Issue 44: Small

SMALL / 44

Fall 2017 $15

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

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

P LEA S E J O I N U S .

COVER IMAGE: Patrice Sullivan. Backyard Blues. Oil on Linen. 24 x 36 inches.

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

SUB M ISSION S

We welcome unsolicited manuscripts and visual art submissions year-round.

For information on Ruminate submission guidelines, Ruminate resources, and to submit your work, please visit our website at ruminatemagazine.org.

S UBS C RIP TION R ATE S & SE R V ICE S

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

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

GE N E R AL IN QUIR IE S

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

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

F R IE N D S

Your generous donations allow us to keep the lights on and the fire going for the artists, writers, and readers of our community. This issue was made possible by the friends of Ruminate, whose generous Summer 2017 donations gave us the financial support to make this issue of Ruminate possible. From the bottom of our hearts, we thank you!

B E N E FACTOR S

Darwill, Inc., Kim and Steve Franchini, Sara and Kelly McCabe, Janice Van Dyke-Zeilstra, John Zeilstra PATR ON S

Grace Church Presbyterian, Katie and Ryan Jenkins, Nicola Koh, Kelly and Brandon Van Dyke, Ralph and Lisa Wegner SP ON SOR S

Lynda Smith-Bugge, Phyllis Bussard, Judith Deem Dupree, Jennifer Fueston, Michael Ford, Sophfronia Scott Gregory, Jessica John, Katie and Tim Koblenz, Carole Lee, Robyn Lee, Terry Minchow-Proffitt, Stefani Rossi Cheryl Russel, Travis Schantz, Evelyn Lloyd-Smith, Ben and Morgan Van Dyke

T O BE C OME A F RIE ND OF Ruminate, V ISIT ruminatemagazine.com/donate Copyright Š 2017 Ruminate Magazine. All rights reserved.

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

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

Kristin Bussard M A R KE TI NG + O U T REA CH D I RECT O R

Keira Havens SE NI O R ED I T O R

Amy Lowe P OE T RY ED I T O R

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

Stefani Rossi B L O G ED I T O R

Charnell Peters P R I NT + W EB D ES I G N

Scott Laumann E D I TOR I A L I N T ERN S

Laney Collins Olivia Scofield A SSOC I AT E REA D ERS

Laura Droege Carly Joy Miller Dana Ray Amy Sawyer Michael Wright G U E ST PA N EL I S T S

Stacy Bustamante Gyasi Byng David Hopes William Jones Sobia Khan Susan Norman Seema Yasmin P R OO FREA D ERS

Libby Kueneke Sarah Wheeler

2017 William Van Dyke Short Story Prize

SP ONSOR E D B Y TH E VA N D YK E FA MI LY 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 P R I L VÁZ Q U EZ

A N D REW M c CU A I G

Rebirth

The New World

HON O RAB L E MEN T I O N M O N I CA J I MEN EZ

The Curse

F I NA L I STS A M A NDA A D A M S

CA RO LYN H O WA RD - J O H N S O N

C HA D B R OU G HM A N

T. MO RA N

J OE C A RY

REBECCA MU L L EN

L A U R A FA R NSW ORTH

BRI D G ET MU L L ER

RY L I E F R E D E R I C K

PET ER N EWA L L

KR I STI NA G OR C HE VA - NE W BERRY

J EB PA RK ER

J E F F HAY DE N

MA RY K AT H ERI N E S PA I N

F I NA L J U D G E L AT O YA WAT K I N S W RI T ES :

about being human and hero. It’s a beautiful depiction of how each life, especially the innocent ones, deserves a chance—how each life makes a difference. “ REBIRT H" I S A ST ORY

received her PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas. Her stories have appeared in Joyland Magazine, Passages North, Ruminate, and Potomac Review.

In 2015, she was awarded a Pushcart Prize for short fiction (for a story that originally appeared in Ruminate!). She has received fellowships from Kimbilio Fiction Center, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the MacDowell Colony. LaToya lives and teaches in Texas.

LATOYA WATKI NS

contents

NO T ES

Readers’ 6 Artists’ 32 Contributors’ 83 Last 86

FICTION

Rebirth, April Vázquez 14 The New World, Andrew McCuaig 44 The Curse, Monica Jimenez 66 NONF I C T I O N

Catching Crosshatch, Cathy Beres 76 VI SU A L A RT

The Art of Patrice Sullivan 33-40, 57-64

PO ET RY

25 Lessons, Jess Williard 26 Crepusculara, Dave Harrity 27 Anatomy of Release, Aubree Else Woelber 28 Compressions, Libby Kurz 30 Praise in Old Age, Allison Hraban 41 Skin, Jonathan Duckworth 42 Transmigration, Matthew Landrum 43 Pascal, C.K. Dawson 53 Isaac, Raven Leilani 54 When My Mouth First Opened, Hannah Lee Jones 55 October, Hannah Lee Jones 56 I Could Still Hear Him Whistling, Okwudili Nebeolisa 65 Grace Notes, John Sibley Williams 74 Buckner Orchard, Paul Willis 75 Children Will Swim Here, Laurie Klein

readers’ notes S MA L L

We call a perfume’s salutation its top notes. These are the smells that often sell a fragrance in a department store. The sales associate sprays a paper card, and we are introduced to peach or perhaps citrus, volatile molecules that disappear quickly. But, by the time the top notes are gone—before we’ve had a chance to learn the perfume’s heart— we may have already bought the box sealed in cellophane.

Middle notes come next. Beyond the initial greeting comes the conversation. We can expect roses here or something more exotic: narcissus, labdanum.

Hours later, the perfume is done talking.

It sits with us, quiet but present. The base notes are raw vanilla. They are castoreum or oak moss, secretion or fungus. “Base notes,” writes Diane Ackerman, “are almost always of animal origin, ancient emissaries of smell that transport us across woodlands and savannas.”

The shifts from top to middle to base are called the dry down. The perfume’s separation, once it leaves the bottle, is a departure from its globe of water. Its gradual disappearance isn’t so much evaporation as it is dehydration or desiccation, a language thinned until it’s little more than a faint ohhh.

JEHAN NE D U B R OW, DE NTON, TX

I became ill; my world became the smallness of one town, then one flat, one doctor’s surgery, one short walk, then one bed. A divorce followed swiftly. I lost my job. My universe

became a cat, four walls, and a wheelchair.

My future shredded like my tissue paper nerves.

I made like a cosmos, contracted into myself, folded up to a kernel. I found I had not decreased but concentrated, as though all the necessary things were still tucked up under my chin ready to unfurl in the right soil. Once the noise of emotional pain had subsided, I sank into the silence and the stillness.

Here was a kind of peace, albeit found in the bomb crater, that brought me to prayer, prayer to contemplation, and contemplation to love. Love let me flower, and my cells proceeded to teach me everything.

K EREN D I BBEN S - W YAT T, K EN T U K

During a hike in Acadia Mountain, my wife stopped me short, “You hear that bird?” she asked. The call of a bird I had never heard before immediatly trilled from a tree nearby. My son and daughter caught up to us.

“You hear that bird?” I asked them. “So strange.” And again the bird obliged.

“It sounds like more than one bird,” my son replied.

The four of us scanned trees, searching for a glimpse of this exotic mountain bird whose call rippled like a choir and seemed to come from all around us. We stood still for a timeless moment, until my wife spotted the bird in a nearby pine. So unassuming, it resembled a simple sparrow.

PET ER VA N D ERBERG , MA S S A PEQ U A , N Y

6

It was the first time anyone had come into my bedroom at night to wake me. I follow my mother into the living room of our one bathroom, orange-brick, ranch house, too young to be afraid that someone had died or there had been a tragic car accident. My father is more asleep than awake in his armchair.

He waves. He starts his job managing a milk plant early. My two older brothers are sitting on the floor in front of the black and white flicker of the television set. The screen images are blurry. I rub my eyes and try again.

“What is that?” I ask Mark. He has been more patient with the presence of an eightyear-old sister recently.

“We landed on the moon—our astronauts.”

I identify the white glow of the lunar surface, a bundled man with a white helmet suspended on a ladder. I glance back at my father asleep. My mother leans forward on the sofa.

She is used to these hours as a charge nurse assigned to the three to eleven p.m. shift. I turn to watch what is happening on the moon, Mark’s eyes unblinking beside me and the outline of Curt’s mouth yawning.

“He’s going to step off!” Mark announces.

Curt rolls his eyes, but this time he remains quiet. Mark is the scientist in the family, and his room is stuffed with microscopes, slide rules, telescopes, and a miniature planetarium. Curt has a life that steers him away from this house—two jobs, drinking parties, and a girlfriend.

“This is one small step for man . . . ” says a voice from space. Like a snapshot of who we were together, I keep it. Mark is alive, my father is young, strong, resilient. Someone shuts off the television.

“Is it over already?” I whisper.

V I RG I N I A WAT T S , WAYN E, PA

A single crochet stitch is one quarter inch square and, in and of itself, nothing. But one hundred and forty-four is a dishcloth for washing dishes. Three thousand, two hundred is an afghan to keep you warm.

One piece of gravel is something to get rid of. But with twenty thousand together, they make a driveway to turn off the busy street into your own home.

MA RY ZI MMER, MA D I S O N V I L L E, K Y

this issue doesn't have our usual editor's note. We decided to make our own editorial voices smaller in order to make space for more voices from you, our readers. But we still wanted to share with you this hope: May the art, stories, and poems gathered in these pages continue to inspire you to do and be small things with great love in this world (as Mother Teresa said). And may these pages also give you space to continue hearing and naming the small-mindedness that breeds hate, racism, and violence. As fellow creatives and contemplatives— with our prayers, attentiveness, words, stories, art, actions, and community—we join you in this deep work. ­—Ruminate Staff YOU M I G HT NOT I C E

7

readers’ notes

My athletic and witty nephews are in town for a couple of weeks, and the older one, who is about to be five, has already accused me of not playing with him enough. He may have a point. Work wears me out, and sometimes I just want to collapse on the couch and not move once I get home. This time, however, I play catch with him, though I yawn several times throughout.

“If you’re tired, just go to bed,” he tells me.

“It’s only seven,” I say. “It’s still a little early for my bedtime.”

“You’re a grown-up. Grown-ups make rules, and you can make one to have an early bedtime.”

His logic’s sound, if inaccurate, but it allows me a glimpse into his world. My nephew yearns to be older, to do things his way and craft his own rules. He’s in that transitional phase, realizing the world operates without his wants and needs in mind. I also look at my younger nephew, not quite two, and his ongoing competition with his big brother. I see their budding rivalry, and I think of how it will never truly end. I imagine the adventures, scrapes, and bruises these two boys will share. I think of them growing up and finding their paths, and I simultaneously smile and cringe.

JOSEPH SA NC HE Z , C I TR U S H E I G HTS, CA

It’s anathema to most Americans. We want everything supersized—salaries, cars, meals, degrees. Small means poverty, rust, hunger, ignorance.

I wish I could call myself the exception.

Born under Colorado’s big North Park sky, I’m the quintessential big girl. The doctor who witnessed my arrival declared me the largest he’d ever seen. He would document it, too, as if I were an alien species. Notes were taken about how quickly I breathed in the air, sought out the nipple. I grew into the great, greedy reputation he gave me. My first word was want. My second word was walk.

I couldn’t wait for help and pulled myself up by the wood stove. I burned my hands. It was a lesson in overreach. Still I could not break this new-found habit of biting off more than I could chew, adding too much to my plate, and burning every candle I could at both ends.

Adulthood hasn’t brought change. I have read E.F.Schmacher’s Small is Beautiful and have tried to keep it local, simple. I have looked at minor miracles—ladybugs and spiders, bees and butterflies, pill bugs and even a sample of my own blood, but my custom remains. I want more, always more.

Too late in life, I started working with kids with special needs. I’ve learned, at last, to stop looking for savants. I look instead for kids. If a girl doesn’t understand the letter C, I don’t summarize the whole alphabet universe again and again. I concentrate on the C, the curves and carbons of it, until something bright clicks—more than once. Okay, I have learned one thing. Hope is small, repeatable.

N A N W I G I N G T O N , D EN V ER, CO

Our twenty-one-year-old tortoiseshell cat, Lucy, weighs in at just five pounds. At her heaviest (a decade ago) she was seven pounds. The vet lifts her off the scale in the

8

careful way you might a large, sick dog. His eyes are gentle as he says, “She may have another couple weeks. Keep her comfortable.”

The swelling on the left side of her face is likely a malignant tumor, he tells us. Inoperable. The size of a grape is not so small on a five-pound cat. We bring Lucy home and take pictures of her throughout the day in her various sleep poses.

The smallest and gentlest of our animals, Lucy has had staying power. In the big picture, I cannot say she has changed us. Rather, she has accepted us. She has gone along for the ride. Her needs have been small, and no matter how we may have changed, she has only wanted a soft nap in the sun.

We kiss her softly on the forehead and coo at her three times more than usual.

KELLY B E L M ONTE , Y OR K, M E

Though we never formally laid out the details of our agreement, it works for us: my roommate, Laura, cooks the meals, and I wash the dishes. She serves us fluffy white rice and succulent meats; I scrape the slimy pots and dig my nails into the baked bits of lamb or chicken on the pans.

Feeling ornery, I once teased, “What if I told you I don’t exist. You set a plate for me, but you live with an imaginary friend. I’m not real.”

Without looking up, Laura said, “But you have to be real. My dishes get washed.”

So there it was—the proof of my existence.

After dinner at my parents’ home, I collect the dinnerware, like setting the table in reverse. While the rest of the family sits around discussing politics, religion, and the condition of the world, I stand with sudsy arms, swiping a cloth over the sauce splotches and gravy smears. I stack the plates in the

9

cupboard just to set them out again. But it doesn’t get old to me, this little task of making dirty things clean.

S A RA H ES H L EMA N , F L O REN CE, K Y

I am too close to my own body to notice its changes. It is strangers for whom I notice growth, notice the sudden surge of adulthood. In June, I attended my youngest brother’s high school graduation. He seems to have always been so tall, broad, and heavy-lined with muscles that pull him into pole-vaulted flight. Walking just a few steps ahead of my brother was a woman I had never seen, could not expect, had no way to recognize: Serena, a child I last saw as a three-year-old when her mother helped with the church children’s choir.

Serena had had wispy, tangled hair and an arm cast; she was healing from a burn, had pulled boiling water down on herself when someone looked away for a few, forgivable moments. She healed. She grew—to me, suddenly, fully, like a tree springing up overnight.

But my brother—I cannot remember him at three. I cannot remember his tiny body, cannot remember the weight of his infant self in my ten-year-old arms. I remember our games, the sword fights I organized in the yard, how he begged me to fight him every day after I taught him the rules of dueling (I made up the rules myself). I remember the swords and the rules, yet his smallness is gone from me the way my own young body is gone. He is too close, too much of myself to mark the change.

D A N A RAY, BEL L EF O N T E, PA

After several years of studying chemistry, I had the sense that I was just learning complicated ways to keep track of electrons.

readers’ notes

If chemistry was a story, electrons would be the main characters. Most of the things that happen have to do with where the electrons want to go, or don’t want to go, as the case may be. The protons might tell you what element you’re dealing with, but they are static characters. They give a setting its local flavor but do little to drive the plot.

The neutrons have their place, but they’re like the deus ex machina of chemistry. Once they’re involved, the story ends with an explosion of epic proportions and a lack-luster denouement that leaves you with a pile of lead.

Electrons are enigmatic main characters who, if you could actually see them, would ride off into the sunset at the end of the story. No one knows what electrons are.

They are sometimes a particle, sometimes a wave, and always both. You can’t see them.

You can’t measure them. You can’t touch them. All you can do is speak to their effects.

The more confidently you know one aspect of an electron, the less confidently you know another. Electrons seem both this world and other-worldly.

By the end of my degree, I could not tell you where an electron would be at any given moment, but I sure as hell knew where it was not. At some point I made peace with the fact that I study things so small that paradoxes become true and the existence of the main character is taken on faith. There are times when I wonder if all these models are fiction, and electrons are nothing more than a figment of my imagination.

HEATHER Z E I G E R , D A L L A S, TX

One February afternoon, I was trying to take in the sun’s glory across gleaming patches of newly turned earth when I glimpsed a slender, shimmering thread. Low rays revealed ethereal beauty—thousands of spider web filaments were flung across damp earth, crisscrossing the field and each other as far as I could see. A thousand thin and shining moments.

BREN D A ZO O K , BEL L EV I L L E, PA

In memory of Brian Doyle, my favorite writer who, though grandiloquent for the rapturous fun of it, could minimally describe a hawk as a most daring knife. Also, he could zoom in on a scene, like a fellow train traveler savoring one little almond at a time every five minutes for two hours or a young toddler plucking a caterpillar from the green grass and inserting said one-hundred legs into her tiny puckered mouth.

So, here’s the moment when I learned you cannot outrun words once they have fled your mouth, no matter how small they (or you) may be: I was four. Gee was visiting. She lived time zones away and came once, maybe twice a year. It was summer, and she was tying the laces of my shoes, which were propped up on her thighs as I leaned back on the couch. Sunlight streamed through the windows around Gee’s round face. And I said: “You are fat.”

I don’t know why.

But I recall exactly how she said, slowly, “Yes, I am.”

10

And then there was nothing to do except leap from the couch and run for outside as soon as my shoes hit the floor. For, suddenly, Gee looked very small.

ANDREW TAYLOR-TROUTMAN, DUBLIN, VA

I left my life in America to live in a village of 800 people near the northwest coast of Scotland—over an hour away from the nearest city. Scotland is roughly the size of South Carolina, and, at one million people, the country is roughly the population of Seattle, the city I formerly called home. It is a small place. But the more familiar we grew with each other, the bigger it became. A miniscule patch of geography expanded into an infinite space of psychogeography.

Our village was on a grid of two main streets, centering round a stunning loch, surrounded by hills and hill-crofts. I walked most places that I needed to go in the town. I even walked the eleven miles to the neighboring town. I found myself noticing more than I’ve ever observed in my life.

The lodges next to the road; the cattle; the mazes within the gardens. Every mushroom underfoot; the faces in the trees; the history in the stones of the crumbling walls. Robert MacFarlane’s glorious book, Landmarks, is a tribute to this, the way that people used to know the land. Intimately. The more I climbed, the more hills there were to climb, the more trees and burns and dells there were to celebrate. The land expanded with every trace of history and legend that I met.

Sacred stones. Sacred fountains. Graveyards. Hidden treasures.

Lift your eyes to the Cuillins, the mountain range of the Isle of Skye. And in that tiny speck on the map, you will experience majesty, awe.

MOLLY M U R R AY, H E L E NA , M T

I have often heard this feeling described as drowning, but I think it would be more accurate to say that there is too much air. I am inhaling, inhaling, inhaling, with no exhale.

No release.

My anxiety is a beast. But it wears my own face and speaks with my own voice. My anxiety is a thief. It breaks into my home and steals my will with its greedy fingertips.

My anxiety is a bottle labeled “drink me.” It shrinks me down, down, down.

I am so small that I can’t even see myself.

MO RG A N BI N K ERD , A N D ERS O N , I N

I used to think of small as an endearing size or as something insignificant, until today when the doctor called.

She told me that there is a small area of Grade One cancer cells requiring removal by surgery. Small becomes an all-encompassing thought, a looming threat brimming with uneasy and frightening potential. How quickly the psyche is hijacked by this potent kernel of fear, how quickly our stalwart, daily march through the workday is so utterly and completely shattered.

Perhaps all of our language is double-sided, complacent until another perspective is brought to our attention.

RA MO N A L U EN G EN , BU RN A BY, BC

It is my current hope that as I become more human, I will have patience for the trifling trials of this existence; I will be the bigger person without making note of it; I will be closer to one archetype and further from another; I will fulfill my potential. This requires vigilance. It requires thought and reason and honesty. Unfortunately, none of the preceding occurred to me when I retaliated against a discourteous checkout clerk in the grocery line.

RO BERT BRU CE CA RU T H ERS , A L BU Q U ERQ U E, N M

11

readers’ notes

In his poem “Musée de Beau Arts,” W. H. Auden writes: “About suffering they were never wrong, / The old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position: how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”

He is referring to Brueghel’s painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a painting in which this famous tragedy is depicted uncharacteristically “in a corner, some untidy spot,” quite literally in the corner of Brueghel’s canvas. The fall goes almost unnoticed as ships sail calmly on.

The morning after my mom died in March 2012, my brother said: “Someone forgot to tell the sun.” This is how loss goes. It takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

But here in the quiet corners is also where joy strikes unexpectedly: in the supermarket when I come across her favorite apple, or last Tuesday evening when I was going through old files and came across a flower she drew for me on the back of a pharmacy bag.

do—testing the limits. They were too young to understand what stress and high stakes and loneliness can do to a person. My sense of purpose and value had dwindled to the size of the freckle on my palm. That’s when the process of re-learning to recognize myself began.

SUZANNE MONTZ ADAMS, SUGAR LAND, TX

The laundry room was merely 5 x 7 feet, with much of that space being used by the washer and dryer. I sat on a floor cushion and wrote my undergraduate thesis in these tight quarters to avoid my husband’s incessant harassment and increasing paranoia. I succeeded and my thesis earned an A. Having left the abusive marriage, I’m miles away from that harassment now. But I still contend with fears, anxiety, and suspicion—residue of the abuse—that sometimes threaten to keep me isolated and paralyzed in the constraints of my own mind.

In the Psalms, hiding in caves and hunted by his enemies, David unapologetically wrote about his own terror and isolation while also acknowledging, over and over again, the boundlessness of God. ALEXANDR A M A RTI N, A Z U SA , C A In our small spaces—pressed in by launAfter years of pirouetting on a pinhead of dry machines to our left, cupboards to our hope, I’d buckled and fallen off. My traveling right, and fear and suspicion crouching at husband and rickety marriage were conthe door—God is boundless. Write about stants. My three rambunctious boys, with that, too, I tell myself. uncanny precision, sensed my daily tipping K I MBERLY A N N PRI ES T, S H AW N EE, O K point and crept behind me with giggles and poking fingers. Bloop. There she goes. Down I began to believe the body that didn’t show dominance was a lesser body—that mine for the count. Without malice or even full was a lesser body—when I started school. awareness, they were doing what children

12

It did not matter who was born first and last. What mattered was how one looked.

Tall students found themselves admired, and small ones like me were hindered in our quest to find ourselves.

I didn’t mind being small at first, especially in the classroom. But on the playground, smallness was hideously apparent. Being small was an injury—the last one to be picked for a team, the one barely seen when running with taller classmates, classmates whose longer legs gave them privileges.

I wish I could say that smallness was only a thing for playground kids.

Philco radio had no takers. In a small town, lots of people still had those items hanging around in their basement. And even though the puzzles had all their pieces, no one else was a fan of those thousand-piece mountain scenes.

By the time we tallied everything, we broke even—not counting the cost of the lemonade and cookies, which I figured should come under the category of “social entertaining.” We did get a clean garage out of it.

MA RI L CRA BT REE, MI S S I O N , K S

Even now, it’s the moment I remember as our most romantic: his hand covering mine, “Let’s have a garage sale and get rid of some lips muttering a curse. of this stuff,” I said innocently to my mothWe’d fallen in love in Bangladesh, turning er-in-law one spring. I sensed her hesitaaway from the relentless traffic and nauseattion. Turns out that holding a garage sale ing pollution to gaze into each other’s eyes. in a small town (pop. 407) is tantamount He was a Bengali who’d lived in New York to hanging your ugliest underwear on the for years. I was a Chicagoan who’d moved to clothesline.

Dhaka to work. We were matched: bodies in The neighbors, she warned, would talk Asia with minds forged in America. about (a) what was in the garage sale, Once, on our way to an event at the (b) what wasn’t, and (c) what prices we national fairground, we walked by men in charged. Nothing could be in the sale that fundamentalist dress—ankle-length tunics hadn’t been cleaned and polished to within and prayer caps—who stood on the corner an inch of its life. Nothing with missing piec- under the mid-day sun, looking bored and es, nothing cracked or chipped, no matter irritable. When we passed, they locked how tiny the chip. Everything had to look eyes on my unmistakably foreign body. My new. “Another thing,” she said. “We’ll have boyfriend said nothing. But as we walked, he to clean the garage. I wouldn’t want anyone took my hand and covered it with his larger to see how dusty it is.” one. I knew that two people of opposite I began to regret my suggestion. Espegender touching in public could attract more cially when she said we’d need to serve adverse attention, but it felt too good to pull lemonade and cookies. A small-town garage away. Instead, I whispered, “But they’re sale, it seems, is more of a social occasion looking at us.” than a way to get rid of things. In the end, “They can go fuck themselves,” he murMom parted with a few pieces of depresmured, too low for anyone but me to hear. sion glass and some extra dining chairs that True love, I thought, at that moment and got snapped up immediately. On the other for years afterward. hand, the “antique” wringer-washer and M. S O PH I A N EW MA N , H O MEW O O D , I L STEVEN P E TE R SHE I M , R I C H M OND , I N

13

Rebirth

A P R I L VĂ Z QU E Z

14

it his mid-life crisis, the way Mo had suddenly rushed madly into the jaws of a beast everyone else was fleeing. He'd made all the arrangements within a single month—September—and on the fifth of October boarded the plane at Raleigh-Durham that would take him first to Toronto, then to Istanbul, and finally to Aleppo.

If there was anyone who could make sense of his being here, it was Rama. Their mother used to tell how, when Mo was being delivered, she experienced such strong déjà vu that it gave her the impression of the same baby being born a second time. I was completely sure you were identical, she'd say, mischief lighting up her face as she added, And so you were, except for one little thing. The story had always embarrassed Mo, but it did demonstrate an essential truth about him and his twin: they had an uncanny, almost psychic connection.

Tonight, for example, she'd telephoned him at the moment when he was thinking about her.

“Thank God you're alright!” Rama exclaimed as soon as the nurse passed him the phone.

“Can you talk?”

“Not really.“ Mo craned his neck to check the corridor between the office where he stood and Emergency. It was a calm evening: no bombs. Hospitals were among the prime targets of the regime, so people avoided them when they could.

“I’ve been calling you for days,” Rama went on. “I couldn't get through.”

“There were airstrikes on Tuesday.”

“I know. I saw it on the news.” She paused, then asked in a lower voice, “You okay?”

He could imagine her brown eyes narrowed with worry. Rama had never married; other than her dance students and two cats, Mo was all she had.

“I’m alright,” he said. “Staying busy.”

“Well, that’s not exactly reassuring, given what it is you do.”

Mo almost smiled. “I’m alright, Rama.”

“Okay, well, I’m glad the phones are working again,” she said. “I’ll call you in a couple of days. You need anything?”

Mo closed his eyes. An image of his house on North Ridge Drive flashed across his mind, so solid and white that he could almost reach out and push its front door open. The open kitchen, Diane at the stove making scrambled eggs in her UNC t-shirt, her hair falling into her eyes. Did he need anything? He needed his life back.

“No,” Mo told his sister, opening his eyes. “Nothing.”

“Alright.” Rama paused again, then exhaled deeply. “Be careful, bro.”

“Yeah. I will.”

As he walked back down the corridor toward Emergency, Mo could see that there was a new patient now, a neonate who was discharged two days ago. Though Mo had trained as a pediatrician, he had assisted with the baby’s delivery. Here you did what needed to be done, and what you didn't know, you learned on the spot, like Ayman. Ayman was the head of the maintenance department before the war, but now he's an emergency room technician. The man seemed hardly even to sleep; Mo was almost never at the hospital when Ayman wasn't.

“Four days old, respiratory distress,” Hasan informed Mo as he stepped across the threshold of the open doorway into Emergency. “I took the liberty of starting oxygen.”

H IS SIST E R CA L L E D

15

Mo paused and looked at the baby, now in the arms of tall, stooped Ayman, whose illfitting scrubs revealed two hairy forearms. The oxygen mask, though made to fit a child, swallowed the baby’s face; only two unfocused gray eyes were visible. His tiny hands were balled into fists of defiance as if to say, I’m fighting. I’m holding on.

“Thank you,” Mo said softly. “I’ll take it from here.” in a car crash when Mo was four, not a single wisp of memory remained. It was his mother who had always been at the center of his world. An oral surgeon at Duke Raleigh Hospital, she'd been educated in the United States, but at home she spoke only Arabic, and after dinner each evening the three of them would sit at the kitchen table for an hour practicing its ancient calligraphy. Together they read books and—Mo’s favorites—comic books shipped to them from relatives on the other side of the world. The right-to-left cursive script the superheroes and villains spat at each other seemed to Mo an extension of their powers, a kind of secret code. The language possessed a mystical quality; he spoke it only with his mother and during prayers.

On his first visit to Aleppo, the year after her death, Mo found that even as an adult he couldn't separate the language from her. Hearing it spoken jarred something in him, like lying down on a bed and remembering the last dream he'd dreamt there. The city was infused with his mother’s presence. The ubiquitous jasmine vines with their fragrant, star-shaped flowers were the same ones that had marked every Mother’s Day. The spiced sayadieh the vendors sold on Tilel Street, the pungent anise-flavored arak, the medieval citadel on the hill where the prophet Ibrahim once milked his sheep; they were all just as she'd described them. He saw traces of her delicate features in the people around him, especially in the faces of the children. There were so many of them: bounding home in a phalanx of matching blue school uniforms, their laughter ringing; shooting marbles and playing with dolls on balconies; visible through doorways, the fine, slanting script of their language trickling onto their homework papers.

It was because of that first trip, the one before the war, that Mo was in Aleppo now.

He'd come for his mother then, but it was a child who moved him, finally, to return: one morning in early September, the body of a three-year-old boy washed up like so much flotsam on the shore of the Mediterranean. He looked as peaceful as if he'd been sleeping facedown on the beach, his little shoes still on his feet. As Mo sat in front of the television, one hand over his mouth, he had to fight the urge to scream. He'd made donations before, but suddenly it didn't feel like enough.

“You don't have to do this, you know,” Rama told him the day before he left. “I know they'll let you out of it if you tell them you’ve changed your mind. I mean, their whole m.o. is that they provide medical aid to war victims. They can’t be assholes.”

“I’m sure they aren’t, but it doesn't matter one way or the other. I’m not going to back out.”

All morning they'd been moving things around: Mo’s clothes, toiletries, and threevolume Complete Works of Shakespeare into two carry-on bags, Rama’s things—what was most essential—from her loft apartment above the dance school and into one of the guest rooms upstairs.

“Have you read the travel warning?” she asked.

OF H IS FAT HE R , WHO D I E D

16

“Rama—” “Have you? It’s like three pages long. ‘No part of Syria should be considered safe; the U.S. Embassy has suspended its operations.’ I think you should look it over.”

“I don't have to look it over. I know what the risks are.” Mo looked at her. His sister’s beauty, like their mother’s, had deepened as she'd aged, so that now, at forty-one, she was as lovely as she'd ever been. Her delicate dancer’s body sat perched at the edge of the bar stool the way a small child might sit, as if ready to jump down any minute and run off to play.

Rama frowned. “We could sponsor a family of refugees. We could sponsor two. You live in this mansion alone.”

“Rama.”

“I just don't see why it has to be this.”

“They're using medical care as a weapon, that’s why. The government has already killed hundreds of doctors—” “That’s what I mean!” Rama broke in, bursting into the tears that had been threatening all morning. “Mo,” she sobbed as he leaned forward and put his arm around her at an awkward angle from his stool. The warmth of her body reminded him of when they were children and Rama, afraid of storms, would creep into his bed at the first sound of thunder during the night. She always seemed to radiate heat.

When the storm passed, she looked up.

“Alright. But I can't promise that Caspar and Gloria won't shred your drapes while you're gone.”

By late afternoon everything had been packed or moved in, including the cat carriers with their yowling, hissing cargo. Outside, a fat sun the color of Orange Crush presided over an October sky creamy with low-hanging clouds. The air had grown cold. They put on jackets before walking down the driveway toward Rama’s Volvo.

“I called Brenda,“ she said as they got into the car. “She said she'll have them ready.”

By the time they pulled into a parking space outside Brenda’s Flower Shop, the brilliant orange sky had faded to purple. Rama emerged from the shop with a large arrangement: lush greenery surrounding several sprays of jasmine, the white, star-shaped flowers glowing faintly in the gathering dusk. Their ritual was to come on the seventeenth of each month, the anniversary of their mother’s death.

“I told her you were leaving tomorrow,” Rama said, passing the arrangement across the seat to Mo. “She says she'll pray for you.”

“Thanks.” He leaned into the fragrance. “I’ll take all the prayers I can get.”

They stood at the gravesite, silently watching the night fall. When lights gleamed in the distance and the gloom made it difficult to read their parents' names, Mo leaned down and kissed each headstone. “Let’s go.”

At the airport the next morning, Rama hugged him hard. “Come back.” As if she were willing it to be so. goddess of childbirth, hadn't wanted children. Mo knew it—he'd been told several times before they married—but in some recess of his heart he'd DIANE, NA M E D A FT E R T HE

17

held out hope that one day she would change her mind.

She did change her mind, but not in the way Mo had hoped. After five years of marriage, Diane told him she was unhappy. A few weeks later, she moved out. After work one evening, as Mo sat reading in an armchair—a medical journal he had contributed to himself—the doorbell rang. It was a sheriff’s deputy, come to serve him divorce papers.

For a moment, Mo stood on the doorstep staring at the man, trying to make sense of what was happening. They were taking a break, Diane needed some time, but the word “divorce” hadn't come up. Yet her name, Diane Morgan Sahloul, was printed in the space above the line marked Petitioner, and there in blue ink were the neat round letters of her signature. Mo, whose dignity meant more to him than his marriage, signed the papers.

Afterward, he walked through the house gathering up photographs—skiing in Vail; at a hospital gala, Mo in a tuxedo, Diane in a gold cocktail dress; on horseback in Ireland, their hair blown back, squinting against the sun. Mo stacked them facedown in an empty bureau drawer.

Then he pulled his wedding band off and stood studying his naked hand. The ring had left a pale space on the back of his finger, like a ray of light. Walking back through the house with the ring looped around the tip of his index finger, Mo stepped outside and, in the failing light of the fall day, buried it in the soft dirt at the edge of the flowerbed, as if something good might yet grow from it. Afterward he marked off the days on his desk calendar until, like a scar healing, the white line on his finger darkened to match his hand.

It took more than seven months.

Just over a year after the divorce went through, Mo ran into a friend in the supermarket. He was crossing the first item off his grocery list when Randy’s voice broke through the elevator music, startling him.

“Mo! Mo, my man, I haven't seen you in forever!”

“Randy. How are you?”

“Great, great. Got an account with Bank of America right now, doing good.” Randy’s voice trailed off, as if he'd just remembered Mo’s status and become embarrassed by it.

“Kick in the teeth about Diane, eh?” he said more confidentially. “Hope she didn't clean you out.”

The question, not quite asked, hung in the air between them.

“She didn't take anything,” Mo replied. It was something he'd wondered about himself.

“I mean, she took her things. But the house was mine, from before we met. She just . . . left.”

“Had an airtight prenup, didn't you?” Randy grinned, jabbing a meaty finger in Mo’s direction. “Smart man.”

Mo didn't have the energy to correct him. He was about to plead to being in a hurry when Randy, raising a pudgy hand to his beard, went on, “It’s a boy, Kelly said. The crazy part was how fast it all happened, just boom boom, remarried and pregnant, all at once.”

“Yeah,” Mo repeated, “Boom boom.”

Randy laughed. “Look dude, you should call me. We’ll play some disc golf. You got my cell, right? Good to see you, man.”

Mo watched Randy’s broad back as he rounded the aisle and disappeared. Then he

18

folded his list and put it in his pocket. Leaving his cart in the produce section, he turned and walked back out into a cold rush of air.

Back home, Mo sat on the foot of his bed and wept for the first time since his mother died—not so much for Diane as for the child that wasn't, and would never be, his. in Aleppo, there was a period of weeks when they saw multiple sniper wounds every day. The victims, many of them children, would arrive at the E.R. with eerily consistent injuries: all shot in the right arm one day, all in the left leg the next. On the worst day, eight children and three adults had all been shot in the abdomen.

One was a full-term expectant mother on her way to the hospital for a breech delivery.

That afternoon, a hospital technician was eavesdropping over the walkie-talkies when he heard the sniper laughing about the shot; with it, he'd won a bet for a box of cigarettes.

It was because of the threat of sniper fire one gray afternoon in March that Mo left the hospital by a back entrance and took a different route home. It was a road he'd never been on, but the scene was familiar: here, as everywhere in the city, jagged, blown-open buildings gaped. Rubble was piled like dun-colored snowbanks on either side of the road.

Few pedestrians and even fewer cars.

Mo walked slowly. His leather shoes were powdered a cloudy beige by the thick dust of the road, and as he walked he looked at them: one foot after the other, an unceasing rhythm as steady as the clicks of a metronome. He was alive. He'd made it through the fall, watching the days grow shorter. He'd learned his way around the hospital, saving some lives, losing others. Once, Mo alone of all the personnel had been able to convince a grieving mother to release her little son’s body to him for burial. The boy’s name, she told him as she lay the broken body into Mo’s arms at last, was also Mohammed.

He'd made it through the winter, the barrel bombs and poison gas attacks, the shelling and sniper fire. The Russian phosphorus bombs that lit up the sky like pyrotechnics as they fell. Even when his own hospital was hit—leaving one wing so damaged that it remained closed—he survived.

Mo caught sight of himself now in the dusty glass of what had once been a storefront, now abandoned. In the grimy glass his face looked sallow and his eyes too large, but there was something new there too, a profundity born of all that he'd lived through over the past few months.

It was a noise—shouting up ahead—that caused Mo to turn away from the glass.

Children, from the sound of their voices, and for one bright red moment of panic all he could think was that he didn't have even a medical bag with him. Then he caught the cadence of their squeals, a sound so uncommon here that he had mistaken it at first: joy.

Walking more quickly, he saw a lot ahead on the right—a wide rectangle of scrubby grass bordered by a low concrete wall. He stood watching as the children—dozens of them—ran and shouted and flew into the air on metal swings. Mo saw a half dozen women interspersed among them. Then, with startled recognition, he met the eyes of the emergency room technician Ayman, standing behind two little boys on swings. Apparently having watched Mo approach, he now smiled and raised one hand in the air. Mo waved back, then, on second thought, crossed the street and walked toward Ayman.

WHEN M O F I R ST AR R I V ED

19

“This is amazing. You so rarely see children playing.”

“Only on days like this, when it looks like rain,” Ayman replied, glancing up at the sky before giving the boys another push. “The regime doesn't send aircraft out in the rain.”

“Are these your children?” Mo asked him, looking down at the boys.

Ayman was silent for a moment, then he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a worn leather wallet. He held out a photograph of himself, beardless and apparently much younger, with a woman and three small children. They sat on a beige sofa in a brightly lit room: the parents, both dressed in black, sat on either side of the children, a curly-haired baby flanked by identical boys in red polo shirts. All were smiling broadly.

“They were twins,” Ayman said simply. “Six years old, and Amira almost three.”

Mo searched for what he might say, but Ayman continued, “It was a barrel bomb, early in the war. At the hospital in Adana—” “You made it to Turkey?” Mo asked, surprised.

“I woke up in Turkey. Medical transport helicopter.” Ayman returned the picture carefully to his wallet. He gave the two boys on swings another push, then motioned for Mo to follow him to one of the metal benches nearby. They sat down.

“I had to be retaught how to walk,” he continued, his eyes on the children. “On the day I took my first step on my own, the doctor told me in his accented Arabic, ‘You're reborn!’

He was excited for me, pleased that amid so much death one good thing should happen.

‘Ayman,’ he told me, ‘my very fortunate friend, you've lived up to your name.’” Ayman looked at Mo and added wryly, “My name, of course, means lucky.”

Mo gave a mirthless half-laugh and shook his head.

“But I didn't want to live anymore. My only goal was to get back to Aleppo, to visit their graves. My brother had taken care of the burial while I was away.“ Ayman looked into the distance. “So I walked back.“ “I suppose most people were going the opposite way.”

“Everyone was.” He looked back at Mo. “It was me against a confluence of human flesh: men, women, children, babies, the elderly, carrying all they could take with them on their backs, in their arms. Two or three people tried to convince me to turn around. One old man clung to me, begging me not to come back to Syria, but I shook him off. My brother met me at the border and brought me the rest of the way. I knew there was no life for me anywhere else.”

A little girl with clear green eyes and pigtails ran up and hugged Ayman’s knees, then as quickly darted away.

“They're orphans, you know,” he said, nodding his head toward her. “War orphans.”

“No, I didn't know.”

“The orphanage is just over there,” Ayman pointed. “Underground.”

There was a pause, then he continued, “The day I reached Aleppo, I went straight to the cemetery. I was bone tired. I lay down on my wife’s grave and fell asleep. I must have slept for ten, twelve hours; when I awoke it was dark. It was a clear night, full of stars.” Ayman cleared his throat. “That night everything changed for me. As I lay stretched across her grave, my wife came to me, in a dream.”

He looked at Mo earnestly, as if anxious that he should understand. “There was a long

20

line of people. She was among them. My children too, but they were playing with the other children and didn’t notice me. My wife, though—she looked straight at me. And she smiled the most beautiful, radiant smile. It was a smile, Mohammed, like no one could ever smile in this life, with its sorrows. I knew at once that she was at peace, and that I’d see her again. That was what she wanted me to know.

“A few weeks later I started to work on this.” He gestured around them.

“You built this?”

“I built it.” Mo could hear the pride in his voice. “Out of the beams and girders that I pulled from the wreckage of our city. My own little statement against the regime.”

When Mo left, Ayman was pushing the roundabout to a chorus of joyful squeals. As Mo walked home in a warm drizzle that dampened his clothes against his skin, he noticed a splash of green by a pile of rubble along the roadside. Along each green spray, a series of tiny white buds stood out against the debris. Mo knelt down before the plant and breathed deeply, pushing his face in among the cool, rubbery buds. Soon, he knew, the fingers of their delicate, star-shaped blossoms would stretch outward in every direction. during a lull at the hospital one evening, Ayman asked him, “And you, Mohammed, why did you leave your comfortable home to come into this hell ten times worse than hell?”

Mo thought for a minute, then crossed the room and took a pen and a half-sheet of paper from the top drawer of a metal desk against the wall. He sat back down on the high leather stool beside the examination table and, laying the paper on his knee, began to sketch a picture.

“I’m not sure how to say the name of this animal,” he explained, holding up his drawing.

“Najam albahr.”

“Ah, that’s very poetic: sea star. In English we say starfish.”

“Star, fish,” Ayman repeated thickly, his brow furrowed.

“Starfish. My college roommate was an education major. His name was Lamar Jackson.

We shared a dorm room for four years, and every summer he'd go down to Haiti with this group called the Starthrower Foundation. I never even asked him what they did. I had my head up my ass back then—” Ayman looked so puzzled that Mo had to laugh.

“I guess that didn't translate well. It’s an expression we use in English. It means that all I cared about was myself, my own problems. But just as we were about to graduate, it occurred to me to ask Lamar what it meant, starthrower. It was such a strange word, an impossibility; it didn't bode well for an organization meant to help people, I didn't think.”

Mo looked down at his drawing.

“He answered my question by telling me a story: one morning, a little boy walked down onto the beach near his house. He saw that during the night thousands of starfish had washed up on the shore, so he started throwing them back into the ocean, trying to save as many of them as he could. An old man came along and watched the boy for a minute, then he said, ‘What’s the point? You'll never be able to save them all. Can't you see that what you're doing doesn't matter?’ But the boy just kept tossing the starfish into the sea. ‘It A FEW DAYS LAT E R ,

21

does matter,’ he told the old man, holding up a starfish. ‘It matters to this one.’’’

Mo stood up and crumpled his drawing into a tight ball. He tossed it into the trashcan, a bank shot that landed with an audible crunch.

“Anyway,” he finished, “I have a Syrian passport. I speak the language. And I’m a doctor.

Who better than me?” prayers on a Friday, the holy day, the children begin to arrive, an influx of dazed, trembling victims. There are no stretchers; their bodies lie huddled together on the ambulance floor. EMTs, most of them volunteers, strip off the children’s outer garments and hose them off outside before carrying them into the hospital. The children’s still-damp skin bleeds wetness onto the green fabric of their gowns, dappling the material into a motley of dark and light that reminds Mo of foliage.

The best cases, those with the least exposure, sit breathing shallowly into oxygen masks. The worst, the children closest to the site of impact, lie gray-faced and gasping on examination tables under albuterol sulfate masks.

The use of chemical weapons has always seemed to Mo the most egregious of all the regime’s crimes, not so much for the degree of damage inflicted as for the flagrant violation of international law. By flouting the Geneva Protocol and Chemical Weapons Convention, the government is making a statement, one that has repeatedly proven true: We can do whatever we want to you, and no one will stop us.

Mo moves among the most affected of the children, checking their sats—the saturation of oxygen in the bloodstream—and vital signs. The worst case is a golden-haired girl of Mo guesses about five. She vomited as an EMT carried her in, and again afterward, over the edge of the examination table. Her pale, blue-veined eyelids ripple now, her thin chest rises and falls lightly under the hospital gown, but otherwise she lies immobile. Mo watches her carefully. He has noticed that in moments of crisis, he experiences a certain sharpening of focus, as if the locus of his perception were squeezing out all sights and sounds extraneous to the disaster at hand. Now, for example, he hears a journalist behind him explaining the particulars of the attack, but the words are peripheral, only faintly registering as Mo moves from one patient to another and back again to the golden-haired girl.

“Chlorine gas dropped by an army helicopter,” the young man narrates, his British English crisp and official. It’s a television voice, dispassionate and objective. No outrage, no tears—though they may come later, when the man’s alone, or after a few drinks.

Holding it together, Mo knows, is part of the job. It’s part of his own.

“I’ve been told,” the reporter goes on, “that two metal canisters were recovered at the scene, as well as a mound of tell-tale white powder. As you can see,” he gestures with one hand as the camera pans the room, “most of the victims of this attack are children. From what I understand, a former teacher had organized classes in an empty warehouse, and these children were inside, very nearby the place where the barrel bomb containing the canisters hit.”

Because barrel bombs are unguided, there’s no way of knowing where one might land.

Mo has seen for himself how, at the approach of a helicopter, people will stand stockstill—many of them moving only their lips, in prayer—rather than running or seeking JUST AF TER T H E MI DDAY

22

shelter, the assumption being that where they are is at least as safe as wherever they might try to hide.

Another group of victims is brought in. Mo watches as Ayman begins to connect oxygen lines for the new children and is aware, with some part of his consciousness, that the adult among them, a balding man who stands coughing into his hands, is their teacher. He stayed behind when the first ambulances left the scene, sending as many of the children as he could ahead of himself.

“It’s been more than three years,” the British journalist continues, “since the president claimed to have relinquished Syria’s arsenal of chemical weapons in the wake of a government attack with the nerve agent sarin near Damascus. However, chlorine has not been, and indeed cannot be, banned due to its legitimate industrial uses, including the purification of water. It dissipates quickly, leaving little trace.”

Mo is accustomed to being filmed after attacks. Against a regime willing to use any and every weapon against its citizens, the recordings are a necessary act: a witnessing, a gathering of evidence. But, Mo thinks grimly, it does beg the question, for whom?

The golden-haired girl is the only one of the first group of children whose condition has not stabilized. She takes a series of rapid, shallow breaths, smacking her dry lips listlessly.

When her sats drop into the mid-80s, Mo turns to Ayman.

“We’re losing her.”

“What can we do?” Ayman’s eyes, visible above his surgical mask, look weary. The brown skin around them is creased with fine lines, like desert terrain at a distance.

“Terbutaline, subcutaneous.” The drug is not approved for children this young, but it’s all there is, all Mo has left to give. It’s the girl’s last chance.

Outside, the parents are beginning to arrive. The sound of women crying breaks over Mo like a palpable sound wave, a low droning sound at this distance, as from a hive of bees.

Ayman crosses the room. Even without looking at him, Mo is aware of his slow, purposeful movements. He remembers his last glimpse of Ayman that day at the playground; backlit by the few weak rays of late afternoon sunlight breaking through the clouds, he looked like a haloed figure from a medieval painting.

He gives Mo the vial. As Ayman puts it in his hand, Mo’s attention is drawn to the black hair of the other man’s thin wrist pressed flat beneath the latex glove. A quotation from Shakespeare rises up in his mind, as clear and whole as if it had come to him from somewhere outside himself: We all are men, in our own natures frail, and capable of our flesh. Few are angels.

Few, Mo thinks, grasping Ayman’s hand for the instant it takes for the vial to pass from one to the other. Not none.

The brown glass gleams under the fluorescent lights. Mo unscrews the metal top and inserts the syringe. Then, raising the sleeve of the hospital gown, he slides the needle under the tender skin of the girl’s left shoulder. Ayman has placed himself on the opposite side of the table. Leaning nearer to the girl, he smooths her bangs from her damp forehead and murmurs something in her ear, the words too soft for Mo to make out.

“We’ll know in a few minutes whether or not it’s going to work,” Mo says, exhaling heavily.

23

He stands looking into the child’s pallid face. She might have been one of his sister’s four-to-five ballet students—“the teensies,” Rama calls them. Rama has a talent for bringing out their natural cuteness: dressing them as cats or flowers or honeybees for recitals. Having them waggle a finger, the other hand on their hips, or clutch their little faces, mouths open in perfect Os of surprise. Instead, by the accident of her birth in this place, the girl lies struggling to take enough air into her scorched lungs to keep her alive.

This child, like so many others, has known only war. Her body is the same age as the terror and misery that have reigned unchecked in her homeland for years, rivaling any evil the world has yet seen. During the brief span of her life, half a country has been displaced Half a country: eleven million people scattered around the planet, learning new languages, new ways of living. Mourning. Recovering. Then there are those in Aleppo, still holding on.

When the girl’s breaths become deeper and more regular, her green eyes flicker open then shut again. Her small body stirs as if in sleep. Mo checks the oxygen monitor.

“She’s going to make it,” he breathes weakly, grasping the girl’s cool hand in his own. No matter how many victims there are, how many there will be, each one that Mo can save is a gift to him, a greater gift than any he could have imagined before this war.

“Najam albahr,” Ayman murmurs.

Hearing his friend’s voice, Mo looks up. Their eyes meet, and an unsteady smile of relief flits across Mo’s face. Ayman smiles back, lowering his eyes. The dead they can do nothing for; the dead are gone. But the living, sometimes, they can save. They're here. For now, at least, they're still here.

24

JESS W I L L I A R D

Lessons Here the dead are buried above ground.

They teach me to dance and chew frond snails that press against the sea floor like palms.

To come home and come home late, to sweat through the night before and during

sleep. To drive stick, nestle and make movement in any husk of a thing. To drink, to take.

Not to think too hard in either language, to use one to forget the other, to traipse in silence

through groves of blue crabs. Not to point any flash of sense inwards. Where to feel

to read things and how to drag your hands just right. To time each waking breath

with someone else’s—they teach me to touch the caskets, stacked like shoes and already

shedding their names.

25

DAVE HAR R I TY

Crepusculara Red sunlight, hamstrung in brags of bare sycamores. Bitter air in the ear. I don’t know the names of neighbors. On the walk, a wild nest— on the ground unthreaded, feather-twill.

Later, you come up the stairs with an open robe, soaked hair. A soft braille of birthmarks on the thigh.

We’re a trapeze, jumble of precious asides— doomed to wash out in the next storm. Tomorrow, the nest is cleaned. Picks of herringbone & rind, the straw gone. Shadowed. We walk in rain.

26

AUBREE E L SE W OE L B E R

Anatomy of Release This morning I accept that I am scared to die. I converse with discomfort this time, again. As if decay was the peace found in a forest clearing. My hands’ uneven veins are geodes of sea & sky—to split them open, a body stripped of skin. Tissues encased in fluid, cured. My mind will travel to another place: sterile birth through a window, except the glass can’t shatter because it doesn’t exist outside the pane. But are there molecular voids where galaxies crosspollinate—exchange emptiness for emptiness? Is the body a formality? There are nations I can point to, vaguely upward, where a body is just liminal space. A match not yet struck, a windmill waiting for more than a gust. In that universe, let texture be my phantom pain, the fieldwork of the earth my only mantra. There, or maybe here, I want my bones to fall away as I praise their cracking.

27

LI BBY KUR Z

Compressions As I perform my skills test

on the rubber mannequin it strikes me that

the movements used to save a life

are the same repetitions that create it—

my hands lightly lifting the chin as if I might kiss

the cheek, my eyes watching for rise and fall

of the chest, my fingertips placed at the vulnerable

curve of the neck, feeling for a pulse. And then

my palms, one on top of the other like two lovers’ hips

compressed, my fingers intertwined like legs woven

between sheets, pumping my weight into the

dummy’s breastbone with enough depth to squeeze

the heart, enough thrust to snap a rib, the way I imagine

God did when He took

28

the shard of bone from Adam’s side

to form the woman— the way their bodies swayed together

for the first time, her womb quivering like

a heart starved for blood.

29

ALLI SON HR A B A N

Praise in Old Age Praise for the dim light of our dining room, dapples of flour on the marble counters, grey veins and blots from sloshed tomato sauce, etches: accidental Rorschachs. For pizza margherita on the patio, dank timber from our woodpile and your bent figure faint in the dingy light, flushed face close to the first stubborn sparks.

For Estes in October, your hands clenched to the wheel when you weave the mountain pass, Praise for the hike to Twin Sisters, steep sections of talus and scree after the tree line, your cheerful whistle now a wheeze, my rasps: replies. For scrabble in loose rock, my belly on a boulder, your hands moving my feet to foot holes. For the summit and below, tips of the pines, the Continental Divide.

For putting the gardens to bed before frost, mulch at the swollen joints where stem meets the rootstock, pruning the rose bulbs.

Praise for your arthritic hips, the way they move when they need to, when shooing rabbits out from our whitewashed porch, when tugging off your thick-lined wool socks and tossing them into the hamper.

For the late November static clinging to your arm hair, and for hedge apples under our bed, their bright yellow-green and brain-like ridges keeping spiders away.

Praise for an early snow, soft flurries and scraping snowplow on the street.

For your peacoat’s annual return from the closet, moth breath when you open the pockets

30

and excavate forgotten coppery change.

For you the way you wake before me, start hot coffee in the pot, and outside: your impressions already in the drifts.

31

artist’s statement PAT RI CE S U L L I VA N

AS A NAR R AT I VE , figurative painter, I use the figure to depict universal emotions.

A narrative is time captured in a moment. The synthesis of the photographic and the painted image, within the familiar context of the family, invites viewers to explore their emotions and transcend worldly barriers—perhaps recalling a moment from parenthood or childhood, perhaps renewing a quest to understand the meaning of our existence. These moments display a benevolence that might be masking deeper, more malevolent variables.

My work is inspired by my childhood home and memories. The figures tell personal stories about my childhood through their introspection, innocence, or wisdom and their complexity within the family structures.

32

PATRICE SULLIVAN. Dad. Oil on board. 7 x 5 inches .

33

PATRICE SULLIVAN. Steps. Oil on linen. 8 x 8 inches.

34

PATRICE SULLIVAN. Blue Coats. Oil on board. 9 x 9 inches.

35

PATRICE SULLIVAN. Snow. Oil on linen. 8 x 8 inches.

36

PATRICE SULLIVAN. Pam. Oil on linen. 8 x 8 inches.

37

PATRICE SULLIVAN. Endless Orange. Watercolor. 8 x 8 inches.

38

PATRICE SULLIVAN. Ballerinas. Oil on board. 7.5 x 9.5 inches.

39

PATRICE SULLIVAN. Rivaling Sisters. Oil on linen. 8 x 8 inches.

40

JON ATHA N D U C KW ORTH

Skin The other day, in a hard wind, my skin tore clean from my body & sailed away on a thermal.

Pale, diaphanous, a severed moth’s wing flitting through air.

It was my privilege to let it go, to watch it disappear, to pretend it didn’t make me me.

41

MATTH E W L A NDR U M

Transmigration Starlings exalt above the highway, a sinuous wheeling over grey concrete. They scatter and reform, blotting blue, brailing air. I’m thinking about what you told me about the man who burned indelible handprints on your skin, your no no no thrown to the floor with your torn clothing. You fell silent through his harrowed taking, riven passenger, rent witness.

Then he calmly gathered his things and walked out into the snow-cut dark. I’ve heard about transmigration, that death after death will lead the spirit to freedom from suffering but have no word for the way the body splits into a thousand parts or how the mind returns over and over to a single scene.

Starlings stud the signs and power lines––a whirr of wings, the flock following instinctual patterns of migration.

They lift then settle only for a second before lifting up again.

42

C. K. DAW SON

Pascal The veterinarian on the farm in Portugal showed me one of the newborn lambs then winked at me: Pascoa esta perto, she said.

Easter is near.

I don’t squirm at the sacrifice.

It is as it always was and always will be and the innocent will go first.

I would like to be one of them.

I would like to finally hold that heart I cannot see in my hands.

Make good on your promises I think as I cut the meat.

43

t h e n e w w o r l d

BY A N D REW M c CU A I G

44

in 1969. A Tuesday afternoon, the weather finally cool. A young mother trembles in the living room of a rented house in Ypsilanti, Michigan. She has lived here since August, although it sometimes seems as if she has just moved in. The house is sparsely furnished; some things are still packed in boxes; there are no pictures on the walls or on the small mantel above the artificial fireplace. The distinct smell of burning leaves seeps through cracks around closed windows. It is a new smell to Mary, and one she will always link—even thirty years later, her mind ruined by dementia—with those first few months in the States. Her small southern Ontario town of Guelph had either not allowed the burning of leaves or no one really cared to do it, but now, here in this new country—the New World, she has joked in letters to friends—only four hours from the town where she was born and raised, but at times a different planet, it is a smell she is growing to love. A pungent smell of death and change and new beginnings.

She has put on a light blue linen dress, new nylons, and a string of pearls her mother gave her when she left home. A pair of newish navy-blue pumps lies on the floor by the door, worn perhaps twice before. The black-and-white TV, a new luxury to her, is on low and tuned to WKBD-Detroit, Channel 50, which has been her savior the last couple of months. Her husband, a graduate student in civil engineering at the University of Michigan, began classes in September and has been gone from early morning till dinner or later, leaving her with their two-and-a-half-year-old son and no car, no neighbors worth meeting, and nothing within walking distance except a park with playground equipment too old for her son.

He sleeps now in a rocker on the floor. His name is Aaron. Some days he will sleep for three hours in the afternoon, allowing her time to think, but at times—and today is an example—she is thinking too much. She is, in fact, in a panic. She knows her husband is in his afternoon lab right now; she called him once two weeks ago and his professor answered, surprised and not pleased. Her husband made her promise not to call again unless it was “an absolute emergency,” and she is trying to decide now, as she watches the host of The Galloping Gourmet (she can never remember his name, though she watches him every noonhour) serve his Swedish meatballs to the studio audience of housewives, whether it is.

Though I’ve said she is young, that is only relative—to both history and retrospection.

She is, in fact, thirty-three—a rather old new mother for her time. Her only child was conceived after much inner turmoil, tears, and debate. Her own childhood battle with rheumatic fever had left her with a weakened mitral valve in her heart, an enlarged right ventricle, and orders not to risk her life by having a baby. She had gone six years of marriage, practicing careful birth control, before deciding she needed to have her own child even if it killed her. Her son was born on February 14th, 1967, Valentine’s Day, the day after the Beatles released “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” as a doublesided single, the same month the Pontiac Firebird was introduced and Martin Luther King began speaking out at length against the Vietnam War. The birth, attended to by specialists at Toronto General an hour away, had not damaged her heart further, but she agreed to have her tubes tied three days later before being released home to Guelph with her newborn son.

AN O CT OB E R DAY

45

The credits of The Galloping Gourmet vibrate down the gray screen, followed by three commercials (Charmin, Oil of Olay, Chef Boy-Ar-Dee) and then the opening credits of Leave it to Beaver, a show she feels is beneath her but which is nevertheless helping to keep her son asleep through the phone call she now knows she must make.

She wonders if the smell of burning leaves will be noticeable on her clothes. Her son breathes in his rocker, his little chest rising and falling under his red blanket pilled and nubby from many washings. The tiny veins in his eyelids are a miracle. As are his hands, his wispy almost white hair, his dimpled knees, his laugh. In his two-and-a-half years of life she has only been more than one room away from him twice. He is her everything.

She does not want this child—this second child, the girl that is scheduled to be delivered from the agency today, this very afternoon. How could she love another as she loves her son? She knows it now. She’s probably known it for several weeks; maybe a part of her has known it all along. But all the meetings—all the documents and payments and her husband asking if she’s absolutely sure—have confused her, while the counselors and social workers and agency people, people from the church and with the state, have planted doubt where there once was none. If they had just given her the child that first meeting— just gone into the back room, brought out a wrapped bundle and handed her over (“Here.

Yours.”) that would have been the way to do it. Nature would have taken over. Instead she had to endure the well-intentioned haggling, the quizzing, role-playing and serious nods: Are you sure? You need to be absolutely sure. But maybe the doubt had existed all along.

The laugh-track to Leave it to Beaver bubbles up. The collar of her dress, still too new, chafes her neck. She realizes she’s been scratching; it will most certainly be red. She rises and goes to the yellow phone hanging on the wall of the kitchen and dials her husband’s professor’s number. The lab will be in its first hour, and she doesn’t know what worries her more: old Prof. Boyce answering angrily, or not answering at all. But on the fifth ring a young woman answers. It is probably his secretary, but do professors running classes have secretaries? Maybe here, in the States. When she worked in the engineering office in Guelph it was never possible to contact a professor while he was teaching. The woman could be a student instructed to answer, but it’s hard to imagine a woman in the School of Engineering. The voice on the other end is high-pitched and thin, like a child’s, asking how she may help. Mary explains she must speak to her husband. She’s very sorry but it’s an emergency.

“Just a moment, please.”

She winds the cord several times around her wrist and forearm, making her hand pink and puffy. This cord could commit murder, she reflects. She glances into the living room and sees her son moving in his rocker. His head sways a bit and then his hands go to his eyes to rub them. His head tilts and then he’s still. Her husband’s voice says her name.

“I can’t,” she tells him. “I can’t.”

“You can’t what?” But he already knows.

She breathes deeply, tries to control herself. “I can’t take another child. I can’t love another in the same way. It wouldn’t be fair. I can’t . . . adopt.”

Silence on the other end. She imagines a sigh; the rattling of chemical equipment, beakers and water and the hiss of Bunsen burners. “But the meeting is already arranged,

46

Mary. They’re coming at three, remember? Mr. Carson and Samantha. And the baby.”

“I can’t do it. I just can’t.” You should be here! she thinks. Why was it arranged that she accept this child alone?

He says her name gently, twice. “Why don’t you rest for a while? Or go on a walk.

You’re just nervous. You’re getting cold feet.”

“It won't matter.” She is feeling desperate now. She needs to say something definitive, something he will accept as final. “I’ve made up my mind, Bruce.”

“You’ve made up your mind,” he says.

This was my idea from the beginning, she wants to say. My push alone. You never wanted this at all. Isn’t one enough? you said. Isn’t our own enough? was your position—so logical and rational. I was the only one who wanted it, and I can be the one to stop it.

“We could postpone till another day,” he says. “I’ll give them a call. We owe them that much. I’ve already written the check.”

“I don’t care!” she yells. “I’m sorry,” she adds in a whisper. She knew he’d mention the money. She is crying now, having held it back as long as she could.

“OK,” he says finally. “I need to get back to class. Call them and explain—” “Can’t you do it? Please? I don’t think I can talk to them.” She knows she would not have the courage, and would be talked out of it. She is ashamed on so many levels her crying increases.

“Mary, I’m in class,” he says gently, but he knows he must do this. He knows, too, that her emotion—her irrational behavior, his own mother once called it—is what drew him to her in the first place. That and her beauty, of course. When they first met in the engineering office at Guelph he was amazed that she didn’t have a boyfriend. On their first date at the commons coffee shop he was drawn to her spontaneity, her flippant comments, the unfounded opinions that made him laugh. As he got to know her more, he relished her unpredictability. When she started calling him “Brucie” he was a goner.

“Please.” She is tired of begging. She cannot beg any more. If he says no now she will not know what to do.

Finally he agrees; she thanks him and hangs up. When she enters the living room her son is looking at her with wide eyes. A commercial tells her to “Things go better with Coke!”

Her son begins to cry, his hands outstretched, and she goes to him. His little arms reach out for her and she takes him in. He is warm from sleep; his crying stops, and he buries his face in her neck. Her crying has replaced his now. Almost immediately, his head lifts, and he stares into her face. His eyes are big and brown. He has dimples even when he isn't smiling—where did he get those?

“Mommy crying?” he says.

“Yes, Mommy’s sad today.” She wipes her face, knowing the worst is over, and smiles.

“How about a little lunch? You’ve been sleeping for a long time.”

“Mommy’s sad?”

“Yes.” In future years she will love him to the point of smothering out her own self-respect and losing his. When he becomes a teenager, she will long for his innocence, for these

47

quiet days with The Galloping Gourmet and Leave it to Beaver. In anger, when he has pushed her to her limits, they will scream and sometimes slap each other, and she will shout “Why weren’t you a girl! I wish you were a girl!” Throughout his entire childhood he will find it odd to hear her musings on those children in the neighborhood who happened to be adopted, who created turmoil for their own families, who did not quite fit in. After he moves out to go to college, she will host one exchange student a year for many years— always in the fall, always a girl.

She brings him into the kitchen and puts him in his high chair and gets a jar of Gerber from the fridge and his little spoon from the counter. She can’t be bothered with the bib. She unscrews the lid, leaves it on the counter. In the door of the fridge is a bottle of Boone’s Farm, and she brings it out without a second thought. She places the bottle on the counter next to the Gerber, a ham and peas mix; the applesauce was finished. They both need their lunch. She pours the sweet white wine into a fancy glass she never uses, a wedding present placed so high in the cabinet she needs a chair to get it down. It is dusty, but she doesn't realize this until the wine is already in it. She spoons some of the mush into her son’s favorite bowl, the Campbell’s alphabet soup one, and watches him eat. Her first glass is gone in no time, and she pours herself another.

When he was born, the nurses advocated bottle feeding with the attitude that there was no other real modern choice. She wanted to breastfeed, but one of her doctors said that nursing could affect her heart and why take that chance? Another doctor, the heart specialist, told her that breastfeeding was messy and unnecessary and did she really want that kind of headache in her condition? As a result she has never felt her son at her breast.

But what she really wants to do now is to take him into her bed, pull the covers over them, hug him close and sleep and sleep.

She thinks about this now: those early days of napping with Aaron in their bed, those days of uncontrollable shaking, tears, and an inability to do anything, a condition that, a condition that would eventually be accepted as postpartum depression and not a woman’s neurosis. Alzheimer’s, too—a condition she will develop in her late fifties—is not yet a household term in 1969.

If she had another child, where would that child even go while she and Aaron were together?

She is thinking these thoughts, nodding in affirmation, gulping down her second glass of wine in relief, when the phone rings. Her husband tells her there was no answer at the adoption agency. Mr. Carson and Samantha will be at the house in a little less than an hour. They will have to explain themselves at that time, face to face. He is leaving school as soon as he can get away; he will be there with her. she powders her face, applies mascara and lipstick, wondering all the while why she is doing it. If she were to appear drunk and disheveled, fraying, perhaps even trembling, wouldn’t that be to her advantage? Wouldn’t this show she really wasn’t fit to adopt in the first place? The agency people would back off, quietly excusing themselves while expressing regret. They would bow and leave. The hefty deposit would not be returned, but it wouldn’t be returned anyway, regardless of how AT FIVE M I NU T ES T O TWO

48

she behaves. No, she decides as she blots her lips on a Kleenex, she is putting her best face forward because she does not want to appear hysterical. Furthermore, she does not want to seem afraid. She wants the story they tell about her to be a story of courage, or if not that, of principle.

Aaron is playing with cardboard bricks in the living room, stacking them higher and higher and when they do not fall on their own, striking the tower down with his tight little fist. What is it about boys, she thinks, but can’t finish the thought. She puts on her blue shoes and eyes herself in the mirror by the front door. The redness around her neck has faded. The pearls add a touch of class, though she will learn years later they are not real pearls. She is also not aware, on this October afternoon, that being Aaron’s mother will be her life’s single greatest accomplishment; that to the outside world she will never be more than a mother and wife; that her “career” will be limited to being a secretary, and, for a short time before her dementia kicked in with a vengeance in 1992, a part-time phone solicitor for the University of Michigan Foundation, raising money for an institution that was swimming in it. On this October day, looking in the half-length mirror that came with the house, she sees herself as beautiful, modern, proud. A principled woman who could never love another child as her own and is honorable enough to realize it.

She peeks through the curtain at the street. It is a quiet street with no traffic. On still days with the windows open the hum of I-94 can be heard along with the roar and fade of planes taking off from Willow Run, but now, with the windows closed and the TV off, it is eerily silent. The only sound, if she concentrates, is the light slap of cardboard bricks in the living room and the thump of her heart in her ears. The neighbor across the street is raking leaves into his smoldering pile. She notices that the trees are either completely bare, bright yellow, or dark red. The sky is gray.

A white Ford Fairlane (or something like it—she is not good with cars) slows in front of the house, the woman in the passenger seat—Samantha—looks and points and her lips move; the car signals unnecessarily and turns into their driveway. She watches as Mr. Carson from the agency gets out with a bouquet of flowers in one hand. He is dressed in a crisp brown suit and orange tie; he says something to Samantha and then smiles. Samantha, who is perhaps five years younger than Mary and dressed in a black dress with a white belt and big white buttons, dips into the back seat and brings out Olivia, who is five months old.

She was given up by her teenage mother soon after her birth. She is healthy, vibrant, wideeyed, and very black.

She thinks again, as Mr. Carson and Samantha approach the house, how her own parents—uneducated Scottish immigrants to Canada—would react when introduced to their second grandchild: with horror and panic, then anger, then wonder and recriminations and lengthy ignorant lectures. Finally, perhaps, with acceptance and love—but maybe never.

This was one of the role-plays she had been through at the agency. But she will never know their reaction now, and they will never know she was even thinking about adoption. For she has not told anyone—not her sister Margaret, her parents, or any of her friends back home.

In fact, aside from the agency people, the only person who knows about their deliberations is a checkout clerk at Kroger’s named Leslie. About a month ago, the young woman had asked, searching for a price sticker on a loaf of bread, how she was doing today.

49

“We are struggling to decide whether to adopt a Negro child,” she replied, and there the conversation had ended.

She meets them at the door and they enter. Smiles and handshakes and congratulations.

Samantha shifts her body to show her Olivia, but Mary tries not to look and actually moves away. The child’s eyes are beautiful, a shade of brown so dark they are nearly indistinguishable from the pupil. But to embrace her now would make things worse, and Samantha immediately senses something is wrong.

“My husband tried to contact you but there was no answer,” she explains.

“Today?” Mr. Carson asks.

“What did he call us about?” Samantha asks.

“We have decided we cannot adopt. We’re very sorry.”

Samantha and Mr. Carson exchange glances. There is a prolonged silence.

“We are very sorry to hear that, Mary,” Mr. Carson says, holding the bouquet of flowers at an awkward angle.

“May we ask why?” Samantha says. “When did you make this decision?”

“May we sit down, Mary?” Mr. Carson asks.

“Certainly. I’m sorry.” More than anything she wants to banish them from the house, scream at them, push them, make them disappear forever, but she could no more do this than fly to the moon. She leads them into the living room and directs them to sit on the green Chesterfield (in her life she will never call a couch anything else). She picks up Aaron from the floor and sits down with him in an adjacent rocking chair. With her son in her arms, she reasons, she will not be asked again to hold Olivia, and her argument will appear more authentic. “You remember Aaron?” she says as they sit down.

“Of course,” Mr. Carson says. “Hello, little man.”

But Aaron and Olivia are staring at each other, their eyes locked in unblinking wonder.

Neither of them will remember this, of course. Olivia will never be told she was almost adopted by a young Canadian couple when she was five months old—that she was actually in their house on the day of legal transfer but then sent away and later adopted by an older couple in Dearborn, the well-meaning white people she would know as her parents until she left them forever after high school. For his part, Aaron would not be told he almost had a sister until his father let it slip one day a year after his mother’s death in 1997. They would be at a Borders book shop in Ann Arbor a few days after Christmas, drinking coffee and reading magazines, and his father would say, connected to absolutely nothing, “You know, you almost had a sister.” He would go five more years, imagining his life as a sibling, with a sibling, until he began the research to try to find her, coming up empty at every turn.

His father will never tell him Olivia was black. He will never even know her name because thirty years later his father will have forgotten.

“Can I bring you some coffee?” the young mother asks now, and immediately regrets it.

“Or some tea. Maybe a Coke?” She tries to smile.

“No, no thank you,” they both say.

Mr. Carson sits with his hands between his legs, a frown on his face, the bouquet on the armrest beside him. “We really feel you owe us an explanation, Mrs. Connal.”

“I—” she begins, but then can’t find the words. “We—” (Where is he anyway? He said

50

he’d be here.) “We’ve decided we only want one child,” she says lamely, knowing this is inadequate, both as an explanation to them and to her own morals she wants believed.

“Mrs. Connal, if the race of the child is the issue, there are other children—” “No, I assure you that’s not it,” she says quickly. Perhaps too quickly.

“I see,” he says, but what he sees is that she is lying—that the child’s race is of course the reason. He has been in this business for many years and has seen this attitude outnumber one of true charity and acceptance ten to one. Still, it is a personal matter and one that needs to be honored. He himself would probably not adopt a black child in this day and age. It certainly makes his job more difficult, though. And today—he has had people delay and even back out before, but never at the last minute like this; never at the delivery for crying out loud.

But he will not press further. It is unfortunate but it can’t be helped or changed. Even if she were to say, at this moment, OK, yes, let’s do it after all, he would feel obligated to deny her. They will have to place Olivia elsewhere—but where? He rubs his eyes. At the moment there is no one although he knows that could change tomorrow. He is about to rise to leave when the husband rushes through the front door, apologizing and moving toward them quickly. The little boy scrambles off his mother’s lap and runs towards him, calling Daddy. He picks up his son but his attention is focused completely on his guests.

“I’m sorry I was held up,” he says, a little out of breath.

Mr. Carson wants to say, “It doesn’t matter, we weren’t expecting you anyway,” but of course that would be unprofessional. Still, he wants to be done with this as soon as possible.

“Has my wife explained?”

Samantha defers to Mr. Carson, who clears his throat. “She has not entirely explained her reasons, but we understand that it’s an emotional and personal issue and that sometimes explanations cannot be put into words. We are sorry to have this last-minute change of plan but understand it must be for the best.”

The husband, standing over his wife’s chair, makes a half-hearted and awkward motion to rub her shoulder. The gesture lasts about a second.

“Shall we finalize the paperwork at the kitchen table, Mr. Connal?”

“By all means.”

And that’s how it ends—and begins. She knows it’s over. Aaron has gone back to his blocks; Olivia still stares at him, though Samantha seems not to notice. They sit awkwardly together, watching Aaron, half-heartedly discussing developmental milestones.

Samantha took this job right out of college and has never wanted another. Her idealism and communication with young mothers has made the agency better. One truth that she discovered on her own is that babies are babies, whatever race, whatever the poverty or desperation of their backgrounds. She thought that Mary understood this as well, but it now appears she was wrong. This is the third time she has been close to placing Olivia and each time it has fallen through. She fears now that the child will never be taken by anybody.

The sweetness of the wine has gone stale in Mary’s mouth and throat; she wants another glass and will have one as soon as they have left. The men’s voices are low and

51

indistinct in the kitchen, and occasionally she hears the scratch of pen on paper. When the awkwardness grows too much to bear, she says, for the last time, “I’m sorry.”

But Samantha is done with her, too. To say “That’s OK” would be false; to say “We’re sorry, too,” rude. So she says nothing. After today they will see each other once more in their lives, on a fall morning six years later, standing at opposite ends of a large apple stand at the Ann Arbor Farmers’ Market. Samantha will be hugely pregnant with her second child. Their eyes will meet, register knowledge, and look away, troubled. Within ten seconds of each other—Mary first, then Samantha—they will realize where they last saw the other, and they will be careful not to make eye contact again.

When the paperwork is finished, Mr. Carson clicks his briefcase shut and walks to the front door. Samantha rises with Olivia. They say goodbye at the front door, shaking hands all around, saying nothing more. She closes the door and watches discreetly as they get in their car, back out of the driveway, and disappear.

Their neighbor is now out of sight, though his leaves still smolder, a thin stream of smoke rising into the fall air.

When she turns back toward the living room she sees that Mr. Carson has left the flowers on the Chesterfield armrest. It is too late to give them back, and she wonders if she should throw them away or put them in a vase. They’re so beautiful, it would be a shame.

Instead, she turns to her husband and weeps. At first he doesn’t move to her. Then he does.

52

RAVEN L E I L A NI

Isaac The lord buckled my mother's knees, made his debut as a meiotic shrug bracketing silver, budding retina.

The lord is always surprising women with babies that are meant to die.

I lived because my mother rode the train end to end to keep warm. I lived despite the lack of carpenters in the Bronx, I lived because in rehab she formed a face from the sky that demanded she sacrifice an improbable child.

So I took my spankings in the church bathroom.

I took my math and social studies in the room next to the church bathroom, and once in public school I was a black girl without rhythm, prom shoes heavy with bread, blood, necessary flood, years of communion assuming dominion of my hips.

There were others, and we pretended not to see each other in the hallways, tried to shuck the homeschool from our shoulders.

Then, an apple turned like an eye and gazed into my mouth and I colored my lips before sundown, lived without the lord, like my mother lived without Joseph. I wondered, who were these men, made of air and amygdala, too aloof to send a lamb before the knife was at our throats?

53

HANNAH L E E J ONE S

When My Mouth First Opened The known world was in whiteout.

A woman flew over my orchards with her housecoat in flames.

The sky, once given to every shape of star, darkened for the utterances I thought would end me.

Instead they’d turned wind.

They pushed me northward on a river through a thicket of lupine.

The woman over the orchards became a deer eating snow out of my hand.

Some days a red lightning arrived to wick the blindness off my body.

Last night I dreamt I was the deer.

Her world felt realer than this one.

And out of it came a singing: too fine to be that of birds, too unknowing to be human.

54

HANNA H L E E J ONE S

October What lessons in autumn’s lessening leaves.

They shine with dying.

And the boughs of my life, they know: how dying is fruit, a chamber ensemble of flaming swords.

In their turning he’ll come for me, a figure in the shape of what I never lived.

Green and gold, his weathered hand over mine.

The scent of the tea olive always strongest at dusk.

55

OKWUD I L I NE B E OL I SA

I Could Still Hear Him Whistling My mother was tending to her garden where she nurtured moringa, tomatoes, spinach, and curry leaves. The climbers were extending their frontiers to the neighbour’s fence.

I was trying to say a prayer over the din of father’s Louis Armstrong playing, my head doused with purple blood that almost coloured my eyes. When I breathed deep the air rendered itself stale and what I perceived for some time were the tomatoes in the backyard.

A little butter or just the smell of fish and I would fall sick for a fortnight.

Some songs are dry wells where you drown: even after my mother stopped working with her knife on the climbers, I could still hear her washing the excess leaves in a bath; even after my father stopped the stereo and left for work, I could still hear him whistling.

56

PATRICE SULLIVAN. Mom. Watercolor. 6 x 6 inches.

57

PATRICE SULLIVAN. Family Snap. Oil on board. 8 x 8 inches.

58

PATRICE SULLIVAN. Party Snap. Oil on linen. 18 x 18 inches.

59

PATRICE SULLIVAN. Lost. Oil on linen. 48 x 48 inches.

60

PATRICE SULLIVAN. Poodle Stare Down. Oil on linen. 8 x 8 inches.

61

PATRICE SULLIVAN. Opening. Oil on board. 24 x 24 inches.

62

PATRICE SULLIVAN. Missing Mom. Oil on linen. 12 x 12 inches.

63

NAME. Title. Medium. Dimensions .

PATRICE SULLIVAN. Rich Baby. Oil on canvas. 5 x 7 inches.

64

JOHN SI B L E Y W I L L I A M S

Grace Notes We are driving west with the sun swaddled in storm cloud and all that pristine nothingness that is Kansas flattening behind us. I’ve learned there are ways to sing along to radio silence, though I’m less convinced these days anyone is listening. How quickly winter empties our voices of their animals; windows down and the gray horizon suddenly too small to carry inside. You are the worst kind of lover: highway, landlocked between fled and imagined homes.

As our headlights like slowly falling fires kick out into the afternoon rain and the kids from the backseat start naming everything that blurs by us birds and, suddenly birds again, we begin making Motown of the dead air. I have no idea what I promised them about tomorrow, but the sky is devastating as whirling white asters.

And no clouds will ever make these wild animal shapes again.

65

THE CURS E

BY MO N I CA J I MEN E Z

66

the movie Titanic came out, in the middle of a long drought that withered the trees around the High Honors luncheon patio and slowed the creek winding through the school grounds to a trickle, Jen stood on a cinder block in the courtyard outside 4-Liwayway, our homeroom, and told us about the curse.

It was handed down from the women of one generation to the women of the next. It happened on the day you hit puberty, the day you turned from a girl to a woman. You woke up one morning, a morning like any other, and everything was normal until that night, when you couldn’t sleep. And you never went back to sleep, for as long as you lived.

Eventually you started seeing and hearing things that weren’t there, things that were impossible, like the whispers of the dead, or hair growing out of the walls. You developed a high fever and were bedridden for nine days, tossing and turning, unable to even close your eyes. In your last few days you started laughing and laughing, and that’s how you died.

We went to a private Catholic girls’ school in Manila where the homerooms had beautiful names like Liwayway (“dawn” in Tagalog) and Kalaleng (“flute”). Most girls were overweight and dark-skinned, but Jen was petite, gently curved and fair, her cheeks tender and rosy. Her hair fell just below her ears in a sleek, simple bob, with a single black barrette holding it back from one side of her face. When she smiled, she revealed large white movie-star front teeth.

A week after she told us about the curse, as the drought progressed and the creek turned from mud into dust and armies of giant red-orange ants and rats began invading our classrooms and bathrooms in search of water, our friend Kat went home sick.

Rumors flew that she had been stricken by the curse. At lunch, the girls gathered in the cool, dark chapel and prayed, kneeling with heads bowed and hands clasped tight like the little girls in 1-Adelfa (“pink flower”) and 2-Bahaghari (“rainbow”), conveniently forgetting they giggled, gossiped, snacked, and napped their way through rosary recitations every month.

I did not attend these prayers. Small, skinny and angular, with unevenly cut bangs and big front teeth that pushed away from each other at forty-five-degree angles, I was skeptical of Jen, skeptical of curses and their antidotes, skeptical of most everything, always scenting the air for the slightest hint of fraud.

I chose instead to wander the open-air halls of the school, sneaking up behind the dragonflies that would land on long, dry brown blades of grass. I would pinch their clear, paper-thin iridescent wings between my fingers and bring them to my face, peering at the flashes of gold and green. Then I would hold them out from my body and with a little flick of my wrist, let them go.

TH E SUM M E R B E FOR E

before the start of the next term, that December my mother, brother, sister, and I flew back to the United States. It had been a whole year since we’d left our childhood home to get acquainted with the country where our parents grew up. It was my mom’s idea, and my mom who took us; my dad stayed behind to continue working at his medical software job.

My dad met us at the entrance to the airport. We recognized his SUV before we WITH FI VE WE E KS OFF

67

recognized him. He wasn’t wearing glasses anymore, and his usually unkempt hair was short and styled. His unfamiliar clothes fit him tightly. He was smiling as if he’d been asked to host us by a slightly unreasonable person.

We snuck glances at him as we climbed into the car, our teeth chattering in the clean, cold air. The streets were smooth, wide and quiet, the trees thick and dark, the buildings spaced so far apart. As my dad drove, we watched it all slide silently by, a world that should have been familiar, but that seemed not at all as we’d left it.

Instead of the big, warm brown house I remembered, the one we stopped in front of was dark and small, nearly invisible behind bushes grown so tall and wild, they made me think of the enchanted shrubbery hiding Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

My dad unlocked the front door and pushed it open. Inside it was musty-smelling and totally dark, all the blinds drawn to keep out the light from the street.

My dad flicked on the light.

We stared. The kitchen table was overflowing with newspapers, books, Dorito bags, plates and mugs caked with unknown substances. The stovetop was piled high with pots and pans and dishes and empty containers. Shirts and pants and socks were strewn over both the living room couches, the low glass table and the floor.

When we had all lived here together, our mom was always shouting at us to leave our shoes by the door, scrubbing our handprints and footprints off the walls on the hallway and above the couch, nagging us to pick up books before they piled up and clear away saucers of sliced strawberries and sugar before the juice dried. Our house in the Philippines was immaculate, the speckled tiles always damp from having just been washed, the wooden steps always swept, the bars on the windows always dusted.

We waited, breath held, for what my mother would say.

She looked around. She went into the kitchen and picked up a mug. She inspected it with no expression on her face. Then she walked to the sink and turned on the tap.

My heart gave a big thump, anticipating the beginning of a long stretch of silent dishwashing and tidying while we all snuck around, pretending to be blind to both the mess and the cleaning. And then the inevitable raised voices from the kitchen, Mom and Dad arguing, while we pretended not to hear, even as we did everything more quietly, straining to catch the words.

But instead my mom poured herself a mug of water and turned off the tap. Standing by the sink in her coat and scarf, her bags slung over her shoulders, she took a long drink.

We went to explore. In our bedroom, clothes had been flung everywhere, arms and legs splayed crazily over the beds and the carpet. The whiteboard on the wall, which was used for multiplication tables and merits and demerits (tallied and exchanged for candy bars or extra chores), was covered with an enormous, violent black scrawl. I could not remember this scrawl being here before we left. But my dad didn’t use this board. Who could have drawn it?

I never found out. At that moment my dad called from the living room, “Who wants to go to the movies?”

It was late, almost ten p.m. My mother had disappeared into the master bedroom at the end of the hall. But it didn’t occur to us to question any of this. Half an hour later we were back in the car, on our way to the mall.

68

It felt like a holiday, like a snow day, or in the Philippines a monsoon day, when all normal rules lifted and all bets were off. We yelled and fought over who had to sit in the middle, who was sitting on whose seat belt, competing to entertain my dad. He had ignored us in the car on the way back from the airport, but now his spirits were high. He egged us on, joining in our arguments, laughing at our jokes.

“What movie do you want to see?” he asked, and although I almost never spoke directly to my dad, I said immediately, “Titanic.”

I didn’t know what Titanic was about, but a few days ago in the courtyard, Jen had talked about it in a breezy, worldly tone of voice that told me it was a grown-up movie. One scene in particular we wouldn’t want to miss, she said. She refused to tell us what it was, but grinned wickedly, dimples flashing in her baby-round cheeks. We’d know it when we saw it, she said.

She spoke with special intimacy, as if the movie were an old favorite, but I knew she couldn’t possibly have seen it. Just like the songs on the radio, the fashion in the malls, the slang everyone tried out in homeroom every morning, the movies in the Philippines were a month behind what was new and hot in the U.S. My sister did not want to see Titanic, which my brother had told her was a documentary. He wanted to see the new James Bond movie; she wanted to see the new Home Alone.

This was fine with me, because I had only spoken up to impress my dad with my new mature tastes. As soon as he vetoed Titanic, I too planned to vote for Home Alone.

But instead, his voice mild and amused, as if I had announced a new and startling favorite flavor of ice cream, my dad said, “Titanic it is. The yea votes have it.”

“No they don’t,” said my brother, an inveterate tracker of votes. “It’s two to one against.”

“Two to two,” my dad said, and a silence followed in which we all understood that the unthinkable had happened—my dad had taken a side, and it was mine.

It was a Monday night. The lobby of the cinema was empty. The bright lights filled every corner of the enormous space, although it was just us. My dad went up to the counter and asked for four tickets to Titanic. The woman at the counter squinted at us. I thought for sure she wouldn’t let us through. I’m sorry, she would say, but this is simply not a children’s film. She would call security and two burly guards would have us escorted out— maybe even tail us home to make sure we didn’t stop at any other theaters along the way.

But without comment the woman tapped on her keyboard and the printer sounded, loud and sharp in the empty lobby. She handed my dad the tickets. My dad handed one to each of us. I held mine carefully by the crisp, sharp edges, still warm from the printer.

The theater was empty except for a handful of heads poking up above the seats. My dad stopped at the center row. I hung back, but neither my brother nor sister moved. He looked back and I had no choice but to go into the row after him.

I had never sat next to my dad in the theater before. When we all went to the movies, my mom liked to pretend she and my dad were on a date, so the two of them would sit together and the rest of us on the other side of her, leaning over if we had something important enough to whisper to him.

69

I couldn’t decide how to sit, whether my hands should be on my armrests or in my lap, whether my legs should be crossed or flat on the floor, whether I should be slouched back or leaning forward. But my dad didn’t seem to notice, his eyes on the previews.

The movie began. Rose captivated me from her first moment onscreen. I was fascinated by her perfect beauty, which seemed inseparable from her creamy whiteness. I looked around to see if anyone else was noticing this—but my sister’s head was lolling to the side, her mouth open. She was asleep. My brother and my dad sat staring silently at the screen.

That was when I remembered something I had forgotten—that my family measured how good a movie was by how much it made them laugh. And this whole time, no one had laughed once. And Titanic was not, I realized with a sickening lurch, a laughing kind of movie.

I felt my whole body go hot with anger at the movie for being so dull and dry, at Jen for having made me think of it, at myself for speaking up in the first place. I became unable to focus on a single line of dialogue and quickly lost track of what was going on. All I could think about was how much I wanted the movie to end.

My back was ramrod straight and my shoulders were beginning to ache, when Rose dropped her robe.

Later I realized there had been dialogue indicating this would happen, but at the time it came out of nowhere. One second she was wearing the robe, smiling playfully like she was about to make a joke. The next second, there was one quick movement of her hands—and the robe fell.

I kept expecting her to catch it mid-fall, or for the camera to suddenly cut away at the last minute, just kidding, and everyone would have a good laugh. Instead there they were: two pale, heavy, overripe-looking blobs, hanging like fruit off Rose’s chest, pulling the skin down and pooling at the bottoms like Jell-O in a sandwich bag. The large, soft-looking darker pink ovals were placed not in the center, as I would have imagined, but toward the lower and outer edges, like two skewed eyes looking down and out.

It was as if the velvet backdrop curtain had come crashing down during a play, revealing the puke green-colored cafeteria wall, people skittering around backstage, everything you weren’t supposed to see. I sat there frozen, completely mortified. Now was when my dad would realize he had made a mistake and usher us out of the theater. Instead he said nothing.

Then Rose walked, those two soft droopy pink eyes advancing with her, her belly button not like the flat, friendly face-like thing on my stomach or my sister’s stomach, not round but long, oval, and so deep you couldn’t see the back of it. It was not like a belly button at all, but more like a mouth, a black gaping zero. She reclined on the sofa, those two crazy eyes now seeming to droop down and stare askance toward the floor. And still she was smiling, as if she was about to tell a joke.

I suddenly remembered the time we had gone to the circus and the clown’s pants had fallen down and he was capering about the ring like nothing had happened, which of course was the joke, and everyone was laughing and laughing, only I felt awful and sick, because no one was going to help him put his pants back on, no one was even going to tell him what was wrong. And still my dad had said nothing.

70

From there, the movie descended into a nightmare from which I could not escape. Rose and Jack caught behind bars, screaming for the man with the keys to come back as the bright blue water rose and rose, above their necks, up to their chins. Clutching each other at the top of the skyscraper-sized ship as ominous creaks gave way to a sudden snap, and the whole thing plunged down and down, with terrifying speed.

And then we were all underwater, submerged in that silent, bottomless dark, and the whole theater went a cold, deep blue except for the whiteness of Rose’s screaming, terrified face and the bubbles blooming from her lips. I couldn’t move, I could barely breathe, gripped by powerlessness and fury and despair, not knowing who or what was at fault or why I was so angry—knowing only that I had been betrayed.

The lights came on. My brother was excited, talking about how the ship had turned vertical and gone straight down, speculating about the sharks that had probably gotten most of the passengers. My sister was fast asleep, totally limp, not moving even when my dad picked her up.

I could not get up from my seat. I was perfectly able, I knew it, but the thought of getting up, of walking down the row behind my brother and in front of my dad, of walking through that bright garish theater lobby and into that bleak parking lot was so mortifying and hateful that it took my breath away.

Somehow we made it home. Later that night, I lay in bed under the scratchy woolen blanket, dug up from the back of the closet because my dad could not remember which box in the basement our regular blue comforters were packed into. My teeth felt grainy with sugar from the giant Sprite my brother and I had shared. We hadn’t even unpacked our toothbrushes.

Staring around at the Magic Marker pictures on the wall that I could not remember drawing, I realized with a little jump that I was wide awake. I could not sleep.

My heart started to pound. I felt my neck and forehead the way my mom did when I was sick. I didn’t feel hot—at least I thought I didn’t—but what if that was because my hand was the same temperature as my neck and forehead? I felt myself starting to sweat and itch even more under the heavy blanket. I looked over at the other side of the room, at my sister’s sleeping form. I wanted to lean over and whisper something funny. But that was against the rules. We only liked each other in school, when we were playing Red Rover, or catching dragonflies. Watching her sleep, I felt a terrible loneliness.

My eyes kept returning to that whiteboard, with that black scrawl. I got quietly out of bed. I picked up the eraser. The scrawl wouldn’t come off. I brought the eraser to my face, till the fuzzy bottom, with that strong chemical smell, touched my nose and lips. Working up the moisture in my mouth, I spat on the eraser and tried again. The scrawl smudged, but didn’t fade.

I tiptoed across the hall to the bathroom to wet the eraser, and saw light spilling down the hall from the kitchen. At this moment I knew I should turn around and go back to my room. Instead I crept forward, breathing quietly so I wouldn’t be heard, eraser in one hand.

All the lights were on: the standing lamp and the table lamp and the reading lamp and the overhead living room light that was never on, the kitchen light and the light above the

71

sink and the little light above the stove, revealing that the mess had not been touched. In fact, it seemed to have exploded.

One of the kitchen chairs had so many clothes draped over the back, it looked like an easy chair. I glimpsed blue and white stripes, one of the set of big soft bath towels bought just before we left for the Philippines, that until now had always been kept on the highest shelf of the closet to be used only by guests.

On top of that towel sat my mother, facing the kitchen table, sipping a mug of tea. As I watched, she set her mug on top of a pile of papers. The mug tilted dangerously. She didn’t reach out to steady it.

I should have been relieved that she wasn’t mad, that she wasn’t still in the master bedroom, behind that closed door. But there was something so wrong about her sitting in the middle of that incredible mess as if she didn’t even notice.

At that moment something moved in the living room.

It was quick and huge, blocking out the light. I felt myself reach out and grab the wall, like it was a railing to catch my fall. I felt a cry stick in my throat, a warning, because behind my mother was my father, hurling something enormous at her turned back, coming toward her with his hands out.

And then the huge thing became the familiar green sheet from the hall closet, settling as my dad draped it over the couch. He pulled the corners straight, smoothed it with his hands, intent on making it wrinkle-free.

Of course. I felt my whole body go weak with relief. No huge, frightening thing was in the living room; my father was not attacking my mother; in fact, he was going to bed, right there on the sofa.

I turned and crept down the hallway, feeling cheerful again. I went into the bathroom. I turned on the faucet, and in the dark held the eraser under the cold stream of water.

But in the bedroom, the scrawl seemed to have changed. It now had an erratic, almost sinister look that seemed to intensify as I stared at it, as if any second something was going to come through the violent black lines and into the room.

I didn’t think; I went up to the whiteboard and rose onto my tiptoes and with one sharp stroke, I wiped the eraser across it.

All at once, the blackness smeared over the white parts of the board. It was everywhere, as if the mixture of water and my saliva had caused it to spread like a virus. To my horror, I realized it had somehow gotten all over my fingers. Pressing harder, with my whole shoulder and arm, my whole body, I wiped again.

It happened too quickly and the room was too dark for me to realize my mistake in time. The scrawl had begun to come off, but now water was running off the board in black rivulets, pooling on the metal rim at the bottom of the board.

I looked around for something to catch the water with, an old blanket, or towel, one of the shirts lying on the floor, but I was marooned—I couldn’t leave the board. There was nothing but my own already stained hands.

The black water formed big, heavy drops on the bottom of the rim, shining in the dim light from the hallway like dark dewdrops. I reached out, palms upturned, the eraser between my fingers, not knowing which drop would fall first, but thinking if I was quick enough, I could catch them all before they fell.

72

Later I would look back on that moment as the most embarrassing moment of that night, of that whole year, maybe of my whole childhood. Every time I would think of it, all I would be able to remember would be my incredible, unforgivable stupidity, and the awful feeling that I could have done something—I should have done something, anything, other than stand there in the bedroom with that eraser in my hand like a young child wielding a magic wand, not knowing that what she held was a dead stick.

I was standing there, waiting for the first drop to fall, when I heard a series of velvety thuds, so quiet they seemed to be coming from somewhere far in the distance. It was the sound of the stained water hitting the pale blue carpet and sinking deep down into it, beyond the possibility of retrieval. But to me it sounded soft, soothing, almost like gentle rain as I stood there and listened, hands outstretched, not yet knowing what it was.

73

PAUL WIL L I S

Buckner Orchard To live among dogwoods and Canada geese, tending a grove of small, hardy apples— well, you could do worse. Add a broad pasture in the bend of a river—fir, maple, cedar, cottonwood lining its banks—and you start to get the picture.

AN

True, you have to barge in most of your hay from down-lake because of all the bracken in the back forty, but the three-mile ride to the landing is its own kind of pleasure.

In spring and summer you hear the shout of a waterfall across the valley.

It says, I’ll stay, whether you do or not.

—Lake Chelan National Recreation Area

MA RY L O T Z

74

LAURI E KL E I N

Children Will Swim Here July’s small feet burrow in pea gravel, sun-struck with gleam—shifting caves cradling arches and soles.

Was it wrong to ask for a fish if father harbored a snake, a thick tongue ambitious as silt? We have carried that downriver slither, settling its coils in the gut,

heisting time.

A flick of scale. Underfoot, the amber shimmer absolves him, loves him, wading onward, raking the children’s carpet, pale as corn from the cob.

It doesn’t die, this wanting: the clean dive, bubbles rushing up.

75

CA TC HI CR

OS

SH

AT

CH

NG

BY CAT H Y BERES

IN M Y FA M I LY , we kissed dead cheeks.

As children we were forced to stand in line in stuffy funeral parlors, waiting to bend over a coffin to kiss the cheek of whichever grandparent, aunt, uncle, or friend of my parents lay waiting. It didn’t matter if it was someone close to our family or not, we kissed dead cheeks indiscriminately. Some cheeks felt thick and waxy; some were caked in makeup. Some were deeply lined, some saggy, some sunken. None of them seemed soft, and all of them were cold. Most of them were old.

I can remember being afraid my kiss might wake the dead. I always tried not to look at the body as I bent over, hoping to land the kiss in the appropriate spot. Then I’d scurry on, usually goaded by my two older brothers.

Maybe this was a German or Polish tradition, the ancestry on my mother’s side.

It continued throughout my childhood and past college; I remember kissing my dead grandmother’s cheek when I was in my late twenties.

I don’t see this anymore. At a funeral recently for a friend’s beloved mother, none of the children present kissed her cheeks. I did not see her grown children kiss her cheeks, though maybe they did so in private. She had the most beautiful, smooth, full, pink cheeks.

The kind you might wish to kiss.

Where did the dead cheek kisses go, did they die, too? at a department store cosmetic counter, searching for something to soothe my chapped cheeks. My skin is dry. This is what happens when you are age sixty-something, your skin gets dry. Drier than chalk dust. Drier than cracked concrete.

Drier than cheap copy paper. It is so dry my fingertips get stuck in the crevices each morning as I wash my face.

Here comes the cosmetic consultant. She is cute and chirpy in her coral-colored cardigan. Her cropped blonde hair frames her spritely face. She is everything I am not.

She is young. Her skin is plump and pink.

She cups my chapped cheeks in her smooth, warm hands, turning them up to the light. I feel like a specimen of some sort. “Sample A: 60-year-old widow.”

“It is not so bad,” she says. “Your skin is not so bad.”

“It is dry.” This I already know.

“But at least you do not have crosshatch yet,” she quips, as she dabs a Q-tip with a thick glossy cream onto my cheek.

“Excuse me? I didn’t catch that, what did you say? Cross . . . what?”

“Oh you know, crosshatch.”

I don’t know.

“What is . . . ?”

“Crosshatch? The wrinkles that go both ways. You know, like a tic-tac-toe. You don’t have those. Yet.” Praise the Lord, a reason to be happy for the skin I’m in. I purchase the pricey hope in a jar at her recommendation, hoping to keep the crosshatch at bay. I run from the store, I’M STA ND I NG I N L I NE

77

clutching the plastic bag close to my chest, covering my cheeks with my coat collar. I race across the iron grids that line the avenue sidewalk, gazing at the checkered high-rise windows, snowflakes crisscrossing this way and that.

The crosshatch has not caught me, not yet.

MY GRAND M A HA D T HE C ROSSHAT C H . Crepe-papery crosshatched cheeks covered in

crimson-colored rouge. I did not know her when she might have had unlined, youthful cheeks. I only knew her with the crosshatch. Kissing her cheeks was like kissing crispy charred salmon skin. Grandma smoked, but she did not inhale, as she liked to remind us every chance she got. Her deeply lined lips left red rings on half-smoked cigarettes in gray glass ashtrays all around her apartment. My grandmother’s smoking didn’t cause cancer.

It caused the crosshatch.

She talked with her cigarettes, waving them in the air, ashes flying as she flicked her ruby red fingernails. She smelled of rose powder. Her hooded hazel eyes were flecked with golden specks, hidden behind her bifocal taupe-tinted plastic glasses. She always wore a dress, pumps, and nylons. Always carried a basic black handbag that snapped shut tight. Always wore a hat when going out, usually with a convertible veil to flip up or down depending on the weather or occasion. Church = down. Horse races = up.

She looked a little like Maude without Harold. She talked loudly, even with her huge hearing aid plugged into her ear. “Whadja say, huh?” She played cards (pinochle) and bet on the Daily Double at the Detroit Race Course once or twice a week (sometimes also just over the border in Windsor). She could bake juicy fresh fruit pies from scratch. She could sew smart skirted suits lined in silk. She came to Detroit from Canada when she was eighteen to work at a downtown furrier as a seamstress. She never could understand why I moved to Chicago after college.

“Why ya doin that Cathy Ann, huh, why ya movin so far away?” Ashes adrift, red nails click-click-clicking on her mahogany dining room table.

“Dontcha like Detroit? When ya gonna get married anyway? Oh bruther,” she always said. “Oh bruther.”

“But Grandma, you moved away from your home when you were eighteen!”

“Oh bruther, that was different.”

“How so?”

“That’s how it was then. I had to get work.”

“I have to get work too, Grandma.”

We stood in line to kiss her 92-year-old crosshatched cheeks as she lay in her coffin, red-nailed, age-spotted, blue-veined hands clutching her crystal rosary. Feather light kisses afraid to touch the dead-leaf cheeks for fear they might dissolve.

MY M OM HAS T HE C ROSSHAT C H . It spreads over her face like a spider web when she

smiles. It’s a contented crosshatch, not a cross one. A crosshatch of a life well lived. She plays bingo, does chair yoga, rides the bus, knits nonstop, keeps a diary and flirts.

She forgets.

She forgets the day, she forgets what she did yesterday, she forgets what’s-her-name’s

78

name, she forgets her meds. She never forgets my dad or their anniversary. How she broke up with her boyfriend the day she met Dad on the first day of her job right out of high school as a secretary at General Motors in Detroit. She never forgets her own dad who took care of her mom for eight years after her stroke. That grandma had the crosshatch too. She would say it came from a life well lived. She was a waitress in a bar in Hamtramck, the Polish part of town, and Grandpa worked in one of the car factories. As children, my mom and her two sisters shared a bed, holding hot potatoes to stay warm.

Women used to coffee klatch, gathering at homes after the kids went off to school to consume cups and cups of coffee and chitchat. My mother wanted to go off to work instead. She didn’t sew or bake like the rest of the ladies. We ate a lot of fish sticks. She didn’t color-coordinate or clean much. “Housekeeping will always be there,” she’d say.

My parents drank daiquiris on driveway patios, while I tap-danced, twirled a baton, and tore up the neighborhood with my brothers. When I was twelve, Mom finally went to work as a receptionist at a printing company, where she stayed for twenty-five years. She was happier at the desk than in the klatch.

After my dad retired, my parents did the crossword puzzles from the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press every morning until they merged into one paper. Then they did one crossword puzzle every morning until my dad died. Then my mom did the crossword every morning until she lost interest. “There’s no one to pass it across the table to,” she said.

My mom lives six hours away. I don’t get to see her often enough. Last visit, we wandered around Sam’s Club together. She loves to shop; steering the cart steadies her. We bought a two-pack of Olay Regenerist Micro-Sculpting Facial Serum. Serious stuff. One for the current crosshatch, one for the soon to hatch. The package promises noticeable results in a week. We make a pact to compare notes.

She will forget this.

When it’s time to say goodbye, I hold her close, pressing my cheek against hers.

I wonder if my cheek will carry the crosshatch home, is it contagious? Is there a vaccination for it that I’ve missed along the way? How long is the incubation, when will it hatch?

I lean against the bus window watching my brother drive away, my mom in the passenger seat. My cheek is cold.

“M OM, M OM , WHAT ’S W RONG with your face?”

He was all of five, my darling firstborn son staring intently at me as I laced up his ice skates. My fingers fluttered across my cheeks. My face?

“Um . . . er . . . nothing.” Had I had a stroke without knowing? Was my mouth drooping, food on my lip, what?

“Your face is cracked, Mom! There are cracks in your face. What’s wrong, Mom?” My wrinkles then barely a whispered brush stroke.

“My face is not cracking, dear son. My face is showing you I love you. Those are smile lines, my dear, see? See me smiling now, and see how the lines are just where I smiled?”

Still crossing his laces as I smile.

“Can we go skating now? They’re done clearing the ice.”

79

of this certain age, I’ve added a dermatologist to my growing list of doctors. This is because I have skin tags, expanding moles and wrinkle worries. My dermatologist says there is not much that can be done once the crosshatch has hatched. I thought perhaps if you rubbed enough oil on the skin the lines would disappear; alas, they do not. That is the rub. The key is prevention. Crosshatch comes from loss of collagen, which provides the plump under the skin. If only the plump from my rump could jump.

Oh mon dieu, it’s too late. I’m losing my collagen, where did it go? My doctor says the sun seizes it.

The sun. The backyard above-ground pool at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen; baby oil and iodine slathered on my skin, no sunscreen, no SPF. No worries. The bleachers year after year, cheering on Little League baseball. Golf, picnics, parks, bike rides, Sunday afternoons at the beach. Florida, California, Arizona, Greece.

I’m cooked.

NOW THAT I A M

M EN H AV E I T M A D E . They get to shave. Every day, back and forth, up and down, side-

to-side, over the cheeks, the chin, under the nose, the razor goes. Every day, sometimes twice. With any luck, maybe for sixty-five or more years—23,725 days or so. That’s a lot of shaving, a lot of strokes. Each stroke swiping away flaky dead skin cells, uncovering the fresh pink below. This is why men age better than women, I am told.

“Lou, are you done in there?” I knock gently on the bathroom door, listening to the hum of my husband’s electric razor. It’s been humming for twenty-five minutes. Longer than he needs to complete the job. Longer than it might take to shave Santa’s beard, but he doesn’t know this. The trouble with the electric razor is you can’t tell where it’s been; there’s no creamy lather to cut a path through. And so he shaves, and re-shaves, until I can get him to stop.

“Honey, I think it’s time to get dressed now,” I carefully suggest as I poke my head into the bathroom. “C’mon, time to get going.” And so it goes. The cancer has robbed his brain of its ability to form new memories. He could shave his face off if I didn’t interrupt.

My husband used to take such care with his grooming. Combing his full head of glossy black hair just so. Whistling as he shaved, NPR playing from his old transistor radio.

Splashing his signature aftershave on his cheeks. Fingernails clipped clean. Foulard tie knotted perfectly. My husband didn’t have the crosshatch. I wonder if he would have, had he lived longer. At the age of sixty-five, his skin was plump and firm. Maybe it was all the shaving.

I wonder, had he lived long enough would his hair have turned white? Would he have kept the hair that survived the radiation? Would his skin have become wrinkled? Would it have hatched the cross?

I wish I knew.

I kissed his dead cheeks until they carried him away. collagen by the caseloads. Have you ever seen a Japanese woman with the crosshatch? Not even a wrinkle, come to think of it. They drink collagen JAPANES E WO MEN CO NSU M E

80

shakes, swallow collagen supplements and chew on collagen chunks. Restaurants serve it like a delicacy. It is derived from the tendons of chicken and beef, sometimes pork feet.

It looks to be opaque and gelatinous.

I search for the collagen lost and found department. It’s not at the cosmetic counter with the cute consultant. Where might one buy a chunk of collagen? Perhaps at the Japanese grocery store, the one my younger son visited on a field trip back when he was obsessed with Pokémon and all things anime. There’s always Amazon.

How does one cook collagen? What does collagen taste like? Is it chewy or crunchy?

Sweet or sour? Should it be salted?

I will find said collagen and consume it before the crosshatch finds me. lines are from worry; I wake with a frown. I’ve been worrying since my adult sons were born. I worried about whether they were dressed warm enough; I worried they’d be overdressed. I worried they wouldn’t make the team; I worried they’d get hurt when they did. I worried they wouldn’t go to prom, and worried when they stayed out all night after prom. I worried they wouldn’t get into a good college, and then when they did, that they would like it so much they’d never come home.

Now I worry about good stress, bad stress, weight gain, weight loss. Sleeping too much or too little. Heart attacks, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and the like. I worry about terrorist attacks on my high-rise apartment building and about the flashlights draining in the pantry.

I worry I’ll never fall in love again. I worry I’ll die alone. Who will kiss my dead cheeks?

The horizontal lines on my forehead are from talking with my eyebrows. Years and years of exercising my eyebrows, up and down. You know . . . ^^ ^^ ^^ !! !! !!

Like that. The way the Hollywood actresses and anchorwomen don’t talk. I watched Meryl at the Academy Awards. Sure, she stays out of the sun. But her forehead is not moving. You could roll flaky pastry dough on that forehead; it’s a smooth marble fortress.

I wear bangs now. Works well until the wind blows.

I see the ads for Botox, the injection that freezes your face so the lines can’t form to begin with. I cautiously query my doctor. “What about . . . ?” She says it works best on foreheads and around the eyes, not the cheeks where the cross likes to hatch best. But maybe Botox would keep the cross from creeping, there is that thought. I wonder about losing the lines on my forehead, just a little shot here and there. They make me look tired (I am) and angry (I’m not).

I’m old school. I wear a little adhesive triangle to bed called a “Frownie.” You lick the thing like a stamp, pull your eyebrows apart, and stick it in between, attempting to keep the furrow taut while sleeping. It’s supposed to help smooth the line out. It works. For the first five minutes after removal.

An old friend sports a new facelift. “I’m thrilled,” she chirps when I bump into her in line for coffee. Her forehead is frozen, her cheeks pulled tight, no drooping parentheses TH E VE RT I CA L FOR E HE A D

81

framing her mouth, no hanging jowls. I look into her eyes buried in the mask that once was her face.

“Hope to see you sometime soon,” she says.

“Hope to see you, too.”

But the she I used to see is not there. and see my heart. A heart crossed with memories. Some wound tight, some etched deep, some barely there. Some softly frayed, unraveling, some soon to let go. Untethered, they find their way to my face—my forehead, my eyes, my cheeks. This one, the mischievous firstborn son, breaking curfew. This is the miscarriage. This one, the introspective second son waiting for his turn. This crinkle is unwrapping Christmas morning. This is squinting into the sun, sailing on the sea. This is a biopsy. This is my dear dad no more. This one, the superwoman circling in a holding pattern. This is the candle burning at both ends. This is my best friend’s cancer. This is my niece’s cancer. This, yes, this is my husband’s cancer. This furrow is fear. This is doctors and tests and watching and waiting. The cane, the walker, the hospital bed. The coffin. They are all here, see? And these—yes. These are love. Puppy love, romantic love, deep love, mature love. Dead love.

Searching for love. And this? This line right here is the end of the line. And this is starting over.

I LO OK IN T HE M I R ROR

82

contributors

is a late bloomer retired from a thirty-year career in advertising and marketing. Her interest in writing began with a blog she kept during her husband’s terminal illness. This led to writing classes, and, eventually, Cathy earned a master’s degree in creative writing from Northwestern University at the tender age of sixty-four. She has been published in literary journals and yoga publications. She teaches yoga and resides with her partner, two cats, and her first ever pup in Evanston, Illinois.

CATHY B E R E S

has her MFA in poetry from Seattle Pacific University. Her work appears in or is forthcoming from Breakwater Review, Poetry International, Verily Magazine, and Serving House Journal. She lives in Los Angeles and writes poems under a Meyer lemon tree in her backyard.

C. K. D AW SON

received his MFA from Florida International University.

His fiction, poetry, and non-fiction appear in New Ohio Review, Fourteen Hills, PANK Magazine, Thrice Fiction, Cha, Superstition Review, and elsewhere.

JONATH A N D U C KW ORTH

Author of two books of poetry, These Intricacies (Cascade Books, 2015) and Our Father in the Year of the Wolf (Word Farm, 2016), D AVE HA R R I TY ’s favorite out-oftown travel rituals are visiting art galleries, eating the best ice cream in town, and sitting down with a good craft beer— he loves local color. Read more at daveharrity.net.

83

received her MFA from Creighton University in 2017 where she was associate poetry editor for Blue River literary journal. In the past, she’s worked at a homeless shelter directing a program aimed to help young girls aging out of foster-care. Her poetry is forthcoming or has appeared in The Chattahoochee Review and Third Coast. One of her poems was nominated for a 2017 Pushcart Prize. In her free time, Allison likes cooking, hiking, and (slowly) biking. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with her husband and young daughter.

A L L I S O N H RA BA N

is a senior writer and editor at a university near Boston, an award-winning freelance local news reporter, and an MFA candidate at Stonecoast. She likes teaching piano, hanging out with her local Tibetan Buddhist lama, and standing in line.

MO N I CA J I MEN EZ

H A N N A H L EE J O N ES 's poetry

and fiction have appeared in Superstition Review, Literary Orphans, DecomP, Apogee, LimeHawk, The Boiler, Radar, and Orion, among other publications. A recent Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee, she edits Primal School, a resource for poets pursuing their craft without an advanced degree, and lives on Whidbey Island in northwest Washington. More at primalschool.org. is the author of Where the Sky Opens. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Barrow Street, Books & L A U RI E K L EI N

contributors

Culture, Christian Century, ATR, and other journals and anthologies. She lives in the Pacific Northwest. holds a BS in nursing and an MFA in creative writing. Her work has been published in The Poet’s Billow, Relief Journal, Driftwood Press, and Literary Mama. She was awarded first prize in the New Voices category of the 2017 Poetry Society of Virginia Contest. A veteran of the US Air Force Nurse Corps, she now resides on the coast of Virginia with her family.

When she’s not reading, writing, and keeping tabs on her three kids, she works as a registered nurse and teaches poetry workshops. She is passionate about a good cup of coffee, bumming on the beach, and finding meaning in the ordinary moments of life. You can find her at libbykurz.com.

LI BBY KUR Z

Hunger Mountain, Boulevard, Prairie Schooner, and now Ruminate. In 2009 he won a Pushcart Prize, and in May of 2017 his short story “The Wallet” was performed as a flash opera in New York. Andrew is married and a father of two daughters and a yellow lab named Butter. “The New World” is a fictionalization of his immigrant mother’s own story about parenthood and adoption.

Born in 1993, O K W U D I L I N EBEO L I S A is a Nigerian writer who has his works forthcoming or featured in Threepenny Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Commonwealth Writers, Ambit Magazine, Word Riot, and elsewhere. He loves babies and small dogs.

lives in New York and is pursuing an MFA at NYU. She has been published in New Haven Review, Columbia Literary Journal, Blueshift Journal, Psychopomp Magazine, and Granta. She is a recipient of the Bat City Review Short Story Prize, as well as New Delta Review's Matt Clark Prize for short fiction.

writes: “Born in Portland, Oregon, I have resided and have been a professor of painting at Colorado State University since 1991. My work is inspired by my childhood home and memories. I received my undergraduate work at Massachusetts College of Art, and graduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania. I have participated in national and international shows, including Gracie Mansion and Jim Kempner in NYC and the Gallery of Vaclav Spala in Prague. I have had three residencies: The Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony-1990, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s ‘World Views’ program—1998-90, and The Scuola Internazionale di Grafica Venezia in 2016.”

is a public school English teacher from Madison, Wisconsin.

He has won awards for his fiction from

A native of the North Carolina foothills, A PRI L VÁ ZQ U EZ currently lives in León, Guanajuato, Mexico, where she

holds an MFA from Bennington College. His work has recently appeared in Agni, Image Journal, and the Michigan Quarterly Review. He lives in Detroit, Michigan.

MATTHEW L A NDR U M

RAVEN L E I L A NI

AN DREW M c C U A I G

PAT RI CE S U L L I VA N

84

homeschools her daughters Daisy, Dani, and Dahlia. Her work has appeared in The Missing Slate, Windhover, Cleaver, The New Plains Review, and others. is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently Disinheritance. A seven-time Pushcart nominee and winner of various awards, John serves as editor of the Inflectionist Review.

Previous publications include: Yale Review, Atlanta Review, Midwest Quarterly, Sycamore Review, Massachusetts Review, Columbia, Mid-American Review, Third Coast, and Poetry Northwest. His latest poems are greatly impacted by his new role of father to twin infants, whose beauty and curiosity and eagerness and innocence are awe-inspiring.

JOHN SI B L E Y W I L L I A M S

JESS WI L L I A R D’ s poems have recently

appeared or are forthcoming in Third Coast, North American Review, Colorado Review, Southern Humanities Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Bayou Magazine, Nimrod, Terrain, The New Orleans Review, Sycamore Review, december, Oxford Poetry, Barrow Street, and other journals. He is from Wisconsin.

85

is a professor of English at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. He wrote the poem in this issue while serving as an artist-inresidence in North Cascades National Park in Washington State. His most recent collection is Getting to Gardisky Lake (Stephen F. Austin State University Press). Learn more (than you want) at pauljwillis.com.

PA U L W I L L I S

is a small-town Iowa native who thinks Twitter is hilarious. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Chattahoochee Review, The Flat Water Stirs: An Anthology of Emerging Nebraska Poets, Sugar House Review, and others. She lives in Omaha, Nebraska, with her husband.

A U BREE EL S E W O EL BER

last note C ONTRI BU T O RS O N S MA L L

I just wrote out my writing to-do list this week—books to translate, edits to make, a chapbook to finish, three prose articles to write. Though useful, it’s funny making a literary agenda because for me poetry isn’t about a pursuit of a product but reveling in the joy and music of language. I lose that thread of pleasure when I try to write for the product rather than the process. And when that happens, it always means bad writing. The writer of Zechariah reminds us not to despise the day of small beginnings.

Small beginnings—a deep breath, a blank page, one word in front of another. The poem begins.

MATTHEW L A ND R U M , P OE TRY

Over the summer I read a biography of Alexander Pope, the Mozart of English poetry in the eighteenth century. Due to tuberculosis of the spine, he was only four and a half feet tall. He was also part of a persecuted Catholic minority in a proudly Protestant country. Given his magisterial presence in our Norton Anthology, it is surprising to be reminded of his physical smallness and his cultural otherness in his own time. In the garden behind his home on the Thames River, he created a little grotto that led beneath the main road to London.

Over the entrance was this motto: “What we cannot overcome, we must undergo.”

In our compound, in the backyard, we have something like a garden where my mum grows vegetables, usually small vegetables.

I remember working on the poem one morning while she was working in the yard. My dad was listening to a song on the radio (not Louis Armstrong), while he was preparing to go to work. He wasn’t even whistling. I was just trying to aim at an alternate reality using these little images at hand.

O K W U D I L I N EBEO L I S A , PO ET RY

He stood at my door holding a bouquet of lilies of the valley, first flowers for a new love. I had not seen the tiny, bell-shaped blossoms since childhood. I had forgotten their delicate beauty since moving on to cities, concrete, and skyscrapers, where flowers purchased from florists were predictable, expected.

But this! A handful of spring green stems, dainty pearl buds nestled in ribbons of leaves. Their distinct, sweet scent filled my nostrils, my head, and my heart—Saturday mornings, bacon frying, Dad mowing the lawn, brothers shooting hoops, lilies of the valley resting beneath my open bedroom window.

How did he know?

The most miniscule of flowers, yet grander than a roomful of roses.

CAT H Y BERES , N O N F I CT I O N

PAUL WI L L I S, P OE TRY

86

Over time, I’ve sensed God’s delicate assistance in the process of reframing my childhood—especially certain inexplicable actions my father set in motion and what I told myself those actions meant. Much remains unanswerable. Writing “Children Will Swim Here” was one more baby step in decoding our relationship, describing parental caring expressed in the small, quietly faithful actions of practical stewardship: in this case, repeatedly raking smooth the pea gravel where we swam.

Over time, little stitches align, aiding the mending.

Making something significant from the small is one of the cornerstones of poetry. We are constantly mining small, potentially forgettable experiences to find their universal humanity. The small is a door, creaked open ever so slightly, behind which hides the larger fears and joys and anxieties and loves we all share. It’s not unlike how the temporary is a gateway to the permanent. And my poem “Grace Notes” is all about the small, the fleeting, the kind of moment you experience many times in life yet rarely recognize the great weight it carries.

LAURI E KL E I N, P OE TRY

J O H N S I BL EY W I L L I A MS , PO ET RY

Small is often negative: small portions, small hands, being small-minded. No one brags about climbing a small mountain or catching a small fish. But small can be wonderful, too. I love my small house and relish small class sizes. In The Sun Also Rises, Jake and Bill both get “a good small room” in the Bayonne hotel. Later, Jake awakes to a storm and tells us, “It felt good to be warm and in bed,” which is another good, small thing. Raymond Carver’s “small, good thing” is freshly baked bread after a terrible loss. A new one of mine is drinking coffee on a shady patio on the 4th of July, trying to express my feelings about “small.”

As a nurse, I walk with my patients along the terrifying line between life and death.

Sometimes this line grows so thin that one can discern the spirit world breaking through the cracks of a human body, broken by birth and death alike.

As Leonard Cohen said, There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

How can we not feel small amidst this grand narrative, knowing that the breath in our lungs and the beat in our heart is given and taken beyond our doing?

Leaning into this mystery brings me comfort and awe, both as a nurse and a poet.

AN DRE W M c C U A I G , F I C TI ON

87

L I BBY K U RZ, PO ET RY

last note

I am reminded time and again how life offers us chances to transform our relationship with suffering. I’ve long been fascinated by elite athletes who not only manage their pain but thrive on it by repeatedly testing their endurance and resilience. This is a capacity that depends on letting go of our worst fears—of failure, injury, disappointment, loss.

So often we live inside our zones of comfort, which are not comfortable at all when they keep us from growing. It’s out of the most painful tests in life that I’ve enlarged my belief in what is possible, to be brave enough to “go there.” In my practice of poetry, perhaps what I’m after is something of the same thing.

One of my favorite quotes from Anaïs Nin is this: “A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.”

I am always taken by such small subjects as Nin’s window, her coffee, her bird. If a poet’s job is to be awake, then even ordinary things resonate, offer joy.

My poem, “Praise in Old Age,” narrows its focus on the small objects of a shared domestic life: a musty coat, hedge apples, a coffee pot. May the observation of small things such as these give us our bearings.

A L L I S O N H RA BA N , PO ET RY

HAN NAH L E E J ONE S, P OE TRY

88

PATRICE SULLIVAN. Dad's Ireland. Oil on canvas. 20 x 20 inches.