Issue 38: 10th Anniversary

10TH ANNIVERSARY / 38

Spring 2016

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

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

P L EA S E J O I N U S .

Opposite Page BRUCE HERMAN. Firefly, from the series “Ordinary Saints.”

Oil on linen. 48 x 36 inches. www.bruceherman.com Front Cover NICHOLAS PRICE. Rhino. Screenprint on Rives BFK. 11 x 15 inches.

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

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GE N E R AL IN QUIR IE S

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friends

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

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

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

From the bottom of our hearts, we thank you!

B EN EFA CT O RS

Chappelle Animal Hospital, Darwill, Inc., Leslie and Duncan Fields, Steve and Kim Franchini, Kelly and Sara McCabe, Jeff Parkes, Janice Van Dyke-Zeilstra, John Zeilstra PAT RO N S

Christy French, Grace Presbyterian Church Jennifer Fueston, Ryan and Katie Jenkins, Nicola Koh, Jon and Abby Romano, Cheryl Russell, Sandra Soli, Amy Lyles Wilson S PO N S O RS

Lynda Smith-Bugge, Phyllis Bussard, Lorraine Comanor, Alexa Van Dalsem, Judith Dupree, Michael Ford, Sophfronia Scott Gregory, Katie and Tim Koblenz, Raphael Kosek, Libby and Greg Kueneke, Robyn Lee, Evelyn Lloyd-Smith, Terry Minchow-Proffitt, Raymond G. Otis, Melissa R. Poulin, Travis Schantz Ruminate, V I S I T ruminatemagazine.com/donate

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

staff

E DI TO R- I N - CH I EF

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

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

Keira Havens SE NI O R ED I T O R

Amy Lowe P OE T RY ED I T O R

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

Stefani Rossi B L O G ED I T O R

Renee Long R E VI EW ED I T O R

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

Scott Laumann A SSOC I AT E REA D ERS

Laura Droege John Patrick Harty Erika Lewis Diana Small I N T ERN

Paula Weinman P R I N T D ES I G N

Give Creative Co. W E B D ES I G N

Katie Jenkins

contents

N O T ES

Editor’s 6 Readers’ 8 Staff’s 12 Contributors’ 82 Last 86 NONF I C T I O N

Digging for Nothing, James Silas Rogers 64 Litany for the Body, Jessie van Eerden 76 VI SU AL A RT

Rhino, Nicholas Price Front Cover Firefly, Bruce Herman Inside Front Cover Alley Series, Scott Kolbo 15, 51, 73 They Dream and Stare Upon the Roving Sky, 49 Marianne Lettieri Katharsis, Voyage of the Intergalactic Space Dangler 50

Evan Mann The Least of These, Paul Flippen 52 The Things We Keep, Deb Sheldon 53 Smashed, Laura Carpenter Truitt 54 Heap, Jodi Hays 55 Big Zipper Project, Steve Prince 56 Urban Mix Tape, Steve Prince 63 Ascension, Evan Mann 69 Breaking Bread, Geoffrey Krawczyk Inside Back Cover

PO ET RY

Claro, Aby Kaupang Third Quarter, Niamh Corcoran Mouth, Hope Wabuke Exodus: Father’s American Superheroes, Hope Wabuke 20 Hypothesis Leaning into a Slow Wind, Cory Hutchinson-Reuss 21 Intervals, Cory Hutchinson-Reuss 32 Our Decent Heaven, Susanna Childress 35 Toll, Joseph Heithaus 36 God Spot, James Crews 37 Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast, Hannah Faith Notess 57 A Bird at the Market, Miho Nonaka 58 Long Creek Trail, Julia Cariño 16 17 18 19

REV I EW

60 Shann Ray’s Balefire, reviewed by Rita Jones 70 Marilyn Robinson’s Lila, reviewed by Tom Schmidt 74 Brian Doyle’s A Book of Uncommon Prayer, reviewed by Marilyn McEntyre FI CT I O N

22 He Own the Night, LaToya Watkins 38 The Vision of Mae Anna, Stephanie Dickinson

editor’s note

we invited our readers, staff, and contributors to share their experience with ruminating and contemplation—being still and attentive, pausing and listening. As I looked over the notes we received, I realized how many of us experience a common tension with contemplation—we yearn for it, but we also avoid it. Sometimes our to-do list seems too long, or “pulling in” feels too self-absorbed or indulgent, or we tell ourselves it’s better left to the yogis, monks, and introverts.

Let me tell you, I get this tension. It is scary to be still and sit with yourself and all of your wild thoughts. Goodness, I started a magazine for art and contemplation, and most days, I find it easier to tackle the inbox than to be still, physically or mentally. I find the thrill of problem-solving and checking items off my list more immediately satisfying than the awkward embracing of ambiguity. So I get it. But I’m starting to think these concerns and distractions that keep us from contemplation are really just fear in disguise.

Richard Rohr, scholar, Franciscan priest, and founder of the Center for Contemplation and Activism, writes in his book A Lever and a Place to Stand: “Contemplation waits for the moments, creates the moments, where all can be prayer. . . . Contemplation is essentially nondual consciousness that overcomes the gaps—gaps between me and God, outer and inner, either and or, me and you.”

This is scary stuff! Moving into the gaps, into the gray! And I know this phrase “nondual consciousness” is a mouthful, but stay with me. Rohr goes on to explain what he means by “nondual consciousness.” He sees it as a compassionate posture of embracing mystery and paradox, the difficult and the unknown, and the realization that we don’t understand everything. Gulp. A mind open to contemplation is a mind open to possibility and to curiosity. Yes, this feels true to me.

I also love that Rohr invites us to integrate action and contemplation in our lives, recognizing that we all have both aspects, and we needn’t choose one or the other. I also suspect this welcoming of both action and contemplation would release us from some of that fearful tension we often feel. Rohr writes: [Action] is surely the first half of life for almost all of us . . . We learn, we experiment, we try, we do, we stumble, we fall, we break, and we find.” If we fearfully stay in this stage of action-only oriented living, “We will settle for being right instead of being holy and whole; for saying prayers instead of being one.” So, yes, it’s scary, but it’s worth it to keep stepping into the gaps, to keep practicing a posture of compassion and yeses.

I’ve also learned that simply being quiet and alone or avoiding people does not make me a contemplative. I can be alone with an inner war going on inside, or I can be quiet because I feel numb and shut down. And yes, I have definitely experienced this. Picture IN CELEBR AT I ON OF OU R 10T H A NNI V ER SARY I SSU E,

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me trying to pray and meditate oh-so-peacefully in my favorite chair when I hear my kids bickering in the other room. I’m immediately annoyed, snapping at them to stop fighting!

And then I’m annoyed with myself for snapping at the kids. Whew! I’m learning that to be contemplative is to be compassionate toward others and myself.

And one last beautiful thing . . . always we begin again in this contemplative posture.

Thankfully, it is never simply a task to be mastered and forgotten.

With gratitude to all our fellow pilgrims,

p.s. Some of you might recognize the cover art on this issue, “Rhino” by Nicholas Price.

“Rhino” appeared on the very first cover of Ruminate, and featuring it on our cover again is a playful nod to our roots and the beautiful and gutsy perseverance of a little arts magazine celebrating ten years. Cheers!

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readers’ notes ON SL OW I N G D O W N + N O T I CI N G

When the distant train blows its whistle, baby girl, you still start, though your fear has evolved. You and I heard the whistle on quiet nights past as a haunting cry drifting through the window, a phantom wail in the menacing tree-fingered backyard black.

But now you play with toy trains like a big girl, trains with faces and with names like Thomas and Percy and with whistles that go Hoo! Hoo! in your delicate toddler voice.

Now you call the deeper whistle at night a “Thomas” and the lighter whistle a “Percy,” and you know what real trains are, and you know they move on silver rails, and you know they’re miles away from our house.

And they scare you anyway.

So I hold you tonight in this soft-lit room, sweet girl. I hold you and rock you well past your bedtime, ignoring my own silent siren calls of solitude and unfinished work, and I whisper love and safety to soften your shoulders, grateful in some way that the shadowy realms still scare you, because you do not know them, and saddened for this moment that they don’t scare me, because I know them well. Perhaps I’ll rock you still longer on this night, to comfort us both.

AARON J . HOU SHOL DE R , A ND E R SON , I N

I found yellow, standing beneath a wide tree on the playground, at nine. The others yelled, zip that car, to Vermont Ave., just outside the chain-link fence. Favorite cars, colors were yelled; I wanted yellow, not

pink, not purple, not a Datsun 280ZX. Left of our playground, charred black and brown, a two-story building stood against the summer sky, blue as ocean, despite the blight of last night’s anger. Someone was always burning it; someone was always rebuilding it. Mostly, it burned at night, though once we stood, foreheads against aluminum diamonds, watching slick orange flames lick white clouds, until a thin stream of smoke blackened the breeze. Something freed itself.

We played double Dutch, marching nimble legs in time to the click-clank of the rope, tiny feet beating black asphalt, while Los Angeles grayed on past our young backs. I loved the clank of the rope, even when it slapped across my cheek, I was out, and chosen to turn for other girls. If you’ve never turned rope, if you were one of the girls who couldn’t get the rhythm, then you don’t know about the pull, the tide of the rope, how it waves through your arms, body.

Like an ocean, your shoulders ebb and flow, with your hips, neck, head following.

Thirty years have zipped up and down Vermont—Granma’s gone on, to rest in the earth, and Daddy’s been gone nearly thirtyfour years—and I color the rope yellow.

Instinctively, I sift for the sun. Somewhere, somehow, a speck of yellow—perhaps a flying tetherball, a Pee-Chee folder tossed on the ground, or the colored rooms we learned and napped in—yellow for preschoolers, orange for first, second, third, and blue for fourth, fifth, sixth.

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I made it to the blue room, but inside, I’m small, in the yellow room, playing Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack with Mama. Her large hands, her burgundy fingernails, my tiny palms hitting center of her palm. She smiles wide, daddy’s alive, Granma’s in the kitchen, baking cornbread, and I have the biggest brother on the playground, already in the blue room.

When I see yellow, no one is burning the building. I’m La Niña out in the Pacific, turning rope, with fifteen cents and silver buttons all down my back; I’m stirring the ocean, cooling my feverish brother, who’ll soon scatter healing rain.

KI AN DRA J I M E NE Z , M OR E NO VA L L E Y, CA

Much of my life as a writer is spent online, but it is the labyrinth of the Internet that divides me the most. I spend my day job chained to a desk and in the off hours my phone is a constant distraction, calling me back to deadlines and appointments.

The vast array of choices at my fingertips disables me.

In stark contrast, my wide-eyed six-yearold is an observer. At any given time you can find her drawing or writing a story, her bobbed blonde hair curling around her chin as her pencil furiously flies across the page.

My daughter is my teacher, showing me the way of wonder. For Christmas, she received oil pastels and sketchbooks, paints and pencils. There was a similar package for me under the tree.

Though I come from a line of visual artists who can make masterpieces out of blank canvases, my art is with words and with dance. I have never been able to see a picture in my head and translate that onto the page, so I have never tried.

But as I have sat with the child of mine who sees the world in vibrant colors, I have

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wanted to share in her love. I have picked up the pencil and let myself create art. We sit together and sketch, and she says, “Mommy, your picture is so much prettier than mine.

Can you help me?” She has no idea I am as much of a learner as she is, both in art and in life.

Every time I pull up the chair next to her I have to take a deep breath. I feel the tug of the urgent, and I feel like art for beauty’s sake is wasted. There are so many other tasks that have a deadline. But this task is changing my soul. What can be more urgent than that?

N I CO L E WA LT ERS , N EW N A N , G A

Muscle memory in action, I reach to my left for another dry, crisp pod and feel the seam with my thumbs. Its color is just right, blanched by the sun. Its texture is just right, like old paper from a box long forgotten. And it rattles. Dark points along the translucent shell are showing. They are ready to be born to the purpose I’ve given them; for me to eat.

Pressing down, the hundredth time I hear that crunch is just as soothing as the first.

And the sharp notes of hard, dry beans falling on the pile sing the satisfaction I have been wanting since April. With a thumb and forefinger I run through the concave shape of each half to loosen the stragglers. One of them provides the finishing, sharp note yet to be sung as it strikes the side of the metal bowl. The pod, I discard, like the chaff it has become.

The bucket of pods on my left promises a full hour of peace. I think of other chores calling my name, and then I reach for another one. I double down on my task at hand, unapologetic for the rote and ancient method at getting something to eat. I could be watching a movie while I do this, or listening to music, or a podcast. Not today.

readers’ notes

I’m going to sit in the backyard, shelling.

The rhythmic sounds of it soothe my busy mind. It’s not the most productive thing I could do. And that’s fine. “Do less, be more,” I tell myself. Am I not a human be-ing? That I am. That I am. I do plenty of doing and forget how good it feels to be, even just a little bit.

To feel earthy things with my hands, and smell the garden and all it grows. Here I will stay, in the yard, shelling one primed-forthe-picking pod at a time.

Muscle memory in action, I reach to my left for another dry, crisp pod and feel the seam with my thumbs. Crunch.

JAFFREY C L A R K, H ONE Y B R OOK, PA

A note about the tyranny of significance. The world is found in details, an ocean is made of raindrops. Yet there’s a curious refrain amongst many people that suggests small talk is small-minded, as if all conversations must penetrate the mysteries of Joyce or resolve the plight of migrant workers in the rainy season. Better to start with the weather and see where the sun pokes through. Measured against the digital permanence of the modern age, there is a humanity in the disappearing moment. At the bank, over coffee, waiting on a platform, ordering a drink. Insignificance can be profound and profundity is magic. This is the theatre of daily life. When the neighbor waves hello on your way to work tomorrow, raise your umbrella and mention none of this. Talk about the weather and the weather might improve.

ARI F MI R B A G H I , TOR ONTO, ON

To what end? Usually we can say. We push into boulders, wrestle enigmas, configure and reconfigure things tangible and imagined so that we may eventually lurch forth paycheck, highway overpass, thesis, life benchmark, roasted artichoke.

But there was a time I could not name my ends. During that time I visited an island where I clambered over mossy boulders along the treacherous yawn of a ravine, waded chest-deep through a current, reached a waterfall propelling bright beads about the surface of a cold dark pool, the kind of thing you kiss under. I couldn’t properly photograph it.

Do you feel the gentle question under everything, the soft constant pressure of a finger on your pulse? What would we do if we could refuse to explain? Let’s go to outer space for starters. Not just Andy Weir space but Ray Bradbury space, some physicsall-wrong dream of it. “Meteors broke into fireworks. Time flowed away in a serpentine of gas.”

The evening of a solar eclipse, a friend and I botched a cardboard-and-foil contraption and then snuck onto the roof of my complex, and I climbed until I got the coupling sunmoon to breach the ragged tree line for five more orange minutes. It’s like I’m dying of thirst and the thing is a tangerine.

Then there was the afternoon I half-tried to find the Gulf by taking exits with words like “lake” in them because water eventually flows to the ocean. Maybe I was trying to revive a dead friend. Driving to absolutely no end was our thing. That was the day I

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saw a pickup truck so full of watermelons, whole and halved, that the guy selling them roadside couldn’t possibly have driven that way. I probably would have stopped aging if I’d bitten into one.

There is little I would not do if I could in the end draw from the world a whiff of some alien thing without a function. Search every black crevice of the tide pools until: the red snarl of an urchin. Or, in the aftermath of sunset from that forbidden shingled ridge: a darkening rosy bruise of a bank of clouds that you can breathe into your blood and brain a little while until it turns into you.

There are uncountable hidden vantage points where you can stand exactly poised to see tiny fires. I get to wanting to offer myself up on each one.

SARAH B R ONSON, H OU STON, TX

It happens most years when the weather cools and the trees begin to change color— students crying in my office. There’s something about midterms, shortening days, approaching deadlines that can elicit tears.

This year I walked one student over to our campus counseling center; another had to drop my course; a third just needed to let off some steam. I remind myself to stay rigorous about boundaries. I try to stay still, asking a question or two, nodding my head, affirming when I can. When I was a kid and needed this, my mom would say, “don’t fight it so hard, just cry a minute.” And so that’s what I find myself saying to my students when I can see their tears brim.

I notice in almost every case that students seem relieved afterwards. Sometimes they’re embarrassed, often they apologize.

Mostly it’s as if the air’s been cleared. We can think lucidly again and talk together about how to improve their writing. They can learn. So what’s happening when this happens? Maybe, when I briefly hold their frustration or fear or sadness, they can stretch and readjust themselves and pick up their burdens again. Maybe they’re reassured I didn’t melt or they didn’t melt in the presence of such potent feelings. And maybe it’s simply the relief of slowing down a moment. Regardless, if the student stays in my course, they usually start doing better work.

I’ve long thought that learning was one of the most powerful emotional experiences we have as human beings. Learning is expansion and transformation. How can feelings not be involved? I remember in detail a lecture on the Athenian Parthenon in my undergraduate course not because I have a good memory but because I had such a visceral reaction to the beauty of the Parthenon—its grandeur, antiquity, and enduring power made me cry. To deeply learn about the Parthenon or cell division or Melville is to have something more than an intellectual experience.

Once, a class of students said to me they didn’t want our semester together to conclude. Intrigued, I asked why. “This classroom feels like a holy space where we can be ourselves and learn,” one student replied. Perhaps she and the others were grateful we’d invited not only our intellects into the classroom, but our hearts as well, invited what’s deeply and thrillingly human.

N ATA L I E D YK S T RA , WA LT H A M, MA

SE ND US YOU R NOT ES FOR I SSU E 3 9— W E L OV E H EARI N G F RO M YO U !

ruminatemagazine.com/submit/notes-from-you 11

staff notes ON SL OW I N G D O W N + N O T I CI N G

I long for solace, a quietness of the soul, but there always seems to be a nagging sense of urgency, a sense that things must get done in this life. I can’t do yoga for this reason; I either cry or make to-do lists in my head.

When I turned forty, this urgency grew stronger. It felt like time was running out, and what had I done? I knew, deeply, that loving my family and friends, teaching, and working with a meaningful publication were extraordinary accomplishments, the stuff that really mattered. But, like a frustrated child longing to sit at the adult table, I was dissatisfied and felt like there was something more I should be doing.

My father died when I was twenty-six, and my aunt read Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” at his funeral.

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Not quiet words, and my father never really lived a quiet life. In fact, our house was full of loud living, sometimes life-giving and other times not. Maybe this contributed to my angst, to this tension between resting in the here and now and longing to contribute to the larger world. And I guess now I wonder, is this okay? Is it possible to be quietly loud?

Is there a place for a raging solace? Though I spiritually believe that death can be a gentle reception, a welcome release into a new home, I still find myself fighting for this fractured earthly home, fighting against the dying of the light.

I’ve been a college English teacher most of my life. Lately there has been a push in higher education toward greater efficiency, which has made me realize that the reading and writing of literature has never been— and never will be—an inherently efficient process. I think we value the indirectness of poems and stories because we know that curiosity, love, and wonder always take circuitous paths toward understanding.

Words and thoughts meander; we ruminate.

This week, while taking a break in the library, I found myself drawn to a centuryold volume from the complete works of Robert Louis Stevenson. Opening the book at random, I discovered this quote from his essay “Books Which Have Influenced Me,” first published in 1887: “But of works of art little can be said; their influence is profound and silent, like the influence of nature; they mould by contact; we drink them up like water, and are bettered, yet know not how.”

“Mould by contact” confused me at first.

Was he talking about moldy books? Then I realized that we are the ones, as readers, who are molded and shaped we know not how by our contact with works of art. Even so. Let it be.

PA U L W I L L I S , BO O K REV I EW ED I T O R

AMY LOWE , SE NI OR E D I TOR

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I am always distracted. I am the virtuous child of a homeland that has conditioned me to be at once obsessed with productivity and addicted to entertainment.

As such I strive for so many things: to be an informed and active citizen, a responsible and indispensable employee, a healthy homemaker; to make at least fifty exceptional and marketable paintings per year, all while maintaining a robust social and spiritual life. AND I want to know what fate will befall Lady Edith in the final season of Downton, to read almost everything on the “New Arrivals” shelf at the library, and to follow Tip Hero’s life hacks. The combined force of extrinsic and intrinsic expectations for how I should spend my time can threaten to suffocate me before the sun even rises.

As my pen inundates my daily planner with that pressure in the form of lists, I notice it is the anniversary of my Grandma Nellie’s death. It’s a small note I wrote almost a year ago. Before each year begins, I spend time transferring names and dates to a new journal, remembering the people— living and dead—whom I love. I practice this ritual of placing concrete reminders on the pages of a book I open more often than my Bible for moments exactly like this: when I am so diverted I cannot breathe. Nellie’s name reminds me that life is short. Her memory prompts me to close my eyes, and draw in enough air to relax my shoulders.

It is there, in that breath, that I encounter a steady voice whispering that all of this worry about what to make, to contribute, and about who I will become cannot add one iota to my life. I open my eyes to see the sun crest the horizon, exhale, and greet the day I’ve been given, hoping to love people whose names fill those pages.

This morning was one of those mornings that I wanted to willingly forgo my required ten minute break. To forgo a moment to allow my mind to breathe and my body to unclench.

Instead, I walked outside, sat in the winter sun. My mind still wouldn’t calm. I paused, closed my eyes, took a breath, opened my eyes again, and focused on a twisted cherry tree across the street—still bare with winter sleep. I imagined it gently, slowly pulling water up from the ground, past each of its rings, in tiny, uphill streams throughout its interior.

This grounded me for the moment. A million years of learning strong stillness.

A million years of learning to drink and savor slowly. A million years of learning to be exposed with no leaves or flowers for protection. A million years of turning toward light. I thought, we could learn something from our winter trees.

STEFAN I R OSSI , VI SU A L A RT E DI TOR

K RI S T I N N O RT O N , MA N A G I N G ED I T O R

REN EE L O N G , RU MI N AT E BL O G ED I T O R

Recently, I asked my fiancé what he thought his favorite part of our wedding would be.

We had already met with our photographer and officiant, sent in contracts, and started our gift registry. I was slowly crossing off tasks on what seemed like an endless list, and I was anxious to know what he was most looking forward to. He responded with, “you ending up with my last name.”

I was so busy with all my multitasking that I wasn’t paying attention to the reason behind all the extravagance. The blender I registered for wasn’t just to provide variety in the registry, but it was something that would be “ours” instead of “mine.” I’m learning that love isn’t something you can be efficient about.

staff notes

I am a project-oriented person, and consistency does not come easily to me.

But I have been with Ruminate for six years now, and I am just as firmly certain that this is an Important Thing as I was when I started. Back then I knew nothing about art or poetry. My literary experience was largely confined to science fiction and fantasy. The mystery that is faith confounded me (and still does, in large part).

And while I hadn’t ever even considered going to a monastery like April Schmidt in her essay “Taizé” (from Ruminate’s Issue No. 17), I could feel my soul resonate when the mower cut down her field of wildflowers—because that essay said something about loss that I hadn’t realized needed to be said.

I didn’t know it, but I was about to begin a very long and very slow journey toward discovering myself. Ruminate has likely seemed like a distraction from my “real job” as a scientist, and yes, balancing the two has been difficult at times. But everything I’ve given to the magazine has been repaid tenfold by the writers and artists that fill these pages and tenfold again from the friendships that have blossomed.

There has been give and take, but it feels like growth, not loss. I am not able to work the way I did five years ago. Something is softer now. The link between brain and heart has strengthened after a long period

of denial. I am more able to say “this is true” than I was before, and I am more comfortable insisting that beauty be a part of what I do, even when—or perhaps especially when—it is entirely unnecessary.

I am a better person for committing to something that has no purpose other than to be what it is. I had forgotten how to do that.

This beautiful work reminds me.

K EI RA H AV EN S , O U T REA CH D I RECT O R

I recently asked my carpenter husband to make me a desk for the bath. “Why?” he asked. “So that I can relax and be productive at the same time,” I said.

I love working. My work is my play. It shapes who I am and who I want to be.

I think the fact that I am also a poet is actually some sort of self-imposed failsafe—it completely undermines the goaloriented part of myself that would probably destroy me, bath desk or no, in about ten years. Every poem I write feels like the last one I will ever write. What the poem reaches toward constantly eludes me.

Poetry produces knowledge not otherwise attainable, and yet it is not “productive” because its value defies quantification.

These seeming contradictions in me—to be productive and to produce—constantly hash against one another; I do not fight it.

K RI S T I N G EO RG E BA G D A N O V, PO ET RY ED I T O R

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SCOTT KOLB O. Alley Princess. Graphite, ink, and charcoal. 30 x 46 inches.

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ABY KAU PA NG

Claro I am writing lines to tether a man long lines to latch at a far man he is further than a poem and has left to live in one a poem I am writing a poem to save his life and in so know how useless I am as he is off off with a gun I read it many many times I had to make sure he’d left with a gun didn’t leave a gun I had to make sure where the gun was before I could write the poem I can’t write that poem can’t find that man can’t rest lines with straight speech spur multiple meanings I am trying to write him a poem his own own and revised poem

Micah’s very

I try to revise the course of an action take a line of a poem from our beginning and he returns if I place it at the end he is beginning and end then and with a gun and gone writing lines to tether a man temporarily lines to this earth’s living layer not slack lines slack is to slide into conversations heave into lines unexpectedly I find myself in multiple meanings and into their intention there in attention I am trying to save a life by writing a clear poem claro he said claro his own poem but revised

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NI AMH C OR C OR A N

Third Quarter On the back of the house there are no windows, a door to a garden, but no glass to gape like a harbinger, moon at sober roots bound by the third quarter moon.

I am that way, too, gripped by tide and phase.

Today, waning, out of phase, the backyard jars the half dark heart. Spigot gulps, sprinkler reels. The dark fugue of you kneeling among fallen stalks, staking everything that has fallen.

This devotion is also in my bones. I know this cycle is nothing new, know the ebb within, the way water draws out. It is the earth I fall to; it draws me from the cellar to untended rows.

Half of why I walk among these rows tonight—to be amended by the earth.

Kneel where you knelt in the earth. 

17

HOPE WA B U KE

Mouth They pack nothing to escape detection. One change of clothes, no books furniture or photographs.

My father’s lab specimens are sewn into his pants.

A day trip with our daughter they will say at the border.

We will be right back.

18

HOPE WA B U KE

Exodus: Father’s American Superheroes because certain death. because genocide. he leads them out he is Moses, then Jeremiah when no one else would try the faith to move mountains and get to America. keep them secret keep them safe raise up his body family, begin again.

19

CORY HUTC HI NSON- R E U SS

Hypothesis Leaning into a Slow Wind Through each field an obscure breath, as if an encompassing lung is expanding slowly, steadily, so that the stream

passes for stillness.

Then a sound of gills venting air. Ears press against a great hull.

We count the days like caught fish. We live in the interstices, in the dark ribs, nothing nearer than a promise.

Hook-eye, dark-bright.

Apertures, everywhere unfolding.

20

CORY HUTC HI NSON- R E U SS

Intervals Meanwhile, a young Philip Glass unravels his repetitions on the piano across the ped mall unhooks black and white from gravity the bee falls toward the lower flower, Song of Septembers ripen at the orchard if an apple falls, the moon also falls, measures its time through the condition of falling around Earth I’m outta this town on the late bus this time

among mutual gravities, being here today requires minimal effort each starling on the wire bodies a feathered note what wings are required a woman with oil-slick hair captures young Philip Glass with her phone, our bodies root to a center 3,900 miles within (I’ve rounded numbers like apples) in a system that falls toward the sun almost 93,000,000 miles away this distance approximates an astronomical unit it’s a lot of time invested a lot of energy no one falls into reveries for long little lights always at our fingertips touch screens, people of the clock off the clock tethering how many astronomical units away while the young Philip Glass plays resonant shards from a larger sound which divides into bricks that tessellate under our feet sun walks over the bricks we fall toward the bricks so successfully one knows from experience that most humans harbor a sense of unbelonging at times they unmoor completely but how prismatic the glass piano, a cerulean couple conversing just above the next bench a veteran in a cowboy hat trimmed in white feathers elongating his stride with intention and the brides take in the sun like rock-lizards buildings stretch like restructured clocks the moon inches away each year 1.5 inches farther

21

L AT O YA WAT K I N S

22

in my daughter house cause it’s hard to look at her when she taking care of me. Things posed to be the other way round. So I just sit out here on the curb, under the moon, letting my head ache in the spiritual world and in the natural one.

My head feeling heavy tonight. Like everything, blood, brain, everything, floating round all loose. Ruth say it’s cause I’m too old to be taking classes at the community college. Say the work stressing my brain. Every week she have me walk up to the drug store and take my blood pressure. Sometimes it be high, but ain’t nothing we can do bout it with no insurance. When it be high, she give me vinegar and pickles. Even though she blame the whole blood pressure mess on school, I don’t think she want me stop. Had a little financial aid left after my classes paid. Only time we done had our own little bit of money in a long while.

I don’t think it’s the schooling got my head going, though. I think it’s our situation. I’m used to living in my daughter house—biding by her rules, but it bother me that we can’t offer no help to my girl. They shutting the power off if she don’t make the light bill first thing in the morning. I want to pay it. I want to take the weight off my daughter and pay it.

Situation get embarrassing some time, specially when my dear wife Ruth want shoes without holes in them, and I can’t afford to get her none. But Ruth a good wife. Don’t never judge me on what I can and can’t get her now. She know I took good care of her before Yahweh told me to leave Raytheon—told me I ain’t had to be nobody janitor no more. That was fore our kids was growed. Fore time passed on by us and made us aged. Now our baby boy twenty-six. He the only real boy I got—I done raised a hundred percent, and he don’t speak to me no more. Don’t see me as no man no more.

He was always a respectful boy. Ain’t never talk back or nothing like that. We raised all our kids up right. But he wasn’t perfect. I always had to get on him bout cleaning out the trash right and standing up straight and looking folks in the eyes. He ain’t really give me no problem bout taking the trash out. He was good bout doing that. Did it with his shoulders slumped and head down, but he ain’t never complain, and most of the time he did it like he cared about the job and understood it was his duty to the women around us. That boy never let his momma or sisters touch a garbage can or grocery bag, but he couldn’t never get the rotten smell from dumped things out the can right. I had to stay on him bout that. That and his potential in Yahweh. He wanted to run in the Olympics, but he wouldn’t never really listen to the spirit of Yahweh. I wanted him to run whatever he wanted to, but you got to give to Yahweh in order to receive of him. I gave him all the teachings and spirit I had.

I try to be patient with him cause you posed to train these kids up in the Way and they won’t never really depart. I’ll wait on him to come round. He will. By and by.

“Hey, Rev,” somebody husky voice whisper real loud. I look up to see Big Mike making his ways across the playground. His body move like a vibration or a wave or something loose and sagging. First thing I ever noticed bout Big Mike was his chuckle and the firmness of his face. Now when he chuckle his sagging jaws shake. They used to be full and stiff, but that was fore his woman found out bout the diabetes. After that, she put him on a little bit of a diet. She stopped frying pork chops and chicken. She even stopped cooking neck bones and oxtails. Shoot, the way Big Mike tell it, she threw the frying pan, pork, and red meat right out the front door; went straight bake, broil, and tofu. I felt for him when he was going through all that. I went through the same thing when we moved in with my I D ON’T WA NT T O G O BAC K

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daughter. Homestyle—West Texas style—is the type meals missing from her menu, and since she the one with the money and the food-stamp card, ain’t nothing I can do but wait on the Father to send me the means to buy the food my wife like to eat. We used to it now, but Ruth still hate that menu. Say our daughter a control freak, especially when she say, “Dad and Mom, I love y’all and I’m gone feed y’all like I love y’all.”

Ruth say she feeding us like she the mother and we the children. It break my heart to see my wife begging our girl for that food-stamp card every other month cause she craving chitterlings. But in a way, I’m always relieved when our girl tell her no. I hate cleaning chitterlings. Smell remind me of cleaning out my daddy hog pens when I was boy. Like swine bowels exploded and every unclean demon possess me through my nostrils. I know Ruth love them smothered in hot sauce and salt, but I ain’t never believed the savory flavor is worth the labor.

Now, with his stomach missing to hold it up, Big Mike big white t-shirt hang down to his knees, and he use his free hand to hold up his pants in the back. Look like he wearing a dress. Don’t seem much like love or protection to break your man down like that. To put him in a dress.

I stand up from the curb, what’s posed be the porch, and head to meet him halfway.

When we first come to this complex with my daughter, I hated it. Too many people—too many eyes looking my direction to judge me on what kind of man I am. Didn’t take long for me to figure out most men in the complex live on women—ain’t got no jobs. The women find refuge in the subsidized living, determined by their roles as single mothers. Some mothers don’t even have to worry bout low rent rates cause the complex feel it an honor to accept housing vouchers from the housing authority stead of rent. So the men—they tack theyselves onto women and ride the free housing into the sunset.

Like me, none of them looking for work. Most guys I done got to know content looking after the kids while the women go to work. Being the nurturers while the womenfolk become the providers. Menfolk become Eve and womenfolk turn into Adam in this place.

Creator way drown out. Disappear. Given over to all kind of reprobated spirits. Whole place done lost the way. The truth. The light.

Guess that’s how we different. Me and these men. I know the laws of The Book, and I know what it is to work. To provide. I don’t mind working. Ain’t never had no problem taking care of my family. Heavenly Father got my hands tied, though. Won’t let me go to work. Heard His voice clear as I can hear Ruth’s. He say He got something for me I won’t never find in no job. Still, I look around and see all these men using other men’s daughters, and that old devil creep in and make me feel like I’m just as bad as they is. Like I’m using my own.

Big Mike and me meet at what the swing-set used to be. I don’t know what to call it now.

Somebody stole the swings. Now it just look like a yellow pipe sitting in the center of the complex. My daughter apartment sit right in front of it, and Big Mike faces it on the other side. The park is the only thing separate my world from his.

My granddaughters think it’s a real park. They think I’m something big when I take them out there and let them run under the space where the swings used to be. I like taking them out. Feel good to be big.

24

The complex ain’t bad looking. The red brick buildings don’t look no more than fifteen years old. And we right in the center of a real nice suburb. It’s the elements that float bout the place—elements like Big Mike make it seem like some kind of ghetto or the projects.

Sometimes I joke and tell Ruth Big Mike Little Mike now, but she don’t care to hear nothing bout Big Mike. She don’t like him much. She don’t like none of these folks much. Say we too good for this place—too good for the situation we done found ourselves. She don’t blame me none, though. She take all them concerns to the Father.

Three years ago, when we first moved to Garden Rowe Townhomes, Big Mike was a big three-hundred pound man. That was the most noticeable thing bout him—that and the way all the other men in the complex gathered around his porch to wear dominoes, spades, and drinks as masks for the drugs they was dealing when they women went off to work.

I like Big Mike. Want to give him what my son say I never gave him. A good example.

Another way to be. He done had it hard. Tell me he ain’t never knowed his dad. Boy missing his dad—the presence of that figure like being amputated. Sometimes he don’t know he ain’t whole, but he get out there in the world where other boys and girls got all they parts, and he know. He know he missing a big part of hisself.

I like to be honest with folks. Respect them in that way. Like them to be honest with me.

Big Mike always do that. He respect me like my own son done forgot how to do. I wish my boy would of told me sooner he needed more from me. Needed me to say more stead of letting Ruth say the most. He waited till he was too mad bout it. Just mad at me, though. He call Ruth sometimes. Tell her where he at in the world. Seek her counsel. Like today. She always fussing at him bout me. bout respecting me and talking to me. He said maybe later. He working through some things. Said he almost ready. I want to tell her to let him be. He’ll come round. But she say he can’t talk to her if he can’t talk to me.

“Got your DVD, Rev,” Big Mike say, handing me the burnt copy of The Truth about the Messiah. I showed the documentary to the members of my assembly a few weeks earlier. We meet in the front room of my daughter house. Ain’t but bout six of us that come all the time.

That include my daughter, her two girls, and Ruth. Sometimes, though, people like Mike and his friends come in to hear me teach. It make they women happy. Make them think they grabbing on to religion and letting go of drugs.

“Nawh, Mike,” I say. “You can keep it. My daughter made plenty other copies. She made them so we could give them to the people—the Creator’s people. You one of them, you know?”

“Rev, you funny, man. Ain’t nobody never called me a child of God,” he says.

I smile up at him. “Well, Big Mike, I ain’t said it, either. I called you a son of the Creator— of Yahweh. That ain’t nothing like calling you a son of God.” Big Mike shift his eyes to the same moon I was watching fore he came. It’s bright underneath the useless swing-set; yet darkness swallow the rest of the complex around us. It’s powerful to watch cause He own the night. Most folk scared of the night cause all the darkness floating around in it. I don’t see horror in the night, though. Moon and stars got healing power. Loving power, too. Weeping endured through the night need to be enjoyed much as the joy promised in the morning. Can’t be scared of none of creation. Night beautiful as day. A lot of folk write praise songs bout the day, but they seem to forget that He in the night. I like to watch Him there.

25

Make me feel like bowing and letting Him know we know it belong to Him. While the rest of the complex done locked they door to keep out the darkness, I want to bow and shout and break the quiet with praises to Him. Even what we can’t see. The dark part is His. We stand quiet, but I can tell Big Mike got something to say. I’m patient with him. I’m patient with everybody, cause I don’t think I’m worthy of nothing.

My boy used to run at night. All through junior high and high school, he run. Was committed to running like I’m committed to Yahweh. Like I’m committed to Ruth. He come in and tell me he was gone run the hill, and I grunt okay and keep at what I’m doing. Ironing, talking to Ruth while she cook, or helping the girls with they math. I keep at it and just grunt okay. Soon as he close the front door, though, I go out and sit on the porch. I wait on him there. Think on him and the Olympics and Yahweh. Praying he diligent enough to allow Yahweh to give him all he want to have. And boy was he a pretty runner. I catch him coming round our corner on his return. Neck long and graceful, like a gazelle. Head high and mouth making a perfect “o” to push air he done sucked in back out. Never did quite see his feet touch the ground. He tapped quiet and quick, like a wild rabbit trying stay out human’s path. I’d watch till just fore I’m in danger of him knowing I got my eyes on him.

Then I get up and go back inside and finish what I was doing just fore he come told me he was leaving.

Yahweh the only one know I used to watch my boy like that. My wife don’t even know.

Sometimes I got to keep her in the dark bout things cause she don’t always understand my ways. I’m patient with Ruth and all her opinions and moods, but sometimes she gets a little mad with me bout things I think ought to make her love me more. Like she don’t like that I love people through hate—that I see the best in everybody. She think I don’t see enough in myself. I feel like if I give my love free, folks bound to love me. That’s my law of gravity.

If I tell folks about the best part of theyselves, that’s the part they learn to hang on to. The worst’ll eventually fall off. Somebody’ll do it for me, one day. Guess she don’t realize how much she already have.

“Sometimes I think it’s some truth to that stuff you be talking, Rev,” Big Mike say, taking me away from my boy and Ruth. “I mean, you ain’t no big man like T.D. or Creflo or them other cats on TV, but you say some big stuff, you know?”

I know what he mean. I was born the runt of the litter, all minister’s boys. When I survived a week out of the womb, my daddy took to calling me Champ. Like most runts, I never growed to be a real large man. In fact, I done lived over half-a-century and I ain’t never been taller than five-foot-four and I ain’t never weighed more than a buck-fifty. Being black as night in deep country woods and at least ten years younger than all my daddy’s other sons ain’t never really help me none as far as confidence in myself go. I was always seeing somebody bigger, smarter, and handsomer than me. That kind of made me shy and scared to speak. I always felt like other folks was judging my words. Brothers always told me to shut up, and Daddy ain’t talk much, less it was over the pulpit. I always thought I wasn’t worthy of nothing. My daddy, brothers, and friends all come out to be great things. Me, I ain’t never done nothing worth talking bout. But that ain’t never stopped me from understanding things I was always too meek to speak up bout.

Ruth helped me out with that when she found me. Told me I am somebody important

26

and the stuff I got to say matter. Still, I’m nervous every time I get up at our assembly to speak in front of folks. I ain’t a orator like T.D. and Creflo. That much is true, but I got a champion’s heart, and I believe the Creator saved me for a purpose.

“Yep,” I say, letting the “p” pop through my lips. “A messenger. That’s all I’ll ever be.

This stuff is real, Big Mike. It’s real for real. The Father just waiting to see what we gone do with it.”

“But it’s confusing, Rev,” he say. His eyes peer down at me; they big and lazy at the same time. Not like he was born with dead muscles in his eyelids, but like he tired. His gigantic voice go on, “I mean how can you teach the laws and break them at the same damn time?”

I know where he going. It’s the same place my brothers go. My wife’s family likes to go there too. My children done all went at some point, too. I don’t judge them for that. It ain’t they fault. I understand folks being confused by the scriptures. Folks been taught to read the Bible like tips for living, stead of like a story. Can’t help but be confused.

My head throbbing and I want to lay down. Just want to go inside and rest a bit, but what Big Mike fishing for important. Yahweh’s business always serious. I can’t stop till it’s done.

“Second Thessalonians? A man who don’t work, don’t eat. Right?” I ask, looking up at him.

He step back and lean his body against the yellow pole. His shoulders slump down and his eyes turn to the ground. It remind me of the day I first spoke to him.

Ruth say I ain’t never met a stranger, so she didn’t judge me the first time I stopped and spoke to Big Mike and his crew. Me and her had been taking our morning walk round the complex. When we rounded the corner to Big Mike’s townhome, there sat a Mercedes— SLK 65 AMG. Ruth and all my kids know me to be a car man, even though, at that time, I hadn’t owned a car in ten years. Hadn’t never owned nothing like a AMG. My best car was a 1996 Pontiac GrandAm. Bought it barely used, and me and Ruth was so proud of that car it felt like a AMG. That I ain’t ever and probably won’t never own nothing like a AMG don’t bother me like most folk think it should.

On count of my fascination with cars, I couldn’t hold in my excitement bout the AMG. Ruth know it’s my dream car, and she probably the only one that believe I’ll ever have one.

“Man, look at that,” I said out loud. “That baby clean!”

Big Mike and his crew stopped they chatter and watched me almost catch the Holy Spirit over the sight of the car. One of Big Mike boys was leaning in the window of the driver’s side with his pants sagging way past his tail. It was the one time saggy britches ain’t make me turn my head away. I couldn’t take my eyes off the car as we walked by the group of men. After a while, Big Mike stood up from the card table, stretched out his arms, and asked, “Problem, old man?”

Anybody know anything bout taking a walk in the projects know you can’t be chicken-hawking people unless you can back it up. Usually, I avoided contact with the youngsters. It wasn’t that I feared them or nothing, but I always thought it was gone take somebody bigger than me to save them type of young men. I’d speak to them, of course. Throw

27

up my hand and say, “Good morning, sirs.” See, it ain’t never mattered to me that my mustache and beard completely white, and some of these kids fresh as goat milk. It’s important to make men feel like men, and if that mean stepping into the role of boy to make somebody else sir, I’ll do it.

“No, sir,” I said, and all eyes was on me. I hate for people to look at me—notice me, but I couldn’t wipe that smile off my face. When I look over at Ruth, the side of her lip twitching a little bit, and I knew I better speak, or all hell gone break loose inside her. “That car— that car is clean,” I say, stomping my foot.

Big Mike looked at the car and then back at me. “You like that car, old man?” he asked.

I nodded my head. “Be lying if I told you I didn’t—” “And he a man of God, so he don’t lie,” Ruth say, jumping in. There was a whole lot of sass in her voice. My Ruth never did take no mess. I want to tell her I had it; I want her to stand there and be a woman, but she was too tough and too outspoken. “And he old enough to be your father, so you need to address him as something other than ‘old man,’” she said, rolling her eyes.

Big Mike’s sleepy eyes bucked and stuck to my wife. He looked mad and embarrassed at the same time.

“It’s okay, Ruth,” I said, thinking bout all the times she made me feel like Big Mike looked. It seem like everything stopped—time, the wind—everything. We all watched the only present female in the complex for instructions on what to do next.

“How old is you, boy?” she finally asked.

“What?” Big Mike asked, frowning up his face.

My wife raised her eyebrows, and I dropped my head. I needed to look at the ground.

Felt like I should’ve been crawling.

“I’m old enough to be your momma, boy. You put “ma’am” on the end of anything you say to me. Now, I asked how old you is.”

I don’t know what all was going on with his face at that point cause I couldn’t lift my eyes from the cement. It was silence, and then I heard Big Mike’s voice say, “I’m twenty-two.”

Ruth cleared her throat, and I heard a “ma’am” stumble from Big Mike’s lips.

“Champ,” she said, commanding my eyes from the ground. In my own way, I rebelled.

My eyes took the long way to her direction. As I allowed them to travel to her, I notice Big Mike’s face turned down in the same direction that she just called mine from. His slumped shoulders made me sad.

“Huh?” I said, soon as my eyes landed on her deep dark face.

The cracks in her skin didn’t move when she spoke, and she hardly opened her mouth, which made the way she grit her teeth seem demon-like. “This Pastor-Bishop-Apostle-Reverend Clyde Champ Grace,” she say, addressing none of them and all of them at the same time. “May God have mercy on your lowdown souls if any of you ever address him as anything other than that.” I wanted to correct her—tell her, “Honey, it’s Yahweh. You mean Yahweh.” But I didn’t say nothing.

She stood there a minute. Most of them—most of us won’t look at her. It was like we was rewriting Genesis, and Ruth was Sodom, and we knowed looking back was doom. I wanted to grab the AMG with my eyes one last time, but I couldn’t. The weight of Ruth was on us all.

28

“Yes, ma’am,” Big Mike finally say. And then other mumbles of the same two words followed from out his friends.

Ruth was satisfied with her work, so she headed toward the small playground in the direction of our daughter apartment. She decided, without telling me, that our walk was over.

I know she think she rescued me. She love me, and that’s one of the ways she likes to show me.

Now, he shame I know his thoughts. I can tell cause he holding his head down, looking at the playground dirt the same way he kept his face stuck to the cement that day Ruth womaned him up. I’m shamed that he shamed. I’m just a man. He can ask, feel, or tell me anything he wants. Anybody can. It’s my job to get him to a place where he can understand. And I got to do it with love.

“My momma like to call me and throw that one on me, Rev. But don’t if it apply to me, it apply to you, too?” He say real soft, like he don’t really want to say it.

“Big Mike,” I say in low voice. I scare myself, cause I sound like my father. I can hear him in my throat. “Remember I told you bout old murdering Saul from the Scriptures?”

Big Mike look up at me and the moonlight bring out a hunger in his eyes I ain’t never really seen before. It scare me a little bit. I know I got a responsibility to him. I feel like I’m in my daughter front room and five sets of eyes watching me speak.

He nod his head. “He the one who name changed to Paul? Killed a whole lot of folks for saying the Jesus name. Right?”

He been listening since we become friends that day. Make me feel like my purpose being served. Like this life I’m living matter. Worth something.

I nod my head and swallow. When I speak again, my father gone from my throat. “Well, he say if we walk in the Spirit, we ain’t got to worry bout keeping with the flesh.”

I stop and look at him. I do that a lot when I’m talking bout the Creator and the Scriptures. It ain’t no easy stuff in that book. I want to make sure he with me. His eyes glued to me. I know he with me.

“When he talk bout flesh, Big Mike, he talking bout this side over here,” I say, pointing to the ground with both of my index fingers. “See, the spirit man and the flesh man always warring with one another. We got to deny one of them in order to go with the other. If I deny—constantly deny my flesh, Big Mike, I’m not bound by the law. That bring order to things.” I can hear the courses I been taking over at the college in my words.

That make me feel kind of bad. I’m living on my daughter. She out working and taking care of me. Working and putting herself through school. Working and not complaining at all. Doing it like it’s normal. And here I am done started school and ain’t never been able to put none of my kids through college. That kind of thing break a man in pieces.

Big Mike stay quiet, and I think he missed my message. I try again. “Because I’m led by the spirit, I’m not bound by the law. See, when the Savior left, his followers didn’t want to go back and do the work he taught them to do. They wanted to sit around and wait for him to come back, so he told them to go out and do the work—His work. That’s work. Just like working on any man job—better than working on any man job. That’s work.”

29

Big Mike nod his head. “All right, all right, Rev. I think I get what you trying to say. So you saying what I do, take care of the kids, hang out with the homies, you know? Just chilling out while Kena at work. You saying that be all right if I think bout it like the Savior work?”

I shake my head, “You trying to make loopholes, Big Mike. Ain’t none to be made here.

This is the one true thing. What you do—you know what you do . . . is that—” “Champ,” Ruth voice call out to the playground.

I turn toward my daughter apartment, and I can see the light from the door Ruth holding open pour out to the curb. I hear laughing on the TV. She wait for my reply. I blink my eyes real hard, trying to steady the headache that feel so heavy to me. The blinking don’t help. Feel like something pounding in my head. Feel heavy—heavy like the truth.

“Huh,” I grunt as loud as I can, getting ready to move in the direction of my wife. To be a good husband. To be obedient and kind.

“BaBro. On the phone. He asked for you this time. Come on. You know I been on him,” she say. Ain’t no urgency in her tone. But it’s wanting. Expecting even. For me to get the phone and for my boy to get right with me. I know she feel like she done fixed it for me.

Fixed my boy to make him talk to me. And even though I want him to want to talk to me on his own, I feel kind of nervous and excited bout hearing his voice. Ruth ain’t excited. She talk to him when he call, but she mad at him. He stubborn. More stubborn than her. She can’t make him do nothing he don’t want to. Talk to him so she can keep me up-to-date bout him, but she can’t love him like she need to, cause she think vengeance belong to her.

Say he hurting me on purpose, and she want to hurt him for that. She can’t get excited.

She hate I love him so much that he got that kind of power over me. I tell her we posed to love like that. I love her like that.

“Can I holler at you later—maybe tomorrow?” I ask Big Mike. “I got to go see what this boy want.” I’m trying not to make a big deal bout it to Big Mike. He don’t know bout me and my son. Our talk ain’t never led to that.

“Y-Yeah, man. You know it, Rev,” he says, offering the pound of his fist. But something there in his eyes—something big and sad like the moon. It’s like his eyes and the moon and the Father telling me to finish the work I started with him tonight. He need me to finish, cause his understanding all that matter right now in the world.

I don’t know what my boy gone say, but I’m seeing the voice of the Creator in the moon in my friend’s eyes. If the voice of my maker can move me to leave my job, my cars, and my house, surely that same voice can lead me to tell my wife to wait. To wait myself for a relationship with my boy. Surely that voice can tell my son to call me again.

“Hold on, Mike,” I say, leaving his pound in the air. And without turning my eyes from his, I call out to my wife, “Can you tell him to call me back, Ruth?”

“I surely can’t,” she shout at me. “You can get in here and tell him yourself. I done all I’m gone do.”

Big Mike blink the moon away from his eyes, and I don’t hear the Creator no more. My right arm tingling. Numbing. And I feel a looseness in my neck that scare me. Make me think the Creator leaving my body. In my head, I beg him not to leave me alone in this world.

30

“It’s all right, man,” he say, offering his fist again. “Hit you up tomorrow. We got tomorrow.”

I nod my head. Too embarrassed to speak, but I let his fist slam down into my numb one.

We break and I hate to leave him with only half a message, but I guess Ruth right. My son is on the phone and I been missing him. I been missing my boy.

I make my way to the apartment to talk to my boy, but my brain feel like it’s slipping and sliding in my head. Ruth standing with her hands on her hips, and something feel wrong with my lips. I want to tell my wife I’m coming like she said. She can take her hands off her hips, and suck her lips in, cause I’m doing just like she said. But her face start twisting up and the whole her body seem to get tall and hover over me. To grow up toward the heavens.

I hear Ruth screaming for our daughter, and I feel like I’m still walking up to the porch, but my body done shrunk, and I’m a runt again. I stop thinking bout my boy on the phone and bout Ruth lips being stuck out cause I ain’t make it in time. And I just lay on the warm concrete and apologize to the Creator bout running out on Big Mike.

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SUSANNA C HI L D R E SS

Our Decent Heaven For Ash, born on my birthday You have been ushered through the sacred channel, your hostess a woman I love down to my toes. You, as yet, know nothing of toes. And could you know the risk I take, you would appreciate how aware I am of sounding sentimental here. When you are old enough to know me, or to know the presence but not perplexities of pain in the body’s cavities, a yellow teardrop on the votive, the sore hollow upon seeing a man in rags, an enjoyable evening spent with anyone first thought unenjoyable, or maybe an evening spent with the dog, you will not resist such mention of toes. It is not the mind that spills, though the mind’s spilling is important enough, in time. It is the need for direction, which might be discretion or even distraction. I can rarely keep them straight. It is a good and true thing to welcome you, who arched my sister’s back while love flickered

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precariously close to my own, too far from you for anyone to notice, 24 hours by car.

At the lookout a man fed me from a bowl of quartered fruits he’d hidden in his jacket. It is the only birthday I have ever been in love and seems I, too, was born, so extravagant the blood I beat through my heart just for it to be heard. In this way, it was my first birthday, though I know it makes little difference to you its sequence, his tips of fingers apropos on my mouth, slices of mango slipping from tongue to throat, our city catching black sky in its net, blinking from all the corners of acuity. Perhaps it is not the mention of toes so much as love. I am told I must avoid certain moments, combing over the untouched portions of language like those particles of light from every tower top, every window, spouting their soundless malapert to the moon, who lit our way up and down, who chauffeured us from the slight to the choice

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clefts of rock where we stood, dimly knowing the nothingness of knowing waited: to lean, to bend, alight the neck, the hip, elbow, knee, and remove the dubiety of incidence. For what another year yields, or, more, another propinquity, I am as newly a Something as you, sprouted from that decent heaven, divisible from vacancies and spillage at once. Do not doubt: your mother’s womb, scarlet and whole, misses you. And so that you know, there’s enough in all the heavy words to keep teasing them out, a lanate infancy to each mention of love that I, for one, will not hesitate to tell you of it now, your slight blue veins already providing apprentice, the precise spoons and bowls of the body already stirring, already stirred.

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JOSEPH H E I THA U S

Toll She speaks of what the bells do and I think of Donne’s meditation and how a person pulls down hard on a rope and how the time tolls across the air and I think of God and how my wife’s voice rings against our children at night counting those moments before sleep, theirs and ours, and I know I want love, hers and God’s, and the bell’s blessing, but I understand the pun, the tolls we pay. Affliction is a treasure, says Donne, though I don’t agree.

The bell’s toll for the dead reminds us of our own afflictions and we should be happy about that?

Nevertheless we make the moment count by humming something sweet or kissing our infant on her head or appreciating the smell of her hair, how intricate and small those fingernails we trim off carefully with our teeth, knowing, of course, that while we do this affliction haunts, that even in this room with its lamplight and pillows and coos there will be tolls to pay, unexpected taxes, like those scenarios we watch from the windows of our house: divorce next door, murder across the street, the slow death around the block, her limping past each day on the sidewalk.

There’s no end to affliction’s treasures, no end to the tolls that hammer out each hour, nor is there an end to grace, the bells between the evening’s silences, this moment here when I whisper back to the woman I love.

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JAMES C R E W S

God Spot God would never speak to us in tongues or show his face in patches of shower mold, on burnt toast or a steamed-up window when he could just touch that place in the brain said to be the sole sweet spot where we link with his signals.

Maybe it’s those beams we’re looking for when our dreaming eyes blink wild behind our shut-tight lids, scanning scenes that seem to stream from the sky for a sign of the ghost light that makes each mind a homing device.

Last night, when I felt the sudden weight of someone sitting on the edge of my bed, I shot up in the dark and pressed a hand to my chest. Are you there? I almost asked, but the question faded as my eyes adjusted to the earthly shadows of dresser, nightstand and armchair in the empty room. I got up and stood in the square of streetlight shining like a door on the floor, and I listened as my heart hammered home its lone message: I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.

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HAN NAH FA I TH NOTE SS

Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast I say the most obvious things to you all the time: the cold river water flows from mountain snowmelt. The birds fly from tree to tree—not woodpecker, not pileated, just bird, bird, tiny bird.

I’ve never had much to say about nature.

I’m not the type to name spruces and firs by their needles. I forget what’s native, what’s invasive. The book of nature is heavy as water, so I leave it out of my pack.

What I know: when I snapped cottonwood twigs to show you hidden stars, you were already far gone up the trail, and I was left holding the topo map.

You followed bent limbs out over the river to be closer to water, play water, rocks, play rocks, the play of water over rocks, the way the river will name itself to you until I tell you otherwise.

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The Vision of Mae Anna STE P H A N I E D I CK I N S O N

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1919. WHI TE R I VE R . SOU TH D A KOTA .

as I tug off the school uniform blouse with its yellowing sleeves and twist the skirt’s buttons too big for their loops. I am a runty but strong Lakota girl with one shoulder rising higher than the other and scars like gooseberries welting my back. I change into the boy overalls from the orphanage laundry. The red flannel long johns itch.

Honeylet begins tearing the blouse into baby rags. “Goodbye to Sister Agatha and Sister Magda,” she says.

Goodbye to the ruler and switch, goodbye to the school where Honeylet lived her whole life and I lived half of mine, goodbye to the black locust grove, to the enormous turkey we named Fat Turkey Who Waddles, goodbye to the ants’ forest and thistle root, to the place where English is spoken, and Lakota barely whispered.

The baby sleeps in a blanket fragrant with dry leaves. When we washed his bottom in the river he hardly cried. His black hair comes from his mother Honeylet and from his nameless father, his blue eyes. In the night’s middle we carried Honeylet’s newborn from the nursery and ran from Tekakwitha Indian Orphanage and School. We walked long miles before we reached the White River, hiding until first light in the reeds. They will be looking for us, two girls, one fifteen, the other barely fourteen, already a mother. You see how these native girls are, the nuns will say. No morals. Thieves, savages. In a few days they would have given the baby to a white couple. Honeylet, stealer of her own flesh.

Resting now, we kneel next to the river where we watch fish swimming, two bass with long whiskers, the same pair we saw sucking moss from a stone. “Some fish make bubble nests,” I say, then cup my hands and splash my face. I am known by the nuns to be the girl who talks to fish, who can catch them with her fingers if she chooses. “They rise to the surface and take in air, and then they hold the saliva bubble in their mouth and release it on a water lily’s underside. They lay their eggs among the bubbles.”

“I wish I had whiskers like the bass fish.” Honeylet’s laugh is a tinkling bell. It’s the first time since her belly came that she’s made the happy sound. “The bleeding has almost stopped. If we could hold bubbles in our mouths, we’d float to the sacred cave. My feet are tired of walking.”

Wading into the river, I dip my fingers into the water and call out. A fish swims into my hands, a female shad fat with eggs, one who has sacrificed herself. With a rock I cut her open and scoop out the salty roe. I thank her and wrap the shad’s silvery flesh with some leaves. “Here, Honeylet, eat these for strength.” Another leaf is a plate for the eggs. She licks it clean. Then her black eyes go still as standing water, and I touch her hand. They won’t find us, my hand says. But first we must reach the Black Hills where our people live.

Her black hair shines, shorter, just below her ears, while mine is higher than my ears as though a boy. Her two braids join mine in the dirt where they fell after I cut them off with a knife taken from the school’s kitchen. I cut only half as much as mine. I pick up the braids and a sharp stone. Crouching in the weeds I dig deep, and then press the braids to my nose, inhaling their nutmeg and wind before dropping them in the hole and burying them. No one must know we came this way.

“Sleep for a while,” I say. “I’ll build a fire and cook the fish. You rest. I’ll keep the lookout.”

“My son still doesn’t have a name,” Honeylet says, her lower lip trembling. I think of I LISTE N T O T HE R I VE R

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ditch lilies blown by the wind. “Jericho is a good name. Jericho for the walls the believers brought down with a trumpet call. Sister Rosalina spoke of Jericho. The oldest city on earth.”

“That word belongs to the nuns,” I tell her. Honeylet taken as a baby to the orphanage does not know the Lakota naming ways. I spent seven years with my mother before they came for me. “Once we find our people we’ll ask a Lakota elder to name him.”

“Will we find them soon?” Honeylet asks.

I nod. There are places called reservations where the oldest orphanage children lived before they were taken. My friend is still staring at herself in the water, her slanted eyes glistening from the silvery scales of quick-moving fish, black eyes shaped like almonds.

Teachers jealous of her knew they could not kill her beauty with the cat o’ nine tails, but with me, not gifted with prettiness and having a mouth full of Lakota words, me, they could beat.

“How do you like Jericho Blue Horse, Mae Anna? Someday his eyes will run like horses, don’t you think?” She thrusts out her chin. “I’m afraid to sleep. By now the Sisters have told the sheriff’s deputies. They’ll find us when we close our eyes.” She kneels beside the baby and kisses him. “I can hear him listening. His little ears are so open.” When she straightens up she holds herself around the middle.

I wonder if her belly is still tender but do not ask. “They won’t trust their horses in the dark,” I tell her, “and we stay away from roads.”

I tie together a tinder bundle of juniper brush to build a fire. The brush is dry and the flame takes. The smell of burning wood reminds me of my mother’s scent—skinned meat and smoke, her hair black as though climbing into a cave that hadn’t seen light, hair like the spilled blue-black ink of Sister Agatha’s fountain pen. She died of measles. I know my father’s name—George Fools Crow. My mother said whooping cough killed him. Jericho Blue Horse. I try out the name in my mind.

Fireside, I pinch the leaping sparks with my fingertips, and then let the Big Dipper pour its stars on us. Honeylet asks to hear the story about the orphan boys who lived on scraps and played with the camp dogs. As she listens, she rocks the baby. “The dogs and orphans loved each other, especially in cold winter when they slept together. The boys wore rags and the children who had mothers and fathers made sport of them. Everywhere they went they were called names.” Honeylet’s eyes widen, and in their inky blackness the fire casts its flames. “Instead of being human, the orphans decided they would prefer being switch grass. ‘If we become grass the buffalo will eat us,’ piped up one brother. ‘What about rocks?’ another brother asked. ‘Or water? What about becoming trees?’ ‘No,’ said the wisest brother, ‘rocks can be buried, water spilled, and wood burned. Let us go up into the sky and become stars.’ The stars you see closet to the earth are the orphan brothers and the camp dogs that followed them into the sky.”

She squeezes my hand. “You must tell that to Jericho . . . I mean the baby . . . when he is older. You must. He will be blessed with great insight.”

The fish wrapped in husks smolders on the coals. The late September night, pierced by the nearby screech owl, belongs to us too. I feed my friend the crisp fish skin and white flaky inside. I ask her if she remembers the times we skipped our orphanage chores and

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hid in the black locust grove. How we played with our leaf girls and she’d made friends with the ant marching across the vastness of her hand. “Do the grass blades look to you like trees?” she asked, and smiled so sweetly.

“I thought then we would run away someday. Now you look like a boy and you’re just as strong,” she says. “Promise we’ll always be together, the three of us.”

I lie down beside Honeylet and the baby. He smells of cedar needles. I put my arms around them and pull the blanket over us. “I promise.”

Sister Agatha teaches with her ruler and chalk. Virginia Dare is the name she scripts on the blackboard. The first English child born in the so-called New World. What happened to her and the Lost Colony of Roanoke?

“Did the eighty colonists waiting for a supply ship from England begin to starve?” The Sister pauses, and then taps the board.

My empty stomach rumbles; it growls as if a beast, a hungry mountain lion sniffing prey.

I try to press the hunger down. I try to wonder about this Virginia, the white baby whose name Dare tempted the fates, but I can’t. I think of the cold boiled potato in my undershirt that I’ll share with Honeylet. I think of lard and the excuse I’ll use to get into the scullery.

While we Lakota students plant and harvest the bountiful gardens, pickle and preserve the beans and tomatoes, the sweet corn and cucumbers, fill the bins of the root cellars with potatoes and squash, the crocks with cabbages, little of it finds its way to our dinner table.

Instead we’re fed a thin soup, and on Sunday, a thicker gruel flavored with bones and shreds of meat. The mountain lion of my hunger wants to lunge and bite.

“Was hunger the reason the colonists dismantled their settlement? Did they seek shelter with the Chesapeake Indians? Or did the red men massacre them?” Sister Agatha strides between the desks with her thick hands, their palms padded like the cushioned paws of the bobcat. I picture her thin vinegary lips opening wide and seeing not her oddly spaced yellowy teeth, but a jaw fitted with sharp white incisors.

“What do you think happened to the infant Virginia Dare? Honeylet, please answer.”

I imagine Virginia Dare with the Chesapeake Indians.

“Honeylet, answer the question.”

My friend drops her head. Why call on Honeylet with her big belly since her thoughts are not in the classroom? Although she hardly fits into the desk, Sister Agatha pretends not to see the globe under her dress. Yet I notice how at meals a glass of milk mysteriously appears beside Honeylet’s plate, sometimes a cheese rind.

Who is the father? I asked her many times. I thought maybe the older Lakota boy who milked the cows. Each morning a few strokes after dawn, Honeylet would pay a visit to the millhouse to skim off the cream and buttermilk for the Sisters’ breakfasts. One gray dawn, the sky still dark, someone waited in the millhouse, and when Honeylet bent with the ladle, threw a gunny sack over her head. We Lakota students count for little. We milk the cows, we feed and water the chickens, we muck out the barn stalls, we make soap and wash the clothes. We learn about the treacherous native peoples who fought with the British during the Revolutionary War.

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Sister Agatha taps her desk. “Chief Powhatan lured the colonists into the forest, and then killed most of them. The young women were forced to bear unspeakable children.”

Her ruler darts to sting the sleeping forearm of Harold (Nodding Crow), tired from his early milking chores.

Outside the insects hum. Locusts lift their tiny saws and when the sun stops to eat the ripe berries, whole brambles disappear into its scorching mouth. The buzzing stops.

The Sister’s ruler startles drowsy Wynema and slaps her arm. She returns to badger Honeylet. “Honeylet, who took those eighty innocent lives? Answer me.”

I raise my hand. She doesn’t like to call on me because I speak and don’t care if I’m beaten.

“Yes, Mae Anna.”

“If Virginia Dare lived, it was with the Chesapeake tribe’s help. Why did the white people bring in return only their measles and whooping cough and alcohol?”

Sister Agatha reddens. I don’t feel the ruler’s sharp edge as it cuts through my school blouse into my back. I picture ice forming between my shoulder blades and down my spine.

The ruler’s metal edge tries to chip through but can’t. I hear her hard breathing.

I think of the gentleness of daddy longlegs.

Afterward, Sister Agatha recites from memory a poem about Virginia Dare blossoming into a beautiful girl who a handsome Indian warrior and a withered medicine man desire to marry. The medicine man, knowing Virginia loves his rival, gives her a potion of toadstools that changes her into a white doe. Tears of milk spill down Sister Agatha’s cheeks for the white doe running through the haunted Roanoke woods. I look around and see no expression on Walking Owl, who the nuns call Tom, or Yellow Bear known as Jasper, or Wynema who is Wynema, or Sleeping-Hawk-on-the-Ground, who answers to Harry.

I listen to the woods keen and hear the leaves rustle “Come join us.”

On the morning of the third day the baby’s cries wake us both, and Honeylet clutches her chest. “I’m burning, Mae Anna. My chest is on fire. What if I have no milk?” The baby struggles, tries to nurse. “Oh, no, there’s nothing. My little horse will go hungry.” Maybe Honeylet’s milk hasn’t come in right. I learned things being a big girl helper in the Papoose House. Think of potato moths and milkweed—anything to try to bring whiteness into your mind. Please milk, flow from Honeylet. The baby starts to cough; milk trickling from his chin. Honeylet hasn’t learned yet about the bubbles—the baby keeps coughing, and his face flushes. I show her how you burp him. Aren’t I the one who bottle fed the youngest orphans? She thumps his tiny back, and the burp comes. A pop-pop sound. He raises his hand. Perfect tiny fingers. How big his eyes are, like pieces of cut-out blue sky.

When Honeylet shifts, I notice the leaves she used to soften her sleep are damp with blood. Her dark eyes are grave and exhausted even waking from sleep. “I’m still bleeding.”

“I know. How much?”

Her eyes well. “Enough.”

“You have to eat more,” I tell her. Watching me open the knapsack packed with yams, hard bread, matches, a whole jar of apple butter, she blinks.

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“Apple butter,” she says in a faraway voice. “They’ll come after us for theft.”

I readied for weeks and put out of sight what I could in the milking barn. I hung our bedroll from the smokehouse rafters between the sausages and ham. The cradleboard I made for the baby I hid in the black locust grove, buried inside the crumbling trunk of a fallen tree. The thing they want most is him. Her son was promised to a white couple.

“Here, this is for you.” I cut us each a slab of bread and lather it with apple butter. I watch her fingers eat as though wrens pecking crumbs. My tongue seeks out every bit of sweetness. The baby lets out a cry and I rock him. The baby feels soft, like the wren’s nest.

I clean his bottom with river water and make faces to stop him from crying at the sudden cold. After I bundle him into the cradleboard, I strap him to my back.

Honeylet reaches for my hand. No matter what, she moves like a willow, while I am firmly planted and squat. “Mae Anna, I hear voices hiding in the wind. I feel eyes in the trees. If they find us, I’ll never see my son again.”

I listen for voices but hear only the baby’s breathing. “They will not find us.” I try to comfort her. “My mother told me that Lakota in the Black Hills become invisible to enemies. The Sisters will send those who will not give up. We have something they believe belongs to them.”

I lead the way through the rocks doilied by blue moss, favoring trails first scouted by snakes and frogs. We follow the water’s rippling dank and breathe the raw musk of river deer and fawns; their eyes search out ours and warn us away from the roads. They can see us because they are kindred beings and wish us no harm. Behind my forehead is the map that shows the way to the Black Hills. I studied the page in Sister Agatha’s atlas, and yet I know where I’m going in the four directions—west, and then north to Wind Cave, the birthplace of all Lakota peoples—the sacred axis mundi.

Near the river grow mountain hickory and chokecherry trees. Honeylet, who has never been anywhere but the orphanage, hears for the first time the sound of quaking aspen, the silver-bellied leaves rustling. “When we plant our garden, all our squash and potato vines will blossom. Isn’t that right, Mae Anna? When we find our people and the sacred land, we will plant, won’t we?”

“Tomatoes so big it will take two of your hands to hold one,” I answer.

“I’d like an apple tree with not only red apples, but yellow ones too.”

“You can have that and wild strawberries also.”

We make our way between the trees, their dust-painted red and yellow leaves and vines.

We stop. Across the path a milky thread spun from one tree to another, and at its center, like the angry dark eye of Sister Agatha, sits a gargantuan black and red spider. Its legs are sticking knives. Honeylet and I stare, wondering what the spider’s showing himself to us means.

“Oh, no,” she says, pointing to where she had been standing—droplets of blood on the ash-colored earth. “It won’t stop. I tried to make it stop. I can’t. I’m still bleeding.”

I think of herbs that will stop the bleeding, teas to boil from sumac and rosemary. My mother tried to teach me. I remember her hands pulling thorns from burdock, water roiling

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in the pan. The baby feels safe in his cradleboard and the motion of the walk soothes him. We come to a stepping stone bridge where a catfish long as my arm is rotting, its head severed and belly split, innards clothed in ants. Taken from the water, someone has left it for the sun and ants.

Honeylet hangs onto my arm, her face drained of color. “I’m certain the nuns are coming and they are riding horses.” She buries her head on my shoulder. “I burn from where the milk flows. Now I’m cold.”

Blisters have opened on my feet and back from carrying the baby.

Sister Magda, the nun in charge of housekeeping, bursts into science class and pulls me into the hall. Geology is one of the white subjects my mind likes. Visitors will arrive soon in the Papoose House where the youngest children live. “Go at once to the laundry and bring clean sheets, as every bed must be remade. Every child in fresh bedclothes.” While Sister Magda instructs me, she rubs her red hands that look scalded and are larger than farmer’s gloves. I watch the light sift in the window and strike her upper lip where the nightshade whiskers grow. Her thick wrists remind me of oak limbs, and her torso the size of the bur oak entire. Never mind learning about rocks, or how the spirit shows itself in stone. The floors must be scrubbed on all fours. Sister Magda’s willow switch is never far from her arms.

When I open the door to the Papoose House, I am told to hurry. Dress the children.

Barking Dog (renamed Ignatius) has had an accident. Sister Magda applies the willow switch. The three-year-old boy whimpers. Hurry. Incense burns and covers the smell of frightened pee. I breathe in the myrrh of Latin homilies.

Sister Magda ushers the well-dressed white couple down the aisles of solemn three- and four- and five-year-olds standing at attention. All hope to be chosen for whatever it is. The man in a black mourning suit is shorter than his wife and peers at her through spectacles perched on the end of his nose. He strokes his pointed beard. The woman too is clothed in black and her golden braids coil around her head as if a garland. How slowly they walk between the rows of small beds, how quietly they murmur, but in voices not so low I can’t hear. Henry whistles a sparrow’s song when they stop to meet him. He believes he’s giving them a gift. “No,” the man says, “he’ll bring the Indian ways with him.” Ignatius, a five-year old with plum eyes and a narrow chin, mimics a hoot owl. One, two birds of prey flutter from his mouth. A ceremony of owls. “Stop that, young man,” the man interrupts. “The hairs on my wife’s neck have risen.” A child wants to touch her hair and asks if it is gold.

The youngest of the motherless ones is Little Claude. ”This one is not too clay-colored,” the woman remarks, “and how well-formed he is. How sweet his smile.” Smiles are rare on the faces of an orphanage child—where would he have learned it. Little Claude’s smile warms even Sister Magda’s iron heart. The woman gives Little Claude a horehound, which every child sees. Their eyes widen as they watch him put the sweet into his mouth. “Oh, look! Goodness!” They see his ear, or rather the no-ear on his left side, where he’d sat too close to the potbelly stove, and then a bigger boy had pushed him against the glowing metal until his earlobe melted. “What a shame! Such a beautiful boy!” The spectacled man

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squeezes the woman’s hand. “None of these will do. We’ll wait for the infant. Sister Magda, how soon before it will be born?” After the grownups leave, Little Claude takes the candy from his mouth and passes it to Henry, who licks and hands it on, until all the children have tasted the sweetness. That couple has been promised Honeylet’s infant. Sometimes the little ones go cold in the Papoose House because it along with the infirmary faces the wind. And sometimes the little ones don’t wake up. The Sisters say they’ve been anointed and are on their way to becoming angels.

Then it is time for Honeylet to give birth. She sinks to her knees in the dining hall and has to be carried to the infirmary. Dr. Norman, the doctor we never see, especially since the coughing sickness carried off Nodding Harold and Virgil Long Face, awaits her. He unpacks his black bag that smells of his horse grazing on apples. I am the big girl helper so they let me stay. I comfort Honeylet when she gasps. I count her breaths between contractions. I would take her pain. Out of the ripped red mouth the boy baby becomes visible.

Blood doesn’t make squeaking sounds. Cry, boy baby. Cry for Honeylet’s sake. The doctor sweeps the baby up by his tiny ankles that look like acorns in his hand and spanks him. A war cry. One, and then another. I clean the birth jelly with well water. I am told to hold the cord over my head until the blood trickles back into the mother. Dr. Norman cuts the cord, knots it, and swaddles the baby in cloth. Five toes on each foot, five fingers. The blonde woman and her bespectacled husband wait outside in the corridor. Dr. Norman tells them they must let the mother nurse him for a month, and then they may come for their son.

The rocks are black and the yellow grasses have faded. The red distance keeps pulling us into it. Fewer trees, just another lonesome stretch of brush and rocks and gnarled roots creeping above ground. When a rutted road cuts through our trail, we cross over quickly, both of us on the lookout for horses and cars. We pass a Model-T stuck in petrified mud, but without its people around. I steer us far from the road a sheriff might travel. The sky darkens over us and the air smells of rain. Without warning, thunder rumbles and rain begins falling. Not a slow, ground-soaking rain but a downpour. Lightning strikes close by. Thunder booms. Honeylet slumps against me, shivering now. The rain strikes—each drop, a pebble, sheets of pebbles, the baby crying. I take off my chore coat and cover baby and mother. In the rain I hear barking and whinnying, the reining in of horses. Dogs, Mae Anna, do you hear dogs barking? I unfurl the blanket and tent it over us.

On our fifth day we begin to climb. I brace myself, helping Honeylet walk, who keeps one arm locked through mine and the other on a walking stick. She is burning up. The baby stays swaddled in the cradleboard strapped to my back, although he cries from tiredness. On my shoulders I carry the bedroll and knapsack; I am stronger now than when we started. From a distance the high hills covered with pine trees appear black. Soon the sun will be sinking.

When we make the next rise, we see a cabin built against the hillside.

“Look there, what is that?” Honeylet says, her voice almost a whisper. “Do you think anyone lives there?”

“It’s an abandoned miner’s cabin.” My mother told me the miners came in droves for the Black Hills gold, and pushed out the Lakota. When no more gold remained, most left again.

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We reach the cabin that no one has entered or come out of. No smoke rises from its chimney. A rusted sieve leans against the outhouse. Honeylet tells me soon she must lie down; she doesn’t know if she can stand without my help. The walking stick falls and I listen to it clatter against the rocks.

“Hello, hello,” I call out, as I push the door open and wave away the closed-up dust. The cabin smells of burning wood—pine needles and spruce. In one corner there’s a three-legged table and in another a rope-slung bed. In the charred fireplace an iron kettle crusted with old stew hangs from hooks. I find a cup of petrified flour. And salt. “Hello,” I keep calling, in case there are unseen beings here. I beat dust from the mattress. The Lakota ancestors have guided us to this place of no wind, knowing we need to rest. When I bring Honeylet inside she stumbles; her legs give out as I spread our blanket over the corn husk mattress. I help her lie down. When she holds her arms out for her son, I lift him from the cradleboard. I press my cheek to his warmth. “Jericho,” she says. “Mae Anna, hand me our baby.”

Outside there’s a cistern and hand pump. I pump until most would give up, but I know the water is only hiding and my arm must call it. I try calling harder, pumping, using what the nuns call elbow grease, until I feel the pull of water. It’s struggling up from the rocks, eager now, pure water, cold and delicious. The water flows. I drink, sweet well water, I splash my face.

I wash Honeylet and her clothes, everything, her skirt, the rags and cattail down, red with blood as though a squirrel had suddenly been slain. I don’t know what to do with the blood that seeps from Honeylet. It frightens me—that shimmer of red clay. The rags that are too stained I bury. With the last of the light I search for wood and kindling, then build a fire in the hearth. I boil water and make grass tea.

I roll the stump stool in front of the door. The three of us lie on the rustling mattress, the blanket over us, and in the fireplace the wood crackles as it burns. Few birds have nested in the chimney, so the smoke leaves the cabin.

I can’t coax Honeylet into eating. “I’m not hungry,” she says, her eyes half-closed. “I want to sleep and feel my baby against me.”

“You’ll get better here,” I tell her. “I’ll call more fish. Soon we’ll find our people, and in the spring we’ll plant our garden. The sweet corn will grow taller than either of us. Each ear sprouting corn silk so soft we’ll weave the baby a blanket.”

Honeylet’s eyes brighten. “ Jericho will lie in the grass and listen to the roots traveling in the ground. He’ll hear the beans drinking.”

“Rest, Honeylet. Look, you can see the stars through that hole in the roof.”

Her cheeks feel hot, and she’s quivering; her teeth chatter. I squeeze cold water with the rags made from my school uniform blouse and press them to her forehead. “How good he smells. I want to call him Jericho Blue Horse. I’ve decided,” she says, “Make sure you call him Jericho and tell him his mother gave him that name. Tell him.”

“You’ll tell him yourself, Honeylet.”

“I wish you had been the father.” Honeylet lifts her head and kisses my cheek. “Tell me again about Wind Cave, where we came from. I’m so cold.”

“I was never there except in a vision. The Black Hills are Paha Sapa—Lakota for the heart of everything that is. There are people in the sky, my mother said, and people on earth. The first Lakota came from the star people falling to earth. The Lakota had no 46

clothes and the buffalo did not yet roam or thunder across the plains. The stars in the night sky speak to the rocks here in the Black Hills; they are sisters, two halves. The first Lakota had nothing to eat or wear and took shelter, as Jericho did inside you, in Wind Cave, with its water dripping. They learned from the cave bears. Some Lakota elders think there was once a mighty grizzly bear who went hungry because it was winter and he could find no cave in which to shelter from the wind. He climbed into the sky, and the snow and ice that trailed from his fur and claws became the stars.”

In the night I awaken, yet still sleep. I am dreaming footsteps, rocks scuttling. The wind pushes against the door, then kicks it. I need to get up, I keep thinking, I need to put myself between the bed and the wind. Another kick. In the doorway stands three white men with faces the color of hazel brush, one bracing a shotgun against his shoulder. The wind comes whistling in with them. They are the sheriff’s men. Worse. Bounty hunters. “What do we have here?” The white man without the gun is grinning. His smile makes me shiver as when the sky turns green and the insects go silent. The men wear red bandanas around their necks, rough trousers with suspenders, filthy boots. “We’ve come for you two and the infant. You stole that newborn from its rightful mother.” They give off the odor of civet cat like the one that crawled inside the orphanage’s cellar. I can smell the men gathering around the bed, my throat tightening. The nuns tried to steal Honeylet’s baby. She is the rightful mother! Honeylet, tell them you are the mother! I try to shout. My voice doesn’t carry. The baby starts to cry. I feel for the knife, I can’t find it or even feel my fingers. “Put it down,” the shotgun man says. “You’re trespassing and under arrest.” I drop the knife I didn’t think I held in my hand. Please, tell them you are the mother. The baby kept wailing, and Honeylet didn’t answer. Honeylet? I picture her turning into a fish, the size of a girl, lying on the bank of the river. Her legs are gone, and instead fins grow triangular from her trunk and large silvery scales cover her, but the face is hers. Sister Rosalina comes in and holds one of our leaf girls, its dress of ash leaves withered now, and if I breathe on it, little by little I could blow the breath of life into it. “Why did you take off the long yellow sleeves of your uniform that God gave to you to wear?” she asks.

The bearded man with the lantern holds its glow over Honeylet. Don’t go near her. I try to shout, my knuckles whitening. Honeylet, wake up! They’ve come for us. The September night is colder in the hills. I smell the faint odor of kerosene and coffee. He keeps the lantern hovering over her. The baby wails. “This girl’s not going to wake up. She’s gone.”

Redness soaks the bed—blood like all the blood in her body had gushed out, soiling the mattress. His boots squeak, the one who shook the knife from my hand. “You killed your friend.

You savage! The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” The fire pops and wood sparks fly. I leap up to push the lantern away.

I jerk awake, my body hot, my heart racing. Beside me in the bed the baby is crying, his mouth against Honeylet’s breast. There are no men in the cabin, nothing but the flickering 47

fire, no red bandanas, no broken door. I touch the baby’s head. “Honeylet, wake up.” I try to lift her shoulders; her eyes stare at the cabin sky. I skate on the surface of her lightless eyes, ponds of black ice, nothing. I take her wrist, searching for her pulse. I hear my own beating. My heart is beating in my fingertips. Her skin is warm. I call out to the elders, to the Black Hills. I place my mouth against hers, and try to blow breath between her lips. I keep blowing my air into her.

“Mae Anna, stop. I can breathe.” Honeylet says, sleepily, blinking. “Why are you crying out my name? You’re frightening the baby.”

I’ll remember the smell of Honeylet’s hair—cloves and smoke, and the happiness trembling through me. I’ll remember the vision of the bearded men and how Sister Rosalina’s habit sounded sweeping the earthen floor, how I called on the ancestors, the stones and sagebrush, I called on the arrowheads, the gray bats and antelopes, the hunting women, and the men riding war ponies, red circles painted around the ponies’ eyes. I called on the camp dogs and orphan brothers and they answered.

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MARIANNE LETTIERI. They Dream and Stare Upon the Roving Sky. Discarded doll pram, wood, plaster cloth, acrylic, found photos. 38 x 32 x 14 inches.

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Top Image EVAN MANN. Katharsis. Film still.

Bottom Image EVAN MANN. Voyage of the Intergalactic Space Dangler. Film still.

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SCOTT KOLB O. Alley Kids Tree. Image sequence detail. Television monitor,

DVD, ink, acrylic, graphite, and charcoal on mylar. 25 x 18 inches.

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PAUL FLIPPEN. The Least of These. Oil, acrylic, and relief print on canvas on panel. 32 x 32 inches.

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DEB SHELD ON. The Things We Keep. Mixed media. 21 x 37 inches.

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LAURA CARPENTER TRUITT. Smash. Oil on canvas. 38 x 48 inches.

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JODI HAYS. Heap. Oil on canvas. 26 x 20 inches.

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STEVE PRINCE. Big Zipper Project. Woodcut/Relief print. 48 x 96 inches.

Top image credit: Michael Singer. Bottom images credit: Aleäa Rae

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MI HO N ONA KA

A Bird at the Market The sound of “quotidian” belies its meaning, summoning such a posh feel. This morning I noticed a Cambridge student buy potatoes and a cauliflower head at the market.

He was in the play I had seen last night, Aristophanes’s The Birds. Quite literally, it was all Greek to me.

I liked it nonetheless, the actors strutting and fluttering their wings like the real thing, and this guy was the king of birds! How odd it was to run into him without a beak. I wanted to thank him for the play, for reminding me how alike birds and man are. I wanted to invite him for a cup of tea, to the room I had rented from a surly Irish lady in what used to be the university servants’ quarters. How hard is it to build a town in the air, exactly in between earth and heaven? I wanted his wings, to stay in the spot where I could be wrapped in all steam of sacrifice and common prayers, not to intercept them, but to learn the lesson for myself: do not grow bitter after each god leaves you, is leaving you.

The art of the ordinary & unblessed.

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JULI A CAR I ÑO

Long Creek Trail At Seashore State Park, I like to watch

the osprey empty their beaks into the beaks of their young, see the charcoal mouths grasping for the brine

of inch-long mummichogs and minnows. I love how the park quarters itself out:

down the Long Creek Trail, distinct zones of variegated flora. First, the choke of emerald fiddleheads that curl, quietly

parting by water’s edge to take me into dunes shot through with an augury of Carolina jasmines in bloom. Then, the deepened

viridian in the shade, the cardinals softly nesting in their holly pockets, pine sap collecting in the swale, and the rustle

and dash of cone by foot. And here the branches run into scarcity while everything else opens up—the sky, the path, the rocks

scattering themselves haphazardly into the brown silt, the fallen trunks sunning themselves half buried

in the marsh while their gnarled branches antler up toward the sky as if part of immense animals that have burrowed down

into the cool bleed of marsh muck and tall grass. Everything is louder here— the sun, its glare, the reeds whisking backwards

over shallow pools, the grass sprawling tufted, tawny in the crunch

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of mid-spring’s spackle, and my eyes

draw up to the lean snags of dead cypresses where the ospreys have perched their twig nests.

I am here—witnessing, remembering how even the softest body can shrug itself out of the well-worn husk, can move

naked into the hollow of another shell as it continues to thicken on its own. And I walk on—

to where, finally, the woods drape themselves with Spanish moss, gray tendriling over everything in sight.

The soft things wind quietly around the limbs,

dampening each remembered profusion of extravagant color—leaving only the osprey: their feeding, their flight. Knowing exactly how often

I’ve seen the young take minnow to mouth, all softness in me is unhoused every time.

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review

Balefire, by Shann Ray Lost Horse Press / University of Washington Press, 2014 R E VI E W ED BY RI TA J O N ES

in the corner of my godmother’s living room, there is a print of the Wheel of Life, also known as The Wheel of Becoming. These intricate, mandala-like paintings are a visual guide to the Buddha’s teachings on samsara (the cycle of existence). The whole wheel is cradled against the belly of a beast, surrounded by an eternal blue sky, the moon of nirvana, and lotus blossoms—all crafted in hues of indigo, orange, scarlet, and ivory. My godmother’s print is poster-size, bordered by dusty prayer beads and a few drying sprigs of lavender.

The gold etching that demarcates each realm of samsara has cracked and peeled over the years, falling among her candles like confetti.

Judith, my godmother, encouraged a pluralist faith in me. My father an evangelical, my mother agnostic, my grandfather Catholic, and Judith—well, she poured out dharma talks with tea and surreptitiously taught me about Jesus as a bodhisattva. Sometimes I still pray that way. On cold mornings after our sleepovers, I would come into the living room, the porch windows overlooking a forest cliff to Whidbey Island’s eastern coastline, and there she would sit—incense peripatetically wafting around her body, carved gold chimes in each palm, the whispers of om mani padme om as I nestled against an ottoman AB OVE T HE B U D D HI ST A LTA R

to watch. When she finished her practice, she would beckon me with a wink and an outstretched arm. I sat in the crook of her crossed legs, and she bent her head next to mine, her hair, wisps of gray and fire red, falling along my body. And the lessons would begin—lessons of her teacher, Rinpoche soand-so, philosophies of nonviolence, how to pray over dead animals or the curry chicken she was making for dinner.

Once or twice, we talked about the Wheel of Life. In the hub of the wheel are three fighting animals: a snake, a bird, and a pig. They represent, respectively, the three poisons of aversion, attachment, and ignorance. From that hub, one reads outward through the six realms of samsara, from the animal realm all the way up to the god realm. In the sliver of the wheel that belongs to the human realm, there are drawings of the many stages of human development— birth, friendship, growth, old age, sickness, and death. “The purpose of the wheel,” Judith would intone, “is to teach gratitude and patience. Gratitude that you do not live among the gods, for they are burdened by pleasure and responsibility, or among the animals or in hell, for they only have pain and fate. Here, in the human realm, we have choices. We have feeling.” She told me not to force the wheel. If I pushed too hard, I would

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spin closer to the hub. “It’s best,” she said, “to move as the wheel does.”

That kind of circular motion, a motion that teaches both acceptance and the craft of witnessing, is what lingers when I finish each of Shann Ray’s poems. Balefire, Ray’s first collection of poetry, is rife with not only circular imagery but also a circular feel—something that you might be able to roll between your hands, or move along the roof of your mouth. The reader is reminded of the cosmic curve—the moon, the eye, the sweeping horizon—a curve that exists to reveal and obscure, to bring darkness to day and dawn from night.

Ray’s poems explore the simple unfolding of life and death, with all its delicate fissures of atonement and forgiveness, brutality and beauty. In “Little Dry Creek” and “She Walks in Darkness,” Ray opens us to the possibility that when we have watched a sunset we have watched something die, that laughter and thunder resonate in the same hollow of awe, and that sunlight pierces just as much as it warms. In the latter poem he writes: When the day dies I want to remember there is nothing

so affirming of my own death as the autumn trees carrying dusk in their arms.

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If you have read Shann Ray’s 2011 collection of short stories American Masculine you will see a few characters and scenes reappear briefly, especially among the poems of Sections II and IV. In “The First Definition of Family,” we find a familiar father and son in a violent tangle: The father lifts the son from the ground and slams him into the nearest oaken midback, spins the boy to the window and the purple sky over the cottonwoods splintered by stars . . . the first slap hits hard and a white mark blossoms red.

It is a testament to Ray’s talent that he is able to recraft these stories in staccato lines, each stanza providing the reader with a harrowing and nuanced retelling. Among his new poems describing intimate family moments, the sage green hills of Montana, and wildfire through the window, I greet the characters of American Masculine like old friends, my ear attuned to the new wisdom unfolding from their familiar faces. I have fresh tears to give them as we part again.

Balefire serves as a testament to Ray’s stylistic diversity and use of language. He fluidly transitions between prosaic pieces and poems with lines no more than four words long, each arresting in its own right.

There is a climate for many creatures here—

review

some that move languidly along a cold creek bed, others that race like the heartbeat of a fearful child. For with Ray’s work, the reader is gripped by the imagery, slowly turned upside down by each purifying paradox— almost afraid to read on because you can feel the tragedy coming, but so drawn by each story so human, so loving, so terrifying, that you have no choice but to move with him, to follow. To move as the wheel does. To inhabit the stories along the wheel: the fists of fathers, the sacrifice of strong women, the hunger and thirst of the open plain, the

“wilderness of the human mind” (“After a Curse Against Elegies”).

Shann Ray’s poetry reminds us to slow down, to find the words, and in the midst of all this turning (which will come), to truly feel. He reminds us that our loving hearts are just as much of a mystery as our inner darkness, and each must be given words.

We are encouraged to explore greatness and invited to slowly walk in the “hollows and swales / the rise and fall” of this realm, “each of our tears held bright / blue in your hands” (“Invocation”).

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STEVE PRINCE. Urban Mix Tape. Graphite on paper. 96 x 204 inches.

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DIGGING FOR NOTHING J A MES S I L A S RO G ERS

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the medical drama St. Elsewhere was the mostwatched series on television, few people had ever heard of the seventh-century St. Eligius for whom the fictional hospital was named. Fewer still would have known the profession for which Eligius was patron. I was one who did.

My youthful fascination with the calendar of the saints—a literal calendar started it, one given away free at the back of the church each new year—has studded my memory with loads of such largely useless information. St. Eligius, I happened to know, was the patron saint of excavators.

Maybe St. Eligius smiled on a warm day in April when my daughter Annie, who was seven at the time, asked if she could dig a hole. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to find the shovel, hand it to her, and say, “Sure.” I think I made the decision not with the mind but with the nose. Here in Minnesota, the smell of cold, wet dirt is as least as welcome as the proverbial robin. Children are anointed with the muds of April.

As I rummaged through the garden tools for Annie, I thought about my Grandmother Davitt’s house in the small town of Green Isle in Sibley County, where we visited almost every weekend. One Saturday when we pulled up in our Chevrolet station wagon, I hopped out and ran to my waiting grandmother, asking, “Do you have a shovel?”

Grandma laughed. I suppose my greeting was indeed a non sequitur. It made sense to me. Having come from the confinement of a city lot, digging holes in the fields near her house seemed an ideal way to fill up a weekend.

Weekends needed filling up. Children were not particularly welcomed in Grandma Davitt’s home. She deliberately set mousetraps in the drawers so that we wouldn’t go poking around. In fact, the whole town of Green Isle—about 350 people at the time— seemed quite self-contained and suspicious of outsiders. Like all small Irish communities, its residents raised tedium to an art form. We diverted ourselves by walking down to the railroad trestle, climbing on the International Harvester farm machinery parked in a field next to my grandma’s house, and leaving pennies on the railroad tracks for the morning freight train to flatten. Otherwise, visiting Green Isle meant hanging around while the adults talked. The town was populated, it seemed, wholly by relatives of my mother’s: old ladies who took a scrupulous interest in the ritual of determining who looked like who.

Having sorted that out, my grandmother and the other adults gave the impression that they would just as soon not be bothered by children.

Nevertheless, Grandma Davitt must have understood something about kids or at least about boredom, because she promptly found me a shovel.

I dug all day. Since then, I’ve learned that her home in Sibley County rests on what is arguably the richest farmland in the world. Agronomists marvel at the depth of the topsoil.

That meant nothing to me: I saw only limitless black dirt, dirt that I could pinch and smell and even taste, filled with worms, millipedes, and tiny spiders of which I was completely unafraid. A blister formed on my palm, or I would have continued digging until dark.

Thirty years later, as I watched my daughter grunt and toil to break through the grass, I remembered the pleasure of getting past the soil and down into the black soil.

More holes in Green Isle: this time the grownups weren’t indulgent. My cousins and I had looked into the cellar under Grandma’s house. We rarely entered there, in part because WH EN, FOR A T I M E I N T HE 19 8 0S,

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it was so difficult to lift the heavy sloping doors that covered the descending steps; I couldn’t have lifted it by myself. The cellar had an earth floor on which water pooled.

Electrical wires were exposed down there, and I feared switching on the naked bulb that provided the only light. Brian, an older cousin from Wisconsin, was the first to enter the cellar, and he came back up with a post-hole digger.

A post-hole digger, if you’ve never seen one, consists of two spades with narrow blades hinged in such a way that they face each other. The two convex blades form opposite sides of a circle. You drive the blades into the ground, then spread the handle apart so that the blades pinch together. When you pull the two handles straight up, the dirt is caught between them and you are left with a clean hole in the ground. It may sound complicated, but it works with the elegance of a well-crafted tool.

My brother Mike, Brian and his brother Denny, and I leapt on the post-hole digger with the enthusiasm that kids bring to a new toy. We made Swiss cheese out of the field, riddling it with beautifully symmetrical holes. Denny and I were not quite tall enough to drive it in straight, and our backs ached when we tried to raise the loaded blades.

We were gathered in Green Isle for a funeral, I’m sure—that was the only occasion that would have assembled all the cousins—and were wearing our best clothes. Denny was in the new suit his parents had purchased just for the funeral.

Our younger sisters toddled over too. Maureen squirmed and cried when Brian tried to lower her into one of the holes, but my sister Carol was ready for anything. She had on a frilly pink dress with white tights. I have a mental picture of just how she looked that day, smiling as she looked up from the deepest hole.

That happened to be the very moment when Uncle Elroy took a break from the coffee and rolls in the kitchen and came out to check on the kids.

“What are you kids doing?” he asked.

Denny lifted the post-hole digger. There were thirty mounds of dirt nearby.

“Where’s Carol?” he asked with mounting concern.

“I’m here,” she called from the hole.

Uncle Elroy made a quick survey of our diggings and began yelling. Brian, his oldest son, came in for particular lambasting for not having stopped us. “Are you trying to break someone’s leg? What’s the matter with you, Brian? Look at your clothes!”

We glumly set about filling in our work—the tool that was so good at making holes was hopeless as a shovel—and Elroy left shaking his head. “Where did you get that idea?”

The point is, no one gave us the idea. Our reason for digging holes was a variation on the reason explorers climb mountains: because if we did, there would be one there. The logic was too simple for grownups to understand; even when they did not stop us from digging, they were apt to make a smug joke about striking oil or looking for buried treasure. They just had to intrude a purpose on an activity that neither had nor needed a point.

Last summer I walked down the alley past my old house where I lived until fifth grade.

The house is in disrepair; I know for a fact that the garage has not been painted for more than thirty years. But the structure we called the playhouse was still standing, a gray shed (once a chicken coop) that survived for decades. My brother and sisters and neighbor kids took over the playhouse and we spent most of our time inventing games there.

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The Johnson family’s garage stood two feet away from our garage, and one of the most satisfying afternoons of my childhood was spent digging into the sliver of land between the two buildings. Several feet down, the world’s most negligible time capsule, which contains only a slip of paper giving the date, lies buried in an empty mustard jar. I put it there.

It was a sticky afternoon in the dog days of August, too stuffy to be in the playhouse; my siblings Carol and Mike and our neighbor Jackie were in their swimsuits, splashing in the large green plastic wading pool ribbed with heavy pipes.

My mother was in the house doing laundry and rearranging furniture. She saw me when she came out to hang clothes on the line.

“I don’t see why you want to dig a hole in the dark when you could be swimming,” she said. I thought it was an obvious choice, and to give my mother credit, she made no effort to stop me.

When I got below the foundation of the Johnson’s garage, I felt a sense of accomplishment, though the pebbled underside of the slab was probably only eighteen inches down. When I finished digging, I could stand in the hole and the foundation was at my shoulder as I looked up at the sliver of sky. Then I planted my time capsule, refilled the hole, and let the other kids squirt me with the hose to clean off.

I would love to go back and dig up that mustard jar.

In 1965, my family moved from that house—which my grandfather had built, and in which my father grew up—and into a split-level ranch house on the frontier of suburbanization, on Babcock Trail (there was no one named Babcock) in the newly incorporated community of Inver Grove Heights (which were not heights). I was twelve and didn’t particularly want to move. My parents explained the many advantages of the new house. We gained a great deal of space, especially in the yard, though I still had to share a room with my brother. We gained privacy. We gained a rural ambience—in a few years, my sister even started keeping a horse—but I thought we lost more than we gained.

I missed the simple convenience of Sixth Avenue North—walking a block to school, my mom sending me to get milk or bread at the grocery store two blocks away. My mother would thereafter spend hours driving us to and from our old friends in town. Although the new house had a room called a breezeway, the house wasn’t aligned to catch the breeze; I much preferred the old screened front porch, where I had slept in the summer. Though our new house had two fireplaces, I liked neither so much as the old one in the den. We had no neighbors, and when we eventually met kids from down the road they were kids who took a bus to public school, not the kids we saw at St. Augustine’s. And I missed all the family associations: the license plates nailed to the wall of the garage, the buckeye tree my father had brought back from Kentucky.

Another small disappointment: the new house sat on filled land. The ground was sandy and full of rocks. Digging in such rubble was no fun. It was a frustrating chore that required a mining pick.

For all these small reasons, I disliked the new house, and ultimately, have never made my peace with newer homes. Most of my coworkers or friends with whom I went to school have embraced the suburbs without question. I don’t know many who will say they regret living in places like Apple Valley or Woodbury. But my wife and I have chosen a different

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route. We’ve deliberately elected to live in an urban neighborhood, to live in an old house where somebody lived before us, to go to a school that some people’s parents and grandparents attended.

The connection between generations doesn’t always feel profound or ceremonial. There are ordinary moments when I feel powerfully bound to the past. On that muddy April day when I watched Annie—wholly oblivious to St. Eligius’ protection—wrestling with a shovel two feet taller than herself, I knew I was seeing something that my parents, and the parents of millions of other children, had also seen. Annie clouted the earth with great earnestness, putting all her backbone and heart into busting loose a clod of ground.

Looking at the mound and black and brown dirt strewn in the yard, I thought, here’s another way to honor tradition—with a pointless hole in the ground, a pile of dirt left over, and shovels unlocked from the tool shed.

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EVAN MANN. Ascension. Film still.

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review Lila, by Marilynne Robinson Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014 R E VI E W ED BY T O M S CH MI D T

I READ A L OT . More than a hundred books

per year, and serious stuff: literary fiction and poetry, history and religion. This has been my habit for decades. So, the other day I asked a sixty-ish question of my similarly bookish, sixty-ish wife: “Why do we keep reading at our age? Given the kinds of books we choose, it’s not just entertainment. Years ago, I was hungry for insight and wisdom—is that why I still read?” My wife put down her novel, peered over the edge of her mug of Earl Grey, and announced that I am insightful and wise.

Was it irony? I lack the insight to know and the wisdom to inquire discreetly.

Our exchange followed my reading of Lila, Marilynne Robinson’s new novel. I was attempting to convey the remarkable accomplishment of the book without giving away plot details. I said, “Robinson is so smart, she can write ignorant and still get all the good stuff in.” Such is my sorry summary of this superbly crafted work whose author communicates profound truths via the foggy consciousness and limited vocabulary of an uneducated, Depression-era woman.

The two best people I have known were uneducated, Depression-era women. Unlike Robinson’s Lila, who endures years of near-feral subsistence under the dubious oversight of her abductor-caregiver and a pack of wandering laborers, my two heroines had homes. But like Lila, early limitations

rendered them ill-equipped to understand, much less to articulate, the poverty and suffering of their long lives. I met these two women when they were already old: my grandmother Susanna died when I was thirteen, and my friend Mabel died when I was twenty-three. So, when I tell you they were saints, you may think I idealized them, constructing perception as a foil to my budding intellectual life and ambitions.

Maybe. They prayed aloud; I accumulated degrees. They sang hymns; I lectured and wrote. They longed for heaven; I cultivated influence. Is that idealization? No, I think it is more accurate to say that I was mystified by these two women. My rational self could admire, even wonder, but I could not enter their worlds. I could not go to the places they could not leave.

Marilynne Robinson’s purpose is to take us there. Where, exactly? Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. remarked, “I would give my very life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Robinson has given her very life to the task of taking readers there. In the creation of Lila she succeeds marvelously. This character, in all her complex simplicity, invited me to see suffering bear the beautiful fruit of redemption. She lifted me.

How does such an experience function in my life? What is “real” about my encounter with a fictional character such as Lila?

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Wendell Berry observes in the essay “Imagination in Place” that a writer, like a farmer, must go beyond realism to ask “how things will be, how you want things to be, how things ought to be. . . . If, in other words, you want to write a whole story about whole people— living souls, not ‘higher animals’—you must reach for a reality that is inaccessible merely to observation or perception but that also requires imagination.” If writers like Berry and Robinson bring us, even for a moment, to this better and higher place, what is the purpose of our visit? In An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis contends that in good books “we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as our own.” This experience, Lewis asserts, “heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. . . . Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”

Ah, so that is why I continue to read. I am still becoming. And yet I return to earth—but now accompanied by the very earthy Lila. The novel’s title character appears in Robinson’s Pulitzer-Prize winning Gilead as the young wife of elderly pastor John Ames, whose letters to their son constitute that novel. Lila tells the story of John and Lila’s love, and the past that holds Lila back, written from her perspective. The reader witnesses Lila’s immovable inability to trust, awash in John’s irresistible offerings of grace; together, Lila and John embody Francis Thompson’s poetic dictum, “Fear wist not to evade, as love wist to pursue.” Lila’s love, John’s love, and God’s love co-inhere and deepen as the story progresses.

I refrain from further enumeration of plot points and themes, trusting that the reader’s

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open soul will discover what is necessary in Lila’s story. I will, however, comment briefly on one passage from the middle of the book that I believe represents Robinson’s masterful pairing of craft and logos.

After Lila hitchhikes “from nowhere” to find herself in Gilead, she secludes herself in a shack near the river. Fascinated by the local church but wary of people, she steals a pew Bible and copies out passages to ponder. After just a few encounters with John, she intuits their mutual love and overcomes his shy approaches by abruptly asking him to marry her. Just as abruptly, he says yes, but they part awkwardly. The following scene occurs several days later. I encourage you to read slowly, honoring the pace, the spare language, the layered import of every object and every movement: When she came up the bank from the river, she saw him standing in the road, about halfway between here and that damn shack. So there she was, Bible in one hand, catfish jumping on a line in the other, barefoot, and he turned and saw her. He started walking toward her.

She couldn’t think what else to do, so she waited where she was. He didn’t speak until he was close to her, and then he didn’t speak, still deciding what to say.

Lila carries symbols of her spiritual hunger and fierce independence. The choice of fish—fierce, fighting, bottom dweller—is perfect. Lila is at a crux (no better word), “about halfway” between flight and faith.

She is moving, tentative, but love is not.

He stands. Lila almost runs, John is almost silent.

But he does speak, offering Lila a locket that once belonged to his mother.

Then he said, “We spoke about marriage. I haven’t seen you since then. I don’t know if you mean what you said.

I thought I’d ask. I understand if you’ve changed your mind. I’m old. An old man. I’m very much aware of that.” He shrugged. “But if we’re engaged, I want to give you something. And if we’re not, I want you to have it anyway.”

“Well,” she said, “I got my hands full.”

Here is the gospel in both its universality and its particularity. We are always busy when grace comes calling, we are unworthy, we are amazed at the message that “I want you to have it anyway.”

Lila drops the fish and hands John the Bible, symbolically entrusting both her livelihood and her spiritual nurture to him.

She accepts the locket. They discuss marriage, but Lila, ever on the verge of bolting, expresses her reluctance to face a church full of people to be married or to be baptized.

John offers to baptize her there at the river, and Lila accepts—even, reluctantly, accepts the name she has used, not knowing her own.

Lila Dahl, I baptize you—” His voice broke. “I baptize you in the name of the Father. And of the Son. And of the Holy Spirit.” Resting his hand three times on her hair. That was what made her cry.

Just the touch of his hand. He watched her with surprise and tenderness, and she cried some more. He gave her his handkerchief. “When I was a boy, we used to come out along this road to pick blackberries. I still think I know where to look for them.”

It is not only the words of institution but the touch of God that moves us. Incarnation matters. Then Lila and John pick berries,

and John suggests carrying them in the handkerchief: She spread it across his open hands and filled them, and then she tied the corners together. Fragrance and purple bled through the cloth. He said, “I’ll carry it so it doesn’t stain your clothes, but it’s for you, if you want it. You can steal my handkerchief. If you want to remember.

The day you became Lila Dahl.”

She said, “Thanks. I figure I’ll remember anyway.”

If Lila accepts John’s gift, if she joins with him to make a home, she will bleed. And if she submits to love, John will carry her burden. She chooses, adding her domestic touch by “tying the corners together.” And so, on the day that Lila receives her name from God and becomes once and for all who she is, she also receives her vocation as a wife, and she knows that all this is forever: “I figure I’ll remember anyway.” This is story at its most powerful, with treasures waiting for the reader who will drop that catfish and hand off that Bible.

In a recent New York Times interview, Marilynne Robinson observes, “There’s a lot of writing about religion with a cold eye, but virtually none with a loving heart.” Here is one. Robinson knows what she loves, and she has mastered her craft to such an extent that she can transport the reader, through characters infused with light, to the most complex of simplicities. In her related novels Gilead, Home, and Lila—whose very titles are “the soul of wit”—she offers nothing more and nothing less than love. Even the coldest eye may know a tear. Imagine that.

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SCOTT KOLB O. Alley Kids 03. Image sequence detail video projection, ink, and charcoal. 42 x 76 inches.

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review A Book of Uncommon Prayer

by Brian Doyle R E VI E W E D BY MA RI LYN MCEN T YRE

The Lady’s Not for Burning, a lively woman condemned as a witch meets and comes to love a wry and disillusioned man who wishes to end his own life.

As they converse their way out of suspicion and despair, Thomas, retrieving a bit of his will to live, turns to Jennet and asks, “For God’s sake, shall we laugh?” Surprised, she asks, “For what reason?” Thomas’s response is that of a man whose faith in God and in life’s possibilities is returning: IN CH RISTO P HE R FRY’S P LAY

For the reason of laughter, since laughter is surely The surest touch of genius in creation.

Would you ever have thought of it, I ask you, If you had been making man, stuffing him full Of such hopping greeds and passions that he he has To blow himself to pieces as often as he Conveniently can manage it—would it also Have occurred to you to make him burst himself With such a phenomenon as cachinnation?

That same laughter, madam, is an irrelevancy Which almost amounts to revelation.

It is good to remember that laughter is one of God’s more remarkable gifts—odd and unpredictable and redemptive. Thomas’s question is rich with implication for those who believe we are called to joy: what it might mean to laugh

“for God’s sake” is a matter worth pondering.

In answer, one might turn to Brian Doyle’s quirky, poignant, faith-filled, sometimes hilarious writing. In fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and prayer, Doyle’s voice resonates with laughter that “almost amounts to revelation.”

Piety and playfulness seem, as one reads A Book of Uncommon Prayer, not only compatible but at times inseparable. In a heartfelt prayer of thanks for the sea and its odd creatures (including “the seals popping up their heads looking like moist Wilford Brimleys”), he includes a modest request: “Can you send the whales back this way again? One kid missed the sighting, and it’s not every day you see animals the size of school buses in the sea.”

The range of what he regards as occasions for prayer is startling: his prayers include one “for Women Named Ethel and Men Named Elmer, for We Will Not See Their Likes Again,” and one “for the Incredibly Loud Recycling Truck That Comes at Dawn Every Thursday Morning.” He also offers a heartfelt, heart-opening “Prayer for My Man Daniel Age Three Who Will Die from Cancer in About Two Weeks” and a “Prayer of Awed Thanks for Nurses” and one “for People Whose Dads Left Them as Kids.” His prayers of outrage, like one “for Osama bin Laden Yes Even Him the Stupid Murderous Slime” and another of “Thanks for Good Bishops, as

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Opposed to Meatheads Who Think They Are Important” might recall the exuberant permission the psalmist gives himself, confident of God’s generous, listening ear and of His limitless affection, to rant, complain, reconsider, and repent.

In my own circuitous route from a childhood spent in evangelical circles where earnest spontaneous prayer left little room for the written prayers enjoyed by Anglicans and Catholics, I have had many occasions to give thanks for those who write prayers for the rest of us to discover, pray, learn from, and return to.

Phrases from The Book of Common Prayer—“God, our times are in your hands,” “Feed on it in your hearts by faith with thanksgiving,” “left undone those things we ought to have done”—become touchstones and places to which the mind returns as need arises. Crafted over centuries, those prayers continue to offer a living word in ongoing answer to the disciples’ request, “Teach us to pray.” Jesus’ own answer to them has remained a gold standard of simple, confident, generous, humble prayer. It also has provided us with a model on which we ring changes every time we bring our words before the altar of God—imperfect offerings, but blessed by ordinance and divine acceptance.

So we venture into the messy world we inhabit, seeking again words that may suffice as our needs and notions of worship shift shape under the pressures of cultural currents— and under the pressures of rush-hour traffic: in a “Snarling Prayer for the Reckless Jerk Who Just Swerved Insanely Among Three Lanes of Traffic at Incredible Speed While Texting, Causing Us Other Drivers Heart Palpitations,” Doyle funnels his reasonable fury into a reasonable petition for a little of God’s tough love upon the offender, “that you get a grip, that you see what fear and turmoil you

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put into people’s hearts when you drive like that, that you get a dose of humility without paying for it in your blood or someone else’s.”

Doyle’s capacity to combine lightness of heart with depth of reflection and breadth of compassion makes his prayers more than occasions of momentary surprise and delight at first reading; they take us boldly into the ordinary and not-so-ordinary moments of our own lives and remind us how any time and place may open into awareness of grace. To pray for “Dads Enduring the Epic Winter Rains Along the Muddy Sidelines at Pee Wee Soccer Games” and in “Thanks for All Birds, Herons in Particular” is to practice the presence of God by remembering to “bless the Lord at all times.”

Doyle’s “uncommon prayers” are certainly to be read and enjoyed, appreciated and shared.

Unabashedly personal and widely accessible, they open avenues of reflection for us, the “brothers and sisters” he alludes to freely and often, as we make our way through our own moments of frustration and loss and epiphany—proofreaders for whose “eyesight and patience” he is thankful; boys he once coached who “are mostly all taller than me”; women who have lost their hair to chemo and beam in their baldness, “more beautiful than they were before”; and for his own brother, a mathematician, dead at 64, who thought math was a language and a form of music, and who “thought that the Breath was a mathematician.” The embrace of his hospitable intercession is wide, indeed. And Doyle has a wide understanding of who God is, as well. His prayers teach us new and imaginative ways of naming God—“the Breath,” “O Coherent Mercy,” “Inventiveness,” “Dreamer,” “Designer”—names that frame and reframe what can be neither comprehended nor contained. And they remind us that prayer is a habit of mind and heart that takes little more than a will to notice—as natural and full of light as laughter. “And so,” as he would say, “Amen.”

J ESSI E VAN EER DE N

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looks like it’s dying in the late light of October. Still, I rivet my eyes as I pull off to the shoulder and take in the great swath of it along Route 219. I’m driving home from a wedding, full of pulled pork and slaw and the hope that the couple makes it, and what I want is to crack open, even though, of course, that’s the last thing I want. The engine idles, I sit swollen with the rare desire to extend the day, the way, as kids, we put a ghostman on third so we could keep playing after the neighbors and cousins went home and there weren’t enough bodies for teams. The broken seat of a swing—home plate, the lilac bush—first base, the stone slab marking where the septic tank was buried—second, and there at the apple tree—on third—we could see the shape of the ghost, holding the branch, poised to be hit home. A mother somewhere called in our grass-stained bodies in cutoffs, blurring us into one body that shimmered. Because of the sorry goldenrod, the full, aging gust of it off the berm, because its whole is more achingly beautiful than the sum of its parts, my discrete self that was barreling south on 219 is all at once aware that she is not discrete at all. Of course, none of us are, but we try to maintain that illusion of separateness. I could cut the engine, spill out into the gold and the few spikes of ironweed and tufted thistle, and crack open to love my life as something that is not mine. What is it I am remembering? It is my hard little body I had thought a chiseled thing set apart, rocketing around, and then the thrill of that other October evening cooling, our fingers difficult to bend, so cold, as the dark lay its blanket of chill around the church, the door gaping open to the church yard, the larger body I realized I belonged to and could not leave behind. And could not save.

GOLDE NROD AT I TS P E A K

I am, again, twelve, lifting up the tea towel and sneaking two warm oatmeal cookies for myself. Wide gooey discs my mother has baked for the Beatty youth choir. I cup the crumbs that tear loose from the edges. I am home from school, solemnly delivered by the school bus with its interior air all skidded up with Mötley Crüe, the Helmick boy’s tape that no one really heard. The school day has been a haze, sixth grade containing our bodies in lines for lunch, my ear attuned to shoes clicking on the hard floor, each little tick hard and definite and startling. C.P. has died, the boy in the youth choir’s back row.

C.P.’s voice was bread dough, so soft, worked over, and rising. It was as if we all heard the sighing-down when he died in the wreck this morning. As if we could feel his body walking back to the fogged road out of a truck coiled around a tree, with not a scratch on him, then his heart snapping loose as he folded to the ground like a pillowcase doll. We are all patting our bodies to make sure they’re still here, awareness acute all over: each of my underarm hairs like a tuber’s growing eye, spreading out to feel and feel, I pull at them.

My training bra crosses my chest like a harness, my eyes burn and my lips pucker out as if punched. The two cookies are gone and I lie back on my blue gingham bedspread wishing I hadn’t stolen them. Wishing I could eat all the rest.

But could I feel him fall over like a pillowcase doll? No, maybe not that. I couldn’t feel the no-more of breath or heartbeat. It’s everyone else I felt and I feel, the ones left, it’s as if they are swelling my body, as if I have only dreamt them before now, back when I thought they were separate from me.

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In the morning, after we heard C.P. had died, we dressed by the fire. I did not think: This is a day to mark, a time-mark inked into my diary. Still. My brothers and my sister and I rose in the dark, knocked against one another like pups. We pressed palms to the heat of the fireplace and stood in our night clothes with our jeans hung over a chair back, inside out, so they would warm our legs and even our bones. I pulled on my brother Jake’s high school sweatshirt, without asking if I could wear it. Central Preston arched in blocky orange letters on the front, his football number on the back. We watched for stray cinders, sat at the table for our bowls of Cream of Wheat and cinnamon toast made from leftover biscuits. When my sister went to hairspray her big hair, I saw that some cold Cream of Wheat still coated the bottom of her bowl, the grainy white she had sweetened. When no one was looking, I ate what she had left.

C.P. had a wide moon face like my sister’s. He had teased me from the back row of the choir. He’d promised me that, when I got older, I would be his girl and wear his jacket. I did not find him handsome, but I rehearsed it in my mind, imagined myself with his high school jacket on, the orange Central Preston on the fake leather that would make static with my rayon blouse, one of Diane Annette’s castoffs. I would have worn the jacket down the halls at school, listening to the pleasing click of my short jelly shoe heels on the floor, and down the aisle of the school bus in the morning when I boarded and watched my mother’s shape in the doorway of the house through the windows, in her black barn sweater. I would have worn his jacket in the churchyard with the other girls, talking over which flowers—gladiolas maybe—for my wedding up in the grove across from Beatty Church, under the pavilion by the iron water pump. I would have stroked the single line of snaps down the front, rehearsing the nearness of his last name to my first, over and over.

We four huddled for prayer with Mom, holding hands, bearing backpacks. Mom had pinto beans on a low boil for a faraway supper. Then I ran for the bus with the other three, sensing more than seeing the firebrands of the tulip poplars and the maples shrill with sugar and the goldenrod sagging at the fence line. Running, I felt how present C.P. was in his absence, as if he were running with us, our ghostman hit home. I could feel his jacket on me instead of Jake’s sweatshirt I’d stolen without reprimand. The air was wet on my face as I ran. I thought how this was a place of tucked-back houses with long gravel drives, I thought of when we had gone to Gaye’s house where she’d taken in her mom until she’d died, and the house smelled of that camphor, the small scoop puckered the blanket and a depression held on the thin pillow with a barn scene on it. Leaving Gaye’s in the night, we had waited for one of my brothers to unlatch the cattle gate at the end of the drive, and a black angus rubbed the car door with its hot nose, benign but ghostly—or did it? Did we find the smudge? Did we only sense the shape, black out of the black? And now C.P.’s soft body so present, we all watched for it out the bus windows, to show up between us and Mom silhouetted and still standing there as Willie shifted gears and chugged on.

After supper’s pinto beans with ketchup, cornbread, onions, of which I have eaten little because of the two cookies, we head the mile and a half out the road to Beatty for choir practice. It is not yet cold, but it will be. We crest the hill and jostle down the rutted grove

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road to the small white church with its outhouse in back, curtained by white lattice. There is the broken-down school bus, hood up, at the edge of the lot. There’s the dog that runs his line just beyond the church’s fence, toward and away from the Wilsons’ huddle of buildings growing like tumors off the trailer. We cut through the grove, past its pavilion and the water pump standing sentinel.

Inside, we situate ourselves on the wooden chairs and Mom leaves the door gaping open, behind the pulpit, framing the dusk-glory of fall and leading out to mossy concrete stairs and the path to the outhouse. The choir is three Opels, two Dodge girls, my two brothers and my sister Miss and me, the Molissee boys but only sometimes and not today, Gaye’s granddaughters Karen and Diane Annette who give Miss and me their blouses when they’re through with them, and their cousin Tom who acts up and tries to sing bass with my brothers. The lemon scent of Pledge that has polished the altar hangs in a dry mist.

Mom plays the tenor part four times because Matthew Opel is tone-deaf and can’t pick it out when she plays all the harmony parts together. C.P. was the other tenor—he sang worse than Matthew—they guessed at the tenor notes from the back row. Now untethered, Matthew sits by me, in the front where I sing soprano, and as the dusk thickens and promises to be a pure darkness by the time we quit our songs, Matthew’s leg warms mine.

Slowly we feel ourselves flaming as the inside of Beatty becomes the only thing bright in the falling dark. Mom gives Diane the soprano solo about the blind man now seeing, Verse Three, because we all know her voice is best, but it hurts me anyway. “Here I Am, Lord,” “When You Walk Through a Storm,” “Come Unto Me.” We keep singing, sounding no better than when we started, but we know what will happen when we stop, when we acknowledge the chill setting in, our fingers bone-cold, our young tender nipples alert under our shirts and bras. We understand the smallness of our band now smaller, in this space lit up against the night, and when we spill out of here, grabbing cookies from the tin on the way, we will hunt fearfully for each other by sound and touch as we stray into darkness away from the church-window squares of light.

Some of the songs are from the shape-note book, some from the big red hymnal, most from photocopied sheets Mom got from somewhere, but they all become one litany, and it seems that they have always been that, our entreaties, not only for C.P. who walked out of the truck wreckage and walked no farther, whom we could not save, but also for the people of this small place dying out, the Beatty people who have formed our first intuitions of love. Entreaty also for ourselves, for each other, with our blood pulsing with time. We cannot save ourselves either. Our raspy songs grow big with feelings too much for us, they forecast into the future, to a time when our ghosts will outnumber us.

So we sing a litany for the body we are part of. It could be something mystical, how people talk about the body of God, of Christ, I don’t know about that. I know only that this is where I learn I am not my own and that I’ll never leave this place, none of us will, even when we do leave, for college and the Marines and Philadelphia and New Jersey, for marriage, for divorce, for tree-trimming in Atlanta making better money than we can make here. We sing our litany for eyes watching the dark that is only dark until you look harder—then it takes the shape of the water pump rising out of the ground.

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For the mouth of the Wilsons’ broken-down school bus yielding its engine to the wild grape.

For Mary Jane’s tumor, her lost leg, her long gravel drive lost to the pines.

For Matthew’s hand I could take, but don’t.

For legs too naked so Cindy misses on Sunday and we inquire—home sick, her girls say, and we let it be.

For the head pressing upon the pillow with a barn on it, the bear pressing its bulk into the leaf pile in the grove—Bob saw it and told us, C.P.’s father, Bob’s voice is like bread dough, worked over, and rising.

For Jean who drinks.

For the bulbous head of the gladiola in the ground, dormant and then—and Mr. Bell who lets his gladiolas go haywire after Pat dies.

For toes rubbed raw by the jelly shoe.

For the body that wears polyester, has a mess of knots for hands, eats buckwheat cakes soured from twenty-year-old starter kept on the sill, for the body that limps.

For the eyes sprouting on the potatoes in the dank bin in the cellar.

For the frilled face of the strong gladiolas—I will still choose gladiolas.

For the dried locust feet, hair-thin but clinging to the church siding until we flick them off and the casings crush.

For Jean’s arthritic hands spanking Miss when she climbed all over the altar because she didn’t see it as any holier than a plank of fence.

For the mouth gulping their weeping, some of it, all of it.

For fingers on the banjo and untuned piano and rough moustache and stray wisps of hair.

For lips unto the water stream at the pump.

For C.P.’s moon-face like Miss’s like Mom’s, and for Miss’s torso fitting the denim jumper from Diane Annette from Karen from Connie from— And we do rush out, in time, we grab our cookies from the tin on the front pew and run out to find the locusts and the chestnut burrs. We cannot sing forever. We are natives to the light, racing out as aliens in the tar black where there is, waiting, the dead bus ghost, the water pump unyielding, the world of billions of people whose lives are fiercely bound up with ours, for Beatty is but our foretaste. The litany moves into our pumping arms and legs running, a litany that never stops in the great October world.

I sneak back into the church where Mom gathers her song sheets and grieves. I come back in to seek Mom and her perm and ragged-sad face and jeans and homemade blouse; she is not old. Come here, she says without turning to look at me, and she grabs me and holds me. I guess I want to say I stole the cookies, and I wish she’d given me the solo. I want to say I can’t love this place and this people enough, and I can’t escape them but I long to, and I’m sorry. I want to own my life and this hard little body and be shed of the larger one that will demand too much. But she and I can’t say anything at all, we can only crack open.

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contributors

has been published in Narrative, Prism, Cha, and in the Quotable.

She received her MFA in creative writing from University of Virginia. These are the things that she holds dear: poetry, film, music, chocolate, paper-winged moths, synonyms, glaciers, and sunlight catching on unexpectedly reflective surfaces. She hopes one day to publish a full-length manuscript of poetry and a graphic novel (or two, or three!).

JULI A CAR I Ă‘O

is one half of the musical duo Ordinary Neighbors, whose full-length album is based on her writing (the other half is her wildly talented spouse Joshua Banner). She has two books of poetry, two children, two dogs, two other genres, short fiction and creative nonfiction, in which she writes, and too many months of winter to endure every year in Holland, Michigan.

is author of the novel Half Girl (winner of the Hackney Award) and novella Lust Series , which are published by Spuyten Duyvil, as is her newly-released novel Love Highway, based on the 2006 Jennifer Moore murder. She corresponds with Krystal Riordan, the young woman sentenced for her involvement in the Moore murder. She finds joy in watching the feral pigeons of Manhattan, as they so bravely try to feed themselves.

S T EPH A N I E D I CK I N S O N

SUSANNA C HI L D R E SS

was born in Baltimore, but recently moved across one of the scariest bridges in America to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where blue crabs and breathtaking sunsets never get old. Her poems have appeared in Cream City Review, the Los Angeles Review, Puerto del Sol, River Styx, Third Coast, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an individual artist grant in poetry from the Maryland State Arts Council.

NI AMH C OR C OR A N

edits singingbowl.org, a website featuring weekly poems and reflections for the spiritual path. He is the author of The Book of What Stays, a collection of poetry, and lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he picks fresh berries as often as possible.

JAMES C R E W S

was born in Berlin, Germany, and as an army brat bounced around between Germany, Texas, and California at the whim of the Pentagon. Paul is a painter whose work communicates through layers of pattern, abstraction, and imagery, inviting the viewer to enter a dialog with the work.

Paul currently teaches at Colorado State University, living in Fort Collins with a teenage daughter (who is the height of maturity, just ask her), an energetic boy (excited about kindergarten), and a very, very patient wife. www.paulflippen.com PA U L FL I PPEN

is a painter whose works are included in collections of the J. Crew Company, Nashville International Airport, Gordon College, and the Tennessee State Museum. Residencies include The National Parks of America, The Cooper Union School of Art, and Vermont Studio Center. She received her MFA from Vermont College.

She maintains a studio and pop-up gallery (DADU) in Five Points, East Nashville, Tennessee where she lives with her husband and children. www.jodihays.weebly.com J O D I H AYS

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teaches at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, where he and his wife have raised four children. His most notable contribution to Greencastle is a poem called “What Grows Here” painted on the side of a barn just west of town. His poems appear in Rivers, Rails, and Runways and Airmail (San Francisco Bay Press), books written by the “Airpoets” a group of poets who have poems etched in stained glass windows at Indianapolis International Airport. His book Poison Sonnets is available at David Robert Books.

JOSEPH H E I THA U S

is a Puget Sound native now residing in Santa Cruz, which seems to be as close to the PNW as one can get in California, and is currently a fourth-year PhD student in the UCSC history department. She can often be found in the classroom, practicing aromatherapy and deep breathing with her students, while also teaching them about ancient Egypt. In her free time she takes pictures of clouds, reads Rumi, and occasionally meditates.

RI TA J O N ES

is author of Little “g” God Grows Tired of Me (SpringGun Press, 2013), Absence is Such a Transparent House (Tebot Bach, 2011) and Scenic Fences | Houses Innumerable (Scantily Clad Press, 2008). She has a chapbook, 299.0 (Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified), appearing in 2015 with Essay Press. Her poems have appeared in FENCE, Verse, Denver Quarterly, the Laurel Review, and others. She holds master’s degrees in both creative writing and occupational therapy from Colorado State University. She lives in Fort Collins with the poet, Matthew Cooperman, and their two children. www. abykaupang.com A BY K A U PA N G

writes, “I’ve been making art since I was six years old—more than a half century and largely in response to the overwhelming nature of beauty. I’ve felt for a long time that if I do not make art, I’ll either get sick or die from desire for that beauty. I was asked for a biography here, and since I’m sixty-three years old, there’s a lot already published about my work online. So I’d like to simply share that my art flows from my faith, which flows from my love for my Maker. We were made by a Maker, and our hearts are restless until we make something. Something beautiful.”

BRUCE H E R M A N

holds a PhD in English from the University of Iowa. While caring for her two children and completing her first manuscript, she’s also up to other things: listening to layered cello music, making plans for simplifying all the stuff, participating in a prison’s writing workshop, and following her curiosity, which is leading her into the writings and practices of mystics.

Her poems have appeared in The Pinch, Cave Wall, Drunken Boat, American Literary Review, Cold Mountain Review, and elsewhere.

CORY HU TC H I NSON- R E U SS

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was born in Washington State. As a kid, he spent countless hours drawing to stave off boredom. He received an MFA in printmaking from University of Wisconsin-Madison. His interests revolve around the study of culture, aesthetics, literature, film, and contemporary art. In his studio art work, he is interested in the incorporation of new technologies into traditional art-making strategies and mixing elements from high and low culture. www. scottkolbo.net S CO T T K O L BO

contributors

GEOFFRE Y KR AW C Z Y K

was born in Oklahoma in 1978. He was introduced to art at a young age by his father, a professional cartoonist, illustrator, and Vietnam vet.

Growing up in a family with a disabled veteran gave him an interest in the nature of sacrifice and violence, and greatly influenced his art practice. www.breakingbreadproject. com and www.geoffreyk.com

include a little quiet time, a few hours of writing, a conversation with one of her kids, and a walk with her husband. Her books include Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, What’s in a Phrase?, and most recently A Faithful Farewell and A Long Letting Go—the last two written for people who are dying and for their caregivers. Reading Bryan Doyle is her idea of a good time.

creates art objects and installations out of cultural castoffs imbued with history and memory. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she devotes her time to making art, encouraging artists, and helping churches to engage in the fine arts. She has an MFA in spatial arts from San Jose State University. Her current favorite object is a 1930s tiara that she wears when cleaning and gardening. www.mariannelettieri.com

MI H O N O N A K A

MARI AN NE L E TTI E R I

is a native of Tokyo and a bilingual poet. Her poems and essays have appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Ploughshares, Cimarron Review, American Letters & Commentary, Iowa Review, Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House and American Odysseys: Writings by New Americans (Dalkey Archive Press). She teaches English and creative writing at Wheaton College. recently published her first full-length collection of poems, The Multitude, winner of the Michael Waters Poetry Prize from Southern Indiana Review Press. Nearly ten years ago, she published two poems in Ruminate’s very first issue! She lives in Seattle with her family.

H A N N A H FA I T H N O T ES S

invents imagery suggestive of cosmic forms, cellular structures, biological architecture, sea life. His depictions often traverse through multiple mediums: drawing, sculpture, video, and installation. Evan earned his MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Evan lives and works in Colorado with his wife and their daughter where they run a Denver-based commercial video production company: Otherworldly Productions. www.evanmann.com EVAN MA NN

teaches medical humanities at the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program, offers writing workshops and retreats, and finds that her happiest days MARI LYN M C E NTY R E

lives with his wife in San Francisco. He received his MFA in printmaking from San Francisco Art Institute. He served as Ruminate’s visual art editor from 2006-2008 and his print “rhino” appeared on the cover of Ruminate’s very first issue. www.nicholaserikprice.com N I CH O L A S PRI CE

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received his MFA in printmaking and sculpture from Michigan State University. He is currently an assistant professor of printmaking and drawing and artist-in-resident at Allegheny College. He has lectured, created commissioned artwork, conducted workshops, and shown his artwork internationally. Prince is represented by Eyekons Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan, (www.eyekons.com) and Zucot Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia. For documentary on zipper project: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=5Y5-bHRoVjs. STEVE PRI NC E

has lived in Minnesota all his life and never wanted to be anything but a writer. He’s written poems for many publications (including a chapbook, Sundogs, in 2006), a book about cemeteries (Northern Orchards: Places Near the Dead, 2014), and essays, three of which have been named “notables” in Best American Essays.

He’s also active in Irish studies scholarship.

Most of his writing comes back to the question, What makes a place meaningful?

JAMES SI L A S R OG E R S

reads lots of good books and occasionally attempts to write one, but his grandsons would rather that he play with toy trucks. He tends eight hens that lay eggs of eight different colors in a coop near nine rows of beans and a bee-loud glade in Vermont where Tom lives, by grace, not alone.

TOM SCH M I DT

writes, “I live in the Northwest and was raised on a farm. My paintings tend to be earthy and on the subjects of nature and introspection. I like to explore the whys and the what’s nexts of feelings. I love when a painting resonates with a viewer. It instantly bonds us. I have a “day job” where I talk to people all day long and am constantly reminded of our shared feelings.”

DEB SHELD ON

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writes, “I live and paint in Colorado, having previously lived in Ohio, Scotland, and Baltimore. This matters because landscape and environment are my subject, my muse, and the lens through which I paint. In Colorado, I teach, paint, and enjoy my small family of four.”

More info at www.lauracarpentertruitt.com L A U RA CA RPEN T ER T RU I T T

is author of the novel Glorybound, winner of Foreword Reviews’ Editor’s Choice Fiction Prize, and the novel My Radio Radio forthcoming in spring 2016.

Her work has appeared in the Oxford American, River Teeth, Best American Spiritual Writing, Red Holler, Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean, and elsewhere. Jessie received her MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa. She lives in West Virginia where she directs the low-residency MFA program at West Virginia Wesleyan College.

J ES S I E VA N EERD EN

is a mother, poet, and essayist based in southern California. She is a contributing editor for The Root and a contributing writer for Kirkus Reviews. She is the author of the chapbook Movement No.1: Trains from Dancing Girl Press and the forthcoming chapbook The Leaving from Akashic Press. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Salamander Literary Journal, North American Review, Lit Hub, Fjords Literary Journal, and others. Follow her on Twitter @HopeWabuke.

H O PE WA BU K E

received her PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas. Her stories have appeared in Joyland Magazine, Kweli Journal, Ruminate, and Potomac Review. In 2015, she was awarded a Pushcart Prize for short fiction (for a story that originally appeared in Ruminate!). She has received fellowships from Kimbilio Fiction Center and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. LaToya resides in Texas with her family.

L AT O YA WAT K I N S

last note ON SL OW I N G D O W N + N O T I CI N G

I’m awful at choosing wakefulness over robotic task-list fulfillment. Recently with my nephew, I was neatly stacking the Go Fish cards even as he spread them out to make his matches of Tina Tuna, Louie Lobster—“Good job, oh my, you’re a bright two-year-old,” and tuck, tuck into the box. I can always guilt myself on both sides—not being attentive or industrious enough. If it’s left to me. But it’s not left to me. My most prized moments of wakefulness come when something jars me out of my program—a bit of pain, or a bit of disruption. Grace breaks in—sometimes not so gently—and it won’t let my gaze go elsewhere.

JESSI E VA N E E R DE N, NONF I C TI ON

My fingers peel back the beads of a worn rosary, one by one, mantra by mantra. May I be well. May I be happy. May I be safe.

May I be peaceful and at ease. May I be free of suffering. So begins the practice Metta Bahvana, translated as Loving-Kindness, one of the main mindfulness traditions in Buddhist teachings. The metta mantra moves from the first person in expanding circles, from your heart to others. May my loved one . . . May my enemies . . . May all living beings . . . “The result of mindful metta,” my lama says, “is playfulness.”

With mindfulness, as with playing, we are connected and curious toward ourselves, our companions, and the present moment.

As Rumi writes, “Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself.”

I came across a huge encyclopedia of fungi in the public library, replete with colorful images and hundreds of fantastic names. I checked it out and started listing them in a notebook: false parasol, orange grisette, powdery piggyback. This activity hasn’t proved “productive” yet. I haven’t written a single poem with a fungus in it, though for a while I did close my emails with random fungus names instead of “All the best” or “Sincerely.” I followed my curiosity, trusting that such forays into the “useless,” those unexpected attractions, can become fodder for poems with time. Or maybe the delight of saying those names—and the playfulness it cultivated in me—was enough. Lilac dapperling, branched shanklet, poison pie, splendid woodwax.

CO RY H U T CH I N S O N - REU S S , PO ET RY

Thrown happily into the company of a toddler one day per week, I am both sobered and drunked by his capacity for wonder.

Drunked (let’s call it a word) that my grandson gasps at each fresh delight, as if more oxygen, or a mighty intake of wind, is needed to comprehend this novelty. Now I, too, long to suck in this air, or Spirit, when I see fireflies or falling leaves, when I wake next to the woman I love. Drunked, but also sobered: I witness fewer gasps as this little boy nears his fourth year. Was it before memory that I began to lose this capacity for wonder? Can I learn again to gasp?

T O M S CH MI D T, REV I EW S

RI TA JON E S, R E VI E W S

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When I write I “dawdle”—a verb my grandmother used with affectionate authority. She told me not to dawdle when doing errands or homework. But she was one of the best dawdlers I knew. Southern lady that she was, she settled into “vis’ting” when folks came by with visible pleasure in conversation, which she elicited with skill and humor.

These days, when I find time to write, or when I find time to sit with a friend whose idea of fun is two cups of tea and an hour to spend, I dawdle over that tea. Alone at the computer I noodle around with words (another of my favorite verbs) for quite some time before the next thing happens. The pleasure those times afford is just this side of a good deep tissue massage or lying on the floor in the dark with a candle and quiet music just before bedtime.

MARI LYN M C E NTY R E , R E VI E W S

This past semester I taught a class called “Reading Earth.” Much of the nature writing we read pointed toward the ways humans have damaged the earth, but our initial focus was simply to take time to observe nature for a minute and notice something each of us hadn’t noticed before. This first humble step toward reading the earth led to a small movement among us: Walking Wednesdays.

Once a week, try, if you can, to walk when you might otherwise drive. For me, so far, it hasn’t just been a tiny gift to the earth, but a gift to myself—stars early in the morning, the sound of wind against my own heartbeat, two crows cawing.

JOSEPH H E I THA U S, P OE TRY

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As a little boy I held a dandelion flower in my hand and was suddenly overwhelmed with feeling—and burst into tears. In 1959 boys were discouraged from crying. But something overflowed. I remember the vivid impression that this little white globe, made up of hundreds of gossamer threads perfectly aligned to form a fragile sphere, was a picture of the sun or moon or a star.

My little six-year-old mind couldn’t calmly contain this thought: God loves spheres.

Make more of them. Fill the sky with them. Blanket the earth with them as flowers. Make them fierce with millions of atomic explosions. Make them fragile and vulnerable to human breath, so that blowing on them will move seeds into the air everywhere.

BRU CE H ERMA N , V I S U A L A RT

My Alley Kids artworks series was created in collaboration with a group of kids who used to hang around our house. They were always nearby—laughing, yelling, making forts, crafting masks, inventing stories, and mashing up DIY aesthetics with Lord of the Flies ethics. Playing with them was a test of patience, but also an opportunity to slow down and pay attention to the places in our world that are too often undervalued or overlooked. A smoldering fire made out of scrub tree branches. A homemade mask head on a pike. A kid reading and singing beautifully in a tree. All things I have seen happen in my own back alley.

S CO T T K O L BO , V I S U A L A RT

last note

In the short summers of Minnesota, grilling outside becomes nearly a mandate, a welcomed ritual. Some years ago I willfully complicated this mealtime ritual by vowing to forego propane or even charcoal, and to cook over windfall branches. Most are smallish sticks gathered as I walk the dog, broken over my knee or cut into pieces with my father’s old bucksaw.

Now my grill needs ceaseless tending, but I’ve gotten to know the different traits of the found wood. Silver maple lights quickly, flames high and then vanishes into ash; catalpa crackles; oak will leave glowing, longlasting embers. Passing neighbors say, “that looks like a lot of work”; which it is, but work that connects me to elemental things.

JAMES SI L A S R OG E R S, NONF I C TI ON

It’s become difficult to see what is singular in the 21st century’s multiplex virtual world.

Life becomes a treadmill of deadlines and a slideshow of spectacle-news.

Quietude is stolen even in public spaces by wide screen TVs, and in taxi cabs by small screens. I protest by turning away, by taking long solitary walks through the

asphalt canyons of Manhattan. Walking, I am in the moment, yet envisioning moments that have come before. The sidewalks themselves have a language. I open myself to the mysteriousness and let it flow in.

In my writing room that is at best a large closet, I sit. I luxuriate in sitting and staring into space. I let the blessed nothingness/ everythingness fill me with imaginings.

S T EPH A N I E D I CK I N S O N , F I CT I O N

You only overlook something because you are focusing on something else. I’ve been thinking a lot these days about focus, about looking. About what we choose to hold.

When I was younger, I thought we had to be completely democratic and nonjudgmental in life—that we had to open arms wide, and embrace everything.

Now I realize that it is important not to judge others; it is important to accept others.

But I have the right—the responsibility to be discerning for what is best for my own life. I do not have to allow everything in. I can hold some things and not others. This is what is important. This is taking care of yourself.

H O PE WA BU K E, PO ET RY

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GEOFFREY KRAWCZYK. Breaking Bread. Interactive perfomance, still.

Chewing on Life 2 Humor’s Grace 3 Reconstruction 4 Benedictio 5 Flux 6 Epiphany 7 Addiction 8 Summer I 9 Communion 1 0 Ascension 1 1 Passages 1 2 Summer II 1 3 Confession 1 4 With Earnest Jest 1 5 Borrowing 1 6 Mapping This Place 1 7 Pilgrimage 1 8 Sound and Silence 1 9 Sustaining 2 0 Feasting 2 1 Grief 2 2 Up in the Air 2 3 The Stories We Tell 2 4 Heirlooms 2 5 Unraveling the Dark 2 6 In the Margins 2 7 Glimpses 2 8 Not Forgotten 2 9 In Search of Song 3 0 The Body 3 1 Always, We Begin Again 3 2 Clearing It Out 3 3 Artist as Seer 3 4 Keeping Things Whole 3 5 A Loss for Words 3 6 Writ in Water 37 Being Known 1

Thank you.