Issue 53: Shelter

SHELTER / 53

Winter 2019/20 $15

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

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

PLEASE JOIN US.

Cover: SETH CLARK. Rooftop Study, 2017. Wood. 7 inches x 10 inches x 9 inches.

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

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From the bottom of our hearts, we thank you!

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staff

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Brianna Van Dyke SENIOR POETRY EDITOR

Kristin George Bagdanov FICTION EDITOR

Raven Leilani NOTES EDITOR

Josh MacIvor-Andersen VISUAL ART EDITOR

Carolyn Mount EDITOR OF THE WAKING

Charnell Peters NONFICTION EDITOR

Madison Salters MANAGING EDITOR

Rachel King DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS

Amanda Hitpas

PROOFREADER

Sarah Wheeler PRINT + WEB DESIGN

Scott Laumann ASSOCIATE READERS

Carly Joy Miller Amy Sawyer GUEST PANELISTS

Kate Gaskin Chera Hammons Clemonce Heard Arah Ko Jihyun Yun INTERNS

Cherie Nelson Natalie Peterson

contents

NOTES

Editor’s 8 Readers’ 10 Artist’s 56 Contributors’ 84 Last 88

FICTION

Early Onset, John Picard 18 The Prescott Bridge, Lynn Gordon 32

NONFICTION

Light in Twelve Angles, Ari Koontz 50 Fisher of Men, Jack Campbell Jr. 76 Buttoned, Melissa Ostrom 82 VISUAL ART

The art of Seth Clark 56–72

POETRY

16 Encroachment, John Sibley Williams 29 Everbearing, Amy Trotter 30 God the Mother Speaks of Trees, Dayna Patterson 31 Fishing the Caddo, Jesse Breite 44 Opera, Gavin Yuan Gao 46 God As Rumpelstiltskin, Rebekah Denison Hewitt 47 integument, Preeti Parikh 48 Dementia, or My Mother Is Not a Confederate Statue, Sally Rosen Kindred 54 The Wanting, Jed Myers 55 Lake Harriet, 2005, Karen Bjork Kubin 73 Praise on Pi Day, Lisa Rosenberg 74 Praise, Joshua Garcia 80 Looking at American Gothic, Catherine Turnbull 81 Buzz Aldrin Takes Communion on the Moon, Jendi Reiter

2019 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize

SPONSORED BY STEVE AND KIM FRANCHINI

F I R ST P L AC E

S E C O N D P L AC E

JOHN SIBLEY WILLIAMS

AMY TROTTER

Encroachment

Everbearing

HONO RAB L E MEN T I O NS J E S S E B R E I T E

Fishing the Caddo

MATT MILLER

The Adorned Fathomless Dark Creation

D A Y N A P A T T E R S O N

God the Mother Speaks of Trees

F I NA L I STS JOSHUA GARCIA

PREETI PARIKH

GAVIN YUAN GAO

JENDI REITER

REBEKAH DENISON HEWITT

LISA ROSENBERG

KAREN BJORK KUBIN

SALLY ROSEN KINDRED

JED MYERS

CATHERINE TURNBULL

2019 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize

FINAL JUDGE CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ WRITES:

“This poem stands out for its innovative form and haunting content. The title sets up the main theme of the poem, and each section develops the theme from different perspectives. I appreciate how the poem explores the wild dynamics between predator and prey, between gentle and violent animals, between hunger and consumption, between the bullet and its target. The poet writes: ‘Prayer is an archaic word / for loving at least one thing more than myself . . .’ Indeed, this poem asks us to consider the physical and emotional encroachments that occur between beings who are daily entangled in hunting, eating, living, and dying.”

is a native Chamoru (Chamorro) from the Pacific Island of Guåhan/Guam. He is the cofounder of Ala Press, costar of the poetry album Undercurrent (Hawai’i Dub Machine, 2011), and author of three collections of poetry: from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008), from unincorporated territory [saina] (Omnidawn, 2010), and from unincorporated territory [guma’] (Omnidawn, 2014). He has been a finalist for the LA Times 2010 Book Prize for Poetry and the winner of the 2011 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry.

He is the director of the creative writing program and an assistant professor of English at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, where he teaches Pacific literature and creative writing.

CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ

editor’s = note

For over a decade I have used these editor's notes to wonder with all of you, examining life through a lens shared by the artists and writers in each issue. It’s only fitting then, that this is where I share with you that this will be my last issue as editor-in-chief of Ruminate. The past thirteen years tending to Ruminate have been a gift, and as excited as I am to be pursuing new paths and focusing on my writing, I will deeply miss this magazine, its readers, and the people I’ve had the privilege of working alongside. Our exceptional staff will continue Ruminate's good work into the new year and beyond, and we are in the process of finding a new home for Ruminate inside a university and continuing its contemplative mission.

In the meantime, the theme for this issue is “Shelter,” and I’ve been thinking about the ways that art and writing return us to ourselves, to our internal home. As the poet and editor Christian Wiman writes: “Who knows what atomic energies are unleashed by a solitary man or woman quietly encountering some arrangement of language that gives their being—shunted aside by chores and fears and who knows what—back to them?” Yes, who knows. When we create, our work reveals reasons and rewards we could not know any other way.

Helping make this magazine has carved out a kind of shelter for me and has introduced me to our fellow poets and storytellers and mystics, people who remind us of the unknowable, of our longing toward that which is larger than ourselves, who speak and create in approximation, where wiggle room and story and metaphor tell the unsayable truths. “Although I see the stars, I no longer pretend to know them,” writes the monk Thomas Merton. More than fifty years later, the poet Joy Harjo has a reply: “Beneath a sky thrown open / to the need of stars / to know themselves against the dark.”

Given the space to move, our creative acts become a waltz of flexibility and courage, of generosity and perseverance, of discipline and lightheartedness, of making a turn and being frightened, of making a turn and feeling yourself in synch with the universe.

It’s serious work and it’s holy play. It matters desperately and it matters not at all.

And sometimes it matters simply because where there was nothing now there is something.

And making a magazine, like making a life, is no different. I once heard two women in a cafeteria talking, strangers fumbling over topics and silence like hikers searching

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for a riverbed to follow. And just when the food was finished and it looked like it was only dead ends, they found it. It was something about St. Louis and a question and the other exclaiming “Yes, I know the Smarts!” with such enthusiasm it was clear this was only a stand-in for “Yes, I know you and you know me!” or whatever that is called when strangers become kindred become rivers become one. Which is to say mutuality, which is to say these lives we’ve been given and the stories we tell about them are far more baffling and connected than we imagine. Art and poems and stories imagine it before us, then we get to waltz forward together.

Thank you for waltzing and walking with me; thank you for pointing out the mysterious stars along the way. I’m so very glad to be joining you as a subscriber myself and look forward to the thrill of Ruminate arriving in my mailbox each quarter, full of beauty and goodness. I’m grateful for the shelter these pages have provided, and I know Ruminate will continue to be a home for many in the years to come.

Warmly,

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readers’ notes ON SHELTER

One morning, standing with my coffee by the stone fireplace of Timberline Lodge, I spotted unexpected movement at the picture window—unexpected because the window was darkened by snowdrift.

I bent to look closer. A black-eyed pine marten peered in from a snow tunnel, as if wondering why she couldn’t smell the crackling fire inside.

It was February, the hunger moon on Oregon’s Mount Hood. I wondered how she or any other of the weasel family lives through winter at six thousand feet.

It turns out snow is not inert, not simple, and certainly not lifeless.

Deep snow teems with life down to the microbial. Mice and voles, the prey of pine martens, thrive in winter, eating grasses and insects, even breeding—the snow a shelter much warmer than the air temperature above. Martens in turn make their living hunting these mice and voles.

How unaware I’d been of the drama beneath my feet. And what magic keeps wild creatures safe in the melting, refreezing, sliding snow that I saw there in 2014, or the scant snow in shirtsleeve weather the following February.

We hitch-hiked in fading light, then asked the driver to stop when we saw the abandoned farmhouse. Snowy mountaintops were visible through the skeletal roof of the barn. We followed barbed wire through dried cornstalks to an opening in the fence, and a field.

A rusting silo defied the otherwise horizontal landscape.

“I think we should sleep in here tonight,” my father whispered as he ran his fingers along the metal siding. Finding it filled with corn, we walked farther into the darkness, pushing down tall grasses as we unrolled our sleeping bags.

My father pointed out the constellations, his arm a silhouette against the hazy band of the Milky Way. A coyote called in the distance, another answered. I moved toward the curve of my father’s body.

We woke as the sun hit the tree line. I saw a flattened area in the grass nearby, put my hand on the spot, felt faint heat. A family of deer had slept close, then crept back into the woods before dawn.

BENJAMIN MALAY, SEATTLE, WA

JEAN WAIGHT, BELLINGHAM, WA

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The first time I tried to summit Stone Mountain alone was nine months after my dad’s passing. As I began, a storm cloud appeared. People rushed down, going as fast as they could without tripping to miss the rain. I considered turning around, but found myself walking until the raindrops came in hard pelts. I knew there was a shelter—a few picnic tables under a roof—halfway up and figured I’d wait out the storm there. When it seemed the rain wouldn’t stop, I left and headed back down the mountain.

I thought about the times Dad brought me and my sister here, the countless times we climbed to the top, and marveled that I’d never seen the mountain in a rainstorm. The water flowed with such force that parts looked like a river. I eased my way down, stepping on the drier rocks and soft pine straw to reduce my chances of falling.

Had my dad checked the weather before we’d come? It was a strange question, but it mattered. Dad was an alcoholic, delusional and depressed most of my life. But sometimes he kept his demons at bay. He did check the weather, I thought. He must have, to shelter us from the storms.

SHANNON YARBROUGH, DECATUR, GA

By the time I was two my mother’s screaming made me believe I was defective. I sought out places away from her where I might feel safe.

My grandparents, whose farm was across the road from ours, had an elevated, screened front porch. Lattice panels surrounded the underside and Granma had planted flowers in front of the panels. One day, I noticed a panel out of place. I squeezed through.

Inside, the space was huge. As large as the porch above, but empty: no porch swing, no table with plants. From underneath I could easily see the vehicles which came in the driveway and stopped in front of the porch. I could watch the legs of the people who got out of the car.

Sometimes I could recognize the voices which went with the legs, if they were relatives.

I could watch my Granma go out to the garden or chicken house to get vegetables or eggs. She would let me help carry the bucket of eggs, but watching her from this new, safe place was more interesting. I could watch Granpa go out to the barn, start his tractor, and drive out to a field to work.

I loved this space. I was the only one who could get in.

DUANE L. HERRMANN, TOPEKA, KS

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readers’ notes

I’m twelve years old again, listening to Nelly’s “Dilemma” on MTV while I get ready for school. It’s right before my brother gets kicked out at sixteen. Right before the house becomes heavy, sad.

His emerald-green carpet is plush under my toes as I stand in his doorway, never invited in. Swords hang on his otherwise bare wall.

These memories are all I have left. We are strangers now.

Every day my brother was deployed in Kuwait, I wore plastic dog tags with his name on them. He was safer there. A hero.

People treated him well. People looked up to him.

Now, PTSD keeps him up at night. He can’t keep a job. He is lost in nightmares, broken dreams.

I write it down.

I eat sleep for dinner.

I text my brother a joke.

TIFFANY GRIMES, PORTLAND, OR

Shelter is the line of benches along the running path where I often overestimate my staying power. Like the time I was pregnant, pushing my toddler in the jogging stroller when the world kaleidoscoped in a dizzy whirl. I collapsed on a nearby bench, let the rustle of the trees soothe me back to seeing straight.

Sometimes, seeing more. The bobbing of the branch where squirrels chittered a scolding, the dash of rabbits with their telltale backwards glance. And once, an armadillo snuffling in its armor.

One wet fall, when my father was dying, a bedraggled wreath of fake flowers lay on a bench for days. I jogged past until, against my better judgment, I stooped to read the dogeared card. “To my traveling companion. I miss you.” Above the bench, leaves hung by a thread, twisting in brittle practice for the fall. For a while I didn’t break stride anywhere near that particular place, trying to outpace grief. Then other notes appeared, pinned in place with a rock or a pinecone. “I miss her, too.” “She’s remembered every day.” “Our prayers are with you.” And when the light hit just right, all those frail leaves blazed, a cathedral of veined stained glass.

The benches are there, and if I had to, I could just stumble from one to the next all the way home. A pilgrimage of resting places.

HELEN DENT, FORT WORTH, TX

During a drive to my grandmother’s house when we were small children, we spotted an injured turtle on the side of the road.

We cried for my dad to call the vet to come get it. Hours later, he called the vet

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to check on the turtle, then told us the animal was on the mend. We were so happy!

It took me until I was in my thirties, retelling this story, to realize this was the kindest lie.

LIZ DEGREGORIO, NEW YORK, NY

You, my small child, curve in on yourself, C-hunched. Your hands cup your eyes on either side to close out the too-loud, toobright world. If you can’t see it, it can’t catch and spin and swirl and scare you, right?

I know the feeling. It all comes at you, like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “awful weight! Infinity / Pressed down upon the finite Me!” For you, voices, words, spikes of adrenaline as doors shut too loud, feet walking and people laughing, echoing in big, busy spaces and even at home when we forget to go quiet, step calmly.

I can’t be certain what you’re feeling, even if I could hold the words in my hand: autism, anxiety disorder, OCD, or something else. All I grasp is that it got too loud out there, too loud in here.

Shelter your eyes, my girl. Calm your heart, if you can. Nothing can hurt you forever. You curve in. You do that. The world is too much with us, but already you have found one way through.

REBECCA MARTIN, LYNCHBURG, VA

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I trapped a firefly as a girl by clapping the dusk in front of me, an eye-level chip of light. One hand for the roof, one for the floor. I made a tender place for it. When I realized I couldn’t let myself back inside my house, the shelter opened; that is, it ceased to enclose.

I met a woman last summer who lived in her car. She was not what I expected— refined, using words like “reify.” Her gray hair swept artistically from her face, neither disheveled nor suggesting want.

She wore a scarf with an intricate design.

I imagined nights of cramped sleep, the adoption of a new position, knees to heart.

Mornings she would drive to work, merge with the usual traffic, people who had sprawled out in their beds. She rolled down the windows, her shelter open to the air.

I used a man as roof and floor once, his arms around me in the backseat of his Geo Prism in the campus parking lot. For years I slept knees to heart. When I couldn’t open the door to myself, I ducked out.

LAURA CINI ENGLISH, ELIZABETHTOWN, PA

During the Cold War, newspapers in our small Pennsylvania town advertised fall-out shelters as a protection against gamma rays and radioactive dust from an atom bomb. The government

readers’ notes

recommended constructing shelters in a corner of a below-ground basement or, even better, burying them outside three to four feet deep.

My father built our shelter from plywood with a wobbly, padlocked door and a key hidden outside. The four of us and a parakeet would need to survive there for two to three months. It needed beds, canned goods, water, extra clothes, toilet chemicals, a radio. Bird food.

I didn’t know then about those missing items, or that our shelter would disintegrate if a bomb landed in a nearby town.

Instead, my friends and I used it as a war hospital. Girls took care of the injured soldiers by giving Popsiclestick needles to bare butts and yelling, “Now, get out there and fight!” We made a miniature neighborhood by playing Family, Grocery Store, and Library.

That summer, no bomb fell. We knew only fun and play, not a punishing vengeance.

That winter, I hid in our shelter to keep warm when my adoptive parents locked me out of the house. Hiding from my father, my mother. My own private war.

SHARON ESTERLY, WEST CHESTER, PA

The bleeding began between worship services on a January Sunday. I preached twice more before going to the ER. “All we can tell you is you’re pregnant,” the doctor said after reading my HCG levels. “But—you might be losing the baby.”

After five days of bleeding, the tissue. I saved it in a container we usually reserve for baby carrots and single portions of granola. We buried it out back, by the roses, and listened to birds chirping as the evening faded into bands of blue.

The next month, we took a ferry to an island. I was to be the guest-preacher for a chapel service. I packed my miscarriage book and read into the night. In the appendix, the book advised pastors to baptize babies with a memento parents could save—scoop the water in a seashell, for instance, then give the shell to the parents. That way, there is something tangible left.

We took a long walk down the beach, filling our pockets with as many scallopshaped shells as we could, choosing ones without holes. A drizzle began, but there was nowhere to keep dry, so we carried on.

The nine months in the womb were supposed to be my child’s securest shelter. But now I know: the danger doesn’t begin at birth. Fragility begins before. Life is not solid.

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“It’s been this way all along,” a friend had said, gently. “You just didn’t know it.”

Our jeans soon soaked and slowed our legs. But somehow we were okay. Not safe, but held.

SARAH SWANDELL, PINEHURST, NC

Displacement begins as a geographical question, but quickly flares into a philosophical one. For over a decade I dreamt of a cottage nestled in the Northern California woodlands. After fleeing to the coast where it snowed ash, I no longer trust this dream. Blackened, cratered moonscapes are more common on our highways and byways than road signs. Their acrid stink suggests this can happen again: anytime, anywhere.

We survivors of firestorms, floods, hurricanes, droughts, rising seas— we are climate refugees. Some of us, like prototypical refugees, relocate to blue tarps. Others, like me, live in our vehicles, poised for take-off, prepped for the inevitable. Our transience, our disconnectedness has reconfigured beloved certitudes into question marks.

We become the smoke we once fled.

We reek of what we once called home.

JEANINE PFEIFFER, PT. RICHMOND, CA

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On his first day of school, my firstborn held my hand tightly as we made our way through the entrance and down the polished floors. The hallway was suddenly very long. His hand felt tiny and frantic in my palm, as when I was his age and held a baby bird that had just plummeted from its nest to the ground.

After seeing him safely to the room, I managed to mop myself off gleaming floors and make my way back into the sun.

Shelter is derived from the Old English word for “shield.” Today, bulletproof backpacks are sold to our kids.

After a few weeks of being walked all the way to his classroom, my firstborn now mumbles, “Bye, Dad,” in the parking lot and flies ahead with his friends, their backpacks bouncing merrily behind them.

From the hill, I continue to watch until the big, brick building swallows him.

I remember my son’s first day, how he halted before the threshold to his classroom, how he dropped my hand and how, in that soft-spoken way I love, my own flesh and blood said, “Here I go.”

ANDREW TAYLOR-TROUTMAN, CHAPEL HILL, NC

JOHN SIBLEY WILLIAMS

Encroachment Yes, any evening field, where deer thank the wolves for diverting a hunter’s love; whatever it means to be lesser prey—we’ll take it. Yes,

×

to keep the wild in its place or have something to hand a son harder than a woman’s body—also the dug-under barbed-wire fencing meant to shelter gentler animals wholly inadequate, now, the way things are now; yes

×

—but it’s more than hunger; that light that never leaves even after the eating

×

arouses or—a kind of progress—desensitizes, less out of moral weakness than the more more please more of living this long, which demands a degree

of distance: physical & emotional. Orison

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is an archaic word for prayer. Prayer is an archaic word for loving at least one thing more than myself. I refuse

to love equally

the bullet & its target. That we are all targets; some, thankfully, lord, not today.

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“YO U’V E CON TACT ED T HE POL IC E? ”

“That’s the first thing I did.”

“And?” “They couldn’t put out an official bulletin for twenty-four hours but they said they’d report it anyway. He’s out there by himself and he’s forgotten how to get back. I know it.”

Jenny had gone from room to room, calling Rob’s name. Not finding him, she let herself out the back door and, walking down to the woods, peered into the dense thicket. Inside the town house again, running out of options, she descended the basement steps with a flashlight and shined it over the piles of household discards, as if she might find Rob playing with his old train set. After calling 911 she got in the Saturn and drove all the routes she and Rob took on their walks. Back home, she’d called her sister in Florida.

“I’m sorry,” Karen said, “but do you remember what we talked about before?”

“Rob doesn’t need a babysitter.”

“You wouldn’t be getting him a babysitter. That’s not what you’d be doing. You’d be getting him the round-the-clock care he needs.”

A year ago last July Jenny flew to Tampa to visit Ken and Karen after Rob’s then psychologist assured her that Rob would be fine by himself for the three days she’d be gone. At the time it was still the consensus, and the hope, that an uptick in Rob’s life-long struggle with anxiety was at the root of his odd behavior—his losing his job and his inability to find another one, his short-term memory lapses, his constant telephoning Jenny at the library. The strain on Jenny had been tremendous and she’d looked forward to a break. Instead, Rob began calling the moment her plane landed at the Tampa airport, and he never let up. At one point Ken grabbed Jenny’s cell and accused Rob of ruining his wife’s vacation with his constant calling, but that didn’t stop him. Just before leaving Tampa Jenny tallied the number of times Rob had called: 124. Upon her return, she made an appointment for Rob at Duke Medical Center for a battery of tests and received a definitive diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer’s.

“How’s Ken doing?” Jenny asked her sister.

“Ken’s good. Why are you changing the subject?” Karen’s husband was seventy-one, sixteen years older than Rob, and in perfect health.

“I’m not Irish,” Jenny said. She knew she sounded absurd.

“What? You’re not what?”

“Nothing. I better go. I need to keep this line open.”

Minutes later the landline rang.

“Are you Jenny?” a woman asked.

“Yes.” “One moment.”

She heard Rob say, “Hello.”

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“Are you all right?”

“Yes,” he said, with his usual matter-of-factness.

“Where are you?”

She heard muffled voices, then Rob came back on and gave Jenny the address of a residence that was close by.

“I’ll be right there. Could you put that woman back on?”

The woman explained that Rob had knocked on her door asking for directions to his house. He had no identification on him but he did remember his telephone number.

They’d had the same number since they moved into the town house eighteen years ago. Long-term memory.

Arriving at a small split-level with a chain-link fence around it, Jenny thanked the elderly woman profusely before walking Rob to the car. Once inside, she reminded

She married a man who contracted a rare form of a disease that could kill him before he was sixty.

him to buckle his seat belt, and then said, “You can’t do this, Rob. You can’t just wander off. Could you look at me, please?”

Rob turned to her. She took in the blank expression that was almost constant with him now. As if from lack of use, his face had a distinctively gray pallor. His ball cap was crooked on his head, and the bill was straight instead of bowed, the way he never used to wear his hats. It was a style favored by the young black men she saw on campus who, she knew, got it from rappers, which was funny considering Rob’s opinion of rappers.

“Where did you think you were going?” she asked. She could hear the exasperation in her voice, and, behind it, the fear.

“When?”

“Just now. When you left the house? Where did you think you were going exactly?”

He didn’t answer, merely stared.

“Do you remember where you thought you were going when you left the house?”

He pursed his lips. “No.”

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“Then you have to promise me something. You have to promise me you won’t leave the house without telling me first? Can you do that? This is serious, Rob. Will you not leave the house again without telling me?”

“Yes.” Rob looked straight ahead, waiting for the car to start, the only thing on his mind.

People talked about the virtues of living in the present. Well, her husband lived in the present, and this was what it was like—no immediate past, no future, only the knife edge of now.

*

JE N N Y D OU B L ED D OW N on her efforts to slow Rob’s dementia, despite how often

she’d been told how hard, if not impossible, that was. Since exercise was recommended for people with Alzheimer’s, she made certain they took an extra-long walk every evening, rain or shine. Rob didn’t walk as fast as he used to and she had to make sure not to get ahead of him. Rob had never looked more fit, having lost fifteen pounds over the last year, though not entirely from exercising. Rob had so little will of his own anymore that he ate the same small portions that had kept Jenny under a hundred pounds her whole adult life.

She came up with schemes to keep his mind working and active. She had him help her with dinner, even if it was just cutting up vegetables, which was unnerving, Rob wielding a sharp paring knife, but it was worth a little anxiety if it kept him busy. She insisted they do crossword puzzles together. When they watched television she asked him questions about what was on the screen.

Tonight it was Back To The Future on TCM. Rob watched the movie with the same empty expression he watched everything, the same when Marty McFly sat down to dinner with his comically dysfunctional family as when Marty failed to rescue Doc Brown from the terrorists and headed back to 1955 in the nuclear-powered sports car.

“What kind of car is that anyway?” she asked him. This should have been an easy one for Rob, who loved cars but was no longer allowed to drive.

“A DeLorean.”

“A DeLorean,” she said. “Good.”

Jenny soon lost interest in the plot, beset by the vision of one day sitting alone in front of this very TV. While Rob’s slow, incremental withdrawal from life should have prepared her, it had done nothing to ease her dread of living alone. She had never lived by herself. She’d gone from her parents’ house, to her college dorm, back to her parents’, and then to the apartment she and Rob rented after they were married.

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No one’s life turned out the way they hoped or imagined. She knew that. But she felt hers had fallen shorter of the mark than most. She thought of herself as unlucky.

Her faith wasn’t what it used to be, even though she continued to go to church. If she believed in anything it was the law of averages. Flip a coin a hundred times and the result would be close to fifty heads and fifty tails. Likewise, everyone seemed to be allotted a certain amount of suffering and strife as well as happiness and good fortune, about seventy/thirty, respectively, with a good deal of fluctuation over a typical lifespan. Jenny put herself at eighty/twenty, if not eighty-five/fifteen, with little chance, at her age, of ever attaining the norm. She and Rob had not been able to have

Everybody was happy in heaven.

It was only impressive down here.

the children she so much wanted. Both of her parents died before she was forty-five.

Her sole confidant was a sister who only wanted to tell her what to do. She married a man who contracted a rare form of a disease that could kill him before he was sixty.

She wasn’t Irish.

*

“YO U SU R E you don’t want more than that?” Jenny asked. “Just because I’m having the

salad doesn’t mean you have to?”

They were at the Wendy’s near their town house, Sunday lunch out, a routine going back to the beginning of their marriage, a routine she cherished in memory— first church, then lunch, and then, in honor of a tradition whose loss her traditional husband bemoaned, the Sunday drive in the country.

“How about a bowl of chili?” Jenny urged. Rob stared, mute with indecision. He was wearing his cap rapper-style again. “He’ll have the chili,” she told the girl behind the counter.

Jenny carried their tray to the window seats that looked out on busy Lee Street.

“Don’t you want to take your coat off? You’re not cold, are you?” She could hear the irritation in her voice. It was hard to be pleasant when you hadn’t slept. Last night, lying in bed and listening to Rob snore, it struck her anew that she didn’t have any

22

friends. Rob didn’t have any either. They’d always been each other’s best friend. That had been the unspoken plan; just the two of them until some distant, barely imaginable point in the future when they would die at roughly the same time.

Reaching over the table, Jenny adjusted Rob’s cap so that it was level with his ears.

“How’s that?”

“How’s what?”

“Eat your chili.”

Rob seldom initiated conversations anymore and when she asked questions he replied with short answers. Now, after a silence that would once have been filled with Rob complaining that the Democrats were ruining the country or that he couldn’t find a decent mechanic to work on his vintage Rambler, the Rambler that Jenny had recently sold, rants that she never thought she would miss, she pulled from her purse the Kids’ Book of Crosswords. Jenny didn’t care that the latest research said memory games had no effect on Alzheimer’s. Scientists were always making claims that were disproved by some future study.

“A three-letter word for a type of weapon,” she said. “A three-letter word for a type of weapon. Did you get that?”

“Yes.” “Think rifle,” Jenny said. “Think pistol.”

Rob pursed his lips, squinted.

“Starts with a g.”

“Gun,” Rob said.

“Right.” She wrote in the letters. “Another three-letter word. You ready? Apple colored. Apple colored.”

“Red.” “Now a harder one. Four-letter word for what Batman wears. Four-letter word for what Batman wears.”

He looked at her.

“Try, Rob.” He furrowed his brow, chewed his lips, the face of a stumped ten-year-old.

“You should know this. Think how much we enjoyed those Batman reruns on TV Land.”

“Boots.”

“That’s five letters.”

“Mask.”

“Close. Think long and flowing.”

Rob glanced away a moment, then looked back at her.

“What’s the question?” he asked.

“You mean the clue?”

“Yes.”

23

“You forgot it? You have to concentrate, Rob. You have to listen. You have to pay attention.” She heard herself then. “Sorry. I’m sorry.” She tried so hard not to lose her patience, which made her feel horribly guilty afterward, but sometimes she couldn’t help herself.

While she was close to tears Rob just stared, as if observing her from a great distance.

“We’ll come back to that one,” she said. “Banana colored. Banana colored.”

*

TH AT EVEN IN G they were washing dishes after a spaghetti-and-meatball dinner when

Rob said,

“Could you pass the bush?”

“The what?”

“The bush. It’s right next to you.”

She looked over. “You mean the brush?”

“The brush. Isn’t that what I said?’

“No.” Was this a sign, she wondered, of Rob’s further deterioration, or a mistake anyone could make? If he’d called the brush a hammer or a football, that would be different— terrifying, yes, but a clear indication that something about Rob’s condition had worsened, which was going to happen, but no doctor could tell her exactly how or when.

*

“H E SA I D BUS H instead of brush,” she told Karen.

“So?” “He never did that before.”

“He’ll be doing a lot of things he’s never done before. If you don’t want to put him in a home why not get someone to stay with him when you’re at work?”

“I don’t want a stranger in my house.” True enough: Jenny was a very private person. But it was also the case that she hated change, and a daytime caregiver was a giant step closer to putting Rob in an assisted-living facility and, for herself, living in an empty house. “What if they didn’t treat Rob properly?” she said. “How would I know if he was being abused?”

24

“You could install some of those security cameras they have now.”

“I’m not doing that.”

“They’re motion activated. You could put them in any room you—” “Karen. I am not doing that.” After a silence, she asked her sister, “Are you going to visit me when I’m all by myself here?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you going to come and see me after Rob passes?”

“There’s no point in being morbid.”

“You’re not, are you?”

“You can always come here,” Karen said. “You know that. You have an open invitation.”

Three years after Ken and Karen retired to Tampa, seven hundred miles from the rest of the family in North Carolina, Karen began lobbying their parents to move to Florida and live out their declining years in perpetual warmth and—not incidentally— in the same city as their elder daughter. Karen got what she wanted, Jenny’s parents stolen away by her more aggressive sibling. But to Karen’s dismay, her husband’s consternation, and Jenny’s secret satisfaction, that decline was longer than Karen anticipated, cutting into her and Ken’s retirement plans. They couldn’t travel the country in their Winnebago when one or both parents might die at any moment. The upshot: Ken felt he’d sacrificed enough time and energy to his wife’s family. If any member of that family wanted to see them he or she could make the trip to Tampa.

“Do you ever wonder why we aren’t closer as a family?” Jenny said.

“No. Why should I? We’re very close.”

“Rob’s brothers almost never call him. They never visit.”

“That’s Rob’s family. Not ours.”

“If I didn’t come to Tampa I’d never see you. How is that close?”

“We talk on the phone. We’re talking right now. I never go anywhere without Ken. You know that.”

“You took Mom and Dad away and now Ken’s taking you away.”

“That’s ridiculous. That’s . . . I don’t remember you having a flair for the dramatic.

I’m sorry this is happening to you, but it’s not my fault.”

*

TH AT N IG HT TCM was showing Somewhere in Time. Through sheer force of will

Richard Collier time-travels back to some fancy seaside resort in 1912. He meets the

25

beautiful Elise McKenna and they have rapturous sex. The next morning they’re

sitting on the floor like children, giddily discussing their future, when Richard discovers a coin in his vest pocket. It’s a penny, dated 1979, an object from the future he’d neglected to remove from his person before time traveling. Suddenly, the idyll shatters. Richard is sucked back to 1979, his great love lost. To Jenny, it was irrelevant that he dies brokenhearted and is reunited with Elise in the afterlife where they live happily ever after. There was no trick to being happy in heaven. Everybody was happy in heaven. It was only impressive down here.

“What was the first movie we saw Christopher Reeve in?” she asked Rob as the credits rolled.

The actor who played Richard Collier was the handsome, talented, successful Christopher Reeve, whose fall from a horse several years later turned him into a quadriplegic, his glittering, too-good life a victim of the law of averages.

“Superman,” Rob said.

“Very good.”

*

THERE WAS N O ANSW ER . She pushed redial. Again the phone rang four times and went to voicemail. She refused to panic. Rob could be in the shower that she’d reminded him to take before she left for work. He might be on the patio getting some air. Though the day was brisk, the sun was warm. It couldn’t be easy, cooped up indoors all day. He might be taking a nap, though that was doubtful.

Jenny pushed redial. No answer. She pushed it again. Gathering her things, she informed her supervisor she had a family emergency and left the library.

Arriving home, she found the house cold, the lights off. She searched all the floors, then called 911 and spoke to a man who made her calm down before he took her information.

Reflexively, she thought about calling Karen, but decided against it. She dropped her cell in her purse and hurried out to the Saturn. She drove through the development, barely slowing for speed bumps, then branched out to the neighborhood.

She stopped in front of the old woman’s house where Rob had called her. No car in the driveway. No one home. She sped toward Lee Street, her temples throbbing, her grip on the wheel making her knuckles ache, as she heaped recrimination after recrimination on herself. This wouldn’t be happening if she hadn’t been so selfish, so cowardly. She deserved this, she asked for this; but Rob didn’t. She passed restaurants, car dealerships, strip malls. She made a quick U-turn and started back the other way. It was rush hour, the traffic heavy. It didn’t help that she’d begun to cry.

26

She wiped her eyes on the back of her hand, blurring her vision. As it was clearing she found herself running a red light at a busy intersection, a station wagon about to cross in front of her putting them on a collision course. A little girl in the back seat swiveled her head in Jenny’s direction, her expression oddly impassive, as if merely curious about how this would turn out.

There was no time to brake. A crash was imminent. But the station wagon appeared to pick up speed, or perhaps it was traveling faster than it first appeared. So close did Jenny come to hitting the station wagon that she seemed to pass through it in some ghostly, dream-like fashion, only to encounter another car crossing in front of her from the opposite direction, a car she also just escaped hitting, the Saturn slicing cleanly and safely through the intersection. She pulled off the highway at the first opportunity, cut the engine, and lowered her head to her hands.

She sobbed as the aftershocks of the near tragedy shuddered through her. Once they abated, she felt enormous relief, then gratitude, though toward whom or what

This wouldn’t be happening if she hadn’t been so selfish, so cowardly.

she couldn’t say. She lifted her head. Incredulous, she dabbed her eyes on her shirtsleeve. She hadn’t realized she’d pulled into the Sheetz across the street from Wendy’s. Fifty feet away, Rob was sitting in their usual spot by the window, gazing out at the traffic, his elbows up on the table, his cap at that jaunty angle.

She drove on over.

“Hey,” she said.

Rob looked up at her. “Hey.” “I thought you were going to let me know when you left the house? Did you forget?”

“I guess.”

“I was very worried.”

“Sorry.”

“That’s all right. It’s not your fault. Would you like something to eat? Are you hungry?”

“I forgot to bring money.”

“Be right back.” She went to the counter and returned with their food, placing Rob’s burger and drink in front of him.

“How would you feel about someone staying with you when I’m at work?” she asked.

27

“Okay,” Rob said and bit into his sandwich.

“Because we can’t have you going off like this again, can we?”

He shook his head.

“French fry?” She offered him the bag.

He took one and dipped it in the pool of catsup.

Rob’s focus returned to the traffic outside the window, his eyes following certain cars until they passed from view.

“Do you miss driving?”

“Yes,” he said.

It pleased her that there was something he missed.

“Hey,” she said. “How about going for a drive this Sunday? We haven’t done that in a while.”

“Okay.”

“We could even go to Mount Airy. Would you like that?” They had been making day trips to Mount Airy—supposedly the model for the town of Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show—almost as long as they’d been married.

“Could we go to Snappy’s?” Rob said.

This show of genuine interest, and memory, expressed in something other than the usual monotone, happened from time to time, a brief return to lucidity that was both a painful reminder of the man her husband used to be and a welcome respite from the one he’d become.

“Of course,” she said. “And what do we always order at Snappy’s?”

“The pork-chop sandwich.”

“That’s right. That’s right.”

She watched his lips form that rare thing, a smile.

“How did you find me?” he asked.

“How did I find you? You mean here?”

“Yes.” “Luck,” she said. “Pure luck.”

28

AMY TROTTER

Everbearing Remember the year we overwintered the strawberries in the greenhouse, came out in the morning to find a bat trapped, thumping its body against the roof’s wooden gables. How strange it sounded.

And when we opened the door, how sudden and absolute the silence fell around us. I thought at first that this is how our love is—how we sat in bed for days after the baby came. After he died. How the light swept across your face, reflecting from the snow.

29

DAYNA PATTERSON

God the Mother Speaks of Trees Before the world pulsed alive, I wove leaves on my loom: sawtooth, lobed oak, ginkgo’s fan. Feather and star. In my maker’s lab, I spun and plaited strands of cells, xylem and phloem, filled groves and named them sacred. My votaries seek the loam of my presence under shivelight and insect frass lit to a haze of gold. Here, I’ve appeared since the beginning, clothed in soft green glow of lambs’ ear and lichen thallus, my grey braided with witch’s hair. Here, I’ve revealed myself to my children, farm lads with calloused hands, girls with poultice herbs in their aprons. I whisper

willow, touch the grooved bark with outstretched finger, lead them to clumps of mushrooms, their fruiting bodies bursting from a nurse log’s moulder. I’m nurse log to the universe. From the journeywork of stellar dust, from lignin and detritus, I beckon each thread, each tender sapling. How I love them. Children take mothers for granted: cradle, matchstick, pyre. My heartwood milled for paper, pulp.

Don’t underestimate my present reach of roots, or ignore invisible messages I seep through air. You are cambium in my hands. You are forever seeds I scatter, trunks I’d shield from windthrow, snap—my time is green clocked in needles and rings. Ferns unfurl in my wake: fiddlehead, maidenhair, sword.

30

JESSE BREITE

Fishing the Caddo We never owned a boat, but we dreamed of boats when we dipped our hands into the river. My father taught me to stand, to gaze into the water. On the banks we waited for something, but it wasn’t a boat.

We knew that it went into the water, that it would come out, that the black Nissan truck drove hard, snarled on the route.

Dad flipped his wrist, taught me to throw a little tooth with invisible line to invisible water, that it could grow weight.

The spears we held gave us a language we wrote in the air. As we sat, Dad pulled worms from dirt, fit them to the hook.

If you set it right, he said, there is no pain— not for the worm, not for the fish.

When I stuck my fist in the whiskery cage, the crickets sang my skin alive.

And still we waited—what we pulled from the river was the river—liquid muscle, speckled with our fingertips. Some fish transfigured in the sunlight. We held them as long as we could before giving them back.

31

I DGE R B

T

P

S COT E R

32

TH E F IR ST ON E was an accident. Not the way it might sound: the man walked onto

the bridge on purpose, no question of that. He stood and looked down at the river without seeing me, he put one leg over the railing and then the other. What I mean is that my being there and noticing was an accident.

When I saw what he was doing, I wanted to shout something, but the words fell to pieces in my throat. I paddled, hard, toward the bridge.

He went in feetfirst, and water rose up around him like a crown and then settled back. The turbulence rocked my kayak; I was getting close by then. Parts of him were moving—he hadn’t lost consciousness. I saw his face, pale, the mouth wide-open. I peeled back my spray skirt to feel for the spare life jacket behind the seat. The whole process took ages, that first time.

When the words came out, they might have been more for me than for him: hold on, one more minute that’s all that’s all. I pulled the bungee cord out of the rigging—losing a water bottle in the process—attached one end to the life jacket, and tossed him the works.

“Don’t put it on,” I called, my voice shooting out full and loud at last. “Get it under your head.” He didn’t speak to me or even meet my eyes, but he took hold of the life jacket—in a resigned way, as if it were a bill he had to pay—and I towed him to the bank.

If the Black Horse River had a strong current, this would never have worked. The water is cold and deep, and often brown with silt, but slow enough to allow decent headway both upstream and down. That’s what I mostly do, of course, when I go out on the river: start upstream until I get tired, then turn around and drift back to where I put in.

For over five years now, since the year 2000, I’ve been paddling the river on a regular basis. At first it had to do with Bradley, my ex—not that we were ever married, but my ex-boyfriend. Together seven years; right now it would be twelve, the ironand-steel anniversary, if we’d stayed together. He walked out supposedly because he wanted to travel the South Pacific and I didn’t yearn for the tropics, because he’d passed thirty and felt old, because there was a world of possibility out there, and anyway all good things come to a close. He said all of that in a note he left on our kitchen floor, smack in front of the stove where I would surely find it. As if I would believe a word of it.

He left his kayak behind—I guess it wouldn’t fit on the airplane to Honolulu, if that’s where he really went. I barely knew what to do with it, but one day I found myself launching into the Black Horse and flailing around. It had never occurred to me before to use the kayak.

With time my stroke improved and I took to paddling the river every week or two, right near the Prescott Bridge most of the time. To this day I keep the kayak the way he had it. I guess he’d appreciate that at least a little, with the sponge and the paddle

33

float, the extra life jacket. One day I opened the hatch—I’d hesitated over it for weeks, as if I might uncover raw organs in there, or a notebook of violent scratchings, little tears where the pen had stabbed through the paper—and found a dry bag inside. I let it go another few days before I unrolled the bag. Inside were spare clothes, a fleecy synthetic shirt and pants. Wool socks. These came in handy when I hauled that first jumper onto the bank sopping wet. * H A LF M Y S HIF T went by at the bakery before I said anything to Wendy. A surprising

number of people were coming in for macaroons, peanut-butter cookies, and these twisted things with jam that were supposed to be Danish. Wendy made everything with lard, which apparently tastes okay if that’s all you’ve ever tried. I was handing over spotted pink boxes, and bags slicked almost see-through with grease, and people were handing back crumply fives and tens.

It wasn’t the best bakery—not the best job, either—but what could I expect in a small town in the Northwest. Wendy, the owner, was one of those people who seemed like they gave her the wrong name. She was way too down-to-earth, with chopped-off hair and

He left his kayak behind—I guess it wouldn’t fit on the airplane to Honolulu, if that’s where he really went.

a maze of wrinkles—a far cry from a singing girl in a nightgown, flying with Peter Pan. Once the day slowed down, she came out to the counter and spoke to me through a bite of something. Probably a maple bar, her usual.

“I kept hearing the chimes. Someone leave the door swinging or something?”

“No,” I said. “Those were real customers. You’re going to be rich.”

She laughed and stuffed the stub end of pastry into her mouth. I gave it a moment and then I told her. “I pulled a man out of the water today.” She moved in closer; the attention made me half-shy. I slid back one of the glass panels and fussed with a row of cookies.

“What do you mean? Who?” She had her nose practically in my ear.

“I don’t know. He went in off the Prescott Bridge.” I gave up on the cookies and stood back to face Wendy.

“Come here, you.” She pulled me back into the baking area, into the sugared warmth. Trays of brownies stood waiting to be frosted. “Now tell me.”

34

I looked down at her arms, holding me, the burns and scars from the oven racks and the baking sheets mixed in with wrinkles. “He’s okay, I think. He’s going to live.”

Wendy clutched me tighter. “You saved him! Lorna, you did.” I could tell she wanted to give me a hug, and I sort of wanted her to, but in the end she settled for slapping my shoulders. * B R A DL EY L EFT on a Tuesday. By that weekend I started noticing the rats. I’d be

sitting around before work, and suddenly a dark little body would cross the corner of my vision. At first I didn’t believe it, we’d never had rats before, but now they kept coming. Every hour or so, small rats or maybe large mice—I’m no expert. A week went by and then I thought of traps. There was the question of what kind: the springy ones that mash down on the rat’s neck, the cage-ish ones that trap him alive? With the first kind, I’d be stuck handling a rat corpse; with the second, I’d be expected to liberate the rat back into the outdoors. I was damned if I wanted to do either.

I called Lou, who’d been Bradley’s closest friend from the fifth grade on. If I remember the story correctly, they started by punching the daylights out of each other during a four-square game and that somehow bonded them. I still don’t understand it, although at this point there’s not much reason to try.

“Lorna, what is it?” said Lou, when he heard me on the phone.

“I have rats all over the place, and I don’t know what to do.” He didn’t answer. “I realize you probably don’t want to hear from me.” A breath—mine. “I only want some advice. How do I get rid of them?”

His silence continued briefly, followed by a rumble in the throat. Then: “You’ll have to figure it out by yourself.” * TH E P RES C OT T B RID G E crossed the Black Horse with a double arch. No one

regarded it as beautiful, not in a class with the bridges along the coast or across the Willamette, but it was the bridge I knew best. Because of what had happened, towing that man out of the water, I tended to keep a close eye on it every time I went out in the kayak.

At each end is a date, 1938, stamped in concrete. A man named Prescott was the mayor in Millville then, a solid city-official type with a wife who sang soprano and wore housedresses with white cuffs and collars. Four kids. Wendy gave me all the details, one afternoon when the power was out at the bakery.

The mayor developed a craving for another woman—just shy of a girl, really, about twenty. She lived with her parents and took in mending. Supposedly one leg was shorter than the other. No matter, he saw her one day and fell like a stone. He wanted 35

to see more of her, but she lived on the other side of the river and it was a long way upstream to the footbridge. He started pushing for a bridge directly out of Millville, campaigned for it over two years and got it built.

According to Wendy, the bridge never served its founding purpose; the girl got engaged and would have nothing to do with the mayor, despite his repeated visits. He gave up and found someone else right in Millville to fool around with. Nevertheless the bridge lives on, attracting its share of traffic and jumpers. It’s the mayor’s legacy. * I TO O K to paddling the river more often. Time crept up on me; I can’t say how quickly

I progressed to every day or two, but it wasn’t long. A person could jump any time, and someone needed to watch, after all. It seemed like the right thing to do in Bradley’s kayak.

Rats—or mice?—continued to zip around my floors, flash out from under the cabinets. I would see them even with my eyes closed. A book from the library in Hultgren said to check for droppings. Mouse droppings would be like a rice grain, rat droppings much bigger, maybe like a bean. I walked my rooms, concentrating on the places where wall met floor. In the kitchen I opened drawers; the book had mentioned drawers as a prime spot. Nothing turned up, of any size from birdseed to meatballs.

The book also said that rats and mice were active mostly at night. I ignored that.

“Lou,” I said to my phone. “The rats are really bugging me. Please.”

“Why do you call me with this shit? If you have news about Bradley, then you can call me.”

I hung on the line and waited a little more. While I was waiting, I glimpsed a dark blot sliding down the wall. I turned my head in that direction and it disappeared.

“How about poison, then?” His voice was softer. I’d always liked the way he talked, half-gravel, half-smooth. * WE N DY WA RN ED me about the river, how it was cold and crisscrossed with old logs

under the surface. “If you flip somewhere out there, you could swim to the bank and not be able to get up for the trees and brush. Even if you didn’t mind pushing your face through blackberry stickers and nettles, you might not get a purchase. And you can’t last in that water; it’s colder than bones. Your life jacket wouldn’t save you.”

I told her okay, but I wasn’t bothered. Wendy hadn’t ever paddled the Black Horse herself; she only knew what she’d heard. Yes, the forest upstream was second growth, with spindly trees crammed together—what grows up after clear-cutting is never the

36

same as the old growth. But trying to climb onto the banks up there wasn’t going to be an issue, ever. The water was calm, the kayak steady. I felt I could manage.

To make Wendy feel better, I cut myself a piece of shortbread, gave it an extravagant sniff, and sank my teeth in. Later I asked if I could take home a few cups of flour. She said something about a busman’s holiday; I could tell she was curious. I left it at that.

At home I opened the rat book again to double-check. Sprinkle flour on the floor in suspected problem areas. I walked my rooms again, warily, pinching up flour between my fingers and letting it scatter down. I finished the edges of the kitchen, the front

Wendy warned me about the river, how it was cold and crisscrossed with old logs under the surface.

room, and the small room where I had my bed. The place was a mess afterward: drifts of flour all over, a grainy whiteness hanging in the air. I woke in the night and heard clicks and squeaks and brushing sounds.

In the morning I took the tour all over again, bending down to examine the floury margins of my rooms. The tracks were supposed to be delicate lines in a half-circle burst (mouse) or narrow feet with splayed toes tipped in claws (rat). By the time I got to the front room, I was crouching so low I almost got flour in my eyelashes. Then I slumped down on my back, just a foot away from the wall, and closed my eyes to think about sweeping up the flour or not. I decided to leave it there so I could check again later.

“What did you make?” Wendy asked the next day. “You could have taken some sugar, too, you know. Same as you’re allowed to eat the baked goods, you can sample the raw materials once in a while.”

“Thanks,” I said. It was nice of her, despite the pay being so stingy in general. To change the subject, I pointed out the window at a red-faced man across the road. “Hey, you know, that might be the guy I pulled out of the river last month. He’s about the right size.”

That distracted Wendy. She gave the man a critical look through the window glass. “You think it’s really him? He looks like the car-wash guy they used to have in Hultgren. He would come in here all the time for macaroons.” *

37

I SAT in my kitchen, drinking Earl Grey with a spoon of brandy stirred in. All that

flour on the linoleum really looked like hell; it made the whole room sordid. I had the telephone only a quick reach away from my mug. “Keep your fingers on the mug,” I said out loud. “No phoning.”

That was about a second before I pulled the phone over by its cord. Twenty minutes earlier there’d been no answer, just the machine, with a synthesized message from

After a while the fog came down over me, a low, thick fog that blocked everything.

a robot, but this time he picked up. I had to hurry and swallow my mouthful of tea, which left my tongue with a fuzzy, burnt feeling.

“I tried something I read about, but it’s not working. You know, putting down flour to catch the tracks.”

He inhaled so I could hear it. “Lorna.” He sounded both more patient and more irritated than the last time.

“Hi.” “Didn’t I mention a trap? What about that?”

Actually he had mentioned poison. I unscrewed the brandy and poured a little more into my tea, to cool it down. “Well, I read it would be good to figure out first if it’s rats or mice, so I tried the flour. Only they didn’t leave any tracks so far.”

“Have you heard from Bradley?”

It was hard to tell if he was needling me or maybe just sad. Either way, I had to ignore it. “Is there some other kind of trap, then, that I don’t know about?”

He hung up, which left me holding onto the phone receiver, staring ahead and then closing my eyes against possible rat sightings. After a while I put down the phone and gulped what was left in my mug. * WE N DY AS K ED me the same thing, meaning it differently, when I went to her place

the following week. She had made a fuss over me at work. Are you eating all right?

Come on, Lorna, what is it? I told her I was fine, and I started bustling around and acting extra smiley with the customers, to prove it. She ended up pressing me to visit her on Tuesday, one of the days the bakery was closed.

38

I drove over there, a good three miles from my place, wondering what she had in mind, although she’d mentioned dinner, with beers beforehand. She set us up good as her word, with cans of Bud poured into glasses with a gas-station logo on them. “I break these out for company,” she said, and handed me a glass. “When it’s just me, I take it straight from the can.” She laughed, jabbing the air with her elbow. “Well, I don’t even drink beer much.”

She lounged herself sideways, with one leg hanging over the arm of her chair. That left me the couch. The cushions were soft and chewed-looking. I slouched against them and let my head tilt back. I realized I was tired and hungry.

Wendy waited until we’d sipped our glasses halfway down. I was starting to smell something along the lines of ground beef and ketchup, a sign that dinner was in the works.

“So,” she said, swinging the leg that was dangling. “You ever know the story about Oliver and me? He was my husband.” She looked at me narrowly.

“What?” I should have shown more of an interest, only I was busy picturing hamburger meat cooking, little brown and pink knobs in clear, hot fat.

“Yep. We were together up by Walla Walla for almost four years. Bet you didn’t know that about me.”

I roused myself to a decent level of attentiveness. “I guess I never heard about it.

You were married then?”

“I was.” The shoe on her dangling foot started to flap. Up and down. It was a fancytype beach shoe, a wooden bottom with a wide band of pink leather across the base of the toes. Little golden studs in the leather. “Past tense.” She put down her beer glass for dramatic emphasis. “He took off years ago. That’s when I came over here and started the bakery.”

I didn’t have a ready response to that, so I wrinkled my eyebrows together to show concern, and waited.

“We used to live so cozy,” Wendy continued. “We could lay in bed the whole morning, read magazines and shit, have lunch, go back to bed. Then he’d say it was too confining at our place. Confining, like being confined to a wheelchair or something.

So he’d take off on these hikes, fifteen or twenty miles, always by himself. It being all open hills there, sometimes I went out with binoculars to see if I could spot him.”

My eyes had strayed over to the flapping pink shoe, but with Wendy’s silence I put my attention back on her face. She started up again when she saw that she had me back. “I only found him once,” she said. “He was moving real fast, the yellow grass to either side of him, rolling out in both directions. He was swinging his arms and legs in a rhythm, the only thing moving in the whole landscape. Not a bird in the sky.”

“Why did you go looking for him?”

“I guess something in me wanted to keep tabs on him, he was so shadowy, like I never really could know him.” The dangling shoe got loose and dropped to the floor.

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Wendy’s toes squeezed tight for a moment and straightened out again. “Three days later he bundled up his things and told me he would go away to Idaho, to get away from the hassle. I was the hassle.” She stood up and wiggled back into her shoe. “It’s probably time to check the oven.”

I waited for her on the couch with my eyes closed. With all Wendy’s talk about her and Oliver, I couldn’t help thinking about a time with Bradley, when we drove to the Oregon Coast and walked into the huge sand dunes. The signs call it a trail, but all it is, is little markers on stakes in the sand. Bradley got out ahead of me, which I didn’t mind. I was watching the smooth banks of sand and the ocean beyond, and sometimes just my feet sinking in step by step. After a while the fog came down over me, a low, thick fog that blocked everything. I couldn’t see Bradley and I couldn’t see the little markers, either. I had droplets on my arms and ocean smell in my nose. I didn’t know if I should keep walking, maybe going wrong, or sit down and hope for it to clear. I ended up going along, staggering one way and another, for over an hour, until suddenly Bradley was coming toward me through the mist. We ran at each other— slowly, because of the sand—and hugged so hard, we fell down and got sand on us everywhere. It seemed like a miracle that we’d come across each other. Bradley said he didn’t ever want to lose me. Obviously that was in the days when we were doing better.

Thumpings and clatterings sounded from the kitchen, and the meaty smell grew stronger. I opened my eyes again and it struck me that Wendy had told me about Oliver on purpose. She was having a crack at being subtle, working her way around to what she wanted to ask.

She had the plates all ready when I went into the kitchen—slices of meat loaf, rice pilaf, and cooked carrots with butter and dill. We took the food to the table with its checkered oilcloth, and sat down.

“This looks great,” I said. The steam from my plate rose into my face, and I began eating, much too fast. Everything tasted like hot grease in the best way possible.

But I was right about Wendy. She let me get partway into my carrots and then she asked it. “Has Bradley called you?”

There I was with a hot dinner in front of me, courtesy of Wendy; I felt obligated to tell her something. “No,” I said. I was tired of people misreading the situation, but I couldn’t bring myself to explain. I took another bite of meat loaf, tasting the onions in it, and suddenly felt too full.

“He was so attached to you,” Wendy said, her eyes bright in the midst of her wrinkles. A moment went by. “There’s seconds.” She got up and brought over more rice and carrots. “Help yourself.”

I nodded. “Good cooking.”

We talked about the bakery for a while. Wendy was considering some new items, maybe pumpkin-cream cheese muffins, or something with chili peppers. “I know they

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wouldn’t sell much, everybody likes the old standbys. But I want to do something with a little zing to it. I’ll get bored otherwise.”

“You should give it a try,” I said. “The pumpkin especially. That sounds interesting.”

I had stopped eating entirely. I hoped Wendy didn’t have a batch of prototype muffins ready to come out for dessert.

A large, saggy cat wandered into the kitchen, jumped to the counter, and began licking at the pan of meat loaf. Wendy got up from the table and swatted at the cat,

Morning on the river could be misty and quiet, especially when the current was slow.

who stayed licking what it could get until the very last moment. I got up, too. It seemed like time to leave.

“Thanks for the meal. I didn’t know you could cook like this.”

“Yeah,” said Wendy, standing with me at the door. She let out an embarrassed chuckle. “I guess, a good employee like you, every few years I should invite you to dinner, right?”

“Really, it was great.” I left her looking out at me as I walked to my car.

She called to me then, not real loud: “I never heard a word from Oliver. I never knew what happened to him.” The door closed and I drove away. * AT H OM E the dark shapes kept coming, long after I’d swept up the flour. It had stayed

in place for days, pristine as a snowfall, until I gave up on it.

Unlike Bradley and Lou, I wasn’t local. I had grown up in various parts of Arizona, all of them dry and hot and dusty blue. It wasn’t that we lacked for pests there—I’d come across scorpions in my shoes and javelinas in the front yard—but this rat thing was different. This was every day, every hour, and on top of it I had hard thoughts rattling my conscience. I kept yearning over the telephone. I hadn’t heard from Bradley and it was clear I never would, but I still suffered over him. And I missed being held by a man, sniffing his neck, seeing the hair on his toes.

On my next day off, I drove to Slocum, ten miles up the river and over to one side.

About six different companies had taken turns mining in the forest around Slocum,

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and all had gone bust. The soil held just enough gold and silver to tantalize the miners, but not nearly enough to return a profit.

I pulled onto a skinny road through the trees and bumped along until I got to the cottage. From the outside it appeared dark and soggy and overgrown, but I knew the inside to be always wiped-up and tidy. I was picturing it before I even stopped the car: white paint and warm lights and pinewood. Before I let myself do any thinking, I ran to the door and jangled the string of bells that hung there.

I could tell, standing at the door, that the cottage wasn’t empty. The boards under my feet seemed to vibrate, as if in sympathy with footsteps on the boards inside. The door flew open before I was ready.

He wore one of his usual plaid shirts, with jeans bleached white down the side seams. “Lorna.” The familiar touch of gravel. For a moment I didn’t know what to say.

His eyes glared into me, hard and sad.

I reached to touch him and pulled back. “I didn’t come about the mice,” I said. “Can I come in? Please.”

He backed up to make room for me, and I went in. We stood in his main room, as warm and clean as I’d expected. “I’m not asking you to sit down,” he said. “Speak your business.”

That was a swat. Still I said, “I was just hoping . . .”

“Then stop it.” He yanked at a flap of hair that fell to one side of his glasses. “Jesus, Lorna, what are you doing here? You better have a good reason.”

“I didn’t ruin it all by myself.” I was scared to say that, but anyway I did. “I’m sorry.” I took a step closer to Lou. “But to me it’s a good reason. You’re a good reason.”

I could feel his impulse toward me, but he caught it and stopped. “No, we’re done.”

He looked at the ceiling and back down. “For god’s sake, he was my friend.” After a pause he moved toward me, in the way people do when they want you to back up and leave. I looked down at his bare feet, at the hairs on his toes.

The car bumped back through the woods and finally pulled itself off the road outside Slocum, at a nondescript jungly space between towns. I yelled and wept and hammered at the steering wheel until I bruised my knuckles. * MO R N I N G ON the river could be misty and quiet, especially when the current was

slow. It was a day like that, with a fine rain falling, when it happened again. I’d gone farther upstream than usual—made it all the way along the meager outskirts of Millville and through close-packed forest to where houses began to peek out from gloomy little glades along the banks. That meant I’d done about six miles and next would be our neighboring town, Hultgren, which people said existed only to make Slocum look like something.

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After turning around I marveled, as I did every time, at how different everything looked—the trees, the water, the downed wood that I had to avoid—going back the other way. There were sketchy paths that went slanting into the forest, that you could only see from one direction.

A doctor told me once that I’m walleyed, that my right eye will wander off to the side if I let it relax. I’d known for years, without understanding why, that I could loosen myself and get two of everything: two lamps, two trees, two of my own hand.

On the river that day I went dreamy. I picked out one bubble after another, watched myself get closer and then pass by. Then I defocused and let the bubbles twin themselves and go outside each other, slide apart on a river that was going double itself. Sometimes I reunited the bubbles and let them part company again. Apart, together. I was doing that off and on, until I made the last left turn on the way into Millville, the air still smoky with mist. Five minutes more and I started to see the bridge and the dark, hazy shape at the railing.

That was the second one, a young woman with hair that wrapped around her neck like rope. I got her out, too, and they told me she had broken bones but would do all right. She never turned her head to look at me or said why she’d done it; I’m sure she had a reason.

It bothered me afterward, how she hadn’t acknowledged me, the person who had more or less saved her. (That’s what Wendy said about the first one; I saved him. She was all excited about it, too.) The more time that went by, the more I wanted the girl to have spoken to me—not anything mundane like thank you, I didn’t need that, but some words of significance that nobody else would hear. Or maybe if she’d turned her eyes on me, with something in them besides shock and coldness.

But maybe I had it the wrong way around. The jump had nothing to do with me, only with her own despair. * A F TE R A W HIL E the mice went away, and I got shed of the bakery job and moved to

Hultgren. I still paddle the Black Horse River in Bradley’s kayak, and when the current allows I go all the way up to the Prescott Bridge, where I hope to see someone walking across in pursuit of love.

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GAVIN YUAN GAO

Opera Listen, you say to the salmon-pink horizon waking from its dream of a different silence, even though you don’t know how the world has come to age so steadily into ruin or how to save it from its own hands, only that this hour wears the morning song of cockatoos like a rhinestone choker around its pale throat.

Sunlight branches into your room like a tree of amber & your body becomes a book of prayers that’s only been opened once before.

Listen, even as your father is singing on the balcony to his own reflection in a handheld mirror, he demands the sun’s attention, Snip Snip with his lightning blade as hair falls from his pitted chin into the plastic wash basin like some dark pollen.

Peking Opera swims through his chest, slick as a silver fish & when he reaches the part where the old king, betrayed by all but one, bids farewell to his faithful beloved, his voice trembles like the hand of a stable boy combing through the grass-soft mane of a foal.

Then he can no longer bear the weight of his own singing, which is exactly the weight of living however you look at it,

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for this loss is absolute. Is the horizon dreaming of the same silence. Is the mirror in your father’s hand—the one light he can’t turn his eyes away from. You rise out of your shadow & take it from his hand like a kingdom you’ve been waiting to inherit.

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REBEKAH DENISON HEWITT

God As Rumpelstiltskin In Egypt, Passover, the angel of death comes to claim the first born of the mothers who don’t know the right name for god.

Wailing in the dark.

What information is missing, here?

In the fairy tale, when the mother says his name, the goblin stomps the ground so hard he rips in two. If I say god’s name I open a window.

It is the mother who is stupid promising a baby she doesn’t yet have to a little laughing man whose name she doesn’t know.

In church, I watch a little girl sing praises.

A girl whose father raped her almost every night.

I watch her and still, I pray for protection like the stupid mother I am.

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PREETI PARIKH

integument once newly woven in my mother’s womb my skin now fingered shop-soiled singed once his teenage hand burning palm thumb four fingers imprinted on my little girl belly branded on my little girl chest

each day I unskin discard the dirty integument watch the dhobi at the ghat flog it thrash it on the stone wall of his washing pen

each day I stitch the seams where an other nicked them unseen amongst clothed bodies packed in a crowded Bombay bus station

oh mother I want

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each day I want

dear mother whole other skins

SALLY ROSEN KINDRED

Dementia, or My Mother Is Not a Confederate Statue until she says she is. Then the whole room goes numb, goes with her to stone.

Her hips harden and moss over, her bones

that cradled body after small

body glare and push us back to strangers. Where has it been, my lily-sour skin? When were we limp as ash?

When she says, I see a hole, a field, my dresses burning, a ghost-fire lights back angers in the hearth, her far wall’s maw. The white paint’s

stained and choked by smoke’s

historic throat, marrow-ribboned, fatherhood’s grass rasp. No one will crack this grief, will want these gut-shutters, these dripping eaves. She knows I won’t let her haunt me. Won’t I snarl. O my blood and weeds, I may bend

in the shape of a girl, lay wormed blooms before her, but reach into a pocket to feel

my living sons’ breath, their brown

skin humming. Won’t they shrink from my thumb? She knows we’ve come with an axe to bring her down.

My dresses. My dresses drown her mouth in muskets and welted maps. Tender the spine of my words

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in the arms of a granite man splitting. Won’t I pray until my mother is not. O my grasses, she thinks I won’t let

her haunt—as if I could choose what ghosts, what stones.

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50

I. When you wake in the dazzling glow of sunrise with no one beside you, it is easier to see the reflection: the surface of a pond or river, half of your tilted bedside mirror.

Maybe the cautious newborn rays dance rainbows across your bedspread, or you catch a fragment in the center of your cornea, concentrated into a point of energy so warm you can feel it in your peripheral vision all day. Penetrating the darkness. Tiny dots that linger, even when you close your eyes.

II. There are always three points of absolute tension, three moments when the sun is suspended either at the very edge of everything or right in the middle. Dawn. Noon.

Dusk.

I think they used to measure time by this, until someone, somewhere invented tardiness and now there isn’t a room in any city without a ticking clock attached firmly to wall or headboard. No way to escape the punctual monotony of seven o’clock and nine-fifteen and one-forty-six and maybe lunch in there somewhere, maybe dinner, but more than likely only a hurried, joyless meal of chicken nuggets on the way to seven-thirty, and ten, and then bedtime. Have we all forgotten, I wonder, how to measure the degrees of our own shadows?

But at least there is still this, three moments in a day when we can remember (or so I pray) how it must have felt when we could divide our lives evenly.

III. An unnamed bird takes flight from a branch as I walk downtown, hands in my pockets, on my way to the Saturday market. Hurrying forward into the intersection, the crosswalk signal flashing red and counting down from fourteen to one, each number becomes a beat of my weight pressing down into the pavement.

The street is crowded and feels ten degrees warmer than it did when I left my apartment. Sweat slides down the side of my neck. Nobody else is smiling; their eyes are on the car in front of them or the puffy cotton-swab clouds above, or else they are talking into their phones. The air seems to be whirling, holding everything still as it pirouettes around us.

I walk and I walk and I try to imagine my steps unspooling the time left behind me like pressing a rewind button, casting myself backward so I can find the place where I did not feel such a strong need to keep moving, so I can maybe find the beginning of these winds and trace them all the way back to the start of this world and the end of another.

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IV. It is said that we are all made of stardust, but I prefer us being the stars themselves.

Or they have decided to become us, temporarily.

My body is not man or woman. My body is man and woman. My body is everything that men, women, and everyone else cannot ever be, cannot even touch: I am one single pressurized shape encapsulating all the stories that have been told about the night sky.

If the stars began with a bang, nothing becoming everything and vice versa, then so too was I born in the heat of an unknowable sun. When I die you will find me deep in the grass and blown out into the vastness of the universe. Ashes, ashes, etcetera.

V. When you wake and there is someone next to you, but you can’t find that sunrise behind the thick walls plastered with cheap art and thumbtack holes, and the only light visible the one on the porch that really needs to be changed one of these days, and the kettle on the stove a low sputtering whistle that builds up so slowly you don’t notice until it stops.

VI. I know the simple facts of light: radiation reaches the earth as a form of energy, visible at different frequencies and vibrations. I know there are chemical reactions involved, and I know there is a delay between the source and what it illuminates. But I have no way of knowing what the world around me would look like without the light, because I have no frame of reference to comprehend what that would mean.

Sometimes I think about this—the fact that in the darkness I am visually no different from the birds or the trees or the massive plates of rock underlying it all.

I try to picture everything as a giant expanse of gray goo, Play-Doh beneath fingers desperate to find some emancipated warmth. I try to make sense of the fact that the hues of my skin and my sweater and my coffee, once the light vanishes, will be nothing more than made-up taxonomic categories with no authentic weight or validity.

My imaginary vision fails; it is impossible to separate myself from my presumption that life will, in fact, always look this way.

VII. I am in an empty forest and I am wrapped in shadow.

Underneath my boots, damp leaves crumble more than crunch, and only a few are still burnished. Above my head, the light slants in between branches like the opposite of ghosts—the shadows are negatives within negatives—it’s impossible, after all, to capture something that does not exist.

I have never felt this lonely in my life.

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VIII. It’s easy to be afraid at night, partly because of the monsters hiding in the dark and mostly because of the dark itself. But most frightening of all is this: the moment when you cannot feel your own body under the sheets or the racing rhythm of your heartbeat. Sometimes your tangled limbs are pierced by a thousand needles when they recall that they’re still awake; sometimes your brain sends a misplaced message to your spinal cord and a sudden violent shudder runs through you for a second until you’re able to get your bearings again and remember where you are. Reconnect to this disjointed, skittish bundle of nerves that is holding you together.

You are not the enemy. Your silhouette is no stranger, and you will find your way back to where it is bright again—but before that, sleep will come.

IX. In Corvallis, Oregon, we are all told not to look directly at the sun. We must keep our glasses on for the full hour and forty-two minutes, minus the one-and-a-half minute when we are finally set free to gaze in awe upon the radiating circles that seem to go on forever outward.

Even so, I cannot help but indulge: one second, two seconds, squinting up at that magnificent orb. Afterward I will close my eyes in the cool shade of my grandfather’s front porch while inside he fries onions, and I will worry about whether my vision is fractionally worse than it was in the morning. I will also sip several glasses of water and convince myself it is just dehydration—but for those two seconds I am held powerless and awestruck in the direct path of unfiltered light. Only moments now until the ripples touch everything and the world is sent spiraling out of control, moments until the edges of us all disappear.

X. Why does everyone complain when it’s raining? Do they not see the beautiful bits of sky that fall through the lowest clouds, pooling in golden puddles at the edge of the curb?

XI. My life beneath me is moving. Believe it or not, the sun must always dip toward the horizon.

XII. I light a candle on my windowsill and look out into the growing night. It is snowing, and has been for some time.

I am missing someone, but I’m not sure who.

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JED MYERS

The Wanting The wanting, I felt I saw in the dark brown beetle working its way toward the shining eye of the good-size rabbit dead on its side by the trail, the wanting in how that tiny-legged disc of an insect climbed what for it was the rough heath of the fur of the rabbit’s cheek, the wanting gone only hours out of the rabbit, its stillness off its feet and its tolerance for the bug a live paw would bat at the evidence of a fresh lack of wanting, coat still smooth, unnamable color of the cover of dead leaf mulch the rabbit must’ve been suited for, wanting its life as a body, as my body wants mine, as the little live coin of the beetle moved just a thumbnail’s length in the moment I watched—it must be one wanting life, the sheen-shielded beetle, the legless pale feasters sure to inch in by night, the child I was and the milk of my wanting I sucked and sucked in the unbroken line of the weaving of mothers and fathers, all the way back to the sun-cooked broth of life, I thought, the hunting, the blades, the wanting to kill anything to eat and breathe must be inseparable from our love, and I lifted my eyes, past the trees, to the road’s drumming.

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KAREN BJORK KUBIN

Lake Harriet, 2005 Now the rain comes in shards breaking the stillness of lake, of end-of-myself, of mirror, of window hiding everything below— razor blades of light slicing holy, wholly through thick air, blades I pull in through my skin and suck ragged into my lungs.

How many years does it take to learn to say I don’t want this, or, This is not what I meant?

Not enough, yet.

For today there is just this storm, the unleashing, the words I found the strength to say, like, All is bright in this darkness.

Words like, I want, and I hope, and O sharp joy, I have been waiting for you since I saw clouds gathering on the earliest shore.

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artist’s statement

S ETH C LA RK’S WORK focuses on deteriorating architecture. These structures,

designed to be huge forces of permanence, are continually being challenged, destroyed and forgotten. He sees an inherent honesty in the face of his subject. Among all of the clutter—the shards of wood and layers of rubble—there remains a gentle resolve.

As Clark works, he studies these structures incessantly. The buildings, often on the brink of ruin, have something very energized and present trying to escape from their fragmented reality.

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S ET H CLA RK . Mass XX, 2016. Collage, Charcoal, Pastel, Graphite,

Acrylic on Wood. 72 inches x 84 inches (diptych).

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S ET H CLA RK . Mass Study IV, 2018. Collage, Charcoal, Pastel,

Graphite, Acrylic on Wood. 40 inches x 30 inches.

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SET H CLA RK . Rooftops I, 2019. Collage, Charcoal, Pastel,

Graphite, Acrylic on Wood. 40 inches x 30 inches.

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S ET H CLA RK . Barn Study, 2019. Collage, Charcoal, Pastel,

Graphite, Acrylic on Wood. 12 inches x 9 inches.

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SET H CLA RK . Vinyl Study, 2017. Collage, Charcoal, Pastel, Graphite,

Acrylic on Wood. 40 inches x 60 inches (diptych).

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S ET H CLA RK . Fragments I, 2017. Collage, Charcoal, Pastel, Graphite,

Acrylic on Wood. 42 inches x 33 inches.

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SET H CLA RK . House Study VII, 2019. Collage, Charcoal, Pastel, Graphite,

Acrylic on Wood. 12 inches x 9 inches.

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SET H CLA RK . Mass XXII, 2017. Collage, Charcoal, Pastel, Graphite,

Acrylic on Wood. 72 inches x 84 inches (diptych).

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S ET H CLA RK . Factory, 2016. Collage, Charcoal, Pastel, Graphite,

Acrylic on Wood. 48 inches x 48 inches.

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SET H CLA RK . Network Study, 2017. Wood,

Plastic, Acrylic. 26 inches x 18 inches.

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SET H CLA RK . Gambrel Rooftop, 2017. Networked Glass,

Wood. 5 inches x 8 inches x 7.5 inches.

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S ET H CLA RK . Aerial III, 2019. Collage, Charcoal, Pastel,

Graphite, Acrylic on Wood. 36 inches x 36 inches.

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SET H CLA RK . Fragments V, 2018. Collage, Charcoal, Pastel,

Graphite, Acrylic on Wood. 40 inches x 30 inches.

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SET H CLA RK . Ghost II, 2017. Collage, Charcoal, Pastel, Graphite,

Acrylic on Wood. 48 inches x 33 inches.

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SET H CLA RK . Mass VII, 2015. Collage, Charcoal, Pastel,

Graphite, Acrylic on Wood. 42 iches x 33 inches.

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SET H CLA RK . House Portrait, 2019. Collage, Charcoal, Pastel,

Graphite, Acrylic on Wood. 20 inches x 16 inches.

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LISA ROSENBERG

Praise on Pi Day To praise the nonrepeating, I will praise the universe: each smooth circumference, each jagged fit and fractal-sculpted face of life and not-life. They’re everywhere you look.

The universe, each smooth circumference of our daily mess, won’t fit in simple bins of life and not-life. They’re everywhere you look and elsewhere, too. What surprises us is not our daily mess, unfit for simple bins, but each repeated lesson learned anew and elsewhere, too. What surprises us is not that we forget, but that our learning shifts with each repeated lesson learned anew.

The aster blooms. The supernova cools.

We might forget that all our learning shifts into the pupil of the coming day.

The aster blooms. The supernova cools its jagged fit and fractal-sculpted face into the pupil of a coming day where praise is nonrepeating, and we praise.

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JOSHUA GARCIA

Praise Chinese magnolia blossoms are browning on the ground because it is spring, and as I attempt to string together something poetic about this, something about being two things at once, about both living and dying, I wonder if it simply is what it is: Chinese magnolia blossoms browning on the ground because it is spring.

And while I visit two friends and their newborn daughter, the father praises the mother for many things but also for not complaining about her perineal tearing.

Though relieved I will never need to rise to this particular praise, I watch the mother lift her body from the couch to tend to herself with envy because I am a man, and I love men, and two men cannot from their own bodies produce a child like the one in my arms, which is what it is.

And on Durant Avenue, a motorcyclist drives ahead of me, and something in the roar of his exhaust, something in the way his shirt flaps around his back, the way he rides so steadily into the purpling evening makes me wonder if I, too, move through the world like this, if I, with some radiance, drive home with the windows down to take out the recycling like my roommate asked me to.

And I arrive to a dog panting with his nose pressed to the window where a ghost of his longing lingers when he races to the door to greet me, and I know how he felt as he waited for someone to come home because when I watch people kissing on TV my mouth almost moves with theirs.

And I don’t know where I’m going with this because I think before I speak but say what I will regret anyway, and though I’ve read the signs all wrong, I still look for meaning in birds that shatter across the sky like tea leaves because it is beautiful, whatever it is.

And the doorbell rings as I eat leftover pizza with kimchi on it, and my cheeks flush when the UPS guy calls me bud, as if I might bloom into something he’d press his nose to, and I forget to take out the recycling, and like the pollen that dusts our cars and collects itself in the cracks of the sidewalk, my sex colors everything, boisterous and yellow,

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but also sharp like the green of a palmetto frond, but also sanguine like hibiscus and laceleaf and amaryllis, but also the million shades of blue that occur when the ocean and the sky French kiss, and I will not look away from it, however trembling my lips may be.

 

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ANNE MCGRATH

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I H I DE in the church kitchen, stuffing coffee pods into the whining Keurig. My

grandpa Joe lies in the sanctuary, surrounded by mourners who say Midwestern things like “he looks good all cleaned up.” I don’t need to hear that. His image has burned itself into my skull, and all the concentrated, shade-grown, fair-trade coffee in Columbia can’t wash it away. A crisp white button-down shirt peeks out from beneath a brand-new pair of bib overalls. His fishing hat, dotted with lures, lies next to his still body. A small gold crucifix and a tiny dreamcatcher cling to the chain of a pocket watch on his silent chest. The watch still ticks, but it will eventually die. Time kills everything.

For years, I had planned on writing a book about Grandpa Joe. A redneck Santa Claus, he lived each day as if it were Christmas morning. For him, fishing was analogous to life. He once told me, “You’ve got troubles. Cast out a line and watch ’em float away.” He handed you a fishing rod, a lure, and an invitation to forget.

Fishing is about timing. If you don’t set the hook, you lose the catch. I had missed my chance: Grandpa Joe got away. A few weeks in his canoe may have saved me from my cynicism, and our conversations may have answered my many questions about his past life, his people, and all the secrets he kept hidden behind his smile.

Grandpa Joe was a kind soul and an excellent listener, but he didn’t often talk about himself. The obituary tucked in my back pocket is full of secrets. He joined the Armed Forces in 1942. I carry his American-flag uniform patch in my wallet. My mom said he had been in World War II—probably an Army man—but no one knew what his stint of duty was like, what he did, or where he’d gone. He was preceded in death by his wife, Lometa, son Billy, and an infant daughter. Grandma Lometa succumbed to breast cancer in 1988. Billy fell through the center of a grain elevator when I was just a baby.

I had never heard of the infant daughter until I read the obituary.

I struggle to separate the known from the unknown. We celebrated Grandpa Joe’s birthday on Halloween. He said it was around that time of year, but no one knew the exact date. A few months before he died, he’d told us that he was half Cherokee on his mother’s side. We knew he had native blood, but not the extent of it.

When Grandpa Joe returned home from the war, he bought a gas station the size of a single-car garage in the tiny town of Sharpsburg, Iowa. My memories of him begin with that gas station.

Grandpa Joe often left the station unattended to go fishing or hang out at the café across the street. He trusted everyone to write down their own gas bill but didn’t much care if they failed to do so. He changed oil and fixed flat tires, refusing to take money from people who couldn’t afford the service. Children’s bike tires were always free and came with a can of pop from the Coke machine next to the café.

It wasn’t that he could afford to work for free. Grandpa Joe lived in poverty. His family lived in chilly, loose houses that leaked during rainstorms. After Grandma died, his supper consisted of canned soup heated on the woodstove in the same

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saucepan that he used to make coffee. His vehicles barely ran, and one pickup truck even lacked a steering wheel. He drove it using a pair of vice-grip pliers locked on to the steering column. Still, he gave offerings at two churches every Sunday. He handed out full-sized candy bars and pop to kids on Halloween. On Christmas, every child he knew would receive a gift. He attended the estate auctions of deceased neighbors and bought everything that no one else would, even if he couldn’t use it.

When Grandpa Joe retired and the gas station was bulldozed, the assortment of knickknacks, power tools, and small appliances he had bought in those auctions went in to his “store,” a crumbling, forgotten building on a dead Main Street. Once, he met a family who didn’t own a television. He told them to go ahead and pick out a used one from the unlocked store. They took every television he had as well as a couple of VCRs, then skipped town. My furious mother complained that they had ripped him off.

Grandpa Joe shrugged and said he guessed that they needed things more than he did.

Just before Halloween, Grandpa Joe’s hip hurt badly enough that he could not get in his canoe. He wanted it fixed, so he could keep on fishing. The doctors wouldn’t do the hip replacement until they took care of the swollen thyroid that bulged like a softball in the side of his neck. In the process, they discovered blood in his stomach. Then, they found cancer. A week before Christmas, he was in hospice. Three days later, he was dead. I didn’t even make it back in time to see him.

In the sanctuary, I get a hug from Clayton, a dangerous-looking man wrapped in scars and tattoos. My grandpa Joe brought Clayton and his family to Thanksgiving dinner several years ago. They had moved to Sharpsburg to get their sons away from urban California but didn’t know anyone in the area. Within a week they were ready to give up and go back. That’s when Grandpa Joe showed up on their front porch carrying a bundle of fishing rods.

“He asked if he could take my boys fishing,” Clayton says, his low voice shaking. “If you ever need anything, I’m here. You’re my family.”

Several family members are “related” through grandpa Joe. Maybe they didn’t have anywhere else to go or just needed someone at the time. We never asked, but we always accepted them. His obituary lists among his children an unrelated man who lost his dad in a farming accident. A cousin on my dad’s side once said that it never occurred to her that she wasn’t related to Joe Brammer. She thought he was everyone’s grandpa Joe. In a way, he was. Everyone was “little sister” or “little brother,” no matter their age.

I walk alone with my coffee to the back of the church, where I eavesdrop on the stories of brothers and sisters who I’ve never met. Grandpa Joe showed up at their hospital bedsides, stopped their suicides, saved their marriages, or helped them kick their addictions.

A local preacher tells his story to the small crowd at my back. One rainy day, the preacher’s tire blew out fifteen miles from town. Grandpa Joe rattled up in his old

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pickup truck and gave him a ride. As the preacher waited at home for the rain to stop, Grandpa Joe drove his car in to the driveway. He had already replaced the tire. He refused both the money and a ride back to his truck. The preacher insisted on repaying him. Grandpa Joe said that he could pay him back, but not with money. Instead, if he asked the preacher to visit someone, he would go. No matter who, where, or when.

The preacher promised. Every so often, Grandpa Joe sent the preacher to people who needed him. He never questioned it. He believes that God sent Grandpa Joe to him, and his trust in both strengthens his faith.

The chairs and pews fill quickly. People stand packed together like sardines. They huddle in the nursery surrounded by dolls and blocks, listening to the service over the speaker system and crying.

After the funeral, a car horn bleats outside. Through the window, I see my 350-pound cousin Wade packed into the driver’s seat of Grandpa Joe’s old pickup. Like every Christmas season, a five-foot-tall fake Christmas tree stands bolted straight-up on the roof. A wire from the cigarette lighter powers strands of colored lights.

Wade flips on the Christmas tree lights and leads the procession to the cemetery.

We pass the crumbling house where my grandpa had lived. We pass the lake, now private property, that he helped design so local kids could fish. We pass the volunteer fire department where he served for fifty years. A sign marks the “historical site of Joe’s Gas Station.” A memorial bench sits in front of the blacked-out café.

Grandpa Joe’s life touched everything that we pass. He fished the ponds. He hunted the fields and ran his racoon dogs in the woods. He sat on the porches of the farmhouses, now empty, their owners riding in cars behind us. We trail the Christmas tree, a lure of twinkling lights, to the cemetery. Cars stretch back to the church in a long, crawling line, their headlights glowing—following.

At his gravesite, I step up to the headstone that holds his name and watch the steady stream of cars pour through the gates. Overwhelmed by the crowd, I read the obituary again, mourning both my grandfather and the book I will never write.

Grandpa Joe’s picture is printed on the cover. He smiles widely, cradling a bass in two hands—my grandfather as I remember him. Matthew 4:19 captions the picture.

I remembered the story from a long-ago Sunday school class, before college, fatherhood, a divorce, and a stressful career. Jesus’s first followers were fishermen.

“Follow me,” he said, “and I will make you fishers of men.”

They’d laid down their nets and followed him.

Grandpa Joe wasn’t about to lay down his rod and reel, but he was a fisher of men to the core. So many of us floundered beneath the water, drowning, only to see Grandpa Joe’s smile as he cast us a line. That—more than anything I ever could have learned about his past—was worth knowing.

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CATHERINE TURNBULL

Looking at American Gothic I am too sad to think about this painting, to pay attention to its stylized trees, like a fresco’s, or its blank blue sky.

I have no words for the churchy clothes— white collar, black coat—shepherd’s crook in the guise of a Trinity-tined fork— It’s clear disaster is not averted by the lightning-rod spire, the modest lace that turns the arched window into stained glass. I’m done asking why the farmer, like Jesus, looks right at us while his Mary looks at who’s coming up the drive. I don’t like definitions in poems, don’t like how they say, let me teach you something, so I can’t tell you that gothic is “characterized by the converging of weights and strains at isolated points.”

I want to look away from what we worship at the unsightly American cathedral, where one guy’s gritty hands are always enough.

I’m sick to death of the tough carpenter doing it all with some slats and some boards and a hardware store. Maybe the Sears catalog. I’m too blue to buy it. Too blue to keep wanting to do everything my own damned self.

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JENDI REITER

Buzz Aldrin Takes Communion on the Moon I don’t believe I will rise again like a wafer in an astronaut’s glove, flimsy disc set against the real delicious zero of infinite black.

Know these words you read were put in my mouth like the sticky dough the Irish priests presented as a god’s body to bent-down children.

I’m bones with my arms around bones of my granddaughter in a scorched field, dismembered a quarter century past suing to block the men of NASA from forcing their god on the moon.

Lovely indifference of radio waves, carrying alike the claiming words of man and me, “Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the most hated woman in America,” which is to say, a woman, like the Statue of Liberty.

When your children don’t slay the heathen and the lamb by daily recitation in school it’s me you could thank, if I wasn’t ashes.

That suit-inflated Presbyterian is still out there rhapsodizing about low-gravity wine curling up the side of his chalice gracefully as a teenage centerfold.

When you look up tonight into the cold black sea of light-years don’t think of my son or the flames he imagines licking my vanished soul, but praise the dust of rocks so far-off no foot will ever stamp it with small theories, and let it, because unreachable, be heaven enough.

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D O YO U K N OW the house on Barrett? Olive green and ancient, it sits squat on a

corner lot, the roof a mild pitch, not good for snow country, not sharp enough to shrug off winter. It’s a two-story, but barely, as if fixed in a crouch and hunkered to handle blows. It shakes with the traffic strumming off Washington Bridge and overlooks the entrance to the hospital, so there’s always a chance, if you live in that house, that you might glance out the window and catch a moment of medical drama—severed pinky, busted leg, quickening contractions, a stroke. The house itself is a troubled heart. Its walls poorly sieve the sirens. And the inside: buildups, constrictions.

To feel at ease in this particular location, you must first get younger, say nine or ten. It can’t be your house, but your grandparents’, just down the road from Evan’s Skateland, where your mom and dad drop you off on Saturdays so you can roll around on a polished rink for three hours. The house smells delicious, like caldo verde, and sweet bread, and the dish your grandmother calls mul: fried peppers and linguiça, threaded with egg. It is good to be a child in this house, even if a pealing ambulance startles you and the picture of Jesus holding a thorny heart disturbs you and you’re not allowed to fool around in the living room. Plastic sheathes the couch and chairs, individually wraps them, like vacuum-sealed meats.

There are butterscotch candies in the glass bowl by the rosary beads. One tree out back, every September, gives us pears, pears, pears. On Friday nights, Grandma spends an hour combing and twisting strands of your hair around strips of rags, then lets you rest your tortured scalp on her pillow, lets you curl up against her rump, your hand in her hair—long, black, beautifully loose hair. In the morning, she makes you coffee, milky and sweet. When you ask nicely, Grandpa rolls up his sleeve and presents his tattoo. He flexes his bicep and shakes the hula girl’s breasts. You note that Grandpa always smells like pomade and beer, and you don’t mention it. When you hear him get angry and shout at your grandma or Dad, you slink into Grandma’s room, play with the button collection, and wait until things settle down. You know what to do. After all, you hear shouts at home. A glass or pan gets thrown; curses hurled. Mom leaves for a few days, comes back, starts over.

Grandma’s big glass jar holds hundreds of buttons—old, old buttons. You pour them out on the candlewick spread and separate them: bone and brass and cloth and wood.

If the bellows are still springing up the steep stairs, you divide the buttons further: flat, shank, toggle, pearl.

You wonder about the clothes that lost them. About the people who wore the clothes.

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contributors J E S S E B R E I T E ’s recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in New Orleans Review, Terrain, and Rhino. His chapbook is The Knife Collector, and he is an associate editor for The Good Works Review. He is also librettist for three of Atlanta composer Michael Kurth’s scores.

Jesse teaches high school English in Atlanta where he lives with his wife and son.

J A C K C A M P B E L L J R . writes out of Lawrence, Kansas, where he lives with his wife, son, and their vegetarian pit bull. Jack is a writing MFA candidate at Lindenwood University and holds a master’s degree in literary arts from Fort Hays State University. His fiction and poetry have appeared in over two dozen venues online and in print.

S E T H C L A R K ’s drawings, paintings,

and sculptures have shown nationally, including exhibitions in the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Chautauqua Institution. Recent honors include Best in Show at the Three Rivers Arts Festival and publication in New American Paintings. Clark was named Pittsburgh’s 2015 Emerging Artist of the Year by the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and is the recipient of three Design Excellence Awards from the American Institute of

Graphic Arts, Pittsburgh. He currently resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. www.sethsclark.com holds a BA in English and creative writing from the University of Michigan. He has received a Pushcart Prize nomination for his poetry and was recently shortlisted for the 2019 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. His poetry is forthcoming or has appeared in New England Review, the Cincinnati Review, The Journal, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Sundog Lit, Hobart, Poet Lore, Winter Tangerine, and elsewhere. He lives and writes in Brisbane, Australia.

GAVIN YUAN GAO

lives and writes in Charleston, South Carolina, where he is pursuing an MFA in poetry at the College of Charleston and is an editorial assistant at Crazyhorse. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Nashville Review and Ekstasis Magazine.

JOSHUA GARCIA

L Y N N G O R D O N is a life-long resident of California, where she has worked as a machine operator, a book editor, a research assistant, and a health educator.

Her fiction has appeared in a dozen literary magazines, including Epiphany, the Southampton Review, the Baltimore Review, and Hobart.

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R E B E K A H D E N I S O N H E W I T T holds an MFA from the University of WisconsinMadison, where she was the Martha Meier Renk Distinguished Graduate Fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Stream, Columbia Poetry Review, The Pinch, and Narrative Magazine. She currently lives in Wisconsin where she is a high school librarian and a mom of four small children.

is a queer nonbinary artist with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from Western Washington University. In poetry and prose, Ari grapples with identity, truth, and the sheer beauty of the universe, and is particularly fascinated by birds, stars, and other forms of light. Ari’s writing has been featured in Under the Gum Tree, Oyster River Pages, and Wizards in Space Magazine, among other publications. You can find them online at arikoontz.com.

ARI KOONTZ

For years, K A R E N B J O R K K U B I N has refused to decide whether she is a poet or a violinist, because life is much better when she can be a mix of the two. Her poems and essays have appeared in Spillway, Whale Road Review, Rock & Sling, Off the Coast, How to Pack for

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Church Camp, and American Suzuki Journal, among other publications, as well as in the 2017 Main Street Rag anthology, Of Burgers and Barrooms.

J E D M Y E R S was writing poems as a kid in Philadelphia during the Cold War era. He studied poetry as an undergrad, trained in medicine and psychiatry, settled in Seattle, practiced therapy, raised a family, and kept writing poems. He first sought publication after the events of September 11, 2001. His work is widely published. He sees the arts as our best hope for a more peaceable culture. Jed’s most recent book is The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press).

M E L I S S A O S T R O M is the author of The Beloved Wild (Feiwel & Friends, March 2018), a Junior Library Guild book and an Amelia Bloomer Award selection, and the YA novel Unleaving (Feiwel & Friends, March 2019). Her stories have appeared in the Florida Review, Fourteen Hills, Juked, and Passages North, among other journals, and her flash “Ruinous Finality” was selected for The Best Small Fictions 2019. She teaches at Genesee Community College and lives with her husband and children in Holley, New York. Learn more at www.melissaostrom.com or on Twitter @melostrom.

contributors

has fond memories of a three-story treehouse her dad built between the backyard chestnut and maple. These days, she lives among tree-huggers in Washington State, where her home is bordered by a little patch of forest—Douglas fir, bigleaf maple, Rainier cherry, ocean spray, and holly.

Raised Mormon, she is fascinated by the concept of the feminine divine and is working on a collection of poems and prose about God the Mother. daynapatterson.com DAYNA PATTERSON

P R E E T I P A R I K H is a poet and essayist currently pursuing her MFA in creative writing degree at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.

Her poems are published in or are forthcoming from journals such as Mom Egg Review, Literary Mama, the Hong Kong Review, and others. Born and raised in India, Preeti now lives in Ohio with her family. More details about her work can be found at preetiparikh.com.

is a native of Washington, DC, living in North Carolina. He received his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has published fiction and nonfiction in the Iowa Review, JOHN PICARD

Narrative Magazine, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ascent, and elsewhere. A collection of his stories, Little Lives, was published by Main Street Rag. S A L L Y R O S E N K I N D R E D is the author of Book of Asters and No Eden (Mayapple Press), and her most recent chapbook is Says the Forest to the Girl (Porkbelly Press). Her poems have appeared in the Gettysburg Review, the Massachusetts Review, and Kenyon Review Online. She loves astronomy, though she’s hopeless at it, and drinking tea, at which she consistently excels.

J E N D I R E I T E R is the author of the novel Two Natures (Saddle Road Press, 2016), the short story collection An Incomplete List of My Wishes (Sunshot Press, 2018), and four poetry books and chapbooks, most recently Bullies in Love (Little Red Tree, 2015). Two Natures won the Rainbow Award for Best Gay Contemporary Fiction and was a finalist for the Book Excellence Awards and the Lascaux Prize for Fiction. Reiter is the editor of WinningWriters.com, an online resource site for creative writers.

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Poet and recovering engineer L I S A R O S E N B E R G holds degrees in physics and creative writing, and worked for many years in the space program. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and private pilot, she served as 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, California. Her debut collection, A Different Physics, received the 2017 Red Mountain Poetry Prize. Lisa speaks, consults, and instructs, bringing tools of science and poetry to industry, arts, and education. She was recently awarded a 2020 Djerassi Residency for Scientist-Artists.

grew up on the East Coast of the United States, where she studied at the University of New Hampshire and Sarah Lawrence College before she was exiled to the Midwest for employment’s sake. Her poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, the Michigan Poet, Dos Passos Review, Green Mountains Review, and others.

A chapbook, The Chocolatier Speaks of His Wife, was published in 2008 by MI Writers Cooperative Press, and a full-length manuscript is looking for a publisher.

is a poet and photographer with an MFA from American University. She is an Alabama native currently homesteading in the outskirts of DC with her two children and husband. She is a recent participant of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and her work has appeared in the Potomac Review, Driftwood Press, Obsidian, Mezzo Cammin, and the American Journal of Poetry.

is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Phyllis SmartYoung Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of the Inflectionist Review and works as a freelance poetry editor and literary agent.

AMY TROTTER

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CATHERINE TURNBULL

JOHN SIBLEY WILLIAMS

last note ON SHELTER

The apple tree out back grew small sour fruit, so my parents ignored it. We kids tried an apple each year, hopeful. Each year, we were disappointed. It was great for climbing, though. Its branches were low slung, horizontal in places where you could stretch out with a book. There were plenty of nooks for birds to nest, and once my sister and I yanked hair from our heads to weave around the twiggy enclosure of a tiny blue egg. Growing up with six siblings, the house often felt crowded, and I was a middle child.

If I wanted to hide from my stepmom’s chores, if I felt ignored by my dad, or battered by older brothers—whenever I felt small and sour myself, I’d climb the old apple tree, dwell in its dappled green.

DAYNA PATTERSON, POETRY

Homes wrecked by war, flood, fire, storm; lost to gang exploits, ethnic cleansings, state terror; indigenous dwellings lost to industrial deforestation; wealth concentration stripping millions of home—every day the cherished right of shelter taken or denied. Shelter comes to mean something ancient again—a stand of trees, a stony overhang, cloth held up with sticks, an abandoned craft’s hull. Human again means wanderer, nomad. And we all wander this wilderness between birth and death, hauling our mortal frame tents with us, long as they last.

I worked with my husband for many years in group homes for foster children or kids who couldn’t live with their families for a variety of reasons. It was always our goal to create spaces of shelter, physical places that felt like some sort of home, a safety net, for however long they stayed with us. I often question if we succeeded—with so many people bringing tumultuous stories under one roof, it often felt like a storm was brewing. Still, I hope that the kids in our care felt they had the shelter they needed to let those storms come and to be supported through them.

REBEKAH DENISON HEWITT, POETRY

We often hear the analogy of art as shelter: a refuge and dwelling place for expression, whether or not we choose to share the product. To this, I offer a corollary of art as shelter from the expected, and shelter for the discovering of what we did not set out to make, know, or find. The process of creating a work of art through engagement with its materials, our curiosity, and the gifts of form, is a process that can disrupt our habitual ways of thinking and acting, and allow us to bypass predictable outcomes.

When the habitual no longer serves us, may we find shelter for discovery through the making of art.

LISA ROSENBERG, POETRY

JED MYERS, POETRY

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SETH CLARK. Siding Study, 2015. Collage, Charcoal, Pastel, Graphite, Acrylic on Wood. 42 inches x 72 inches.