Issue 41: And The Soul Felt Its Worth

A N D T H E S O U L F E LT I T S W O R T H / 4 1

Winter 2016/17 $15

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

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SARAH RO CKETT. Gold Spoons Project (detail). Used spoons and metal leaf. Dimensions variable.

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

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contents

NO T ES

Editor’s 8 Readers’ 10 Artists’ 32, 56 Contributors’ 85 Last 87

FICTION

Evisa's Cascades, Amy Pechukas 16 The Sweet Hot Burning Heart of Earla Cloud 46 Nicole Parsons And He Shall Reign, Jeff Marcus Wheeler 68

VI SU A L A RT

The Art of Sarah Rockett 33 The Art of May Kytonen 57 The Art of Doug Sink 61

PO ET RY

26 Glaze Eyed at Your Humble Shaping, Colin Channer 28 Farfetching, Colin Channer 30 The Fear of Death, Ryo Yamaguchi 31 Biography, Ryo Yamaguchi 41 Confronting the Body, A. Molotkov 42 Persephone's Reflection, Theodora Ziolkowski 43 Autobiography of Demeter, Theodora Ziolkowski 44 Leah, Weary Eyed and Swarmed—, Lia Greenwell 45 Leah, [as girls you both climbed], Lia Greenwell 65 Perfoliate Leaf, Patricia Clark 66 Rewilding, Catherine Wing 67 Before the Race, Catherine Wing 81 Boundary, Amy Orazio 82 Unstruck, Laura Smith 83 Turn, Laura Smith 84 On Insect Holes as Fragrant Portals of Edible Light, Karen An-Hwei Lee

2016 William Van Dyke Short Story Prize

SP ONSOR E D B Y VA N D YK E CH A RI TA BL E F O U N D AT I O N

F I R ST P L AC E

S E C O N D P L AC E

A M Y P E C H U KA S

J EFF MA RCU S W H EEL ER

Evisa's Cascades

And He Shall Reign

HON O RAB L E MEN T I O N NI CO L E PA RS O N S

The Sweet Hot Burning Heart of Earla Cloud

F I NA L I STS E I L E E N A RTH U R S

J EA N N I E PRI N S EN

J E SSI C A B A R KSD A L E

RYA N RI CK RO D E

M A R L E E N PA SC H

J U D GE S H A N N RAY

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2016 William Van Dyke Short Story Prize

F I NA L J U D G E S H A N N RAY W RI T ES : TH E AUT HOR OF “ EVI SA ' S CASCA D ES ” is gifted with profound understandings of life and the deepest recesses of the human heart. The prose is elegant, contains a subtle robust architecture, and in the end becomes a vessel of great compassion. The story draws us in, leading us in a dual descent and ascent that collapses binaries and arrives at an impressive sense of gravity. I found myself swept into a progression by stages both interwoven and startling in which the reading took me through a range of despair, loss, the doldrums of our untold dreams, and the most ragged alienations we suffer within ourselves and in relation to others. Marriage itself becomes a fiery crucible touched by the natural world in mysterious ways. All the while in this dark and beautiful story, we question. We seek. A more artistic, more tender and numinous path of life is revealed without rigidity, beyond grief and bereavement. Uniquely illumined, the author's prose contains complexity and at the same time a pure, undiluted sense of grace. I am so impressed by the sheer immensity of the mercy I experienced in reading this story. All this—grace, mercy, and a form of love that exists perhaps at the center of the world—the author accomplishes while maintaining an intimate relationship to the darkly illumined histories we all share. Soulful. Powerful.

Like all great works of art, “Evisa's Cascades” resonates and uplifts, even as it speaks to the darkness we know.

Consider these words from the author, and enter in to a reading you won't forget: “This year, the rainy season is heavier than usual. The waterfalls have begun to gush, becoming deep wounds whose bleeding cannot be staunched. The riverbanks are saturated, and every day more small trees and bushes are washed down mountain. A damp air invades all homes and buildings.”

I'm grateful to Ruminate for providing a place where this story finds a welcoming home.

SHANN R AY teaches leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga University. Ray’s collection of stories American Masculine (Graywolf) won the American Book Award, the Bakeless Prize from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and two High Plains Book Awards for Best Story Collection and Best First Book. His book of poems, Balefire (Lost Horse), won the High Plains Book Award for Poetry. His debut novel, American Copper, is available now, published by Unbridled Books. He holds a dual MFA in poetry and fiction from the Inland Northwest Center for Writers at Eastern Washington University, a Masters in clinical psychology from Pepperdine, and a PhD in systems psychology from the University of Alberta in Canada. He has served as a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow and as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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editor’s note

H ERE’S O NE WAY of telling you this story: I was looking in a book for a line I needed to hear again and had forgotten. I hadn’t underlined or marked the sentence, and I was chiding myself for it now. If you just would have grabbed a pen and marked it. It would have taken just a few seconds. You could have at least dog-eared the page. Argh.

I kept skimming the same couple of pages over and over, knowing it must be there. I got more and more frustrated, even angry, at the book, at myself, my fingers even beginning to tremble. I actually wanted to throw the poor book against the wall, watch it hit, the pages splayed, then slide down and land on the ground with a thump.

And then finally, there, at the bottom of the page I’d skimmed a dozen times, I found it. And yes, the line was good, just like I remembered it. And yes, it would have taken me less time to read the entirety of the pages I had been frantically flipping through. But I couldn’t slow down for that.

In that moment, I saw a soft, white portion of myself that was, and is, so frantic, so afraid.

Afraid of what it means to love and lose my place. Afraid of being loved and still forgotten.

Afraid of never finding all the lovely things. So afraid of it all, that I would toss a beloved line, a beloved story, my beloved heart into the air and against the wall, splayed, landing with a thump.

To find the line I had to find the page, find the thread of the story. I needed to slow for myself and hear the still voice of God already always inside me. I needed to take my trembling hand in mine. Instead, to borrow from Rumi, I wandered from room to room, hunting for the diamond necklace already around my neck. ***

Here’s another way of telling you this story: A writer wrote a line that spoke to me so strongly that I heard it in the midst of my panic. The words sparkled so brightly that I knew they reflected the truth, and what I remembered of their beauty turned me from my trouble towards that light. I rushed towards that light so quickly that I forgot to see if there might be a path I could follow, plunging in without a map. And just as I thought that light would be lost forever to me, there, at the bottom of the page, the author’s good words returned me to myself.

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Now, I could rest. The words settled in and helped me pause enough to go deeper and wider. I needed this dear, brave author to tell me her story in those precise words, to take my trembling hand in hers.

I keep coming back to Father Gregory Boyle’s idea of kinship, of the necessary act of being returned to ourselves by another. Sometimes, I cannot slow myself. Sometimes, I do not remember to pause. Sometimes, I crash through my life in a panic, forgetting my precious self. In these moments, I rely on the remembered beauty of words, art, and kindred souls to bring me back to myself and breathe, trembling, in my own life. *** I need both ways of telling this story: the forgiveness that comes from glimpsing my own soul's worth and the affirmation of that worth through another's words. Both ways bring me toward the path of wholeness and seeing the worth of the people around me, myself, and the things that we make together. These words, this art, this poetry allows me to remember we exist inside a God who delights in us, reminds me that fear does not have to define us, and gives me courage to love wholly and without shame.

That is what Issue No. 41 does for me, and that is what I hope it does for you. When have you awakened to the worth of your soul? I’d love to hear your stories. You can write to me at editor@ruminatemagazine.org.

I’m grateful to be traveling the way with you all,

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readers’ notes A ND TH E S O U L FELT I T S W O RT H

That kitchen is still one of my favorite places in the world. Though the summer I spent in the house was one of the darkest, to me that house is always a place of light and love. The multi-colored tile mosaic around the old fashioned, redundant fireplace, the pastel green-and-white squared lino, and the mismatched chairs are homely and inviting and safe.

In the early morning quiet, I sat alone on a stool cradling a cup of tea that was probably an hour old. I was too anxious and agitated to really drink it, but holding it steadied me.

My head was in a heavy fog of hopelessness.

My friend wandered out to make his coffee and tried to engage me in conversation. How was I feeling this morning? What was going on in my head right then? I felt so helpless and paralyzed by my own pain, but I hated that I was imposing all that pain on others as I carried it around. I don’t remember why, but soon I was in tears and apologizing again for being a burden to their family.

Looking down into my teacup I said, “What am I even doing here? Why do you even care?”

Exasperated, I hear the reply, “Because we love you.” There is a pause that hangs in the air.

I slowly look up at him across the room.

He looks directly at me and says again slower, gentler, “We love you. When will you believe that? We love you.”

We. Love. You. And something stirred inside me resembling belief. Even though I couldn’t love

myself yet, others did. I was loved, and so maybe I was okay. I was loved, and maybe this is where I was meant to be.

A L I S O N W I L L I A MS , N S W, A U S T RA L I A

I hold him up, under his arms, so that his sweaty, little face is level with mine. His lips are pressed tightly together, his nearly invisible-white eyebrows, just like mine, scrunched down so far that they almost meet the tops of his eyes which flash angrily at me. For a second, I wonder if he is mirroring me or if I am mirroring him. Just seconds before, I had been watching my boys, ages five and three, play roughly with toy light sabers as I tried to stay engaged in the sort of grown-up small talk that summer pot-lucks are made of. When their play began to get out of hand, I excused myself to yank my oldest son away from the game.

“If you can’t play nicely, you don’t get to play,” I said through gritted teeth. “Now sit here.” My son yanked his arm away, took a step back and squared his shoulders.

“No,” he challenged. "I don't want to."

"Sit. Down." I hissed.

I feel weary writing the rest of it. Who hasn’t experienced it themselves, either because they’ve lived it or witnessed it? It never ends as neatly as the parenting books suggest it can. In this instance, it ended with me dragging him twelve feet away to the semi-privacy of the side of the garage.

"YOU," I snarl, "can NOT talk to me like that." But why can't he, really, when it is exactly the way I am talking to him? We glare at each other wordlessly, panting

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like bulls, our matching pale complexions flushed popsicle-red. As I begin to spit out something about obedience and disappointment, my anger, swollen to capacity, explodes into shards of deep sadness that quiver in my voice and pool in the corners of my eyes. My son's face softens.

That boy. He shatters my cool as casually and as frequently as he crashes his brother's Lego creations, but his heart pumps my blood. My fierce love for him is reflected back in his fierce love for me.

And for the second time that night, I catch myself wondering if he is mirroring me or if I am mirroring him.

ELLEN MORGAN PELTZ, SILVER SPRING, MD

I keep thinking of Mary Oliver’s words from her poem entitled “Bone”; “Understand, I am always trying to figure out / what the soul is, / and where hidden, / and what shape . . .”

I don’t know what shape the soul is, though I believe it’s beyond physical definition. It is both hidden and in plain sight, like the oxygen we breathe, which we know only by the filling of our lungs, by the blood which carries it through our veins to feed our body.

Last month my six-year-old daughter was hit by a car while riding her bike. That day in the ambulance, I felt the soul to be a weighty thing, hanging heavily around me—its pleas powerful enough to reach the dimension where life and death are decided—the realm of faith. My daughter survived the traumatic crash. On the day I almost lost her, I not only recognized the deep worth of her soul, but also the worth of mine.

Today, I am reminded in a vivid and visceral way that the human soul was never

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meant to be a single entity. My soul feels its worth most powerfully when it is joined together with another soul, interceding on another’s behalf.

L I BBY K U RZ, V I RG I N I A BEA CH , VA

On a new and glorious morn, when I was twelve, I was fishing where Half Moon Lake narrows, and pale green and yellow weeds reach up from the dark bottom toward the light. I cast my bobber into the weeds and waited. The air was still. Two horseflies buzzed past. Somewhere a cottage door slammed, a man called out, and then the air was quiet again.

The bobber dipped, and I began to reel it in. It felt heavy, like pulling in a small log.

Then, just below the water’s surface I saw the fish—a bass with a dark green back, a silver belly, and a black stripe down each side. It was lethargic, full of small fish it had been feeding on in the weeds. When it came near, I grabbed it and pulled it into the boat.

Excited at the biggest fish I’d ever caught, I quickly rowed home and showed it to my family. Ordinarily, I cleaned fish right away, but my mother had just served breakfast for everyone, so I went back to the beach, filled the boat with water, and put the fish in to wait while I ate my meal.

When I returned after breakfast, something felt different. The fish had digested its meal and was darting around in the water trying to get free. I watched the fish, then suddenly realized it was also watching me.

In that moment we saw each other, two living beings, two worthy souls, simply meeting one another. I fell on my knees, gently lifted the fish from the boat, and set it back in the lake. As the fish swam off, I whispered, “Thank you. Be well.”

T O M EH L I N G ER, BL O O MI N G T O N , MN

readers’ notes

A teacher at my son’s elementary school was talking about me behind my back. Word got back to me that this was her comment: “That mother is a magnificent woman.”

I did not feel magnificent, mired in the mundane of meal prep and homework and running errands like a gerbil in a wheel. But driving down the street, I saw a grizzled, old tree, rooted and grounded, yet always reaching skyward, outstretched toward heaven. It dawned on me, I am that tree: my core made up of miles of moments, ring upon ring, years of memories, newly layered with fresh growth. I may have gnarls and knots, mars and scars, but I am also stately and sheltering, even magnificent. Suddenly that teacher’s words gave me something to sink into for the rest of my days.

LI Z MCFADZ E A N, L A C A NA DA , C A

He was a generous man with hands the only part of him calloused. His invitation was to join him in building a set of corrals out of railroad ties and two by tens for his Angus cattle. To come alongside him in a job he could just as easily have done alone.

His offer fell neatly into the space where doubt and desire dwelled, where hope and insecurity grew together, ever close to my thoughts. I gladly accepted. The work, like him, was straightforward, methodical, and tough. Dirt was labored against with soaking water and a post hole digger. My ego wilted as this man, forty years older than me, relieved my quick-to-ache shoulders as we dug thirty inches into ground closer to concrete than dirt. He’d worked by him-

self most of his life and learned the clever tricks that yield efficiency. But I never felt an impatient glare or frustrated sigh when my pace or performance lagged. Our conversation was occasional and usually centered on haying or cattle breeding. The silence allowed time to recognize the slow healing found in our work together. Work had been the great revealer of my failings and fears. Now it seeped affirmation.

Inadequacy’s whisper was lost in the drone of drills and hammers. Within that noise I heard that I was wanted and believed in.

J ES S E FREN CH , FO RT CO L L I N S , CO

Mom won every game we played: Candy Land, Go Fish, Gin Rummy for a penny a point, Clue. She won. I rebelled.

She wanted me to be a lady, so I climbed trees and street lights. She worked three jobs to provide for me. I resented the time I spent without her and used that time to get into trouble. She wanted me to go to college, but I got pregnant fresh out of high school. I moved partway across the country to show her I didn’t need her. I only thought I won.

The cancer really won. Mom’s impending death brought me back to her side. I thought I would have time to mend fences. She was my mother—always waiting for me, the prodigal daughter, to return.

She deserved better than a daughter who fought against her at every turn. I was what she had. I had forgotten how to tell her I loved her until winter upended the skies for a March snowfall. Parking lots were dotted with dirty snow piled high. Mom dared

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me to beat her at King of the Hill, another game I never won. Although weak, with a scarecrow’s frame, she scrambled to the top of the mounded snow. I followed. We wrestled, but she was dug in. I couldn’t dislodge her. I tumbled to the pavement below, spitting snow and laughing.

As I looked at her sitting on top of the snow, cheeks and nose beet red, tiny flakes sparkling on her lashes, and heard her laughter ring out, my soul began singing.

My past failings as a daughter didn't matter.

God deemed me worthy of this perfect moment of shared laughter and love with my mother to carry with me forever.

MONTE R E Y SI R A K, M E L B OU R NE , A R

As a little girl, our country church would always have the children read recitations and reenact the nativity scene on Christmas Eve. Angels and shepherds abounded, encompassing the couple in the congregation with the most recently-born baby. I was reminded of this last year, when our community worked together to clear an abandoned slave cemetery, overgrown with thorn-ridden underbrush and vines of poison ivy. Kneeling over a one meter in length depression, I noticed an extremely thick grape vine that began directly in front of an unmarked headstone. Minuscule shells were attached to the fieldstone. In the quiet of the forest's edge with a small creek tumbling over moss-covered rocks below the knoll where the cemetery was situated, a realization struck me. Unlike the twenty other depressions, this one was smaller—it marked the burial of a child.

As I looked at the grave, I felt the presence of more than myself. I felt surrounded by other souls who once mourned the loss of this child—so much so that in their grief,

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they planted the start of a vine that would one day grapple skyward through the trees.

I was part of something far greater than myself, than this place. There was a worth to it that I remember recalling as a child, wearing wings and wondering at the impression in the straw of a manger, each Christmas Eve. S A RA H K O H RS , MT. J A CK S O N , VA

July marked seven months of singleness, after a relationship I deeply valued disintegrated even as I fought to fix it. For months I churned through the frigid Midwestern winter days convinced that I was dry bones—lifeless, hollow, an artifact of a life I once held close. When a friend suggested I take a road trip to see her, something clicked inside of me. I left in July, during the scorching heat, mapping a route from mid-Michigan to Northeast Tennessee that would take nearly ten hours. Maybe it was the silence, or the distance, but the road felt clean. Whatever knot had bunched up inside of me, all those doubts, all that sadness, unraveled as I covered more ground. I sat in a borrowed car on a dirt road in the middle of Ohio and watched early morning light tilt through the windows while the rest of the world slept. Driving felt like prayer, like any moving forward was in itself an act of faith. For the first time all year, I felt worthy again—not stagnant or left behind, but en route and headed toward something good. I cried because I lost something—something so valuable and mostly lovely. I cried because I had spent so long being together, being with someone, I had forgotten the beauty and the loneliness and sometimes that voice of God that rushes in with solitude. I cried as the sun rose and black asphalt wove into Kentucky and tangled into mountains that twisted into Tennessee. The back roads

readers’ notes

slanted and curved. The mountains rose up to meet me, and I kept going, mile by mile, into a light I forgot could carry me forward.

ELI ZABETH F R A Z I E R , A NN A R B OR , M I

My soul has felt its worth in the Psalms ever since I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

I remember weeping in my bed one dark winter afternoon with my down comforter pulled up to my chin in an attempt to escape from reality. The mania was gone, and I was in a season of severe depression. I had trouble with basic tasks and struggled to give my family the time and attention I desired to provide. I couldn’t do much more than get my kids to and from school, prepare a simple dinner, and work on a load of laundry. Even still, the Psalms gave me words to speak to God, and they gave me words to speak to myself.

CHARLOTTE DONL ON, B I R M I NG HA M, A L

It is your first day of preschool, and there are Mom’s homemade banana muffins at the crack of dawn. You say this helps to settle the fireflies in your tummy. Then there is your favorite shirt with pictures of all the beetles, your new blue Keens with Velcro straps, and a too short car ride. And then you march all by yourself through the lumberous, green doors. You do not look back.

Not even once, your dad notices, and . . .

Then there are toy sea creatures and real goldfish and snack goldfish and what Miss Christy calls “outside time” where a loud, LOUD girl, Ella, teaches you north-south-

east-west-go-go-go with a bright yellow taxi she calls Maxi! Your dad knows this because he picked you up, right on time, and you’ve told him all these things from the backseat, all red-faced and exclamation marks, pausing only to point out the passing car carriers and that excavator and . . .

Then you come through your doors to the favorite combinations of crunchy peanut butter crackers and cold green grapes and your little, ten-month brother, who crawls silently over to where you are lying exhausted on the floor, pulls another orange pillow off the love seat, and lays down right next to you and . . . then you both sigh AT THE SAME TIME, you hear your dad telling your mom later that evening. But at that moment, right there on the floor, right THEN you catch your dad looking at you all misty and trembly because, well, how might he explain it to you? You are his first and he has felt something that he does not seem to have the words for, not then, and, he suspects, not ever. Not ever as long as there are firsts.

ANDREW TAYLOR-TROUTMAN, DUBLIN, VA

I wore a scarlet letter all my life. Not Hester’s “A”, but a blazing “V” for victim.

Everyone was always attacking me, taking advantage of me, or slighting me in some way. In October of 1996, I got sober and stayed that way, one day at a time, ever since.

On the night of my two-year sobriety anniversary, my soul felt its worth. I noticed

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that since I quit drinking, I hadn’t been slapped across the face, sexually assaulted, robbed, ejected from a bar, blacklisted from a laundromat, or arrested. Had the world become a better place? No. I was the only variable. I had stopped playing my part in all of that violence. I never even considered that I had a part. I was the victim after all.

Twenty years have gone by, and still none of those humiliating and degrading offenses have so much as brushed up against me. Terrible things could happen to me, same as anyone else. I’ve just stopped luring them in.

Taking responsibility for the troubles of my life was painful medicine on a festering wound. It stung and it burned and then it healed. Now my soul feels its worth.

JENNY MALCHOW, SAN FRANCISCO, CA

Recently, I’ve felt as though I’ve been poured out on dry ground only to be sucked into the dust and evaporated into the wind. I feel like a young boy, in a nice room, layers of safety around my heart like a cocoon, yet there is something breaking in from the outside. I’ve sensed it for years. It is the Great Physician. He is set on liberating me, yet I have thought, “What shall I do with such freedom?” I have felt a great sadness, an old sadness that never met its day. I now feel a deep sorrow that has never been recognized, nor soothed, a great understanding that has never been cracked open. And though I am scared to be revealed and opened up, I do know that it must happen, and I hope that it will happen. For this is the revealing that I’ve

longed for . . . the revealing of my true self.

Yet, of how much worth is my soul to him that he should go to all this work to liberate it—a decade-long heart surgery just to release me from the prison I’ve built? I feel the physician's knife come closer every day.

J ES S E A N D ERS O N , F RA N K L I N , T N

My dad stretches his bare arm from where he lays towards the light from the window; with thumb and forefinger he tries to pluck something from the air. I imagine milkweed blowing in the breeze, or specks of dust in the beams of light coming through the blinds.

He is laying propped up in the hospital bed on the skilled nursing wing that has been his home for the past ten weeks. Until two days ago, my mother was in the next bed. He has outlived her, though barely. I sit in the only arm chair in the room, and my husband is perched on a wheelchair in a dark corner.

Dad’s hollow cheeks are covered with several days of gray stubble. We’ve been watching him for half an hour now, as he reaches towards the beam of light, again and again.

At one point he looks to me and says, “We were driving across the state, your mum and I, to a reunion. But I don’t know if it really happened.” And later, “I had a dream, I think. Your mum and I were at lunch in the café.”

At this, his eyes fill with tears. I am thankful for this time, these days and hours in the semi-darkness of the hospital room, watching my father’s face, knowing my husband is nearby, feeling the presence of God in those beams of light.

K AT H RYN T. J O N ES , L O U I S V I L L E, K Y

SE ND US YOU R NOT ES FOR I SSU E 42— W E LOV E H E ARI N G F RO M YO U !

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AMY PECHUKAS

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emigrated from Italy to Corsica in the beginning of the 1920s, the youngest grandson of Babbo Nocera would never have drowned in the waterfalls. After entering the seminary and then fighting with a priest and then entering the university and punching a professor, Babbo Nocera moved his family to Corsica. The island is a stony, solitary place situated in the blue waters of the Mediterranean between Italy and France, which engaged in a centuries-long tug of war over its ownership. Now it is owned by the French, and in the moneyed port cities, clamoring hordes of Parisians arrive by ferry, dripping with gold jewelry and obnoxious judgmental attitudes.

French tourists seldom breach the interior of the island where tiny mountain towns are reachable only by ribboning, narrow roads that travel the crests and valleys of crumbling mountains. In the interior, people speak their own language that others have labeled a dialectical mixture of French and Italian. It is not. Corsican grew from the Latin just as the more famous idioms did. It is a cousin and not a child. In quiet moments, Corsicans will remark that the truth is they belong to no one.

Evisa is one of the only interior towns that attracts tourists in the summer. A tourist office with one employee—a tireless, multilingual woman­—welcomes the streams of backpack-laden adventurers who make it this far into the island. The woman shows them maps of the waterfalls and sends them down the footpath with abundant pleasantries and nary a warning. Although she is unfailingly cheerful, there are always one or two accidents involving the water and hikers every summer. But people on vacation dislike warnings.

Davide was born and raised in Evisa. His reprobate grandfather had opened a restaurant that served crepes made from the region’s famous chestnuts and distilled liquors crafted from local berries and nuts, and Davide and his brothers were raised in its kitchen. Now that Babbo has died, Davide works the bar and serves lunch and dinner nearly every day while his older brothers and father continue to cook. A family business relinquishes no able-bodied member, and while he might have liked to study at a university or join a seminary, these wishes were placated with the family’s assurances that priests and professors alike were all idiots.

This year, the rainy season is heavier than usual. The waterfalls have begun to gush, becoming deep wounds whose bleeding cannot be staunched. The riverbanks are saturated, and every day more small trees and bushes are washed down the mountain. A damp air invades all homes and buildings. Everything is clammy. The restaurant’s customers huddle over their crepes, eating quickly and hurrying home to let their dogs out while rubbing their hands together in futile attempts to warm them.

The only truly warming menu items are the local liquors. These clear amber, red, and golden infusions are served in petite glasses of varyingly crafted round and oblong shapes recalling the many beautiful iterations of the female body. At night in the restaurant’s bar, the local drunks, divorcees, and other restless residents gather to drink. While serving drinks until one or two in the morning and imbibing them, the tension in Davide’s chest eases slightly. His thoughts stop circling each other warily like warring cocks. Later, as he falls asleep late beside his pregnant wife, he is incognizant to his own freezing toes and

H AD TH E NO C E R A FA M I LY NOT

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cold nose. The oblivion is more desirable than a happy marriage.

His wife, Sara, while drinking her café au lait one morning in late October, dispassionately observes his pink sclera and sallow, lined cheeks dusted with brown and white stubble. She tells him that he is as unattractive as one of the wild pigs that litter the roads.

She means to add, “when you drink,” but forgets to amend her statement because being pregnant makes her lose her train of thought and not care. Her disgust is merely factual.

Davide comes home earlier than usual that evening carrying the shame of the bad husband like heavy bags of groceries. Sara has already fallen asleep. She is lying on the couch with a mystery novel featuring emblems of blood on the cover splayed across her chest.

Her brown, sun-streaked hair and light scattering of freckles across cheeks and nose are arresting. There are purple pregnancy shadows under her eyes. Tonight, she is dressed in multiple layers of light-colored cotton clothing arranged like the sheaves of feathers on a goose. She has on one of his flannel shirts as a final protection against the cold and wears thick woolen winter socks rolled up to mid-calf. He thinks of how pretty pregnancy is in this middle stage, not overwhelming and staggering as it grows to be at the end. The final weeks and birth remind him of a gorge opening in the middle of everyday life. Perhaps she reads the murder mysteries to please hungry spirits.

Davide goes in the kitchen and turns on the burner for tea. There is a need to drink something, even if it isn’t alcohol. On the counter is an electricity bill she has left with its amount due circled in red ink. A cell phone rings. In his quiet house, the sound feels like stepping on a shard of glass. He turns off the teakettle before it has boiled. The ring is coming from the living room. He reenters wondering if she has awoken. Sarah’s mouth is slightly open and she is snoring in a deep rest. He pulls the phone from under her thigh, then steps lightly back into the kitchen, and shuts the adjoining door behind him. The number is unknown but it is Corsican. He answers.

The first sound is of rushing water or wind, an invasion of noise so sudden that he holds the phone away from his ear. “Yes, who is it?” he asks more loudly than he intends.

“Are you Davide Nocera, the husband of Sara?”

“Yes, yes, I am,” he replies, speaking in Corsican rather than French.

“Where is your wife?”

“She is here. She is sleeping.” He begins to pace the kitchen as the noxious perfume of anxiety invades the space.

“There is a problem. Your wife’s sister Luisa is here at the waterfalls. She believes her youngest boy drowned in the river.”

The next moments are fragmented, like the tiny broken tiles that create a mosaic. Davide isn’t aware of rushing to the living room or waking his pregnant wife, but soon Sara is sitting up on the couch and listening to the man on the phone. Her novel has fallen to the floor. Then she is wearing her galoshes and a raincoat and telling him to get his on.

Next, they are knocking loudly at their neighbor’s door, explaining to the elderly woman that they must leave. Would she please listen for their child, perhaps sit in the kitchen and have a cup of tea? The woman agrees without fanfare and tightens the sash of her robe before stepping into the rain bareheaded.

Then they are in the car. Davide is driving on the road toward the crest above the main

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tourist site for waterfalls. The windshield wipers are flicking aside thick, fast-falling drops quickly and neatly. Davide’s eyes are peeled back, watching the road. Strange fears occur to him. What if the boy, who is only six, is playing a game and now runs out from the woods to surprise them and is hit by his car as he drives?

He tries to still his mind and emulate Sara, whose hands lie placidly in her lap, not fidgeting. She directs him in a calm tone, even though they both know the route. They arrive.

There is a small brown sign with white lettering marking the location and indicating the downhill direction of the falls. There are no other cars here yet. He pulls to the side of the road and remembers to take the flashlight in the glove compartment as they exit the car.

Sound is the first impression. The wetness and darkness of the forest are overshadowed by its loudness. Above them, the rain is hitting leaves continually, like thousands of fingertips tapping lightly on the tops of waxed skin drums. Glancing up at the high shelter of chestnut trees with almond-shaped leaves and deeply grooved winding trunks, he feels a brief sensation of warmth in his chest, as jolting as it is soothing. He decides to try to emulate one of these thick-rooted, old, and solid trees for Sara.

Holding her hand, he guides them down the narrow path that goes toward the water.

Soon they notice the flashlights from others closer to the falls. They are intermittent firefly embers, seen for a moment and then lost again in the trees. His jeans become wet from walking, brushed with water from the low leaves of bramble and bush. Sara is silent behind him, but pregnancy warmth radiates from her as though she could never grow cold or chilled, unstable or worried. It is ineffably comforting.

As they approach the lights, they see that several jeeps have parked at the main clearing for the falls and have their headlights on, illuminating the privacy of the forest like doctors peering at one’s disrobed body. This is an area where only foot traffic is allowed except in emergencies. There are several members of the team walking urgently in differing directions through the wooded area. These men wear heavy, bright yellow raincoats and carry large flashlights with generous beams that illuminate swaths of the leaf-strewn forest floor in strange undulating lines. Luisa’s husband, the boy’s father, is speaking with one of them. That medical man’s flashlight is subdued as he listens. It points down at the ground, forming a trembling round spotlight at their feet.

Sara lets go of Davide’s hand and moves ahead of him. She begins calling her sister’s name and walking toward the water. Someone tells her Luisa is at the river. Sara moves to the path that leads down to the water with the hesitant progress of someone encumbered by pregnancy and impeded by the slickness of the descending stone steps. Her head disappears and Davide turns back to the rescue team.

One member appears to be directing the help of volunteers. He is blonde and tall with a thin, angular body and strong-looking hands. Davide approaches and sees that this man looks old and young at once with the strange combination of crow’s feet and a patchwork beard that has not yet fully grown in. The man issues commands to him brusquely. “Go to the riverbank. Look for anything that looks strange. Take this.” He hands Davide one of the heavy, substantial flashlights. Davide nods and realizes that the man is being terse to compensate for his youth and can’t be much more than twenty.

He begins to descend the less-used of the two paths that go toward the falls. It branches

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off in the opposite direction of the one taken by Sara. The climb down in this direction is more difficult because it is a dirt path that the floods have damaged substantially in the past weeks. He steps carefully, avoiding roots and feeling for the strength of the ground before placing his full weight on it. Light disappears as he moves closer to the water, and he flicks on the flashlight. In summer, one would hear the pleasant splashes of people playing and calling to one another, but now there is only the drumming of rain, the rush of currents and the brief, echoing calls of “Francesco” from further downstream. The others have assumed that if the child fell, he has been washed onto one of the outcroppings below or is still underwater.

Close to the water’s edge, Davide steps onto the thick, slick slabs of rock where sunbathers lie kissing one another in July and August. No one else is here. There is a wind moving through the trees about him, as though the forest is hungry. He stumbles and adrenaline shoots through his legs and alerts his mind of the need to be cautious. A careless step or thin layer of ice could easily land him in the deep pools filled with powerful currents. It has happened before to others. Among them was a boy from his high school whose mother pulled the beautiful young body from the water herself and covered it with kisses as all of them watched.

He almost calls Sara’s name and then pauses. She will not hear him. The light from his flashlight is blinding him to the contours of the forest. He switches it off and waits for his eyes to adjust. Finally, he sees faint outlines on the opposite bank with contours of bushes and trees barely drawn. There is a movement. He waits to see if it repeats or was a trick of the mind. His breath enters a warm, dry cellar in his chest and his mind attaches to nothing, only radiates in rhythm with the sounds of the rain. I will find him, he thinks without intending to form that self-important idea. He amplifies the thought. I WILL find him. The forest sounds seem to grow louder.

Doubt pinpricks him, saying things like, “you stupid, worthless, useless drunk—would you like to be a hero now? Is that it?” He ignores these catcalls, places the unlit flashlight in his pocket, crouches, and begins to unlace his boots. Again, he notices a movement on the opposite bank. He doesn’t know if he sees it or merely senses it. But there is sureness of the direction from which it came. He removes his shoes, jacket, and sweater. He keeps his jeans on and his woolen long underwear. He wonders momentarily how Sara will feel if he drowns here, but then he remembers that he took out a life insurance policy in the summer. It would give her security for at least a year. The calm he feels now is familiar.

Once, there was a premonition before a car accident. It had the same tenor. It was practical and colorless. He had opened a canteen of coffee as Sara drove and thought, “this will make a terrible mess when we have an accident.” A few moments later, the car flipped, and the coffee flew from his hands.

He breathes in, calculates an angle, and dives into the deepest part of this pool where he has swum since he was a child. The water’s strength is more immediately shocking than its cold. He is slammed back against the canyon wall by the rush of tides coming from the falls. His head bangs against rock, and he feels a sharp pain. This pool teased them in summer with its gentle caresses and is only now revealing its true bestiality, like an untrue husband.

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He understands suddenly and intimately how that high school boy drowned. His head feels painfully clear, as though lighted in the dark by thousands of tingling firecrackers erupting from his scalp. Without rushing, with a generous sense of time, he tucks his feet against the canyon wall and pushes out hard while diving straight down. It works. He passes the tunnel of surging, forceful water. It rides over his back like a clawing tiger, but releases him to glide under it and toward the opposite bank. His head emerges into darkness, and he treads water and breathes in the scents of the forest that he hadn’t noticed until now. There is warmth in the odors of earth and rot, tree and bush.

The sensation of heat in his chest is still so present that he touches his own skin there and is surprised to feel the coldness of his body. He swims to the opposite bank. The higher rock ledges of the opposite side are well above the level of his head. He thinks, I am too weak for this. Then he remembers, I don’t need to try. My body remembers. In his mind, he rehearses the exact movement needed to grasp slippery rocks and heave oneself out.

Then he leaps, extracts himself, and plants a hip on the stone beneath him. There is unsteadiness in his legs as he rises, and the jeans are heavy. He removes them and takes the tiny car flashlight from the pocket. He tries flicking it on. It works. He turns it off. Again doubts assail him. Find the boy, Davide, he says aloud. You CAN. He remembers that his brother-in-law once found a woman’s glasses on the beach. She was distraught when she found they were missing. He merely asked in which direction she had lain, then jogged there and jogged back minutes later. “Here they are,” he said. The frames were the exact color of sand. He had not used his eyes to find them.

Davide begins to work his way back through the forest quickly, almost angrily, in the direction he sensed before he crossed. He can see almost nothing in front of him, and he reaches into his pocket to finger the small flashlight but doesn’t turn it on. He sees better without it. He cuts through the brush and fallen trees, careless of abrasions. A sense of impatience pushes him, and he works through the forest continually, always in the same direction.

Finally, he stops. He has gone further than he intended to. It would be illogical and difficult for the little boy to have gone this way. He is cut in many places. He admits to stupidity and just stands. The rain has slowed, and the leaves are no longer blowing as wildly above. He looks up, but there is nothing to see. He has not found the boy.

You CAN find him. The angry instinct flares again. He thinks again of the glasses on the beach and repeats the sentiment, putting it into his own words. Davide, you’re an IDIOT if you can’t find him, he says aloud. He’s right HERE. That sentence leaps out of his mouth and shocks him. He is? He pulls the flashlight from his pocket and presses the button. It lights a tiny weak beam in front of him. He walks a few yards to the right, then turns to his left. There is the form of Francesco a few paces ahead. He lights his body slowly. The boy is lying curled up on the dirt. He is wearing a white t-shirt and pants, and his blonde hair looks dark. His arms are tucked under his head as though sleeping.

Davide has seen newly dead people before, and this boy looks like all of them did. He realizes that even though he has found this child, the child might still be dead, making him not a rescuer but a deliverer of terrible news. He reaches him and puts one hand on the small back. It is a cold, little ribbed cage of a chest, and his hand covers it completely. He

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does not sense movement. He presses more firmly. In the next few seconds, he will know if the boy could live. Then he realizes the terrible stupidity of wasting time to see if the child is alive. Roll him on his back, he thinks. Take off his clothes.

He remembers a time when they found the lifeless tiny rat bodies of new kittens lying in the barn on a bitterly cold day without the mother cat. His father had taken them inside, two in each pocket, filled a plastic bag with warm water and placed them on top of it.

Together, they rubbed their little clammy bodies until they all began moving, mewing and blindly crawling about, clamoring for milk.

He places the flashlight on the ground, still on, and crouches, pulling the boy up into a sitting position and supporting him. He removes the soaked t-shirt, then stands and lifts him. The boy is light—perhaps barely twenty kilos—but he has the dead weight of the sleeping and none of the lightness of youth. He presses the small, chilled trunk into his own naked chest and rests the head on his shoulder with the face toward him. He rubs the tiny back in wide circles with both hands, exerting firm pressure. He then turns the head, clasps the boy’s mouth under his, and breathes hot air into the little lungs.

Prayers in images, words, and an ache in his chest begin to infuse Davide’s mind. He asks repeatedly for the heat to reenter his own chest and hands and radiate out to Francesco. He imagines the espresso machine at work with the boiling water forming even hotter steam, which is then forced into tiny powerful jets. Their bar has one of the most expensive steel machines with the strongest boilers. He tells himself to generate this kind of concentrated heat in his hands and transmit it into the cold flesh beneath them. He removes the boy’s pants. Even with their elastic fabric, they peel off with difficulty, clinging to the legs like a deathly octopus reluctant to release its tentacles. He wraps the bare, skinny legs around his torso and alternates rubbing the legs and the chest, attempting to warm the entire body in sweeping movements. He continues to blow hot air gently into the child’s lungs and walks in tight circles, creating rhythm and sound. In between breaths, he speaks. “Francesco,” he says gently. He says it again.

The boy doesn’t respond to his name, so Davide begins to talk quietly in Corsican in the lilting tone with which one tells a bedtime story. He interjects slow sentences into the rhythm of breaths, steps, and strokes. He tells Francesco about his little sister who will be born in the spring, how now he will have someone to play with who is younger than he is. He talks about Christmas in Evisa, how the lights look as they walk to church, how the people sing, and how they eat chestnut cake for breakfast. He speaks about Francesco’s next birthday when he will be seven, a special number, an age when you become a young man. He tells him that when he was seven, he had his first job in the restaurant, and he will teach Francesco how to work the cash register if he wants.

Once he feels surreptitiously for a pulse at the neck but cannot locate it. Sara would know where to find it. He considers returning to the river, but knows he could not pass to the other side with the boy in his arms. He also could not continue to warm him as well if he had to walk, so he remains in the small area, rubbing him, blowing hot air on him and into him and speaking. The light in the forest begins to change.

Leaves are visible in their individual, ridged, oval shapes. They shine with gray raindrops. There is a sound like a voice. Davide pauses and waits, decides it was a trick of

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the mind, and continues his routine. Then there is a shout. Someone has found his trail.

It is the rescue team. He can tell by the certainty of their approach, crashing through the trees. A regular person would not be so sure. There is more than one of them. His legs are suddenly weak. They feel as though the blood has drained from them. It is the same feeling he had as their first baby emerged, a sense of all energy leaving his physical form for a moment and hovering near the top of the room, suspended momentarily in time with an uncertainty about its being linear.

“I am HERE!” he shouts hoarsely in Corsican, his voice cracking as though he has just woken. He tries again more loudly. “I am Davide! I have the boy!” He picks up the tiny flashlight, shines it in their direction, and begins to move carefully toward the group, encumbered like his wife with a child who is merged now with his own body. Then he sees one of the giant flashlights sweeping the forest floor. “They found us,” he whispers to Francesco, stopping and continuing to rub him. There are three of them, three separate beams of light in a row. Those lights find him and Francesco and focus on them, blinding Davide and forcing him to look down. The rescuers reach them in seconds and remove Francesco from him. There are no congratulations.

Davide’s arms without the child in them feel bereft. The imprint of the boy’s form is still in the memory of his body’s cells and causes them to miss him in a purely physical manner, the way one’s wrist might miss a watch. The feeling is so strong that he is distracted by it, and it is difficult to focus on the recovery efforts. The team lays Francesco on some sort of small blanket. They remove chemical packages, break them, and wedge the hot packs under his tiny armpits and between his legs. They inject his backside with a shot of something, massaging it into the muscle, and the female rescuer blows into his mouth while also covering his nose. They are working so quickly on disparate parts of him that they look like cooking teams on the reality shows that Sara watches, rushing to meet the deadline in disjointed efforts. On those shows, it often seems that no one is a chef and that no one is orchestrating the meal with a sense of wonder and joy.

Davide notices that they have stopped rubbing the boy and are now attaching a special mask to his face and filling it with some sort of steam. He feels a heat rise to his hands.

Usually, he would not join a card game, let alone a rescue team, with no invitation or experience, but his hands seem to have needs of their own. He kneels at the edge of the blanket and begins to rub the boy’s lower legs in sweeping motions, pushing blood up from the bottom of his calves to the top of his thighs. He looks down and makes himself believe that the team does not notice him. However, one man—perhaps the leader—glances at Davide’s hands and then issues the order in Corsican, “Continue.” He does. There is a rhythm to moving hands over that tiny body and watching the others as they delicately listen with stethoscopes to beats hidden within Francesco’s chest, count the pulse with eyes trained on a watch, and monitor breaths behind the mask of steamed air. Abruptly they all stop.

Davide removes his hands from the body, feeling the remaining warmth in his palms and fingers. His hands now miss the little legs. Francesco is swaddled in blankets and cradled half upright in the large man’s arms, the mask still on his face. The rest of the team gathers equipment quickly. They begin moving back through the forest along another path.

They are going in the opposite direction, toward the other side of the falls and the clearing

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that borders the mountain ravine. Davide is unsure why his legs follow the team, but then reflects that there is no other choice. The group members talk to each other in medical shorthand infused with dialect. It is difficult to decipher their meanings.

They reach the end of the wooded area. The mountain range across the ravine is visible when one concentrates on where it must be. It has stopped raining entirely. The team gathers around Francesco, and there is the sound of a helicopter approaching. These planes are usually used for emergencies with hikers. They save people from forest fires or rescue those who have fallen and broken a limb. Davide crouches down and narrows his eyes. The rescue team shields Francesco from the wind generated by the blades, and the landing is gentle as though the pilot is aware of the youth of the boy and the earliness of the morning, and wants to infuse tenderness into his actions.

More team members emerge. They quickly and efficiently place the boy on a child-sized stretcher before lifting him into the helicopter. This team includes another woman whose smaller hands cradle Francesco’s head with the experienced, kind touch of a mother. She inserts tubes in his mouth and nose. Inside the lit interior of the copter are bags of IV fluid. This sight generates a wave of calm in Davide chest. His knees tremble slightly in the crouched position, and he wonders if he should stand up or wait until they alight again.

The large man from the forest rescue team turns to him and beckons. Davide pauses. The man beckons again rapidly and impatiently and points toward the copter. “Come!” he shouts. Davide runs toward them, embarrassed to have been making them wait. He climbs in without making eye contact. No one asks his relationship to the boy. At the very least, it must be clear that he is family.

They rise over Evisa. In the light scattering down from the mountains, the one steeple of the church is visible. So is the curve of the mountain road around the parking lot by the Genoese bridge. Davide turns to look at the boy. The little face appears more alive than before, although he is not sure why. Davide takes the hand that is not tethered by an IV and begins stroking it. In Corsican, he says, “Your mother loves you. Your papa loves you. Your big brothers love you. We all love you. So you must fight to stay here with us.” The female member of the helicopter team looks at him with an expression that indicates approval, although it is not a smile. She has brown eyes and brown hair and what looks like an old surgical correction of a hair lip that marks her mouth.

Davide takes a deep breath. When he exhales, he shivers and feels momentarily ill.

Urgent concern for Francesco recedes to a dim, flat, colorless thought. “Sir,” the woman says to him. She is beside him. “We are bringing you for treatment as well. You were in the forest for nearly six hours. We have to check your body and make sure you are okay.” He attempts to nod. She is tucking a thick blanket around him and inserting an IV into his left arm. The liquid moving into him is surprisingly warm. Slowly, the world regains color, and outside the small round window of the copter he sees the brilliant blue of the ocean lit by new sun. Guiltily, he realizes he has forgotten the boy for a moment. He turns back to him.

The woman is now working on Francesco again, adjusting the mask on his face and glancing at the monitor. She retrieves something from a canteen and pours it. She passes Davide a cup of warm, sweet coffee. The sensation of sipping from it is as though the pipes of his body are being turned on again after a winter season off. He thanks her. The world

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retains more vibrant color and the shivering ceases. Outside, the sky has lightened quickly, and they are flying along the coast. The beaches with their clear, blue-green water are splayed out below like postcard images. He continues stroking Francesco’s hand. “There is the coast, Cesco,” he tells him. “I can see all the beaches. We are both going to the doctor now to make sure we are okay.”

Bastia is one of the two largest cities in Corsica. It is on the northwestern coast, and it is where the biggest hospital is located. They begin a circling descent toward the city’s center, its many edifices jutting up from the landscape like a child’s sandcastle on a beach. Francesco’s hand has begun to feel tepidly warm in Davide’s grip.

When they land, Davide stands and immediately sees purple and green spots. The female paramedic pushes him back down. “It is likely,” she tells him with a slight, lopsided smile, “that he will be okay. You did the right things.”

“Did he drown?” he asks her.

“There was some water in his lungs. If you hadn’t come and warmed and moved him, it is possible he would have drowned in his own fluid. Certainly, his temperature would have gotten so low, he would have died in the next few hours. He was very lucky.” She smiles again.

The door opens, and she exits the helicopter quickly into the whirring noises of the blades and the attendants in the parking lot calling orders. Davide is distracted by the beauty and warmth of that half-smile. It has the same kindly burning sensation of the coffee he drank. Then the technicians come for him and guide him to a wheelchair. There is weakness in his legs and lightness in his head. One can drown and still live.

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COLI N C HA NNE R

Glaze Eyed at Your Humble Shaping Halfway from Kingston to Watchwell our Vauxhall convoy smoking like a navy in retreat, we took the swell of foothills cutting door-high mist, everyone black in skin and cloth and per late-sixties gendered: shees decked in mantillas, hees aunt-rigged in ties.

There below cool Mandeville I glimpsed him half-emergent from a hut pitched in palm shags, rod legs in nappy-slacky briefs, rope arms round what to my carsick six-self was a giant's dull brass goblet or a godlet's broke brown egg. Now on runabouts to Watchwell in my Necchi-putting Volks I leave bypass, stitch village, sweet-foot the down shifts and toot. Me and dready drift in smoke through clay wreckage to a jumbo yabba like the one I glimpsed that far, far time.

We cup out soup to gourdys.

Our habit is half silence.

Chew-slap and blowing do the talk as we gaze glaze eyed at the humble shaping sweating through performance, ringed by white spotlighting coals.

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Potter, plaiter of myths more pliant than the stickles of your ribs and listing hut, raj remnant, sadhu look-alike, twice in dreams I kissed your ginger foot and stroked your dreadful unconditioned hair in thanks for kilning Africa to life.

Sometimes I wonder if you hear me sweet-foot and tooting on the distant bypass with the trucks and compact automatics on the days I do not come, or if you understand in man's language that each time I do not take the ruts along that main my convoy sailed along to mourn granddad in Watchwell that way far time, it's me who sends the dogs and goats to tack as if aimless past your rock reefs of made stone to the horseshoe of crabgrass at the lank door where you greet them with uplifted palms claystubborned, posture like an oracle's, eyes tinted with the turmeric of in-burnt disillusion for all the souls gone tinnish while you work the weight.  

 

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COLI N C HA NNE R

Farfetching I dream a shadow self sometimes. Last night he was a boy eye-troubled, nearsighted to the point he saw newsprint as dots, so he saw the universe in fractions, and utilized his knowing on pay-Fridays at the docks, taking in his parlance disadvantage of dock workers shrunk by gantries and red rum.

Waterfront. Prostitutes. Belly skin with tiger stripes. Pinto mongrels.

Crown & Anchor men. His scruffed khakis.

Rayed school tie. Tampering with probables.

Dicemen charming. Arms writhe. Cups rattle.

Brine air biting focus through cook smoke and steaming piss.

Glassed him in the huddle, judging risk, scatting number scales Shadowmanning incidence, surmising likely, speculating as he will in lonesome with books he buys from this day's profit. Almond tree, head cooled by church-fan leaves, he hedges fake prophetic, farfetching in the spell of new words like he did at twelve with Gazpacho, a 59 to 1 at Watson's which he bet on and lost, for how could he not side with the Apaches who marauded to the steppes to pitch tents with Cossacks? And who would waste a name like that on soup?

I lie here now in half light without contacts and my light gray flat is all amush with bird calls and the vinaigrette smell of caked wine.

I see him acapelling for relevance in the house whose wanting haunted,

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his prayed hurt sui generis as one below a vinculum that slabs a fat amount.

In this big house by myself I read rejections, trade without brokers, play pickup cricket on a grass court with old spars and grow sensi for capricious melanoma next to heirloom black krims grown out of seeds sown in glow days when awrightish husband and good poet were the picks to win.

Twice a week I blend my own gazpacho, half heart of compassion, half canned, and slurp its metacool, bones porous, all flesh like my balls.

Great Apache fighters of the Cossacks, promise sound will save, say no consequence will come from dreams.

Let me to be child.

Holler back.

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RYO YAM A G U C HI

The Fear of Death I was thinking of the gift, its passage, a peripheral movement, something like a secret, something like cloth, and the morning, the darkness falling apart upon the uneven surfaces of the city.

The smell grips you and never lets you forget. One way of looking, I think, is through the perforated air of this barely legible spring, asking what all can be forced into position, this stiff pair of scissors, this single blue light bulb, a claim to anger, maybe, or at least a totality of irresolute winds. Doesn’t it seem like the typeset is gradually shrinking?

The morning is, in some ways, completely destroyed, and in others relieved of its minutes, laid down and its hair brushed back. One has a brain like a prison full of imposters, the horizon stacked like boxes over which we have draped our clothes.

None of it is easy when it doesn’t feel like yours. Sometimes the smell of coffee reminds me of airports, and then I think of my mother. This lapidary infringement of sunrise reflecting off my throat, this pop song rubbing my organs, it’s as though the world refuses to acknowledge our expertise with it. Where have I put my glasses, I slowly type out. Birds going quiet in the trees.

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RYO YAM A G U C HI

Biography To shirk this received feast, to lay the tongue out flat on the rocks, born a different day than any in which a story can begin, an education spent drumming the stumps and tottering around in the clean light; herewith is the severed ear, the incomplete deck, some notes on the method of history; the streetlights get caught up in our clothes like an accidental fire; one would think it is a miracle, the day coming out like this, alternating narcoses ribboning our freedom; but the rhyme is doomed to tautology, the way commerce can hollow out an idea, dead bodies can be hoisted onstage; forget that anyone ever told you anything; just sit there and gum the lines; if we are lucky our wigs will come flying off; if we are lucky the friction will induce pleasure, and our eyes will go clear with the kind of transparency that for centuries has been buried in the earth.

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artist’s statement SARA H RO CK ET T

for social change and awareness is the backbone of my practice. Value is the main concern of my current work. As a human construct, value is placed upon both material goods and people, often with unequal distribution. American culture is obsessed with the attainment of wealth, while routinely ignoring the hardships of others. My work aims to offer a new perspective in the hopes of affecting social change.

Used objects, not simply found objects, are an important aspect of my work. When an object is used, it implies a history of human contact and connection to a life. The Gold Spoons Project features a mass of used spoons, some donated and some found. Each uniquely shaped spoon represents the diversity of American culture. Faux gold leaf is delicately applied to each spoon as an assignment of equal value for each life. Used workers’ shoes are juxtaposed with gold and gems in Center Piece. The work contrasts labor and luxury symbols to consider class. Paradise Lost incorporates used children’s shoes and repurposed plexiglass to address gentrification in Denver, Colorado, and the displacement of low-income families.

Using the Gold Spoons Project as a fundraiser, performance has been integrated into my practice as a means to create dignified experiences for those facing homelessness or hardships. The project funded Comp: Activist Art Dinner, a fine dining performance and free meal for all. Located in the parking lot of a contemporary art center, the Comp dinner negated class barriers of participants through the ritual of sharing a meal. All were served and given equal care regardless of class status.

The Gold Spoons Project and much of my current work has been inspired by the location of my studio in an urban area surrounded by homeless shelters. I am a firsthand witness to the gentrification of Denver’s downtown districts and the displacement of my neighbors.

The display of wealth disparity is unavoidable in this small cross-section of the country.

Towering new buildings loom over individuals sleeping on the streets below. Laughter and music from a fancy outdoor café sit opposite my neighbors holding “hungry” signs. As a socially responsible artist, I must be a voice for those who have none in my community.

BEING A CATA LYST

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SARAH RO CKETT. Gold Spoons Project. Used spoons and metal leaf. Dimensions variable.

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SARAH RO CKETT. Five Star Fixation. Used baby carriage, old business shoes, lights, rhinestones, gold paint.

Dimensions variable.

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SARAH RO CKETT. Comp: Activist Art Dinner. Performance. Dimensions variable.

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SARAH RO CKETT. Center Piece. Used shoes, artificial floral remnants, plastic mold scraps, rhinestones, gold paint.

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SARAH RO CKETT. Comp: Activist Art Dinner. Performance. Dimensions variable.

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SARAH RO CKETT. Paradise Lost. Scratched gold plexiglass, used children’s shoes, gold paint, rhinestones on wall.

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SARAH RO CKETT. Comp: Activist Art Dinner. Performance. Dimensions variable.

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SARAH RO CKETT. Comp: Activist Art Dinner. Performance. Dimensions variable.

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A. MOL OTKOV

Confronting the Body The dead enter, lazy handfuls of light through the fence. We’ve been making room for them to correct us. Between summer and silence, white flowers and your body on the grass. In the end, the amputation of self is a simple act, a gesture of acceptance. Our endless conversations, and life itself, a dream before being dreamt. If you disagree, perhaps the labor of forgetting is light on your shoulders. In the better tomorrow, we will be laughed at. Let them laugh. Let them pick your body from the grass, take it carefully on its journey. We are here for merriment and blood and forgiveness. We learn from sudden changes in history as tomorrow's music helps the years run smoothly.

The dead watch us, smiling. Speeding past our mistakes has long been our tactic. In the end, what do we have to be lost by? We speak through our work: sheltering the storm, naming the rainbows, whispering clouds to sleep.

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THEODO R A Z I OL KOW SKI

Persephone’s Reflection When summer comes Persephone fashions a ladder from her death robes, each rung a sacrifice she knots.

She does not know that the window she reaches leads only to more windows.

Mistakes the empty face in the glass for a stranger, not seeing as she bows her head that the stranger does the same.

Praying to the dead girl, Persephone acquaints herself with hell’s terrain.

Which is to say a winter past its expiration, a nature she tells herself she’s made.

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THEOD OR A Z I OL KOW SKI

Autobiography of Demeter Usually my daughter and I held hands to enter that arbor of antlers but tonight she exits alone like light through a keyhole.

*

When I hear the word control I think rope, lose all sense in my hands.

*

Stepping onto the fields the tree line wavered and leaves turned.

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LI A GR E E NW E L L

Leah, Weary Eyed and Swarmed— And when the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb: but Rachel was barren. —Genesis 29:31 looking into the dark well you were unchosen, and surprised how much your own face looked like the moon— a white wave shaking in the darkness below.

It was afternoon, though you were already hoping for night.

Hope is a very old lozenge, one my grandmother mouthed her whole life. Leah, one you keep mouthing.

You were unloved, and so God opened you like ripe fruit and so you were swarmed.

Leah, my shadow— your body made for giving way.

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LI A GR E E NW E L L

Leah, [as girls you both climbed] As girls you both climbed into riverbeds with friends.

My grandmother waded in too far and then almost was gone

like one of those fish sunk and silver in the river muck.

You almost lost yourself in looking,

staring in the well at your face as if the water somehow might change you.

If God calls— how to surface again, rise up like the black stone of a whale’s back?

In swimming pools I would make myself a stone on the bottom, an anemone girl with hair floating skyward.

The sun marbled the clear water.

Until the lungs threatened I would stay there.

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N I CO L E PA RS O N S

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when I heard my own voice for the first time, wailin’ into the open air with a new noise.

Before then, I’d kept my mouth shut. That’s what kept out the sticky tobacco air that clung to the walls, the blankets, the hard bread of the dark rooms we lived in. Dry cracked hands rolled cigarettes. My closed mouth kept Ma and Pa from pushing and shouting at me like they did each other. Best be invisible most of the time. Best not to mix my sounds with theirs.

Then one night, a little fire from the end of my Pa’s sleepin’ mouth fell on bedclothes.

Soon our dark lit up like noonday. Everything so dry and shredded anyway, that’s all it took. Hot and dancing, the fire charred it all black.

That is when I heard my own voice.

And for the first time, someone else heard it too.

My cry carried to an outpost of cloistered monks, folded up in their fields, their coarse robes, their vigil chant a mile away. Out there, where the wide plains meet the edge of the Colorado mountains, they found me wandering away from the smoldering tar paper homestead. My folks already ash inside, I suppose. I don’t know how I escaped. I only remember the wailin’ sound that started in my throat and flew out into the world. I followed the sound in the night until the brothers found me, my pockets full of hoarded bread crusts, scraps of cloth and yarn.

Those quiet monks took me in for the night, gave me warm milk, and whispered over what to do next. It was the hard times, the Great Depression years, and they’d had their share of dusters, killin’ their fields and livestock. The brothers had seen conditions at the Colorado Springs children’s home, too. They could not bring themselves to turn me in.

They could not bring themselves to just keep me either. So they waited. Waited for God to show them what to do.

Their little mud-brick outpost was full of quiet. Nine men lived there in rough brown robes that hushed their steps. They rarely spoke to each other, saved up most of their words to talk to God instead. In all that silence, I felt my hunger. Started to hear my own mind. Wondered at this noise inside me. At first, I didn’t dare use my voice again, but with all their quiet, my sounds started leaking out. Low hums and whispers. Then attempts to chirp, squeal. Nonsense noise. Round and round, rising and falling from my own cracked lips. My chant. I suppose, my prayer.

And then one morning just as the brothers finished chanting their prayers, my noises formed into words. “Bread please,” I said into their silence. All nine of them turned to look at me. We all stared at each other for a breath. Then one of them, Brother Manuel, hoisted me onto his shoulders, laughing out loud. They practically danced me down to the kitchen. Spent the morning breaking into loaf after loaf of their precious bread, all of them giggling just to hear me say it again and again. Bread please.

I WAS FI VE YE A R S OL D

TH AT’S WHE N T HEY M A D E Brother Manuel my guardian. He was the doorkeeper. Round faced, red cheeked, and except for a little jingle of the keys on his belt, he was quietest of

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them all. I have heard that silence is God’s first language. Manuel spoke it real pretty. He hardly said a word to me, but he gave me his ears for endless hours, day upon day, for all the months they waited to decide what to do with me. I followed him to the chapel, to the courtyard, to the kitchen. He asked me questions with a tilt of his head. Made jokes with his eyes. Told me stories with his thick hands. And I babbled out my own questions and jokes and stories for him in return. My voice blew through their rooms, across their acres.

Louder and freer than the relentless wind.

That first wail saved my life. I did not want to lose either one again.

WELL. NOW. Do I have a choice? I know I am dyin’, honey. Heart failure. They all stand beside the bed and talk over my moaning bones like I can’t hear. But I could tell before they said it. I can feel my life tracin’ itself backwards along the cracks.

I have things to tell you. I thought I had time. Time to do all the grandmotherly things, say the old woman words to you as you grew. I didn’t expect this hard labor of layin’ in a hospital bed, not knowing if it is day or night, my voice going away. Back to the silence.

Words near frozen in my mouth. I only got a little warmth still left. I pray it’s enough to let what I need to say drip out. To you.

Heaven help us, I don’t even know if you can hear me, honey. Or if hearing, can you even understand?

Little one, there are things you look at but do not see. And you are not even twelve years old.  Will you remember? I knit socks and scarves and sweaters. I’d dig through sale bin yarn, the kind that came out of dye lots gone wrong or cheap leftovers in pea green and tangerine. Or best of all, old holey sweaters. Castoffs. It’s how we did during the war. When everything was in short supply. That’s when the old women taught me. Nothing wasted.

We unraveled old knits, washed the wool and wound it into new balls. Started fresh.

Truth is, I never was very good at knitting. I started three sweaters for every one I finished. Never returned to the same pattern twice. I was always starting over. I loved wonderin’ what that long yarn would become. Kept my hands busy. I knit you booties and blankets and socks. I was going to make you a sweater once you stopped growing. So it would always fit you.

Maybe it’s better this way. You won’t stop growin’ now.

GROWIN’ U P, WE A L L look at things without seein’ what they are. I lived in my own skin all my life and never known my real age. Born in that tar paper shack in the middle of dust storms, who’d expect a baby to survive? That brawling man and woman, my ma and pa, they seemed to have already given up on their own lives. They never bothered to register a birth certificate for me.

I always was small and wiry. Could’ve been five or as much as seven. But no matter. I was quick to learn anything the monks would teach me, and I spent the summer watering pepper plants and learning to make bread. I helped milk their goats and washed dishes, playing with the suds. I’d do anything once they showed me how. As far as I knew, it was the whole world.

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 But finally, God give them the answer for what to do with me. They found a family lived on Nevada Street who agreed to take me in. I was to do the chores instead of their oldest girl. She would finally get to go to boarding school when I came.

That’s how it is. Children always going somewhere else.

Before I left the brothers, they led me into their little chapel for the last time. I felt a sound gatherin’ up inside me again. It shook my bones. A wail. But I could not get it out. I could not find my voice. Brother Manuel saw it on my face then. He knelt down and wrapped me up in the scratchy arms of his robe. He smelled like dusty wool, and he stroked my head. “Earlita, do not be afraid,” he whispered. “Jesus lives in your heart.

Always. He has given your voice to bless. You are safe.”

Father Jose baptized me then. As he put me in the passenger seat of their old truck, each of the brothers reached through the open door and put a hand on my head. I watched them out the back window as we drove away until they disappeared in the distance and dust.

CH ILD W E L FA R E HA D T O make up a birth certificate when Father Jose brought me in.

The lady at the desk looked at my teeth and pronounced me five years old. The old monk asked her to make my birthday May 31. The feast of the Sacred Heart that year. So I would always remember the day my world burst into flame and I was found.

workin’ hard at that house on Nevada Street. It never troubled me.

Mrs. Muenche, the lady of the house, she liked things orderly. And she had the goodness to teach me her ways—how to hang clothes on the line so they wouldn’t wrinkle. How to peel apples and potatoes in one long skin. How to make sweet bread when sugar was an exotic treasure. They were all kind enough, the Muenche’s.

But they wanted help, not another child. I understood these were the rules.

Years passed that way. Then the war started. One day I looked around, and it seemed like only women and children were left in town. So we all worked after that. All the women did all the chores, side by side.

We all felt like orphans in those years. And I never told no one, but I was at peace while the whole world was fighting each other.

OH , I D I D N’T M I ND

came home from the war, the whole town felt happy. And sad.

So much won. So much lost. But that wasn’t to be talked about. There was work to be done. A whole new world.

I hadn’t any idea how many new worlds there could be. The next one started for me when child welfare sent me a letter to say I was emancipated. Can you imagine? All it took was a letter to say I was grown up. It was the first time I could decide for myself where to go. Had no earthly idea how to go about that, so I did what the other girls were doing. I enrolled in secretary school, got a room in a boarding house.

While I studied shorthand, I got a job at the ice cream and candy shop on Tejon. All the boys from the Post, just back from Korea then, loved to come in to that place. Mostly they came to see Mrs. Lois, the boss’s wife, who looked like a pinup movie star, while she

WH EN T HE M E N FI NA L LY

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supervised the making of chocolates.  That’s how I met Oscar. He came in all the time, too. Round faced, red cheeked. Something about him reminded me of Brother Manuel. And he never gawked at Mrs. Lois. He’d order the Giant Beauty, a sundae with strawberry shortcake, three kinds of ice cream and a flaming sugar cube on top. He’d eat it slow, sitting at the lunch counter and stealing glances at me between each bite. Every time I saw him, my heart went up in flame like that sugar cube.

The way he looked at me; it was like I’d never been seen before.

WE H ONEYM O ONE D I N SA NTA FE .

Your grandfather and me. We paid our first month’s rent, took all that was left, $100. Borrowed a car from a pal of his and drove over Raton Pass. Mountains and valleys, spreading as far as I could see! I’d never been so high.

Then on into New Mexico. It was the first time I’d left Colorado. We got a room on the edge of town and then drove into the Plaza. Looked at all those mud adobe buildings. Sat on a park bench and smooched like there was no tomorrow. When we got hungry, Oscar said he’d go find something for us to eat.

I sat there and waited. Honey, I’ve never told anyone this.

I waited until it was dark. I wandered the Plaza as far as I dared, never lettin’ the bench leave my sight lest he come back while I was gone.

And that bone-shaking wail gathered up in me again. Fire and darkness. It destroys everything. It ends the world. But then, just as the church bell chimed ten o’clock, your grandfather danced across the Plaza back to me, smilin’ and singin’.  I broke down in tears. Relieved, furious. Starvin’. And the joy in that man! He wrapped me up in his arms, kissed the tears off my face, danced with me in the dark.

“Where did you go?” I asked him in little hiccup sobs.

“My dearest darling,” he practically sang, “My dearest love. We are indigent! We are impoverished! We no longer have two pennies to rub together.” Then he held me by the shoulders and smiled into my face. “The whole world is now ours!” He just kept dancin’ me around and around the Plaza.

I didn’t recognize the yeasty, sweet smell that night. I’d never smelled beer before. All I knew was that my new husband had lost all the money we had. Somewhere, somehow, that night he had given it all away. Maybe buying rounds for the bar to toast our marriage?

I never knew.

But he was ecstatic.

“The whole world is ours, Earla,” he kept sayin’. “It’s ours. All we have to do is cup our hands around this ember of nothin’ and blow, blow on it until it ignites into everything!”

We slept in the borrowed car that night, since we couldn’t pay for the room. We had just enough gas to get back to Colorado the next day.

And then I went back to work.

mother all of this. I suppose I didn’t want her to be scratched inside as I was. But all people have scars. Brother Manuel told me this. Everyone gets broken and cold, scraped and burned. I was not the only one.

I NEVER T OL D YOU R

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You will not be the only one, dear child. I just wish I knew if you could hear me now. Do you even come anymore to this cold hospital room with its machines and cries, its mixed-up smells of man and manmade? I don’t blame you if you can’t. I don’t blame you. Life should have more draw than death.

His special talent was chili peppers. Hot ones. Sweet ones. When nothing else grew in that dusty time, he grew peppers like weeds out there in the sun. That summer, I would help him carry water. He showed me how to go slow, pour careful, not spill a drop. He would bless each plant as he passed. “Earlita,” he called to me in his soft accent. “Earlita, your voice is for the blessing, yes?” And I said yes. Then I patted every pepper plant, walking behind him, and repeated “bless you, bless you” up and down the rows. By late summer, those rows came alive with green leaves and bold, fiery fruit. Reds, oranges, greens, and even purple peppers. August blazed, but that courtyard burnt it back with hot glory.

The day Brother Manuel and I harvested the first pepper, he cut it open carefully. Put the seeds on a piece of brown paper until they were dry. Then he slipped them into a small glass jar and gave them to me. “A good little fire for you, Earlita. For healing. For warmth.”

BROTH E R M A NU E L .

He went silent when he drank. He was a joker the rest of the time. Too kind to have gone to war. Too generous to be a cop. He went to the police academy anyway. I always kept the checkbook, paid the bills, saved every bit I could. Worked at the candy store until I got pregnant. For months, waiting for the baby, I had whole days to myself. I painted the nursery and wandered around town. I knit and discovered I could sing when I heard myself liltin’ lullabies to my growin’ belly. I joined the choir at the First Baptist Church. Oscar came with me every Sunday, holding my hand while we walked, beaming up at me from his seat in the pews.  Lorraine was born, and we forgot everything else for a while.

Oscar finished at the academy and started on patrol. We bought the little house on Weber Street with a VA loan. I held our baby girl all day long. When we finally put her down for the night, he’d open a beer and we’d sit on the couch and dream of what she would grow up to be. A beauty queen. A novelist. The first lady of the United States.

Then Oscar would open his second beer and go to the garage. That Chevy always needed work. I’d fall into bed, fast asleep until the baby cried to be fed.

Good years. Sweet as they could be. But, honey, all things are passing.

Loraine, that’s your mama, of course, she had not yet started school when Oscar took the Chevy out late one night and backed hard into the light pole in the middle of the block. The sound woke me up. Hard slam of iron against iron. The blaze of the headlights pierced through the bedroom window.

Good Lord! I wailed out his name, ran into the street in my nightdress. Found him in the driver’s seat, sobbin’ hard and drunk. I scooted him over to the passenger side, got in behind the wheel, and put the car back in the garage. When I took the key from the ignition and turned to him, he pleaded, “You keep them. Promise me. Keep them every night. Don’t let me have them.”

He made me cross my heart with my trembling finger. The look in his eyes scared me worse than the crash.

M Y OSCA R . YOU R G R A ND FAT HE R .

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My dreams at night, any idle moment of the day from then on. A nightmare of Oscar grabbed at me—his Brother Manuel face—bloodied and broken, bent behind a twisted steering wheel, a shattered windshield. His dead eyes wide open, stunned, hurt that I had not kept him from such a fate. Such a betrayal.  I did all I could. I tried anyway. But I know I failed your mother, my baby girl. I did the best that I could, but I failed anyway.

I never stopped jumpin’ up at her every cry. Fair enough when she was a babe in arms.

When she started to walk and talk, I could not take my eyes off of her. I couldn’t say no. I gave her everything. Too much. I made her my world. We both nearly died when she was born; and while I was still unconscious, the doctor fixed it so I couldn’t have another child.

But when I did wake up and Lorraine did too, and they put her in my arms, I looked down into the face of the only blood relative I knew. She was all the family I would have. I didn’t want to let her out of my sight.

So I nearly smothered her. She was my world, but I had no idea what to do with her. Every whimper brought me runnin’. She never did sleep well, woke me at all hours, from the time she was a toddler until she left for college. Bad dreams, jealous friends, aching feet.

Hungry. Thirsty.

Once those were soothed, she cooed her requests. New dresses. New records. Everything she wanted, I found a way to give her.

Until nothing I gave her satisfied her. And then she left me.

What did I know? I’d had teachers who saw to my reading and manners. Bosses and a husband. The rest was a mystery. I had wanted everything too, growing up, but I had no mother. Only a blank space.

So Lorraine left me. She stomped off to college. She met your daddy. Oscar and I were left alone in the house.  I knitted a lot when your mama was a fussy infant. Only motion would quiet her. I could rock her cradle with my foot and keep my hands busy. Always doin’.

Undoin’. Always makin’ do.

But I really only had one chore. To take the keys when Oscar got home from work each night. And hide them.

I had promised.

I had my places. The box of sanitary pads in the bathroom. The toe of a snow boot in summer. In the kitchen trash between the bag and the bottom of the can.

I was always looking for places to hide them. Never using the same spot two days in a row. Never using the hiding places in the same order. I woke up every mornin’, my mind already threadin’ through the house. I couldn’t risk Oscar figurin’ out a pattern. I could not let him catch on. He was the cop, but at home, I was the night watchman.

I had never tasted beer, but I had seen it light Oscar’s face. I had heard his tongue get quick when he drank. And been soaked by his tears. It seemed that golden liquid burned him with thoughts too clear for words. With powers I could not understand. I had to be more clever, more cunning.

Caring for your mother, my little Lori. That was my life. But keeping the keys was my work. I did it diligently every day. And Oscar did his. Patrolman during regular hours.

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Then, off-duty, he was busy with his evening chore: drinking. We both worked very hard.

On days when I thought of a perfect hiding place in the morning, the rest of the hours were light and free. Like a holiday. I remember the morning I first discovered that the refrigerator in Lori’s dollhouse actually opened and was the perfect size for the key. I went out and bought myself an ice cream sundae!

But when I had used all the safest spots, when all the hiding places I trusted were off limits to use again so soon, those days I was shaking and achy. I would be late walking Lori home from school, burn dinner, be on the edge of tears by the time Oscar headed out to the garage. Him looking at me with pleading and trust. Save my life tonight, Earla, his face said. Promise.

I had crossed my heart. Did all this without ever telling a soul. So I also never told a soul, least of all my own, that for all my hard work, day in and out, it never did matter where I hid the keys.

Because in the end, every night, I couldn’t bear to leave them where I’d put them.

Every night, after I’d turned out the light, I could not sleep until I’d get out of bed. Go get those keys from wherever I’d put them. Squeeze my fingers around them. I slept with them under my pillow.

In the morning, I’d put them on the kitchen counter next to his coffee so he could drive himself to work.

Every morning, I told myself it would be different today. I would find the safest place. I would trust leaving them there. I would sleep without dreaming of disaster.

But I never could.

TH E SU M M E R A FT E R I turned eleven years old, the Baptists paid for a group of orphans to go off to Bible camp. One night, I woke up screamin’. All the girls in my cabin and our counselor gathered around my bunk. I had dreamed about a monster. Chasing me. Getting close to catching me.

At all the campfires that week, they had talked about living a prayerful life. So in the middle of the night, they all prayed for me. And when they opened their eyes, another girl was crying. She told us that the boys in the family she lived with molested her. So we all prayed for her next.

The last night of that camp, I sat by myself on a high berm behind the girl’s cabin, looking down across the grassy playing field to the dark woods beyond. We’d all just left the last campfire. The young pastor sent us all away, to be silent. To be with God. To pray and to listen. Everyone had wandered off to some place.

I looked up at the stars, out at the trees. They were slowly waving in some breeze I didn’t feel yet. It embarrassed me, how I made a big deal out of a bad dream when someone right next to me lived in an actual nightmare.

Sitting in the dark, stretching my sweater over my huddled knees, the wind picked up harder, but the coldness didn’t bother me. My own thoughts whooshed clean in the breeze. I inhaled wakefulness. How else can I say this? The night laid on me like Father Jose’s hand when he baptized me. Alone there in the dark, with sharp gravel and stubby grasses poking through my dungarees, I had no fear of the kindly night.

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A few other campers passed behind me, and I remembered I was supposed to be talking to God about, what was it? How he wanted us to live better? I tried to focus on this. “God,” I said, “what do you want me to do for you?” I listened, and for just a moment I felt ready to do anything God would ask. Anything at all.  But these are the only words that came: Just be a little fire. can you hear me?

I am at the part I most need to say.

Can you see it yet, how it was? Lorraine gone to college, Oscar and I alone again. All the kindness and generosity leached out of him. The quiet of that house like the daylight darkness of the old dust storms. I let him bring his drinking in from the garage. Couldn’t stand to have him alone out there. Couldn’t stand my own company.

At the kitchen table, we said nothing. By then, he only drank whiskey. And I’d hide the car keys until he passed out. Put him to bed. Go fetch the keys back and lay awake thinking up all the words I could use, all the noise I could make.

I had such screams in me.

My bones shook harder and harder until the night I didn’t sleep at all. Just kneaded the things I had never said, letting them rise, punching them down again. The sun rose on a Saturday. When Oscar opened his eyes, all my thoughts shut down. But the truth had already started filling me up. Hard truth.

He drank his coffee. Shaved. Read the paper through bleary eyes. At noon, he took the car to the liquor store. He gave me the keys when he got back. Opened the bottle of whiskey and sat at the kitchen table. He drank all afternoon. I made us his favorite dinner. I knew he would not eat. I sat across from him and cut my pork chop. I buttered my roll. I drank a tall glass of water. I did the dishes.  All day, I knew. The truth. We breathed and walked and took up space, Oscar and me, but our lives were gone. Death had already taken us. Made us two weary forms in the dim.

So just as it got dark, I got into my nightdress. I washed my face like I did every night.

But I had not chased any hiding place that day. Back in the kitchen, I took the car keys from my pocket. I put them on the kitchen table next to Oscar where he sat draining a glass of whiskey.

I went back to our bedroom and fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.

I told myself, if we were already dead, what would it matter if I killed him?

DEAR CHI L D,

is as quiet as it ever gets. Tomorrow they will call Loraine, tell her it is the end. Tonight, I am dreaming.

I am back in the mud-brick chapel on the plains east of Pikes Peak. Brother Manuel is lighting candles on the altar. Beside the little fires, a carved wooden figure of Jesus. He touches his exposed and flaming heart with his fingertips.

“Does his heart hurt him?” I ask. I cannot decipher the quiet face of the wooden figure.

Brother Manuel nods. “It hurts him much.”

“Why does he let it burn then?”

The old monk sits silent for a long while, his eyes closed. “It is mystery, Earlita,” Manuel

TONIGH T, T HI S HOSP I TA L RO OM

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finally says. “He will do whatever he must to live in us.”

I touch the rough buttons on my sweater. “I don’t want him to hurt.”

He shakes his head. “No, but it is not ours to choose. He chose it. And the fire becomes amor. Love.”  I watch the flames swaying on the candles. The carved hands of the wooden figure look gentle. I suddenly need to know. “Manuel, how does he get in me?”

“You just ask him.”

“Does it hurt?”

Brother Manuel takes my hand. He says, “Sometimes, yes. Sometimes his fire burns us too.”

And then, many things come to me. I see. Bedclothes in flames. Grease on the stove catching fire. Windows cracking. Lungs banging against ribs, frantic to get out. The roof beams falling. Bones snapping. Wailing ignites a heart.

Then.

A single candle in the dark. Unraveled sweaters knit into new socks. Someone crying in the next room. Get up. Go look.

Look for a safe place.

Keys. Keys on the table. Oscar holds them in his shaking hand. He shakes, cries. Burns.

Out in the street, headlights or stars falling? Betrayal or resurrection? His voice calls me back, back, back. My voice, meant to bless, bless, bless.

Red and yellow and orange, even purple, shimmer through the blank heat. A flaming sugar cube, sweet and hot.

Then everything is dark.

I see a young woman. You. My own granddaughter, grown as I will never know you now.

You are walking out into the dark. Alone, with your mouth open, but there is no sound.

Sparks fly up into the dark.

I call out. Do you hear me? My words catch in the sparks. Sparks that fly up.

And when they come down, the stars have faded behind me. The purple-blue sky has already shifted. Red layers on pink. Lighter and lighter through the strands of clouds.

The first shot of gold light explodes the horizon, a tiny slip becomes a blinding wedge.

Beloved child, I give you my voice, my life now.

And I fill up with light.

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artists’ statements M AY KY T O N EN & D O U G S I N K

writes: “My paper sculptures are crafted from material sourced from my life and culture​. I transform thin and fragile paper into a sculptural form able to hold its own weight. Crumpled up, it pulls tight within itself. Loops are cut and then peeled from each other, reaching out for connection. I am also intrigued by the hidden dialogue within the material.  My process began with a longing for connection. Growing up in a bicultural home, I experienced dissonance in who I was and where I belonged—a loss of connection between my American life and that of my relatives across the water in Taiwan. Yearning to bridge the gap, I became curious about how Chinese and English, the languages of my family, might interact in a joined, physical form. Taking newspaper, I spun together yarn and began knitting. As the tapestry started taking shape, new questions and curiosities arose for me. What did it mean for paper to break, disintegrate, or be left undone? How was something as fragile as paper able to transcend its original form?

As I have created this body of work, my thoughts about identity have also expanded.

I often experience a divide within my heart, a chasm between cultures and who I feel I can or should be within my multiethnic identity. Yet fibers and thread and yarn are binding substances—often used to build forms, transform materials, and make bonds of connection. My current work begins a map of how one can stretch out and let the folds of self breathe easy, even in the midst of dissonance.”

MAY KYTONE N

writes: “One of the most basic human impulses is to build—to alter our environment to suit our need. To survive we MUST adapt our environment to suit our needs to a certain degree, through building shelter and making tools. It is no coincidence that kids everywhere build forts.

But we live in a time and place that demands so very little of this. We can live in a house built by others, wearing clothes that others have made, and eating food grown by others.

We are able to completely cut ourselves off from this basic human function that our ancestors knew to be as inherently human as breathing.

I love the comforts that define our modern world, but often I feel lost amidst them. So I make things, some that are directly useful, like furniture or clothing. Other times they are indirectly useful, like these artworks. Their function is to remind people that we built our place in this world. I also like making things that are obviously delicate, that require some care. I want us to be tender in the way we live, to treat each other tenderly, to treat our home (environment) tenderly. So I make things that are somewhat fragile, that force me to bring that tenderness and attention to the object. I hope you feel invited to bring more of that into your own life.”

DOUG SINK

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MAY KYTONEN. Popular Demand. Newspaper, rice paper, gold thread. 3.5” x 5”

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MAY KYTONEN. Cartography. Newspaper, rice paper. 4” x 5”

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MAY KYTONEN. They Told Me, “Be Yourself”. Newspaper, rice paper, gold thread. 2.5” x 6”

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MAY KYTONEN. Self-Conscious. Newspaper, rice paper, gold thread. 4” x 4”

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D OUG SINK. Envirostruct #3, 2016, various materials, 30” x 16” x 6”

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D OUG SINK. Envirostruct #4, 2016, various materials, 24” x 16” x 8”

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D OUG SINK. Envirostruct #1 (detail). Various materials. 24 x 6 x 12 inches

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Envirostruct #6 (detail).

D OUG SINK. Envirostruct #6. Various materials. 20 x 15 x 12 inches

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PATRI C I A C L A R K

Perfoliate Leaf Because the stem

because the flat white

clusters of flowers

because it grows commonly

by the roadside

with large crinkled leaves.

A large basal leaf

grows around the stem

making it appear

to be growing through the leaf.

Because of this

it was thought to help repair

bone fractures, putting

a leg or arm straight. O heal us if you can,

boneset, after the terrible break,

knit us together again

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stronger than ever before.

CATHER I NE W I NG

Rewilding I dance to fall down fall down to feel my back against a solid surface.

There’s light that shines and light that leaks.

Between them I’m— What’s the moon but an opening mouth that can’t distinguish its tongue from teeth.

I cannot contain all my hands all arc and angle across my electric field.

The world divides and division’s a kind of making a wheel must wheel against.

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CATHER I NE W I NG

Before the Race after Edgar Degas Haphazard suspends above hap in a race unrun the moment is all muscle From here there is no finish line just a body in transition animal to animal suspension We move towards moving into order a rough sense of words wonder at sentencing How almost casual the grass greens against the sky against which even the clouds threaten but fail to move

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J E F F MA RCU S W H EEL ER

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1.

I cried in front of another man, for the first time, at boot camp. Boot camp for scientists. It started with running. “Conditioning is key,” they tell you. So you run, in circles, in place, to nowhere and back. You run until you cry. If you don’t cry, they drown you in gas until you do. That’s day one.

2.

They woke us at sunrise on the second day and lined us up in our underthings and pajamas. Nearly naked, the twenty-four of us, all scientists of varying disciplines, stood against a wall built with concrete blocks. “Angel Moreno,” the Commanding Officer addressed me for the first time.

“Get with Cristiano Silva.” Cristiano raised his hand and nodded. He was tall and lean but strong, with defined trunks for thighs stressing the seams of his boxer shorts. The CO paired us off, and we fell into parallel lines for morning noxious training.

“Should we have food in our stomachs?” I asked, more confused than hungry. “You’ll get breakfast when you pass the test,” the CO said. “If you still want it.”

3.

Gas spilled from the noxious tent, burning our eyes and throats even before they led us in, two by two. Cristiano and I had still not officially met, but we entrusted each other with cinching the back of our gas masks. “Err on the side of too tight,” the CO told us. She told us many things, said it would take months to learn it all. We only had days. “Jungle Warfare,” was one of her favorite descriptors. As if we were soldiers. As if we assembled for a war. “I’m preparing you for anything.” Inside the flaps of the gasses tent we were tested.

I’m still not sure why. The gas immediately breached both of our masks, and we stumbled from the tent, squinting, spitting, and coughing out the dregs erupting from our sinuses.

The CO met us and laughed, lifting her own mask. “Not so simple, eh smart one?” She stood over us and nudged her boot into my ankle.

“What is the point of this?” I asked.

“To strengthen the weak,” She said. “You need to be ready for anything.” As if she knew what we needed.

4.

We were hit with noxious training every morning at dawn like a call to prayer. Each time we fled the tent and ripped off our masks, the CO followed, took her own mask off and laughed, saying, “So this is what we’ve got? This is what I’m left to work with?”

“If I quit you’ll have nothing,” I said.

“Sounds as if we’re dead either way,” the CO said and spat into the grasses beside me.

“Hallelujah!” She replaced her mask and walked back to the noxious tent. Mucus still ran thick in my eyes. Gas ravaged the tissue of my lungs.

“Let’s do it again.” Cristiano said to me. “Let’s get it right. Make her a fool.” And so I stood, where he led I began to follow. We got it right, again and again, whether we needed to or not. Perfection gave way to immediacy. The world wouldn’t wait.

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5.

Havoc first broke in northern Eurasia. Reports of strange animal behavior, including deaths by the millions, were followed by the rapid decay of natural habitats. Patches of dead forests and grasslands and tundra peppered the continent. There was no pattern, no discernible reason for which lands lived and which withered to carbon and salt.

Governments pointed fingers, made claims of over manufacturing, democide, and religious cleansing. Theories were tested—pollution, biological warfare, terrestrial expulsion—though nothing could be proven.

The devastation circled the globe and began to move south. Amidst waves of equitable panic, global governments and civilian elites planned to assemble teams of specialists and commissioned military groups to navigate and lead researchers into ground zero. People began to die before the strength of the efforts initiated. Sickness spread much faster in humans than it did in plants or animals.

Those who survived were said to be resistant, or lucky, or simply delaying the inevitable. Two thirds of the world’s population was lost by the time spatterings of land in the Amazon river basin began to rot. Chaos and war consumed depleting lives and resources.

Global communications were all but lost. Inconclusiveness reigned, the universal language of the surviving world as it waited to die. But still we try. If you were deemed immune and able, you were called upon. Everyone had a part to play.

6.

Our party totaled twenty-four. Most pulled from labs and research facilities funded by surrounding governments. Brazil, Argentina, and Peru contributing the lion’s share. Two of us were in the all but dissertation stage, still in school as the sickness hit. Not many had extensive time in the field. We were all able and eager but hardly the A-squad—choices were ever limited. Really, what choice did any of us have? Who else could answer the call?

7.

The jungle cats had all died out. The sloths and primates next. By the time we finished training, there were no mammals left in the Amazon.

8.

If every problem has a solution, there are surely clues to discover. The assignment was vague but simple: collect samples and look for patterns, something to analyze, anything; report our location, helicopters or Evac teams would collect our findings. We weren’t told to fix anything. “You’re researchers. Research.” But we understood they were tasking us with saving the world. We were running out of options. We were running out of chances.

We needed to find something. We didn’t need noxious training. We didn’t need boot camp.

We weren’t insubordinate pieces of shit. We didn’t need to cry. Regardless of their faith in us, we were here. Regardless of our faith in the plan, we were willing. Regardless of faith in anything at all, we would try.

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9.

In a single transport vehicle, they brought us to a deserted ranch on the edge of the Amazon river basin. Farmers and agriculturalists had maintained the land, fighting back the encroaching rain forest for years with machetes and fire, but now trees and pining roots had overtaken the soil, transforming the modern construction to enveloped ruins. We stepped off the caravan and gathered on the edge of the dying world. The smell was overbearing.

Cristiano covered his nose with a pale blue bandana and gestured toward a dilapidated barn. It was filled with the rotting carcasses of cattle.

“Ready your packs,” the CO ordered. “There’s no reason to wait.” She turned and climbed the wheel-well of the transport vehicle into the cab.

“Will we see you again?” Cristiano asked, before the CO shut the door.

“May we find providence either way.” The caravan rumbled back from which it came, and the rains began to shower. We secured our equipment, tightened the straps to our packs, and stepped, hand in hand, into the forest.

10.

Not even one hour in and we were greeted by tapir, brocket deer, and capybara, dead where they stood, stiff with rigor mortis. I reached out and touched the snout of a tamandua that clung to a tree, and it tumbled with a thud to the ground.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—” “Don’t worry,” Cristiano said and braced my shoulder.

“They’re dead. You can’t hurt them.”

“I’ve always wanted to see an anteater.”

“And now you get to cut one open. Take a tissue sample.”

11.

On that first day, during the lightest break in the rains, we spotted a great morpho butterfly, half a meter wide and a peripheral shade of iridescent blue—not dull, not tinted gray— but when we got too close it flitted away, and we lost it among the foliage. “A good omen,” Cristiano said. “So large, it must be thriving. You’ll see. Lady Fortuna is with us.” In one breath we laughed at the idea of fortune, but in the next we willed it so.

12.

We kept to ourselves. We were not friends. We shared no memories beyond boot camp.

But we knew enough to be suspicious. A sniffle or cough might raise questions. The reported consensus was if we hadn’t been sick yet, we weren’t going to get sick. But “yet” was the operative word.

13.

We were in the dark. Even at the sun’s highest point, light looms scarce in the heart of the jungle. We tried not to burn lanterns, anything to avoid disrupting the healthy fauna from its regimen. But even when standing shoulder to shoulder, a team around you, the jungle makes you feel alone. It’s an opaque space that smells of earth and death, and in that place

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the mind plays tricks—every bead of sweat becomes a hole in your equipment; every tickle on your skin, an infestation; every snap or rustle in the distance, a predator you know can’t exist. Every butterfly becomes a beacon of hope.

14.

The insects started to go too. We soon found entire armies of carpenter and fire ants, hordes of beetles, flocks of winged creepers, all dead, lifeless in these unthinkably great, nauseatingly still piles in the middle of the rain forest. Each accumulation, the size of a fire station, several stories high.

“How have they done this?” I whispered.

“Who’s they?” Cristiano asked, looking on. “The insects?”

“I don’t know.”

Sorted and stacked like children’s blocks, the collections were unnatural. This dirge macabré brought us together, slowly. We often stood in circles surrounding a pile, straining back to see the peak above. “Diablo,” some would say. Others would say nothing at all. Sometimes, as we passed the larger piles, wind or rain would rustle one of the bugs at the top, creating a small avalanche of exoskeletons tumbling to the base, clickin—ticka-ticka-ticka-ticka—all the way down. We’d wait, helplessly, for it to stop, and we'd look for subsequent movement. Any sign of life. We clasped at reason, at process, but spoke of Armageddon, of End of Days.

“This has divine intention,” Rohan claimed. “How can we fight the heavens?” Many agreed. “You’re being ridiculous,” others said.

“Unless,” Esther said, hushing the group. “So much loss. Does it denote the death of God himself?” She said this with a face of stone, neither in fear or jest.

“Deus ex machina,” I said and winked, at Cristiano. “Perhaps we are the unsolvable problem.”

That night, Cristiano built his tent next to mine. “Can you imagine?” he asked me. “If these things came back to life. So many in one place. They’d destroy us all.”

“Maybe the fire ants,” I said. “But most of these things wouldn’t attack people.”

“Too much of anything can kill you, Angel.”

“We’re still here.”

“Hallelujah.”

And we laughed and slept soundly.

15.

Every morning, Eugene Carvalho, our only doctor of medicine, administered a round of health and safety checks. Many complained, “If we haven’t died yet, are we not safe?”

“It’s better to be sure,” Dr. Carvalho would say.

But it was clear to me, just as we were collecting samples of the life and death around us, Eugene was collecting samples from us.

We were part of the research.

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16.

When the samples became more than we could carry, we radioed for an extraction. A helicopter arrived the next morning, dropping off large packing crates for us to fill and food rations when we needed them. We then climbed trees and set pulleys to hoist the crates up to the top of the canopy where another helicopter came and lifted our findings away. Wrap things tight. Keep things dry. Preservation was the key to our preservation. Despite our best efforts, everything from samples to our skin became soggy and soaked from the rain.

All wet. All rotting. There was no escape, no way to desiccate.

17.

The rains were relentless. Days and nights blended into singular moments of wet, dark existence.

The best of our equipment claimed “water resistant,” but water found a way in. We used empty tents to hang our socks and other garments when we slept, to dry them as best we could. We had a few small heaters, but battery life was at a premium, and we didn’t fire them often. The constant beat of the rain washed out other sounds. During the worst of it, we’d have to yell at the person next to us or risk going unheard. Hello! Hungry? This way!

The sounds of our screaming, back and forth, still barely a whisper as the showers rumbled like a kettledrum in our ears. When the rains fell light, Cristiano and I joked, singing verses from The Messiah as we hiked; “And he shall reign forever and ever.”

“Revelations?” some would say.

“No,” Cristiano would say. “The downpour.”

“The Deluge? Noah?” they’d ask.

“No,” Cristiano would say, “the Amazon.”

“King of kings,” I’d add. “And hoards of hordes.” Cristiano and I laughed while most scoffed. If only to fight the fear in our eyes for how this all would end, we were relentless, singing our theme and variations into the muting tropical rains.

18.

It wasn’t long until the reptiles had gone the way of the insects. The fish too. Hundreds of dead piranha collected on the shores of the river alongside packs of stiff black caiman, belly up. Eels, twenty, thirty at a time floated lifeless with the current toward the sea.

Sometimes frogs or chameleons or other lizards would fall from the trees as you walked, bouncing off your back or thumping to the ground, having expired long before impact.

19.

“It’s amazing what you notice and what you don’t,” Cristiano told me. I asked him to explain. “I don’t notice the rain. Everyday there’s rain. Every night, rain. It’s a part of this place. But the ground, it’s not mud. We walk and walk, and I only just noticed how the earth still holds firm. It’s amazing. What else don’t we notice, given what we do?”

20.

We only noticed the birds after they stopped calling.

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21.

Days went by without any sign of animal life. The hours were spent scouring the trees and combing the water for movement. But every upturned leaf was a fruitless endeavor. Surely, we thought, there must be something left. We must be close to the key. The entire forest became our Sisyphean task.

22.

We championed the plan more than ever. We moved often, took specimens. We collected everything, anything. Two samples of all we found—every color of beetle or toad, every aphid or moth, soil samples from beneath every pile, cuts from all nearby vegetation. We scooped out vials of coagulated blood from any dead thing we encountered. When a helicopter would drop crates, we uprooted entire plants and potted them for safe travel. Every few days we’d radio, a helicopter would come, and we’d send it back with a load of new specimens. We were becoming efficient.

23.

Then, without warning, the radio failed. Things seemed fine from our end, but who is to say. All channels were empty. We homed in on every frequency. No reply. We set off the emergency Evac beacon and waited hours, then days, for a helicopter, a convoy, a voice.

24.

Morale hung low. Amidst murmurs of defeat and a lightening rain, Cristiano reached into a nearby horde of scarab beetles and pulled one out. He threw it side arm, spinning into a puddle that had pooled at the base of a nearby tree. Even with the light rain breaking the surface tension, the beetle created a series of rings in the puddle where it landed and floated across the top. He roared something primal, a sound louder than any we’d heard in days.

He rubbed his hands together and whipped them violently as if he was in pain or trying to dislodge slime.

“These things are disgusting,” he said. “Better to have them dead and out of our hair.”

He reached back into the pile and took out a handful of the beetles. He collected them in the crook of his arm and with the other hand threw one at Esther, then another at Tiago.

The whole group erupted into laughter, playfully tossing the hard carcasses at one another.

Marcos dug through his gear and crafted a football from a tarp and some blaze orange duct tape. We were hardly in an open field but it didn’t matter. Everyone played. Marcos tried to set boundaries, separate us into teams, and even signify the goals in various gaps between the trees. But none of it mattered. For the first time since the onset of the sickness, we all laughed, truly laughed, as if forgetting the worst. We all took a second breath. It didn’t matter.

25.

We made camp that night among the giant mounds, the hoards of hordes. With food for weeks and water falling daily by the gallons, we agreed to leave our samples along with a

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beacon in the morning and continue on, keeping with the plan. In our dreams of best case scenarios, this was just a simple case of equipment failure. If we kept to the plan, and once this technical glitch was corrected, command could airlift what we gathered, having never missed a beat. We all knew the worst case. The plan gave us hope, a reason.

26.

Before dawn I awoke to a drumming vibration. The earth moved beneath my tent, and I curled to a ball. There was a single, short scream, and then only thunder. When it stopped, I scrambled from my tent just as Cristiano and a few others emerged from their own.

One of the insect towers we’d pillaged, eroding its foundation, had shifted and toppled into another. Both masses fell in an elephantine wave of sparkling blue and green beetles, covering several tents in the night. Rohan and a few others ran from the calamity, fearing reanimation. Others raced toward the detritus in a river of words. Who is missing? Count, somebody count! Hello. Hello. We’re coming. We’re coming! I leapt into the flotsam, clawing at the beetles, blindly feeling for bodies, looking for movement. The mound rocked in a state of deposition, constantly shifting under my weight, cracking and scattering beneath me. The sharp shells dug into my knees, under my fingernails, and sliced at my bare hands as I scraped again and again. Cristiano found someone and cried out, pleaded for help. We found another, and another. We labored to uncover our companions quickly, freeing limbs and scooping out broken parts of the bugs from their mouth, ears, and eyes. We tried to revive them, but they were gone, trampled. Each beetle carcass, near weightless in our hands, had accumulated. The sheer number too great, the surge had crushed our companions’ bones.

27.

We lost almost half our party, ten dead where they slept. There was nothing to blame and no peace to be found. We were left with a question of grace.

28.

Helpless, we climbed to the top of the canopy and fired unavailing flares. Brilliant hues of purple and orange dazzled in the sky, carrying unfair expectations in their wake until they extinguished. The tails of smoke drifted away in the rain like jellyfish. There proved no turning back. There weren’t reinforcements. We looked to the sky for time. Apologized to mothers, fathers, God. We moved on after scavenging what we could from the tents and packs of those we left behind. There was no other way.

29.

For several days our efforts at collection and salvation were halted. Days and nights we gathered in a single oversized tent. We held hands and those inclined led prayer. There was a time, not long before, when most of us would have laughed at the idea. But on those nights in the tent, prayer stole the conversation. With closed eyes and bowed heads we recited along, regardless of religion, as if we were all persons of faith. We hoped for someone looking down upon us, something more than what was left. In this way we connected.

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Given what was gone, what was lost, we held each other to keep its place.

30.

We told stories of our various studies, of who and what we once were. But mostly, we spoke of friends and of our families. We told stories of home.

31.

Marcos had followed in his father’s footsteps. Isa came from a family of ranchers. Rohan’s parents, successful vintners. Cristiano didn’t know his mother. Esther claimed to be a descendent of Hitler. We all opened quickly. Questions like, “What did your father do?” echoed in the tent, no more than a ploy toward discussing one’s own father. We all had stories to share. Every detail unique and meaningful to the storyteller, but the meaning rang true with the same clarity for us all.

AN

32.

There is never enough time with those we love. The stories we shared were a way to hold on amidst something we could not grasp, a way to remember. Sometimes the stories were proof of life, of existence. Would there ever be enough time to share it all? We understood each other, in this way. So we stayed up late into the nights, listening. Listening and even engaging, desperately waiting for our turn. Hoping someone, anyone, would listen when it was time for our voices to be heard.

AP R ON

33.

On one occasion, I asked Cristiano why he never shared a story. He had once revealed his mother to be absent, but nothing more since then. “Do you think I killed them?” he asked me.

I choked at the question. “Your parents? Murder?”

“With the beetles,” he said, and threw a piece of bark into the fire.

How quickly we forget. How foolish we can be. “You were in your tent, next to mine,” I said. Of course he hadn’t killed them.

“I was the first to dig into the hoards. It was careless.”

“It was harmless. We were all playing. All of us.”

MA RY L O T Z them. Should never have let our “Exactly,” he said. “We should never have touched guard down. It’s my fault.” He buried his face in his hands.

“It’s not true.” I took his hands and raised them, the countless cuts and scratches on his knuckles and palms only just starting to scab. “You fought for them,” I said. “You were their best hope.”

He pulled away. “I led them to death.” “You’re wrong.” “They died for nothing.”

“They died trying.”

“What do you know?”

I knew very little. I knew explanations were at once few and many. I knew we’d likely find nothing, but we were assuredly dead if we did nothing. I knew we had to try.

“They died for answers.”

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“And what if there are no answers?” he asked. “What will we die for then?”

“We’ll be dead,” I said. “What will it matter?”

“Hallelujah!”

34.

There was a truth in the rain, but it’s one I struggled to find.

35.

Cristiano awoke to panic almost nightly. “Get them off me,” he would yell and scramble from his tent as if breaking free from invisible chains. “No,” he cried out, ripping off his clothes and clawing at his chest and arms, his body constantly streaked and red. Most nights it took several minutes to calm him, to persuade him of what can only exist in dreams. There was nothing left to fear. There was nothing left.

36.

The florae were dying. Vines became brittle, plants and flowers browned and curled into themselves. The trees too, smelled of rot. We set out to climb in a taller area of the forest, Cristiano and I, as high as we could manage. It took hours to reach the top. We crossed from wet tree to wet tree in the canopy and ascended into the emergent layer where we rested on the broadest of the branches so high up, those strong enough to hold us. The view offered no signals, no clues. The rain lessened, and a wind gently blew the waxy leaves as we looked out across the forest. The dull air looked almost smoky, but without any scent of fire. “It looks like an ocean,” I said. “Green swells about to break in a storm, but time has stopped. It’s a painting. All that’s missing is a fishing boat.” I didn’t look to see if Cristiano nodded or laughed or reacted at all.

37.

We both clung to the same limb. “My grandfather was a fishmonger,” Cristiano finally said.

“His boat was lost at sea.” It was the closest thing to a story he’d shared.

“Was he lost as well?”

“Of course. El Capitão.” He gestured with his hand as if to say I was asking stupid questions.

“I didn’t know my grandfather.”

“That’s okay. I did not know my mother.” He laughed and checked the ropes, then leaned back into the narrowing trunk of the tall tree. “What did your father do?”

“He worked for a zoo. The Parque Cerro Cavaco outside of Sao Paulo.”

“Did he work with the animals? Cientista?”

“No. He designed the cages. It was a government zoo, you know? It was never really meant for the people, but when things were good they opened the gates. My father rebuilt the pens for the larger animals, made them more humane. He was most proud of the space he designed for the lion, room to run even. He said it was the most important thing he’d ever done.”

“Did that hurt?” Cristiano looked on uneasily, checking my face for the gravity of my

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father’s proclamation.

“No,” I said. “I never believed creating a son should be the most important thing a father can do.”

He nodded. “It was a terrible question.”

I shook him off. “There’s a plaque for him at the entrance,” I continued. “Bronze— his face next to a lion’s. “Reyes De Montanha, it says. Kings of the Mountain.”

“Must be a nice cage,” Cristiano said, eyebrows raised.

“Nah, it’s not like that. He saved some people. Some of the workers mishandled the locks on the door, and the lion got out.

“Everyone fled, finding shelter where they could in restrooms or behind concession stands, but my father stood righteous and waited for the lion to come. There were some kids, you see. They froze, didn’t know where to go. My father stood between them and the lion.”

Cristiano leaned in, and I kept on.

“The lion lumbered down the path and called, over and over, a hoot more than a roar.

Rwho! Rwho! My father could make the sound better than I can. My father, he held his arms open and stepped toward the great animal. The lion, too, moved toward my father.

When they were only paces away, my father reached out. He ran his fingers through the lion’s mane. Slow, he gripped the coarse hair and squeezed, drawing their faces together.

My father pressed his forehead into the bridge of the Lion’s nose. ‘You owe me,’ he cried.

‘You owe me!’ The lion turned and plodded back to his cage.”

Cristiano sat, mouth agape. “Just like that?” he asked. “I don’t believe it.”

“It’s true,” I said, hands up, declaring innocence. “He too denied it ever happened, but everyone swore it was true.”

Cristiano shook his head. “Unbelievable.”

I nodded in agreement. The rain picked up.

“Did the zoo catch the sickness?”

“No. It had closed years prior. My father and the lion both passed long before.”

Cristiano rested back on his arms. “And he shall reign for ever and ever,” he said, then closed his eyes and breathed deeply.

I closed my eyes too, grateful he didn’t ask how my father died. Even more grateful for getting to speak of him the way I had. “What did your father do?” I asked.

“My father? He did the best he could.”

“That’s not what I mean,” I said, but Cristiano did not answer.

38.

Even at its heaviest, the rain became a blessing. From time to time the showers would let up, but the lulls brought an insufferable quiet. Where once a break in the showers invited a babble of howls and chatter from the abundant wildlife, the new silence rang through the trees, more startling than thunder. It was as if, without the rains, we were forced to listen intently to ourselves—to our innermost hopes and fears. We were forced to voice our prayers, to wait and listen for answers. And when the rain halted, if only for an instant, the quiet demanded we listen to the entire world scream.

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39.

When we found the boa constrictor, we had thought the snakes extinct. She was impossible. She was perfection. Lucky to be alive, such a hardy girl. But even then she was jinxed all the same. Forsaken. To survive this long meant a destiny of tests and needles. If there was anything left of home, her fate was a lab at worst, a zoo at best. We needed answers.

How had she survived? She was paramount.

40.

She was a trophy, first. Like children, we were feverish with excitement, taking pictures of her draped from our shoulders. Alone we could barely hold her. Emilio held the camera during my turn. She wrapped along my sides and slowly twisted around me. The others cheered in pleasure. I let it go on as she coiled. It would prove the best picture of all. Never mind who was left to see it.

41.

When she clinched it was too late. I couldn’t scream. Her body pulsed and the squeeze-release, squeeze-release rhythm massaged my spine with throbbing agony but at the same time rapture, like the pleasure-pain that comes from fingering a bruise, exponentially inflated. It was something like hope, but better. Trust? Faith? Scientific reasoning says it was just the onset euphoric phase of cerebral ischemic hypoxia—the mind playing tricks to prevent suffrage, a defense mechanism. I was dying. But as the pressure built behind my eyes, past unbearable and into release, I wasn’t thinking about the pain, I wasn’t thinking about death. Instead, as the limits of forever opened themselves to me, I was teased with the idea of tomorrow. That I couldn’t wait to get home. Home, to tell my father about the boa. About the research and the Amazon, about the world he knew I’d see. About how much I still missed him. How it wasn’t fair. About how lonely it was after he passed, when it was all over, and I was the last one kneeling in the chapel of a hospital.

42.

My team worked apace, taking off her head and hacking through other parts of her with a machete. They massaged the pieces of her body, still tense around me—blood-letters, releasing the grip. Their breath and strikes brought life back into me.

“Where is she?” I asked from the forest floor, not yet comprehending—not yet discerning the rain from the last of her saturating my clothes. Stains on the hands of the others spoke loudly, their bodies splashed with red. Some wept, others tried to wipe themselves clean. Esther looked to the heavens and swore. Cristiano’s eyes welled. The boa had broken expectation, broken our walls. The pool collected thick, and chunks of her had fallen like bricks around me.

43.

I rose demanding answers, accountability. You made the wrong decision. I wasn’t worth it.

What were you thinking? She needed to be saved at all costs.

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“She was going to die anyway,” Cristiano said. “Look here.” He revealed the serpent’s stomach, empty. “Killing you would have taken the last of her strength,” he said. “You weren’t a meal, you were a dying act.”

“You could have saved her,” I said, into my hands.

“We saved you,” Cristiano said. “For once we saved something.”

44.

After the boa, we no longer gathered in a single tent. We never agreed to stop, we just did.

We didn’t speak of forgiveness, of answers, or of truth. Alone in the rolling thunder of the rain, we found silence. If I believed in God those nights, it was only because I needed someone to hate. There was only so much burden I could bear.

45.

Please let it be that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.

46.

The rains broke as we came upon an outcropping of hibiscus trees. The flowers drooped, dripping with rainwater as they hung like a patchwork curtain of tears. Splashes of pink and red hung there, breaking up the grays and browning greens, the most color we had seen in weeks. I plucked a blossom from the lowest hanging branch. The flower twirled in between my fingers like a parasol. Pollen fell from the pistil and dusted my hands. I tried to blow it off, but the powder stuck to my wet fingers, and even after I rubbed the residual onto my trousers, my hands weren’t clean. For a moment, I let myself marvel at the color.

The fleshy, banded petals browning at the edges as if having been charred by fire. But the mouth of the flower was red, deep, almost like blood. I sank into the color, and the Amazon spoke—soft but brilliant, like a far-off trumpet, whispering, “Angel.”

“Angel,” Cristiano said, again. “Don’t pick it. These might be the last—” “What does it matter?” I asked. “Should we put up a fence? Guard it? Build an altar from which to worship? What shall we sacrifice?” He did not answer, instead picked a blossom himself from the tree above and twirled it in his fingers. The others did the same, pruning the area of any sign of growth. With slow and wandering steps we left, squinting into the sun, the entire forest wilting at our backs.

47.

I don’t know how long the rains held off. It’s possible, somewhere in the jungle, the showers fall until the end of time. What does it matter? We were born without time. Hallelujah!

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AMY OR A Z I O

Boundary Following green lines that fall soft startle at first in the dark fingers over eyes start to surface spring before I feel shape at the river’s edge the flood recedes the herons don’t mind they are watching too drawing and waiting the minnows flap so drastic a sound hollowed out praise for a place made in the winter for proceeds from the east until the current switched fork spooled winds deep like the lines they wing-beat then lay they are pleasant and broad so western to leave room my limbs held out like cups for this year’s portion

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LAURA SM I TH

Unstruck Before the ear, only the gods heard sound.

The note, the hammer, the child, the chord.

The unstruck world quivering with nothing to quiver.

An hour of helicopters each night, train whistle and fog horn, hum of kitchen light, car motor.

After the ear, the way the spine brightens, shifting the fire, the way the spine lights, bending heat toward what can be consumed.

At once, the body becomes a gesture, like a flick.

When one sense dies, the others compensate, the way skin listens, the way that hands find their mouths, the way collarbones turn their particular ears.

Release the spine like a chain, link by link lay it down. What’s left behind the action, light or something lighter.

Inside the hand, a texture like insect embryos, cotton and ash, tissue and powdered dirt.

Further inside, and the fingers in the dirt are in the heart: the heart is blue and full of soil, bits of insect wing and leg, falls apart at the touch. Digging further and a blue river: the heart follows the river to the digestive tract, no moment of the body contained in its own metaphor.

This is where it happens: the heart undone undoes the metaphor of the body: it comes apart, like pulling a string.

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LAURA SM I TH

Turn Birdsong ringtone and birds on the radio and birds in the rooftop trees outside the open window, the earth so preening, so attuned, it reproduces itself. Exponential mockingbird, conflagration.

The problem with improvising is that you never really know the rules, or the rules are all you know.

Feeling along the curvature of the limitations, like a loop hike or the inside edge of a track or wheel, or your own hand, also the shortest route.

You have to make sure the piano gets played. You have to take down the special honey.

Like tattooing a bird right onto the skin, what could be more obvious, bird overlay, the body painted with flight.

What if conversion were sufficient, slow, a turning, sea change, something tidal?

To calm the body limb by limb, calm the intestines, calm the fingers, calm the space between the ribs.

In an antique shop in Prague, an enormous needlepoint of water lilies, nearly five feet square, done in cotton yarn, stitch by stitch like sentences, how to inch across distances, or tend a very small farm.

He said that for those last years, she was reckoning only with the divine forces, like finding a new familiar. He woke to a new body, new earth.

One rarely walks in cemeteries for the information. Turning one thing into another, into itself, introverted alchemy.

It’s a particular labor, listening for the names of god, reaching for the names of god with the limbs of your body, like making yourself sick on happiness, misreading the label for wheat germ, light.

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KAREN AN - H W E I L E E

On Insect Holes as Fragrant Portals of Edible Light On the culinary materiality of sacred texts: asterisks of star anise. Post-devotionals with bytes for millennial career women.

The hypothetical verbs of Jesus dyed in beet juice.

Versions centuries apart in age yet millimeters apart in columns, milligrams of sepia ink.

Self-pronouncing versions with phonetic spelling. Fig cakes, gluten-free. A verbatim translation aiming for formal not dynamic equivalence: i.e. bread of life not breadfruit.

Illumination by scribes who transcribed after washing iceberg lettuce or mending rucksacks.

Gall wasp, not sepia ink, for vegetarians.

Edible versions dropped as leaflets from hydroplanes or read on the sly with the aid of night-vision binoculars. Hunger, the holy scriptures tongued as honey. Pearloid. Oysterfree translations adorned with inlaid synthetic mother-of-pearl.

Rapacious dung beetles feast on pages of heaven, the literal bread of life. Ligninrich pulp of trees, food-of-insects devoured as ounces of ambrosia. Anaphoras, plural chiasmi, and acrostics perfumed by the ink of berries. Palatable boustrophedonic version running left to right, right to left. Scrolls in clay jars found by a nomad shepherd, papyri riddled with insect holes of edible light.

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contributors

Born and raised in New England, KA R EN AN - HW E I L E E currently lives in San Diego where she serves in the university administration at Point Loma Nazarene University. Previously, she lived in greater Los Angeles where she taught herself how to play a cherrywood harp. writes fiction, poetry, occasional essays, and lots and lots of lists. He was born in Kingston, Jamaica, to a pharmacist and cop and lives now in Providence, Rhode Island.

COLI N C H A NNE R

is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Sunday Rising (2014), as well as two chapbooks, Wreath for the Red Admiral (2016) and Given the Trees (2009). She teaches creative writing at Grand Valley State University where she is also the university's poet-in-residence. She was the poet laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan, from 2005-2007. New work appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, and elsewhere.

PATRI C I A C L A R K

LI A GRE E NW E L L is a poet living in Detroit, Michigan. Her poems have appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Poetry East, and Witness, among other publications. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, she has taught creative writing through the Girls Write Now program in New York City and as the 2015 Joan Beebe Teaching Fellow at Warren Wilson College. www.liagreenwell.com.

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is a visual artist from Spokane, Washington, whose childhood included a blend of Taiwanese and European American cultural traditions, values, and food. She first became intrigued by the fine art world while exploring fiber art at the University of Washington in Seattle, subsequently earning a degree in interdisciplinary visual arts in 2012. Her current work is an exploration of multi-ethnic identity, strength in fragility, and connection. www.maykytonen.com.

MAY K YT O N EN

Born in Russia, A . MO L O T K O V moved to the US in 1990 and switched to writing in English in 1993. His poetry collection, The Catalog of Broken Things, is just out from Airlie Press. His work appears in the Kenyon, Iowa, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Tampa, Raleigh, New Orleans, and Cider Press Reviews, Pif, 2 River, among others. His translation of a Chekhov story was included by Knopf in their Everyman Series. He co-edits The Inflectionist Review. www.AMolotkov.com.

A MY O RA ZI O 's work has appeared in

H_NGM_N, Bitterzoet, Gap Tooth, Pidgeonholes, Synaesthesia, Chaparral, and The Curator. Her first collection of poems, Quench, is forthcoming from CW Books (2017). Amy lives in the uncool part of Portland, Oregon, with her husband and halfyear-old son. She is planning to become a more prolific writer when her son learns how to nap. Send all the good vibes and prayer-full tweets that you can to @amyorazio. www.amyorazio.com. has been a ranch cook, an English teacher, a corporate trainer, and a

N I CO L E PA RS O N S

freelance writer. She has an MA in literature and a certificate in spiritual direction. Nicole lives with her husband in Westcliffe, Colorado, where she grows a garden, teaches storytelling, and writes stories every week with a couple of friends.

AMY PEC H U KA S is a teacher, nurse, and writer, and a former waitress, cook, baker, boat-driver, and alpaca care-taker. She has written poetry, memoirs, and fiction since she was a small, bushy-haired child. In her adult ESL classes, she enjoys making creative and academic writing a dynamic part of class. Current interests and passions include nature, her lovely mutts, singing aloud with students, dancing, and connecting with friends and family.

is a conceptual artist and educator in Denver, Colorado. Her work focuses on a desire to express the social responsibility of the artist as a voice for justice and awareness, actively showing the profound value of art in our society. She is currently an Adjunct Professor at the University of Denver and Metropolitan State University of Denver, and is a resident artist at RedLine Denver. Rockett received her MFA in drawing from Colorado State University in 2011.

SARAH R OC KE TT

lives and works in Fort Collins, Colorado. By day, he works with students at Colorado State University to manage the Lory Student Center Arts Program and bring artists to the Curfman and Duhesa Galleries.

By night and weekend, he makes art, furniture, toys, and other fun objects. He is lucky to share his adventures with his wonderfully supportive wife, Elizabeth, and his two curious children and studio mates, Tessa and Finn. www.dougsink.com.

DOUG SINK

L A U RA S MI T H is a poet and scholar based in Baltimore, Maryland. Recent writings appear in PANK, Bone Bouquet, and MultiEthnic Literature of the US. She teaches African American literature, queer studies, and creative writing at Stevenson University.

These poems draw upon varied spiritual and somatic practices, including participation in the Spiritual Practices Research Study at Johns Hopkins University in 2012.

J EF F MA RCU S W H EEL ER is a lover, fighter, hater, and liar. He lives in San Francisco and teaches at both Saint Mary's College of California and The Culinary Institute of America in the Napa Valley.

CAT H ERI N E W I N G is the author of two collections of poetry, Enter Invisible and Gin & Bleach. Her poems have been published in such journals as Poetry, the Nation, and the New Republic. She teaches at Kent State University and with the NEO-MFA, the nation’s only consortial program in creative writing.

RYO YA MA G U CH I is the author of The Refusal of Suitors, published by Noemi Press. His poetry has appeared in journals such as Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Journal, and Gulf Coast, among others. He also regularly reviews books for outlets such as Michigan Quarterly Review and NewPages.

He lives in Chicago where he works at the University of Chicago Press. www.plotsandoaths.com.

T H EO D O RA ZI O L K O W S K I 's

work appears or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Arts & Letters, Prairie Schooner, and Short Fiction (England), among others. She is the author of the prose chapbook Mother Tongues (The Cupboard) and the chapbook of poems A Place Made Red (Finishing Line Press).

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last note A ND TH E S O U L FELT I T S W O RT H

"Your ethnicity is not an accident," she said to us, and it felt as though my soul was coming up for air. It was the first time I had ever heard those words in my life, sending me on a journey of embracing and discovering who Creator made me to be in my biracial identity.

I am not an outsider of two cultures, nor two halves of a disconnected self. I am loved.

MAY KY TONE N, VI SU A L A RT

Crowds slosh through Terminal B at Seattle Airport. I stare into the middle distance until I realize I am looking at a ladder with wings descending from a skylight. An art installation: Aluminum scaffolds rising above the escalator. And each one with feathers and wings of glass.

I think, Jacob’s Ladder, the exile’s dream of angels arriving and departing from heaven. I don’t know what the artist intended, but faces erupt all around me.

The waiting boy is reading a book of poetry. The stooped woman with a cane deplanes, one shock of green-dyed hair on her gray head.

Entrances, exits. Not exactly angels unawares. Something a little lower. More valuable. Each particular soul a buried treasure.

N I COLE PA R SONS, F I C TI ON

How to measure the soul, who knows?

Does it have height or weight or width or breath? Can you put it in a doorframe

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and track its growth over time? What scale might catch its gains and losses? My two favorite metaphors are Philip Pullman’s “daemons,” the inner-self animals from His Dark Materials, or the one presented in Hadrian’s poem “Little Soul” as both a joker and a drifter.

CAT H ERI N E W I N G , PO ET RY

Nature is such an abundant source of nutrition. It feeds our bodies, calms our minds, and infuses our hearts and souls with peace, joy, and love. It is in nature that I feel most touched by how we are woven together in a tapestry of our collective worth as wild and beautiful as the galaxy of stars we inhabit.

This summer I watched and listened to waterfalls in the red canyons of Utah, observed the sun set behind the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, stared at the Milky Way at night from a Cape Cod beach, and swam in the frothy, wild Atlantic in Queens, New York. We are blessed to belong to this peaceful, gorgeous planet.

A MY PECH U K A S , F I CT I O N

The soul—what does it mean in the postmodern, post-religious world in which we find ourselves? We know the famous dichotomy, body vs. soul, the former attending to our physical self, the latter, to our spirit. But where does spirit live; what name does it answer to?

What if, to paraphrase Viktor Frankl, our souls are the meanings we make of our lives,

last note ON TH E S O U L FELT I T S W O RT H

our essential identities serving as guidelines in our perpetual expansion and contraction of selfhood, in our ongoing encounter with the Other? What if the soul becomes a measurement of one’s ability to step outside a selfish physical existence into a postbiological world—a world of empathy, the greater human project?

A. MOLOTKOV, P OE TRY

For me, the miraculous lies in the ordinary day-to-day, our around-us-all-the-time world. I write in a small studio outside our house overlooking a forest and ravine, and sometimes I happen to catch a glimpse of light coming down from the east through a petunia blossom outside in my window box—and I notice it. The tissue-thin blossom, the yellow rays, the flower a miracle of architecture, and our world just aching to us, wanting expression.

I looked up a wildflower and found the word perfoliate to describe its leaves, and I treasure the word. That is when the soul plumps up and feels its worth. When I am working, I rise into myself and grace in all senses of the word.

PATRI CI A C L A R K, P OE TRY

As a little girl, I was very influenced by the actress Lucille Ball. Lucy Ricardo’s unabashed antics on I Love Lucy are

reminders that comedy—the messiness and absurdity of it—is intrinsic to the exquisite fabric that marks our daily lives.

Both on screen and off, Lucille Ball’s constant inventiveness and dedication to her art are apparent: just as Ball herself was the first woman to head up a major Hollywood studio, the Lucy Ricardo of I Love Lucy is remarkably determined and imaginative. Lucille Ball’s creative spirit, her commitment to her art—not to mention the doors she opened for artists and women—continues to inspire me.

T H EO D O RA ZI O L K O W S K I , PO ET RY

I sat on a rock, feeling the settling of time in its ridged surface, and when I looked up to the sky, there was a moment of beautiful vertigo. My consciousness settled briefly into a geologic sense of time—I was no longer me, but maybe the rock beneath my body. So I just existed, feeling the earth spin beneath the clouds.

I was one tiny note to be forgotten moments after my echo ceased. But I was also a note in a never ending symphony of the universe. And it was comforting. It was the most free I have ever felt because no matter the shape of my note, the symphony would still be beautiful.

D O U G S I N K , V I S U A L A RT

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SARAH RO CKETT. Paradise Lost (detail). Scratched gold plexiglass, used children’s shoes, gold paint, rhinestones on wall.