I slid beneath.

At Agnes’ age I feared that terrible maw, the underbelly between float drums which forms an echo chamber where ordinary drops become bloody drips and an innocuous breeze becomes a cacophony of ghosts. Eventually though I learned that terror’s antidote is clarity: knowing what is hurts far less than imagining what might be. I paused at the center of the float-cave and slid my toes down the cold, thick anchor chain, suspended between known and unknown worlds. Then I continued through the dark chamber, slid over the second buoy line, and breast-stroked into the lake.

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I confess I am always a little nervous at the start of an open water swim. That morning, too, my usual list of anxieties roamed the waters before and below me: snakes, snapping turtles, and ancient skeletons leering across the River Styx waiting to close my throat. Waterlogged roots upturned by storms became bony hands eager to drag me under. Rusted sunken derelicts morphed into razor-sharp knives. But what are our choices?

To swim you must forget the what-ifs, whether the water is two or ten thousand feet deep, and that all efforts are rewarded with imperfect results. And if you cannot forget? Then long before death comes, fear will strip you of all you love.

I left the float astern and turned to the pond’s long axis, warming to a freestyle waltz: left-right-breathe-right-left-breathe-left-right-breath-right until I reached the kettle-pond’s center where I stopped, tilted my head back, and relaxed. Dawn had tinted the mist silver and turned the high cirrus into coral-colored scales in a kaleidoscope of light. There in the middle I closed my eyes, exhaled, and felt my body sink. I imagined I was dead.

Then I inhaled sky, rolled onto my belly, and made for the distant shore, caught as I was between terrible knives and things that float.

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KEVIN MCLELLAN

Winterberries II That the depth of longing is measurable, so I dig, try to leave it there to enrich the soil. Amaranth will grow as it has for centuries. On the way down the hill I trip on a tree and face up into the sky I fall, stare gone in the face, recall the teacher who didn’t know what to say about light the color of margarine. The light seemed to pulse from the façade of the brick building, so instead of saying that he had nothing to say he said nothing at all, and we turned into notes.

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artist’s statement

SARAH JANE B E LLS A N D C HIM ES are ancient instruments, dating back to Neolithic times. They

hold significance in many religious traditions, including Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism. The ringing of bells invites us to attentiveness and reverence.

In Resonance, each hand-thrown ceramic bell is singular and unique, distinguished by the mark of the artist’s hands and the particular note with which it sounds. Yet the bells are clapper-less, and by itself each bell remains unrealized, unable to sound on its own. When they are together, however, the bells sway and interact in patterns that are both repetitive and ever-changing. Their movements are affected by fans, ventilation systems, and even the motion of human visitors. They nudge and strike one another at varying angles with varying force, transferring energy and producing sound in surprisingly complex and nuanced patterns. Their interdependence binds the bells together and makes them resound with song. This piece invites viewers to reverently attend to their own interdependence with one another, with all living things, and with this earth on which we live.

AARON MCPEAKE

ICELAND LANDSCAPE is a series of wall-hung “painting” works, depicting the

topography of Icelandic volcanic landscapes. Made using an open-cast method, the oxide-hungry nature of the molten bell-bronze (20 percent tin, 80 percent copper) freezes in the open air, creating patterns and colors that look remarkably similar to satellite photographs of Iceland. Intended to be rung as well as touched, the pieces provide a novel gong quality in various pitches. As the size and weight of each piece varies considerably (between two and eleven kilograms, or five and twenty-five pounds) so too do the resulting tones comparable to the range found on a piano keyboard. I wanted not only to accurately depict the topography and nature of volcanic landscapes, but also to give them audible and unique voices; in effect, the landscape sings.

My memories of watching television footage in primary school in 1973 of the Eldfell volcano erupting in Iceland prompted me to embark on the process of making these “paintings” that ring, giving the landscapes real voices that can be extracted and heard by beholders. Notions of the disparity of time periods and their attendant understanding, from the personal to the geological, are important themes within this work.

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SARAH JANE. Resonance, 2015. Dimensions variable (7 x 7 x 18 feet as pictured).

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SARAH JANE. Resonance, 2015. Hand-thrown white stoneware. Dimensions variable (7 x 7 x 18 feet as pictured).

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SARAH JANE. Resonance, 2015 (detail). Hand-thrown white stoneware. Dimensions variable (7 x 7 x 18 feet as pictured).

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SARAH JANE. Resonance, 2015. Hand-thrown white stoneware. Dimensions variable (7 x 7 x 18 feet as pictured).

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AARON MCPEAKE. Iceland Landscape 13, 2011. Bell-bronze. 19 x 14 inches.

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AARON MCPEAKE. Iceland Landscape 10, 2011. Bell-bronze. 19 x 14 inches.

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AARON MCPEAKE. Iceland Landscape 6, 2010. Bell-bronze. 19 x 14 inches.

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AARON MCPEAKE. Iceland Landscape 4, 2009. Bell-bronze. 19 x 14 inches.

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JEN STEWART FUESTON

Trying to Get My Body Back As if the baby had slithered away with it. As if I had carried a spare change of bodies into the hospital in my overnight bag. As if a trapper had come in the night, slit it from me like a pelt, leaving me pooled in the bedsheets. As if I were a game show and svelte models displayed my body on a turntable, glittering in the Showcase Showdown. As if my body had run off to join the circus, wanted to be the girl who is shot from a canon. As if it had wagered itself on a hand of poker and lost to a man with diamond teeth. As if it were a nautilus, emptied on the beach. As if it were a shopping cart, a locker key, a rented suit. As if I had pawned my body for cash.

But not as if the body can’t empty and fill, empty and fill, like a harbor.

Not as if lungs don’t give birth to breath, pregnant again every pause.

As if it can’t grow like a sea star, relimbing itself from a center.

Or that the body might think it’s a wardrobe, larger inside than out, might fold itself in like tent, or dissolve like an old country’s borders—a crossing shuttered, the guards asleep.

Not as if bodies can’t winter like gardens, or ebb like a river.

As if my body hadn’t bourne me itself. Had wanted to be a cathedral sounded, or a chamber echoed, a canyon hollowed by waters—all fullnesses formed by what has been sculpted away.

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MATTHEW LANDRUM

City of Refuge How to guard against accidental undoing–– the flaw in the axe handle, the misfiring rifle, the swerve to avoid a deer that knifes into another car, the battery not charged for the emergency call. You can’t take it back.

There was the box of books that set your labor in motion.

I let you carry it down a flight of stairs. I didn’t insist on the doctor’s visit when you said it was just cramps.

I should have done more. Our daughter was born too early, her mottled fist gripping my pinky, then slackening.

Next came the apportioning of blame, the trajectory of mourning, the unravelling of our twined lives until there was nothing to do but leave.

Once, in another country, I climbed a mountain and idly kicked a stone. It rolled, colliding with a bigger rock, which then struck another and another.

Soon boulders were tumbling, gouging long irregular tracks of dark earth in the mountain’s grass face as sheep scattered, bleating.

There are cities of refuge and a life to be lived–– though it is less than it was. It’s snowing in Detroit, a coating of white to cover the ugliness of plow banks and salt of grit in the gutters. I live alone with radiator heat to keep me warm in winter. If I go out, no one will know who I am.

Snow covers me covering my tracks, I turn and return, no way to go back.

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EMILY RANSDELL

After Your Illness, I Think of the Perseids In room after room, blinds are raised.

Monitors blink, families cross thresholds with fresh-faced hope. Outside, garbage trucks and Starbucks, morning’s routine machines. Geese making such a racket along the flyway, even boys in the schoolyard stop to look up.

A heart is invisible inside a body, a pulse undetectable across a room.

I won’t forget how lost you looked as they took you to surgery, I won’t forget waiting in the hall.

By summer this will all be over and we’ll sink back in our beach chairs to watch the Perseids shower down again.

Maybe there’s a word in some other language for the sound they make as they plummet, that silence we’ve always sworn we could hear. Soon, the heavens will ignite like they have for millennia, a show that’s amazed peasants and pilgrims, monks and lovers and long-married couples like us. The way it never flames out but keeps dropping its embers everywhere, even into the sea.

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SEEMA YASMIN

The Queen’s English Grandmother is dying and the nurse wants to know if we speak English.

Cousin sucks the air behind her niqaab, flips pages of the visitor’s room Economist.

Tell him you wrote your thesis on George Eliot, an aunt pokes her daughter who tells the nurse:

We speak a bit.

The nurse wants someone to translate the diabetic menu for Mrs. Khan.

We don’t speak her dialect. Grandmother is dying and we are breaking the rules.

Seven robed women swaying around a bed which lies beneath a sign that says: Maximum

two visitors per patient at any time please. We pretend we can’t read English. Cubes of camphor wrapped like candy soften in a pink plastic bag. Smoky sandalwood creeps beneath fraying curtains. We unfold grandmother’s shroud, perfume the white cotton with josh sticks, rub our cheeks on cloth that will caress her pigeon chest. Mrs. Smith in bed two stirs her pale Yorkshire tea, crumbles a yellow biscuit down her smock and clucks her tongue at our mess. We point at the two empty chairs at the side of her bed. Ask if we can borrow them—in the Queen’s English.

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LARY KLEEMAN

In early spring before leaves have taken place

there is a need for another kind of necessity like a non-productive economy

crisscrossed by a wet mathematical forgetfulness.

As if to convey its inaccessibility, a house, having refused the goldfinch, pine siskin & chickadee chorus, stands empty & alone just to be correct.

If you strain, you might see the black streaks in woodgrain where nails have bled from weather.

It’s this kind of liberation which keeps me from forgetting the necessity of having refused.

Courage requires of us a lessening.

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JIHYUN YUN

Homonyms 태우다 · (T’aeuda) 1. To burn or singe by fire 2. To carry, give a ride, pick up Beloved daughter, I burned you. You grew up burning, bundled on my back.

Petulant petal, jaundiced thing, plucked from my amniotic rib, I loved you very much.

Had you suck the milk of dandelions to take the yellow from your skin, sliced antlers rendered to wretched tea to temper your bloodied coughing. I dislodged your limbs in hopes you’d grow to something desired, the suggestion of a girl. And you did until your girlhood grew dangerous as it does for all girls. I’ve been sorry ever since. You burned on the coattails of our immigration. Singed your tongue on America until no tongue was rightfully yours, until you came home disgraced everyday having pissed yourself instead of asking to go to the restroom in English.

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But I wasn’t ashamed. I burned you gently in my arms, burned you all the way home, away from the laughter, burned you on my back to safety.

And daughter, you will not forget these aches you learned.

When you have a daughter, you will burn her too.

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The Gathering David Desjardins

DAVID DESJARDINS

WH AT I R EM EM B ER M OST: He looked like he belonged in those woods way more

than the rest of us did—Jimmy, me, even Mr. Bentsen, who used to spend every weekend hiking or fishing up there before he met Mrs. B. and they had Jimmy. He was like some shaggy, lumbering thing. Picture a Yeti carrying a backpack. Better yet, if you remember the game Magic: The Gathering, he looked like Runeclaw Bear on that game card, grown fierce from orneriness or pain, I never could tell which. Back then, Jimmy and I were obsessed with Magic, and we played in the back seat the whole ride north. As we balanced the cards on our knees, casting our spells, I remember us smiling and sneaking looks at him every time one of us played that card.

Mr. Bentsen called him Cheech, but he was Mr. Chmura to us kids. When the three of them drove over to get me and load my stuff in the back of Mr. B.’s pickup truck, Jimmy’s dad told my mom that Mr. Chmura was an old school pal who’d just come back from Iraq. “He doesn’t know it yet, Mrs. Fournier, but this hike will do wonders for him.” That was pure Mr. B., always a big booster of nature and all that granola stuff. Mr. Chmura himself, sitting shotgun and fiddling with the radio, hardly glanced at us.

Our plan was to hike three miles into the White Mountain National Forest to a lean-to shelter overlooking a pond Jimmy’s dad knew that was stocked with trout.

There we would spend two nights fishing, hiking—doing manly things, Mr. B said, winking at us because he knew, or suspected, that we didn’t quite share his passion for the wilderness. Our Magic playing time would be rationed, he warned us, but he balanced that with a promise to teach us how to trap wild animals. The fishing would be aided with the use of an inflatable raft we would pack in. We’d tested it the previous week in a neighbor’s pool, but seeing Mr. Chmura’s girth punishing the front seat cushions, I had my doubts about the raft’s seaworthiness.

I’d met Jimmy the year before at Baldwin School, when we were fifth-graders together. My mother had just moved us in to a three-decker over on Magill Street, and Jimmy was the crossing guard when I reported to school my first day. He knew I was a stranger, and after ferrying a gaggle of us across the street that day he asked if I wanted to give it a try. I did, and so he slipped the fluorescent-orange strapped vest over my head and handed me his flag. If any impatient drivers honked their horns, Jimmy counseled me to stare them down and pretend to write their license plates in this little pad he carried. He was the only kid to befriend me that day. He likes to say that it was just part of his trying to earn a Citizenship badge for Scouts.

It was cooler up there. On the drive up, Mr. Bentsen pulled over to the side of the road and pointed out a white patch on the side of Washington that he said still had skiers on it, but I couldn’t make them out. Everything else around us was deep green and gave off a piney breath you never get down in Rhode Island.

The lot was empty when we got to the trailhead, maybe because it was a Friday smack dab in the middle of a scorching early-June heat spell. Mr. Bentsen had

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persuaded my mother to let me skip school to go on the trip, and considering how the teachers by then had thrown in the towel and resorted to just showing us videos on the roll-out TV, it was no great educational loss.

We ate our lunches standing up in the parking lot, then Mr. Bentsen checked everyone’s pack. His own and Mr. Chmura’s were colossal. Strapped atop Mr. B.’s was the raft, bright yellow and stinking of polyurethane; peeking out from within Mr. Chmura’s were six-packs of Colt 45s—three of them, I counted later. I wondered how

Our Magic playing time would be rationed, he warned us, but he balanced that with a promise to teach us how to trap wild animals.

they would ever carry those heavy packs all that way, and when they hoisted them up, I almost laughed to see the two of them side by side: Mr. Bentsen, a slight man no taller than my mother, seemed to be carrying a telephone booth on his back. The same cargo on Mr. Chmura looked no more cumbersome than a book bag.

With our relatively light loads, Jimmy and I raced ahead. The trail was clearly blazed and, in most places, obvious, so we never needed the map and emergency whistle that Jimmy’s dad had pressed on us. We bounded from boulder to boulder, stopping occasionally to resume our Magic game, then sprinting forward again each time we spied the bright-yellow crown of Mr. Bentsen’s backpack catching up with us.

It was late afternoon when we reached the lean-to. With its gaping mouth and overhanging roof, it looked like a stage for a play, or the shed that used to house the Nativity scene in front of Pawtucket City Hall till the ACLU made them take it down.

Best of all, its wooden-plank floor would be perfect for the game.

We dumped our backpacks and ran down to the pond’s bank to skim stones, and after twenty minutes Mr. B. came into the clearing, peeled off his pack, and joined us.

He put a hand on each of our heads for a minute before setting up camp.

Mr. Chmura arrived five minutes later, his camo T-shirt black with sweat. He watched without interest as Mr. B. assembled a spider-shaped stove and twisted a beer free from his pack.

“So, that was three weeks ago,” Mr. Chmura said, pulling a briar from inside one of his socks and scowling at it. “Not one fucking word since.”

Mr. Bentsen had his back to his friend. He was poking a tiny wire brush at the stove.

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“She’s done this before, right? Before you went over?” He stood up and wiped his hands on his ripstop pants. “You know she’ll be back, Cheech.”

“Yes and no.” Mr. Chmura pulled off his T-shirt and mopped his face with it.

Tattooed on his upper arm was the image of a soldier’s helmet, assault rifle, and boots, a pair of dog tags dangling from the gun’s magazine. When he caught me staring at it, he glared: “What?”

Jimmy and I climbed into the lean-to and examined its dark, smoky interior. Graffiti had been carved into almost every square inch of its walls, even its floorboards. Some listed names: kids, lovers, Scout troops, Class of Such-and-Such. Each scrawled entry included the date of its carvers’ visit.

“Dad, can we do one?” Jimmy asked excitedly, but turning, we saw only Mr. Chmura, leaning against the structure’s lip and working on his beer. Without looking at us, he pulled a huge knife from his belt sheath and stabbed it into the lean-to floor.

“Knock yourselves out.”

The blade alone was almost as long as my forearm; the serrations just below the finger guard grinned like a shark. Using it to carve our names into a wall was like trying to write out a postcard with a sword. We’d gotten part of a J finished when Mr. B. returned with an armful of kindling.

“What the hell, Cheech?!”

He took the blade away and handed us instead a small penknife he kept on his key ring.

“Come on, Bentsen, don’t be such a pussy.”

Mr. B. snatched the beer from his friend’s hand and chugged the rest of it.

“Why are you even packing a knife like that in here? Where’s your head at?”

“Got way more than that, friend. You know the Boy Scouts, right?” He removed the rest of the beer from his pack and tilted it away from us, his eyes on Mr. Bentsen’s. “I am prepared.”

After that, the two of them dragged the raft and the poles down to the water, Mr. Chmura returning briefly to retrieve the remainder of a six-pack. We watched them wrestle the raft into the shallows and climb aboard. When they’d managed to steer it clumsily out to the middle of the pond, Jimmy and I interrupted our carving, dug out our Magic cards, and lay them out as they were when we’d last interrupted the game.

It was my turn. I tried to figure my next move: Could I block his Kargan Dragonrider? Should I? These were simple decisions, but I couldn’t concentrate.

“Do you think he killed someone? Runeclaw, I mean?” I poked my chin toward the pond. Mr. Chmura’s weight tilted the raft precariously, with the water nearly swamping it at his end. “You know, over there?”

“Hell, yeah, just look at him. You saw that knife.”

I put my cards down.

“I wonder what’s in his backpack.”

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Jimmy looked up. “Me too.” He put his cards down opposite mine.

We stared at each other, and I felt my chest pound. For a minute I thought we might do it, but one of us must have seen something in the other’s eyes.

“Yeah, like you would dare touch it, Fournier,” Jimmy said, smirking and picking his cards back up.

“Me? You’re the chickenshit, Bentsen.” I formed my cards into a fan, but they still looked strange, almost foreign. “Whose turn is it?”

“Well, duh?” Jimmy tilted his head and did his dork imitation and we both laughed.

We finished that game, and two others, before Mr. Bentsen and Mr. Chmura finally came back. They’d caught three trout, and Mr. B. showed Jimmy and me how to clean them. Without a word to any of us, Mr. Chmura pulled a small brownish vial from his pack, shook a few pills into his hand, and swallowed them before crawling onto his sleeping pad with a groan.

I’d never gutted a fish before. My father had never cared about outdoorsy things, and he was never home much anyway. Showing us, Mr. B. moved steadily, with a matter-of-factness, like he was tying a shoe. To me, it felt creepy taking apart something that seemed to watch you as you did it, but once I managed to cover the trout’s head with my palm, I felt a little better about it.

There’s a kind of dreamy look that grownups get sometimes when you know you can ask them almost anything. As Mr. B. watched me work the blade down the trout’s belly, I thought I’d try him.

“Your pal Mr. Chmura, he’s kind of— is he—?” I could feel Jimmy next to me on the verge of laughter, but still I couldn’t figure out quite how to finish my question.

“You mean: Is he as big an idiot as he seems?” Mr. B. was smiling at me.

“I didn’t—” “Yes you did. It’s okay. I know how he comes off.”

He pried open the trout’s flank and showed me how to shuck its skin. “See? Just like peeling a fruit. Try it. That’s right.”

He was quiet a minute while I tugged at the silvery skin, then he said, “With Mr. Chmura, you have to realize that what he saw over there, things that happened right in front of him, to friends. That messes you up, almost as if those things happened to you. It truly sucks, boys.”

Mr. Bentsen laid the fillets on a paper plate and pronounced our work satisfactory.

He scooped up the collected trout guts in his hands to be pitched into the pond and sent us out to gather firewood.

The woods around the lean-to seemed to have been picked clean, so Jimmy and I began straying farther and farther to find decent-sized fallen branches. We also grabbed any sleeves of birch bark we found, which Jimmy said made good fire starters. Every few minutes we’d drag our bounty back and pile it next to the ring of blackened stones at the shelter, where Mr. B. had balanced a pot of water atop his

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tiny stove. The device’s gas jets whistled with the static of a poorly tuned radio, which sounded oddly comforting in those quiet woods.

I was following a long rich trail of perfect pieces—thick, dry, dense, like old bones— when I looked around and suddenly realized I was lost: no Jimmy, no hint of the slight incline toward the lean-to that I’d been using till then to retrace my steps, no distant

Its antlers were peach-fuzzed, and small cascades of water tumbled from them each time it resurfaced. whisper of the stove’s gas jets. I did see a thinning out of trees in one direction and pushed through some thorny brush to find my way to the banks of a pond—but not our pond. This one was much smaller. A line of large stones led partway across, as if some path builder gave up in the middle of his work, and beyond that, its head submerged, was a large moose. When it came up for air, a few strands of green dangling from its jaws, it stared right at me.

There are bison at the Providence zoo, even cheetah, but you always know they can’t get you. This was different. I reached inside my T-shirt and pulled out the emergency whisle Mr. Bentsen had looped around my neck. Earlier, feeling lost, I had been on the verge of blowing it—three times for an emergency, as he’d instructed us—and now it seemed even more urgent to do so. Still, I sensed that the moose hadn’t really detected me and despite my alarm I did not want to scare it off.

I lowered my armful of firewood carefully. The moose resumed its feeding, coming closer with each mouthful. Soon it reached the line of large stones, and I felt a powerful desire to rock-hop out to the animal and touch its shaggy coat. Its antlers were peach-fuzzed, and small cascades of water tumbled from them each time it resurfaced.

Behind me, a snapping of twigs nearly made me jump. Picking his way carefully toward me was Mr. Chmura, his index finger held up to his lips. He stood at my side, crossing his arms. His biceps were so thick that he seemed even more formidable than the moose.

The animal took two more steps toward us, grazing on the pond’s bottom with each stride, before it stopped suddenly and angled its head to the side. That’s when Mr. Chmura held out his palm toward it, as if touching its force field, and the moose turned to amble unhurriedly back across the pond and disappear into a stand of pines on the far side.

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Neither of us moved for a minute, maybe two. When at last I looked up at Mr. Chmura, he had his eyes closed. It was only when I shifted my weight from one foot to the other that he opened them and aimed his baleful gaze at me.

He tapped my chest.

“So, Thing Two. This here, on your little necklace? It’s called a whistle. You blow into it, when you’re lost?”

His tone—like my father’s, I remembered—made me angry.

“I know that.”

“Good! So glad you know that. Make my job easier next time.”

The thin wafer of bright sun that was edging through the trees blinked out. I tucked the firewood under my arm, and we headed back to our camp. As we walked, I asked how he found me.

“Piece of cake. Look here.” He crouched and waved his hand over a patch of disturbed pine needles. “See that?”

“Uh huh.”

Forty feet farther, he knelt down. “And that?”

A square-inch section of soil betrayed my sneaker print. I looked up at him and nodded.

“Go on,” he said. “Try it.”

I did, and each time I found a trace of my earlier passage, he seemed pleased. When I walked obliviously past a telltale scuff mark, he stopped over it, like a pointer dog, till I came back and acknowledged it.

“It’s harder in this dim light.” He touched my shoulder gently, then pushed me forward.

Soon we came within sniffing range of the sizzling trout fillets. We abandoned the game and ran down to the lean-to.

Mr. Bentsen handed out plates piled with trout and pasta flecked with fried peppers and onions. We all sat in a line on the shelter’s edge and ate quietly with occasional moans of pleasure.

“We saw a moose,” I announced, after scraping the last morsel from my plate.

“Cool!” Mr. Bensen and Jimmy reacted as one. They pressed me for details, and I tried to convey the majesty of the animal and the closeness of its approach. As I spoke, Mr. Chmura cracked open another beer and watched me with an air of sadness or disappointment, as if I was leaving out the best part. He stood up and walked off a few steps, his back to us, staring across the pond. Mr. Bentsen watched him, scooping up the last of his pasta as he did, then stood up and stretched.

“Okay, you boys are in charge of cleanup. Jimmy, you know the drill. Mr. Chmura and I are going to have a smoke.”

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He took a package of cigars down to the pond and tapped free one for his friend and another for himself. He lit them both with a single match and they sat together on a long flat rock.

Later, Mr. Bentsen came back and built a tepee in the fire ring of the wood we’d gathered. He stuffed birch bark in the middle, then handed us the matches.

“Light it up, boys.”

The birch bark caught with a roar, and the blaze seemed to summon Mr. Chmura from the darkness to join us. He paced from side to side, dodging the smoke, before spotting our deck of Magic cards. He picked them up and shuffled through them, shaking his head.

“You let your kid play with this voodoo crap, Bentsen?” He brandished the deck toward Jimmy’s father.

“It’s just a game, Cheech.”

“Uh huh. Listen to this: ‘The magic of the forest leaves its mark on the animals who live there. The animals of the forest leave their mark on all who trespass.’ Weird shit, you ask me.”

Jimmy and I exchanged looks. The passage was from the Runeclaw Bear card.

“We could show you,” I said, gazing at the fire. “How to play. You might like it.”

Mr. Chmura laughed derisively and looked at Mr. Bentsen, who was smiling.

“Yeah,” he said. “You might.”

Jimmy and I fed the fire for a while, but it probably wasn’t long before I lay back on my sleeping bag to watch the flames curl and pop. Soon I drifted into sleep, waking

He took a package of cigars down to the pond and tapped free one for his friend and another for himself.

occasionally to glimpse shadows waving across the shelter’s chiseled interior. Jimmy lay nearby, but long into the night I heard the murmuring of his father and Mr. Chmura and the popping of beer can tabs.

Much later, I woke again, needing to pee. The fire was dead and someone was snoring. A piercing moon made my headlamp unnecessary, and I walked through the chill air to the nearest tree, but I was so alert for the slightest ominous rustling that it took me a minute to relieve myself. When I finally zipped up and turned back, I saw

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him, over where he and Mr. Bentsen had earlier sat smoking. He was standing now, arms folded as when we had been watching the moose, but there was nothing before him to see except the pond, still, almost imperceptible.

I took a step back toward the shelter and he turned toward me, like you might turn toward any sound in the dark: wired, waiting for something definitive to announce itself. Finally, he raised his arm toward me and turned back toward the pond.

Crawling back into my sleeping bag, I shivered a bit, still feeling the night on my skin. I watched a cloud slice past the moon, then two more, before I finally warmed up enough to sleep. I was thinking of Mr. Chmura, standing out there like some sort of night watchman. I wondered whether he knew it was me he was saluting.

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RAINIE OET

Diane, Just a Little Longer 1993—2005 The astronauts of the 70s and the beavers of Beaverkill River and the honey pots from A. A. Milne’s childhood, and the green UFOs gray in black-and-white movies, and the lava levels in Frogger, and the sound of bees in dark woods lit gold by sunset in autumn, and the way water feels on my palms when I lift and drop them gently on the surface of the lake by Baba and Deda’s house, and all the colors of despair, the virus tendrils, and all the ways you made noise in your sleep, and the way a car seat felt after sun, and the constant sound of a clock ticking in another room, and the happiness scales you saw in classrooms, and the dark small metal-walled room they locked you in, and all the 11 second songs we wrote for future pets and the tiny rainbow scales of the fish, the minnow—glinting in the clay pool puddles, red clay in the ground, and reaching your hands in while I watched taking pictures, and all the pens that had run out of ink, so the colors kept changing, like when I so scared of ghosts sometimes ran through the dark hallway into your room and slept on the floor, and in the mornings waiting for you to wake up— for some reason I couldn’t move until you woke up—and things keep changing like jokes in other languages, and in my dream last night I was there again on your floor, stomach curling with hunger I sat up I was touching the side of your shirt— you felt cold—you were going to miss your taxi to the airport, your alarm went off, you were about to wake up— but I turned it off, willed you to stay sleeping just a little longer.

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contributors

K I R A A R C H I B A L D grew up on a haphazard farm in Oregon. She loves her dog, growing watermelons, and tea. And she dreams of living in a castle with secret passages and hidden rooms.

D A V I D D E S J A R D I N S is a journalist with roots in Rhode Island, and has worked at the Boston Globe, the Providence Journal, and other newspapers. His short stories have been published in Red Savina Review, Gravel, Roanoke Review, and elsewhere. He loves mountains, basketball, and playing music with friends, and lives in Arlington, Massachusetts, with his wife.

S H A N G Y A N G F A N G grew up in Chengdu, China. He writes poems both in English and Chinese. He is currently a poetry fellow at Michener Center for Writers.

J E N S T E W A R T F U E S T O N ’s poems have been published in a variety of anthologies and journals, including the St. Katherine Review, The Windover, and Whale Road Review. Her first chapbook, Visitations, was published in 2015. She has taught writing at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as internationally in Hungary, Turkey, and Lithuania. Jen lives in Longmont, Colorado, and keeps busy chasing her two young sons, cohosting a podcast, pitching pop-culture articles, and working on a couple new chapbooks.

B E N J A M I N G U C C I A R D I ’s poems have appeared in Forklift Ohio, Indiana Review, Orion Magazine, Spillway, Upstreet, and other journals. He is a winner of the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize from Harpur Palate, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prize and contests from the Maine Review and the Santa Ana River Review. He works with refugee and immigrant youth in Oakland, California.

V A N E S S A H A L L - P A T C H is a Canadian artist who holds an MFA from the University of Alberta’s printmaking program. She lives on Bowen Island with her family and commutes by boat to Vancouver where she works at Emily Carr University. Her work has been exhibited throughout Canada and internationally. She is currently exhibiting work in Russia, Brooklyn, Hawaii, Minneapolis, and elsewhere.

Vanessa looks forward to participating in an upcoming month-long residency at the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York. www.vanessahall-patch.ca

lives in New Zealand, where she writes poems and sleeps in a lot, because that’s what depression makes you do. She won the 2017 Lilian Ida Smith Award and will be a writing resident at Vermont Studio Center in late 2018. Her poetry has been published in various New Zealand and Australian journals, PAULA HARRIS

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including Poetry NZ Yearbook, Snorkel, Takahē, The Spinoff, Landfall, and Broadsheet. She is extremely fond of dark chocolate, shoes, and hoarding fabric.

C L E M O N C E H E A R D is a New Orleans native, 2018 Tulsa Artist Fellow, and recent Oklahoma State University creative writing graduate. His work has appeared in or is forthcomimg from Obsidian Magazine, Naugatuck Review, Four Way Review, Saranac Review, Connecticut Review, Opossum, and other journals. He worked for over seven years as a line cook, and is interested in food apartheid (Karen Washington), specifically in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he resides.

J E S S I C A H I N C A P I E is a creative writer and teacher living in Austin, Texas. She received her MFA in creative writing in 2018 from the University of Texas, where she served as Bat City Review’s online content and web editor. She is the recipient of numerous poetry awards, including the University of Texas Michael Adams Thesis Prize and honorable mention for the 2017 Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry. You can find her work in print and online in the Indiana Review, Four Way Review, Gulf Coast online, Sorin Oak Review, and more. She’s currently working on her first collection of poetry.

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S A R A H J A N E is an artist and educator with a passion for creating meaningful experiences. Her most recent project, titled Mere Objects, is an ongoing participatory artwork honoring people who have experienced sexual violence.

She received a BA from Asbury College (now University) and an MFA from the University of Kentucky. She and her partner live on the stunning north coast of the Olympic Peninsula, where she serves as the gallery and program director for the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center. www.sarahjanestudio.net K E N D R A L A N G D O N J U S K U S ’ s poetry

has appeared in RHINO Poetry, The Christian Century, Literary Mama, Fifth Wednesday Journal, and the collection City Creatures (University of Chicago Press, 2015). She is a graduate of Spalding University’s MFA program and an associate poetry editor at BOAAT. Originally from New York’s Hudson River Valley, she lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her family, where heat and humidity constantly frustrate her gardening but provide plenty of wild blackberries and persimmons to forage.

contributors

L A R Y K L E E M A N published a second full length book of poetry this past summer: Geometries of Indifference. He hopes to start a small-scale organic garlic farm in the near future.

lives in Detroit where he enjoys exploring new neighborhoods. He reverse-commutes to the suburbs where he teaches English and music at a private school for students with Asperger’s syndrome and other social differences. His translation of the book Are There Copper Pipes in Heaven? from Faroese poet Katrin Ottarsdóttir will appear in 2019 with The Operating System.

MATTHEW LANDRUM

is the author of Ornitheology (The Word Works, 2018), Hemispheres (Fact-Simile Editions, 2018), [box] (Letter [r] Press, 2016), Tributary (Barrow Street, 2015), and Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010). He won the 2015 Third Coast Poetry Prize and Gival Press’s 2016 Oscar Wilde Award, and his poems appear in numerous literary journals. Kevin lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

KEVIN MCLELLAN

After many years working as a lighting designer for opera, ballet and theatre, A A R O N M C P E A K E lost much of his vision due to an auto-immune illness. However, this condition has helped inform his artwork, and methods of practice, which

are wide-ranging. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and has completed a number of public sculpture commissions and international residencies. Recent exhibitions include venues in the UK, Spain, USA, and Australia. He has been a regular resident artist in the Bandoola Foundry Mandalay, Myanmar. www.aaronmcpeake.com is a US Coast Guard veteran and mother of a child who died.

She lives in Saint Petersburg, Florida.

Her work has recently appeared in Brain, Child, Scintilla Magazine, and the Fourth River, and is anthologized in It’s My Country, Too: Women’s Military Stories and Red, White, and True: Stories from Veterans and Families. She serves on Milspeak Foundation’s advisory council and teaches writing to women veterans through Milspeak’s On Point program.

ANNE VISSER NEY

R A I N I E O E T (formerly Jacob) is a nonbinary writer. They are the author of the chapbooks No Mark Spiral (CutBank Books, 2018) and With Porcupine (winner of the 2015 Ruby Irene Prize from Arcadia Press). Their work appears in the Adroit Journal, Poetry Review, Jubilat, Colorado Review, and Sycamore Review, among other publications. They are an MFA candidate in poetry at Syracuse University, where they were awarded the Shirley Jackson Prize in Fiction. Say hi at rainieoet.com.

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B I N R A M K E ’s first collection of poems, The Difference Between Night and Day (1978), won the Yale Younger Poets Prize; The Massacre of the Innocents (1994) and Wake (1998) were awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize. He teaches at the University of Denver and occasionally at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, edits the Denver Quarterly, and is the author of thirteen collections of poetry.

E M I L Y R A N S D E L L ’ s work has been published in such journals as the Cortland Review, Poet Lore, and American Life in Poetry. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize, she divides her time between Camas, Washington, and the Oregon Coast.

R E N I A W H I T E is a writer from the East Coast. She earned her MFA at Cornell University, where she also taught writing.

Her work has been recognized by the likes of the Hurston/Wright Foundation and the Sonora Review and also appears or is forthcoming in The Offing, Prelude, Tahoma Literary Review, Slice, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She lives in New York, like a lot of other folks, where she is clumsy and often astounded.

After many years in an industrial environment, K R I S V E R V A E K E has now focused on photography for fifteen years.

He specializes in freelance documentary

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work and personal projects. Born and raised in Belgium, he has travelled the world, including fifteen years in Asia, but has now returned to Europe. In 2013, he self-published Ad Infinitum, which was nominated for Photo Aperture Foundation First Photobook Awards in Paris. Recent exhibitions include: Ad Infinitum at Jaipur Photo Festival, India and at Palazzo Mora, Venice, and House Full of Gold series at Les Rencontres de la Photographie Arles. krisvervaeke.com S E E M A Y A S M I N is a poet, doctor, and journalist from London currently living in California. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for breaking news reporting. Yasmin trained in medicine at the University of Cambridge and in journalism at the University of Toronto.

She won the 2016 Diode Editions poetry chapbook contest and her first nonfiction book, The Impatient Dr. Lange, was released in July 2018.

J I H Y U N Y U N is a Korean American poet and Fulbright Fellow. Her work has appeared in publications such as Narrative, AAWW’s The Margins, Fugue, and elsewhere. When she is not writing or panicking about not writing, she can be found with a purse full of canned tuna, feeding all the neighborhood strays.

last note ON MATTERING

Early in motherhood, daily tasks can feel invisible. Mothers are often shuttered away, emptying dishwashers and immediately filling them, changing diapers that are immediately soiled.

Couple this invisibility with a cultural urging to, as quickly as possible, decrease the physical body back down to its prepregnancy size, and the endeavor of mothering can begin to feel like a ceaseless battle against matter. Matter that spills and expands and refuses to obey.

My poem in this issue, “Trying to Get My Body Back,” was an attempt to wrestle with this matter of motherhood, and with the insidious phrase I kept reading in fitness magazines and mothering blogs. Our bodies and our material surroundings are the only spaces we have in which to encounter meaning. I don’t want to diminish those spaces.

JEN STEWART FUESTON, POETRY

So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow, the birds of the air, the road less traveled. It may be impossible to tell a butterfly’s effect on anything, but what we do know is that countless others have been here, buzzing with anonymous, minute creation. And amazingly we too are here, touching things, rearranging them, making all the difference—mattering.

DAVID DESJARDINS, FICTION

Artists and their many types of art and methods of production have an unavoidable association with mattering. Things are made to emerge and materialize from a broth of raw ingredients such as ideas, tests, matter, space, time, and energy. The sensitive recipe aims to produce something that becomes greater than the sum of its parts and, to that end, art brings influential new matter into being.

AARON MCPEAKE, VISUAL ART

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My poem in this issue was born from reading about surrealist art and coming across a quote by Baudelaire that says, “Woman is the being who projects the greatest shadow and the greatest light into our dreams.”

I became fascinated with the way Baudelaire’s version of objectifying women in this quote is actually completed through dematerializing her, turning her from a bodied object into something that is pure manipulation of object, of matter; light and in the same vein, shadow.

The fragmentary stanzas are meant to echo that sense of dematerialization, and the deconstruction of the images within the poem hopefully ask the reader to question even the most solid of life’s substances—the idea that even something as concrete as a rock can be as indefinite as something like love.

JESSICA HINCAPIE, POETRY

Music matters in poetry, despite the deprivation of an ear in my poem in this issue. Marsyas, the one who first trespassed the bounds of human discourse, who received his punishment from Apollo, transformed himself into an instrument.

In my poem in this issue, I was also trying to deal with the concept of delusion. Is the ear “yours,” am “I” the dog? What belongs to us eventually, and does it matter? In this reality of constant transformation, will the song that is separated from our throats continue to sing? After thousands of years, can’t we all still hear Marsyas’s song?

SHANGYANG FANG, POETRY

Poetry is the only thing I really have. The thing that lets me know I’m here. So when my poems are published or heard, in that moment, I know I really exist.

PAULA HARRIS, POETRY

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last note

When my son was diagnosed with cancer I realized that I needed to tell him about death in concrete terms he could understand. All creatures die; death is scary but not as much if you acknowledge it; nothing can destroy love. I am certain those ideas thrived in David’s psyche and made a huge difference in his happiness and quality of life, most of which was lived painfully aware of death. But all children are keen observers and death is everywhere. For them, too, it matters that adults help to frame what they cannot conceive, listen for questions they lack the words to pose, and assure them that invisible forces buoy us up if we only believe.

ANNE VISSER NEY, NONFICTION

Mind over matter. Change your mind.

Get a better perspective. Look before you leap. Think before you speak. Yet when I walk, the clouds clear from my mind. When I unclench my hands, my

anger fades. When I make love, my affection grows. When I put pen to paper, a poem opens there. When I ask, without considering whether my question is the right question, I learn. Of course, neither is “matter over mind” the rule. Rather, my being is a looping between mind and matter: one spurring the other on in tandem, with the heart riding along.

KENDRA LANGDON JUSKUS, POETRY

As a child, I was raised speaking only Korean. As I entered school, my lack of English made me immaterial, wallpaper, “other.” I wanted to matter, so I grew far from myself. I learned English and used it exclusively, even at home. I mattered myself into linguistic distance from my family. I mattered myself out of my mother tongue. I learned to regret it, and now in my twenties, I struggle to matter myself back in.

JIHYUN YUN, POETRY

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AARON MCPEAKE. Iceland Landscape 9, 2010. Bell-bronze. 19 x 14 inches.

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