Issue 54: The Everyday

THE EVERYDAY / 54

Spring 2020 $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: MIRIAM RUDOLPH. My Minneapolis, 2014. Double-plate color etching, relief roll through stencil. 24 inches x 36 inches.

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

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This issue was made possible by the Friends of Ruminate, whose generous Spring 2020 donations gave us the financial support to make this issue of Ruminate possible. From the bottom of our hearts, we thank you!

Benefactors: Kim and Steve Franchini, Grace Church, Keira Havens, Kelly & Sara McCabe, Randall VanderMey, Janice Van Dyke-Zeilstra, Lisa and Ralph Wegner, and John Zeilstra Patrons: Judith Dupree, Kelly Emslie, Jennifer Fueston, Kristin George Bagdanov, Katie and Tim Koblenz, Scott Laumann, Robyn Lee, Amy Lowe, Trey Morrison, Carolyn Mount, Anne Pageau, Nicole Roloff, Bruce Ronda, Cheryl Russell, Travis Schantz, Sophfronia Scott Gregory, Lynda Smith Bugge, and Amanda Wilkinson Sponsors: Symen Brouwers, Amanda Hitpas, Lary Kleeman, Carol Lacy, Rebecca Marsh, Alex Mouw, Richard Osler, Paula Sayers, Meg Schiel, Judith Stamm, Seamus Sweeney, and David Tarpenning

contents

NOTES

Editor’s v Readers’ 6 Contributors’ 86 Last 88

FICTION

Shelter Break, Stacy Trautwein Burns 74 NONFICTION

The Destiny of Cumin, Jasmine V. Bailey 12 A True Prayer Is One You Do Not Understand, Kelly J. Beard 24 How To Ruin a Persian Wedding, Atash Yaghmaian 60 VISUAL ART

The art of Daniel Seth Kraus 41–44 The art of Letitia Huckaby 45–48 The art of Andrew Huot 49–52 The art of Miriam Rudolph 53–56

POETRY

19 What Are Poets For, Meredith Stricker 20 New Year, Erin Malone 21 meditation with a question, Lary Kleeman 22 When It Comes to Change, Grief Is More Useful Than Nostalgia, Chelsea Dingman 23 Marriage, Katie Marya 36 Losses, Sneha Subramanian Kanta 38 Clay Bodies, Nick Yingling 39 Isaac, Richard Brostoff 40 Aubade: Troposphere, Myronn Hardy 57 The land begins its vanishing— Kristin Macintyre 58 On & on, Sara Burant 72 Inherit the Wind, Charity Yoro 73 Extinction Theory, Alyse Bensel

staff

DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS

Amanda Hitpas MANAGING EDITOR

Rachel King 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

PROOFREADER

Sarah Wheeler PRINT + WEB DESIGN

Scott Laumann ASSOCIATE READER

Amy Sawyer GUEST PANELISTS

Gyasi Byng Elizabeth Dark Porter Huddleston Cherie Nelson Zeynep Ozturk Craig Reinbold Isaac Villegas Paula Weinman INTERNS

Cherie Nelson Natalie Peterson

editor’s note

“The commonplace is the thing. But it’s hard to find. Then if you believe in it, have a love for it, this specific thing will become universal.” —Andrew Wyeth

When did you first read Ruminate? What drew you into the magazine? I first encountered Ruminate twelve years ago when I was reviewing literary journals for NewPages. I was initially drawn to the beauty of the physical object—the size, the cover artwork, the layout. Then, as I began to read, I was drawn to the writers’ and artists’ intentional focus on the commonplace, the everyday, on their acknowledgement that the ordinary itself could be sacred—and I felt a kinship with the magazine. At the time, I was learning that for me attainable truth wasn’t found primarily in ideas, but within sensory details, moments, and narratives.

In one of my favorite books, Working, Studs Terkel asks dozens of workers— from grocery clerk to financial banker, from farmer to hockey player—about their jobs. Most jobs have a daily monotony innate in them, but somehow, through the personality of the interviewee or the ritual involved in the tasks or the surprising occupational details, these accounts have fascinated readers for almost fifty years.

The book’s subtitle, People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, contains the key: Terkel succeeds because he asks how workers feel. If he hadn’t included emotions as well as facts, then the interviews wouldn’t have engaged readers, and the book wouldn’t have become art.

One stereotype of an artist is a dreamer who turns their back on the world.

Although solitude can be a necessary part of the artistic process, the impetus to make art usually comes not from retreating, but from being an intent observer or participant in the world. Artists or writers, overwhelmed or in awe of what they witness, experience, or imagine, feel compelled to make something from it, something they feel can be conveyed only through their chosen medium. Through that creation, artists do us all a service; they wake us up, they encourage us to delight in—or question—or champion—the everyday that is always there.

Thank you for intentionally seeking the commonplace within the pages of Ruminate.

I look forward to going on this journey with you.

Sincerely, Rachel King

readers’ notes ON THE EVERYDAY

I enter the largely vacant parking ramp through the car entrance with my fiveyear-old son, Baek. We make our way hand-in-hand toward our car on Level C. Baek is slack-jawed as he walks past the empty parking stalls, stacked like blank dominoes up the ramp.

I’m hurrying—not because we have anywhere to be, but because it’s my default. A busy mom of two, my linear mind plots the next step before I finish the one I’m on.

Baek is silent. With his speech and developmental delays, I know—I know—I need to slow down if I want to catch a glimpse of what’s in his mind. While his body can hurry, his words can’t be rushed.

The gears of his mind grind toward what might be, not what needs to be done.

I feel a slight resistance on my arm, then his hand slipping out of mine. I stop and turn to Baek, prepared to prod him toward the car.

He is standing in the middle of the open end of a parking stall, his eyes wide and his body framed by the two marigold lines.

He scans up and down the row, which is vacant except for our car and one other. I scan the row, too, wondering just what it is he sees in the dark, dingy ramp.

“Mama,” he says quietly, his voice pulsing with wonder. “Is this where they park all the imaginary cars?”

Every time my mother saw a barn painted “Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco, Treat Yourself to the Best,” she would tell the story of her grandfather who chased away the company men who wanted his barn for advertisement of their product.

“Old fool,” she said. “They would have paid him enough for a new plow.”

At one time, over twenty thousand Mail Pouch tobacco barns littered the rural landscapes of Ohio, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

Today, they’re not so prevalent, and the barns that still stand usually only sport faded messages that seem to belong to the past.

Still, whenever I see a Mail Pouch tobacco barn I think of my great grandfather. I didn’t know him and I have no other stories about him. But I am sympathetic; I somehow understand his actions. I can picture him standing there, an immigrant farmer in the strange worn Alleghenies of northern Pennsylvania, scowling as the men drove away.

His frown masked his fear.

He was afraid of their strange language, their strange, neat, pressed suits that didn’t wrinkle, the strange way that their cars stayed clean, even as they drove away through backroad dirt and dust.

KAREN WEYANT, WARREN, PA

SARA MARTIN, ST. PAUL, MN

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Alerted by the crunch of her slippers in the snow, hundreds of little brown birds in the bushes quiver. Each winter morning, she hauls a pail down the steps, scoops out one, two, three cups, flings seed right and left, goes back in and emerges with a pot of water steaming like a cauldron.

There’s a pie tin frozen to the earth beneath the cherry tree. She frees it with her toe, stoops, taps it against a rock until a disk of ice pops out, refills it. All over the backyard, pie-sized orbs of ice.

We stand in the bedroom window, elbow-to-elbow, and watch the little brown birds swarm, tides of them incoming and outgoing, attuned to some primal pattern. Collared doves drop down off the wire to strut and peck, peck and strut. We listen for the clarion call of the jay to thrill through the neighborhood, summoning the tribe that will arrive from all sides and scatter the LBBs in loud clouds. Then comes a squirrel and away the jays, complaining, and the dogs in their pen are crazed. By midmorning, every last seed has been cracked open, the kernel extracted, and a film of ice has formed upon the tin, and Fern, surveying the scene from the window—the doves brooding on the wire, the squirrel on the fence, the LBBs in the bushes sidestepping and twitching—frowns.

“It’s like nothing has changed,” she exclaims. “They’re all still hungry! And cold, too.”

And so out again into the snow she goes with pail and pot to feed the huddled masses.

RICK KEMPA, GRAND JUNCTION, CO

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When we were kids, my brother Mark and I decided to plant one of our walkie talkies with the “talk” button taped down just outside the kitchen doorway so we could spy on our parents from another room. Their voices were rigid and hushed. It’s possible they were deliberating over selling the farm and moving south, hashing out what to do about my alcoholic grandmother, or perhaps even wondering aloud if their marriage was going to make it another thirty years.

I don’t know because I was only focused on the tones, the colors, and the textures coming through the device. I imagined my mother sitting at the table in her bright blue and purple terrycloth bathrobe, smoking a cigarette while rubbing her thumb and index finger together in a smooth, swift rhythm—a curious tic that seemed to calm the tension that frequently surrounded her.

I envisioned my father standing at the stove making her scrambled eggs for breakfast, wearing one of those soft flannel shirts that made me want to rub my face in his belly. I heard the percolator hissing and popping, like the deep, raspy breath of a dragon, and wondered if my father would rescue my mother from its voracious appetite for grown-ups. And I imagined that Kitchen Mouse, who lived underneath our refrigerator, was poking out its nose and looking for toast crumbs, unaware that EmmyLou, the one-eyed calico cat, was sprawled out on the window sill just a few feet away.

readers’ notes

Each detail became a part of a much larger story, one that spoke of living happily ever after despite the lurking shadows.

LISA ROUGH, BLACK MOUNTAIN, NC

It’s easy to get bogged down by emails, to resent committee meetings or to dismiss the endless pleas for volunteers to facilitate community events on campus. It’s easy to begrudge the countless demands to be engaging, to avoid cancelling class, to pilot new technology, and to stay up-todate in our respective fields.

Sure, the “daunting mundane” that characterizes my everyday as a community college instructor threatens to frustrate, overwhelm, and demoralize—until it’s put into perspective.

It’s hard to pursue higher education.

It’s hard for the student who battles addiction, or the student who finds herself homeless, midsemester, scrambling to secure necessities for her children. It’s hard for the student who lacks a ride to and from school in an area where public transportation doesn’t exist; for the student who considers gas money a luxury; and for students whose family members sabotage their efforts to learn more about the world and themselves.

It’s hard for the students who grew up in foster care; for those who struggle with anxiety and depression, which makes

getting out of bed a monumental task; for students who return to class a mere ten days after giving birth.

Although these students often receive need-based grants to attend college, steps beyond that can roadblock our low-income, traditionally underrepresented population.

And so, a bit of perspective infuses my everyday with renewed purpose and a clearer focus to tune out the minutia and invest my time where it counts: helping students realize their dreams.

HOLLY GOSLIN, JUDSONIA, AR

Orange seems an impractical color for an airplane, for a tin can about to hurtle across Europe.

Yet the Easy Jet flight roars away from the runway in Pisa despite my deep and abiding fear that the back of the plane will open up and suck me back to earth, where I belong. I brace myself for unfortunate twin pigeons to simultaneously stifle those orange turbines propelling us against gravity.

My soundtrack for impending death by airplane plays each time I break my promise to myself not to get on another airplane. The soundtrack merges drums, death metal, banjos, Icelandic yelling, and anything that drowns out an engine roar. Preparing for death the first fifteen minutes on an airplane seems statistically sound to me—after all, it is tied for

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landing as the most dangerous interval of a flight. I tell myself if I can survive fifteen minutes of long, artful, Icelandic yelling, then the other side of the clouds will welcome me to a space where my parasympathetic nervous system will allow me a deeper breath.

Fifteen minutes later, the pilot has attempted exactly zero emergency tactical maneuvers, and a breath unfurls from some tightly clenched place in my body as the landing gear retreats. Ocean and dots of light unfold outside the window, and I hand my inquiring partner an earful of softer acoustics. We spend another fifteen minutes just like that, holding hands, splitting headphones and climbing towards the clouds.

RACHEL WILKERSON, WACO, TX

I am a tourist in this Caribbean ocean, on vacation from December, swimming too far from the boat when I decide not to worry for a while—about swimming too far, about my frail, rickety aunt back home, about all the accolades I don’t receive and the money I don’t earn, about the sense of failure that plagues me no matter how much evidence I array against it.

As soon as I make this decision (don’t you dare worry!) two sharks appear, swim in slow drowsy circles over the vibrant reef, twenty, thirty feet below, seemingly unaware of me, of each other, of the magic of sunlight slanting through the water making a glinting web around

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me, around them and, even though they are sharks, I somehow stick to my miraculous decision not to worry.

The three of us swim and glide, together and separate, them at home and fearless, me—like I said—a tourist, marveling at the neighborhood.

FRANK DIPALERMO, SAN DIEGO, CA

Halfway through an unremarkable day filled with small tasks, I dashed off to the library. As I bustled to the hold area, anticipating my next errand and making plans for later, I was dimly aware that the library was unusually noisy. When I stopped to check out my book I realized the “noise” was a baby across the room in a stroller, about nine months old, gleefully babbling away in a piercing voice that, while perhaps not raucous at home, certainly seemed so in a library.

I stood across the room, grinning, captivated, delighted by what I heard in that babble: the exuberance of experiment, play, and self-expression.

The baby’s father was nearby but he did not try to hush the child. Nor did a librarian. In fact, no one else seemed to even notice. I exhaled in relief, grateful that this library was a safe place for children, and that this baby, loudly and unselfconsciously declaring selfhood, was apparently loved and tended.

I sent a silent “thank you” and went on my way.

ANNE PEEK, BLOOMINGTON, MN

readers’ notes

Mostly, as I went about my day, nothing seemed wrong. I’d hop out of bed, stretch or twist in random moments, climb stairs two at a time, even sprint to catch a bus without my sciatic nerve complaining. It only flared up on court.

I went to practices, warmed up, did shooting and passing drills, then headed for the sidelines once the intensity picked up. There I tried to keep active while staying out of everybody’s way.

One practice, doing dribbling drills in a corner, figure eights, the spider, that sort of thing, not wanting to lose my feel for the ball, Coach shouted at me. He was on the other side of the gym, ball under his arm, glaring.

“Can’t you see I’m talking?” he said.

“You deaf?”

It was the first time he had addressed me all week.

I slunk into to the stands, only watching and listening after that.

And so it went. Every day, I wasted two hours doing nothing. I could’ve been at the West Brighton YMCA, or at open gym at Holy Family, keeping my jumper honed and my body warm, or even just working on my handle down in my basement.

But that would have set me apart. I was a member of a team. I would never ask Coach if I could go off on my own. What if he forgot about me?

As the newest church choir soprano, I’m becoming accustomed to joining my voice—still shaky with nerves—with others. To hear the parts commingle and swell from our pews to the right of the altar, where a statue of Mary holds an infant Jesus on her lap. My own boys, twin tweens, don’t clamber for my lap anymore. I am no longer needed to keep the peace in the pew, so I joined the choir for Christmas’s glorias and stayed.

Soon it will be both Ordinary Time and ordinary time. Not every song can be a gloria; not every day a holiday, an anointing. We are all a little peaky with high notes, fats, and sugar, in need of a tonic. I remember the glorious day of my boys’ baptism, chrism anointing their pinched infant foreheads, marking them God’s and ours. But more than that, I remember the restaurant meal after, a big group of us at a long table by the windows overlooking the parking lot.

It was a Greek place in a strip mall anchored by pawn shops and cell phone stores. But the salted bread arrived warm, puffed, and steaming. Not wanting to miss such mundane bliss, I nursed the boys at the table.

REBECCA MOON RUARK, GALESVILLE, MD

JOHN JULIUS REEL, SEVILLE, SPAIN

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2020 VanderMey Nonfiction Prize SPONSORED BY DR. RANDALL VANDERMEY

F I R ST P L AC E

S E C O N D P L AC E

JASMINE V. BAILEY

KELLY J. BEARD

HO N O RAB LE ME N T I O N ATASH YAGHMAIAN

F I NALI STS

AVRA ARON, KAIMANA FARRIS, DOROTHY NEAGLE, ALEXANDRA LOEB, SALLY PEARSON, ARIELLE SCHUSSLER, JAMIE SMITH, SHANNON TSONIS, SHANNON YARBROUGH

FINAL JUDGE BRIANNA VAN DYKE WRITES:

“Jamine V. Bailey’s ‘Destiny of Cumin’ offers a wide-searching exploration of food and slavery and motherhood and becomes an essay about power and love and what it means to live among the contradictions of our own hearts.

What a lovely and moving piece.”

is the founder of Ruminate and happily served for thirteen years as Ruminate’s editor-in-chief. She earned her MA in literature from Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins with her husband and their two children. Brianna is currently a student at the Living School through The Center for Action and Contemplation. More at briannavandyke.com.

BRIANNA VAN DYKE

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J A S MI N E V . BA I L EY

O N C E I HA D A CHIL D.

Forget when: let’s say two years ago. Since then, nights are part of day. My friend says, “How was your weekend?” and I don’t know what she’s talking about. All I can remember is struggling with black beans, a struggle that feels like it’s been going on for two weeks, but has been going on for seven years. The Biblical beauty of this fact should mean that some powerful (if unforeseen) resolution is at hand.

Two weeks ago, I became the latest person to buy an Instant Pot, which is a little like finding Jesus. By which I mean that sometimes love is strongest when it’s new. That can be so with Jesus and Instant Pots as well as slender boys. I started delicately by steaming eggs and green beans, then went in hard with black beans. It says everything, the attempt at black beans—it says that I dream of a kitchen that produces the kind of food it takes a dedicated, full-time cook to make while still spending no more than an hour a day in that kitchen. My favorite part of cooking is the dreaming about it. Often, by the time a particularly onerous dish is finished, I would prefer something else for dinner. When I make black beans, I usually wish we were having pasta. * TH E P ROB L EM is Dan, and the problem is everything wonderful about Dan.

Cosmopolitan, relentlessly moral, he is the kind of man who speaks three foreign languages fluently and three more very well. He is that person, but he’s also that kind of person. After two years doing research in Russia for a PhD in political science, he did a year of field work in Brazil, and though he’ll tell you he loves Russia, though he’ll revisit Russia every couple of years, he loves Brazil. In Russia, he lived with an old woman who served him meals as part of his rent. Her favorite dishes were soggy, fried cauliflower and beef heart. Russia was like that. In Brazil, the weather was warm, bikinis abounded, and everyone seemed glad to be alive. He learned about feijoada, and a sweet old woman, the grandchild of a slave, taught him to make a simple version: black beans, a little cured pork, onions, garlic, and cumin.

Imagining Dan’s experience during that year, several before we would meet, I am reminded of the great Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade. His poem, “Infância” (“Childhood”), begins by setting up the quintessential mythic portrayal of happy youth: My father rode off on his horse to the fields.

My mother sat in a chair and sewed.

My little brother slept.

And I, on my own among the mango trees, read the story of Robinson Crusoe.

A long story that never ends.

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This opening would be too on-the-nose if it weren’t the poet’s actual biography, and he is careful not to miss any detail of comfort and security that would matter to a child: both parents are present, the father is engaged in remunerated work, and is at least a horse owner, if not a confirmed landowner (which in real life, he was). The mother and younger sibling are quiet, at peace, while the book the narrator reads promises endless entertainment. The child speaker is at the grammatical center of every sentence.

The poet then disrupts the myth he had etched so carefully.

The speaker hears a voice: “that learned lullabies / in shanties from the slave days and never forgot them.” The voice calls the family for coffee, which the speaker

You wish you could go on being wanted without having to give up so much.

remarks is “black as the old black maid.” The maid’s status as a servant in the household disturbs the sense of tranquility in the first stanza that assures the reader everyone in this private domestic world is family. This woman is subservient to those she works for and is physically separated from them. She is also, crucially, highlighted by her race: the family panorama she performs for is a space of cultural as well as economic inequalities. She has been a slave in the past, and in still holding on to the songs of those days, the reader knows she has not forgotten being owned, even if the speaker has. Coffee itself is a reminder of the plantations which temporarily thrived on the backs of tortured Africans. Drummond de Andrade paints a suspiciously perfect rendering of the myth of a happy, white affluent family, then reveals that their peace and prosperity is the result of the exploitation of black people.

I realize now that I misremembered what Dan told me about the woman who taught him to make feijoada. Though she may have been two generations removed from slavery, she herself lived in a kind of indentured servitude: without family and paid in room and board, she had nowhere to go and no means with which to leave. * I ’ V E R E A D many opinions on the topic of black beans, and I’ve tried so many

techniques I could write on the subject with authority if my efforts hadn’t all led me to despair: soaking with salt, soaking without salt, cooking in the soaking liquid or fresh water, cooking with salt or without. I’ve never made black beans without it taking a 14

whole day to get them soft enough: to that refried texture where the starch spills out of them and they’re suspended like jewels in themselves. The indispensable sofrito in itself takes hours. I don’t understand why recipes tell you you’ll get results so quickly, that the pressure cooker will give you soft beans in ten minutes. Is it a conspiracy, or are they just giving instructions for tough, watery beans, thinking that’s what we’ve come for? Has someone really managed to cook the kind of food people with servants and slaves enjoy, but without servants or slaves? * H I NA , M Y M OM ’S best friend, lives high on the hog in Mumbai, where she spends

three months a year. “Their family owns the top floor of an apartment building,” my mother says in a tone of explanation, although this detail raises at least as many questions as it answers. “They have one person whose whole job is to cook vegetables.

I can remember someone delivering a flat of mangoes and Hina making ice cream.”

I haven’t known many people who grew up with the amount of domestic help Hina was accustomed to in India (and which she doesn’t quite enjoy in California: pool boy and gardener two days a week); in fact, I haven’t known many people who grew up with domestic help at all. But it explains a lot about her, like why nothing she says ever sounds like a suggestion, why she is so quick to assume sabotage. I read about an uprising that took place in a posh neighborhood on the outskirts of New Delhi in which maids who were paid abysmally and had to walk miles from the slums where they lived to the luxury condos where they worked went on strike. Their employers were distinctly surprised and distinctly unrepentant. One woman characterized herself as a benevolent boss, commenting, “I would give her tea before making her do her chores.” Even that word, chores. No one expects to be paid for chores.

I’ve only been proposed to twice: by Dan, four years ago, and once in 2000, when I was seventeen. He was named Fawad, he was from Pakistan, and he was only in his forties, although his hair was gray. He was diminutive in stature and a shrewd judge of marital value. I was working at a ridiculous store called Odd Job that sold a lot of crazy crap but never the same crazy crap two days in a row. It was out of business by the next summer, but while I was there it felt like it would go on forever. He came in to shop, and I was nice to him, as I was specifically instructed to be to everyone, especially weird men, my entire life by my mother. I may have been wearing some jewelry that initiated a conversation that led to me mentioning that my family lived in Saudi Arabia for eight years. Some wrong impressions may have, unintentionally, been given.

A few days later, Fawad started working at Odd Job, and I think I kind of knew it was headed in the nuptial direction. He waited about two weeks before laying out, as we hung up some very odd clothes, what he had to offer: a struggling angel store in the Olde Historic Towne of Smithville, New Jersey, and a mother who was still alive. An 15

angel store is a store that sells angels. I have always been excited by possibilities—and as it’s rude to turn someone down right away, particularly when they’ve taken the trouble to find work at Odd Job, I told him I would think about it. My father advised me in the strongest terms against this marriage. He predicted, “He’ll expect you to get up early to start making breakfast, and you’ll be cooking all day.” At seventeen, the proposals were few and far between. It’s nice to be wanted. You wish you could go on being wanted without having to give up so much.

If I had married Fawad, he would be in his sixties now, assuming he lived, which of course he would have under my excellent care. Poor Fawad. He is so frail these days: some days he eats nothing but khichri, some days he takes only cereals. His soul is becoming purer and purer. * I ALWAYS LOVED cooking and wanted someone to cook for who would eat all the

idiosyncratic food I wanted to make on any given day, often for the first time. When I moved in with Dan, it was an experiment whose outcome was uncertain: we had lived five hours apart, we’d already broken up once in fairly spectacular fashion, and I was newly unemployed. My relocation was saved in large part by the disorder of the old farmhouse he lived in: it gave me enough to do to avoid overthinking our relationship minute by minute. That summer, Dan was off from teaching, and we raised chickens and a garden and readopted a cat from my ex-boyfriend. Sometimes the chickens broke into the house and stood in the middle of the dining room suddenly still, out of ideas.

During these months, I began the project of perfecting black beans the way Dan likes them. When he made them, they took a whole day, but he didn’t make them often and rarely cooked at all. I put them on regular rotation, the only meal that was. I had the time to nurse slow food between reading and cleaning and writing and weeding. I soaked anything you could soak: grains as well as beans, contemplating all the things I could do with them the next morning. I remember standing over the stove boiling bagels and dipping them in a caraway-seed and dried-onion mixture inspired by my favorite Wegmans bagels (misleadingly called “Russian bagels.” Misleading, because they were good). I wasn’t at all bent out of shape by the time black beans took—if anything, I hated that they made so many leftovers, compromising my cooking possibilities for days afterward. But that didn’t last forever. Dan and I stayed together, and I got a job, lots of jobs. I’m still getting jobs.

Being a mother is a job, although no one pays you for it outside of Norway. Scratch that. They pay you for it in lots of places, but not in the United States. Being a mother is difficult to write about because everyone feels differently about it. When you begin to experience it, you are tempted to think there is a conspiracy—why did they all say the beans would cook in ten minutes? But the mystery is in the beans themselves, the water, the altitude, the pressure, the final, ineffable outcome you are chasing based on 16

someone else’s memory of something made by a woman you didn’t know, but heard about, or read about, and whose problems and joys you will never understand because most of the time connection to other people eludes us, and we are very lucky when it happens, or when we imagine that it’s happened. * DI D I SAY that I make black beans because I love Dan? Did it come across that I love

the man he was before I met him, and I want to keep that man, even the teenager, the

During these months, I began the project of perfecting black beans the way Dan likes them.

child, before him, alive in any way that seems plausible? Does it ever feel to anyone else that the pressure, the heat, the sheer time that your love lasts will destroy everything you love about the one you love? Do you ever get to the end of the most exacting, interminable dish and wonder if this was really the best destiny for those onions, that cumin, that water you lugged from the drugstore because the tap water here is contaminated? Do you ever watch yourself in the middle of the most quotidian task, lifting the lever of the beans in the bulk section of your local Whole Foods knockoff, and suddenly question why you’re doing it, whether the value you suppose it has, the vague plans entailing it, are right at all? * FO R T HE LAST two years or so, I haven’t slept much. For a while I hoped that would

become a source of deepening mystery in my thoughts and perception. In other words, I hoped it would make me a better writer. But it made me tired.

Dan and I talked about having another child, or, more precisely, about not having one. It’s hard to say no to a possibility. It’s hard to accept that doors close. It’s the beginning of death, or feels like it is. It’s the beginning of noticing death more urgently.

We finally articulated the fact at the heart of the matter, which took some time to find: the possibility of having another child was no insurance against the loss of the one we have. This is not the book of Job. She cannot be replaced. There are other men, single men who want women. They abound. But they are no protection against losing Dan. A family is a group of people who hope they die before the others.

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One of the worst crimes of slavery must be its violence toward family. The same violence can be true of modern servanthood. I have met rich people’s servants who only see their families, left behind in their home countries, for a week or two each year. Even before the prisons our government put immigrant children into, families have been forced to separate by American immigration policy, or lack thereof, for decades. That we do this to workers who make less than a living wage and have none of the securities of citizenship denudes that policy for what it is: an arrangement that frames the absence of economic freedom in a different rhetorical formula. * DA N B OU G HT special curtains on the internet that promise to cancel out light and

even some sound. They were meant to improve everyone’s sleep. They are ugly and cost one hundred dollars. There’s no question that, living on a main artery in Lubbock, Texas, and having a street lamp right outside our bedroom window, light and noise affect our sleep, and because he sleeps closer to the window, this was particularly true for him. Our daughter seems to be sleeping somewhat better, although it’s only been a couple weeks, and she goes through phases of better and worse sleeping. She has learned words like dark and bright; she will learn any word for any reason. And for some reason she is suddenly willing to announce I tired, although she is no more willing to go to bed. Since daylight savings time, the sun doesn’t set until after eight.

Today is May 9, and the sun will set at 8:36. In this respect, as well as the pungent sewer smell after rain, where we live reminds Dan of summer in Brazil. The curtains are a good idea, but you can’t fool a smart kid into thinking it’s night when it isn’t, and the curtains don’t make work start any later.

They also don’t cancel out thoughts. After our daughter woke last night, I lay in our dark room worrying about when I would manage to edit an essay some journal may or may not publish in a year. When would I work, make dinner, work out, take a shower, and still spend most of the day with my little girl? What delightful thing could we do to make her forget I’d been away so long?

I got up and walked into our living room, which is the same room as the kitchen and the little nook where we eat. The room is surrounded by windows that let in not only the light from the street but the lightning of a thunderstorm that, in our bedroom, you could barely distinguish from the central air. I stepped into a theater of lightning, thunder, cacophonic rain, and the definitional wind. I lay down on our futon wrapped in percussion and orange, the telltale smell of cumin still thick in the air. I slept like Bolívar in his hammock, weary and still committed to all the old dreams, until 6:24 when the real dawn came.

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MEREDITH STRICKER

What Are Poets For in a destitute time asks Heidegger–– you may as well say what are clouds for or why Frida Kahlo paints herself as a deer pierced by arrows in a leafless forest and why the forest around her grows more human and her roots shine so you can imagine a herd of trees running or why at dusk the sky changes from pale blue to orange for no reason except for particles of dust or what is dust for and the polyphonic light that pours through our eyes

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ERIN MALONE

New Year Barely a sound, a wasp crawls the lace on a January window.

We lean toward its low electric hum absent of usual harm.

Because you’re new, here are the rules: Go in pairs. No burning. Obey barbed wire, signs, and in the house cut lights to reduce your footprint.

The past is sick of us, our signaling, and the worried hills we walk to smooth. Here the ground and sky are white, the same sound as the snow.

Lie down, lie down, this is what it’s like to leave your body. To be a winter road stretched in two directions and no one on it, not even the souls of the deer.

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LARY KLEEMAN

meditation with a question how & where the light falls fixed for a moment, fixes a moment in tall grass plumes, takes the eye to a place, gives a sense of staying put so that the whirl stops whirling, the self gathers itself in a collective pause, a chance to notice how shadows have grown & take the yard earlier now that the sun has negotiated a lower angle to its entrance. what would it take to depose the daily dictators of time, no time & not enough time, to institute a new code of conduct, one that praises the lower angle of not knowing where one’s from & bound to go?

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CHELSEA DINGMAN

When It Comes to Change, Grief Is More Useful Than Nostalgia Died of an accidental overdose. Died alone—an accident of time, of the blue hour, unbroken. Time suggests

change. The birds came in your silence to build shadows between our houses. The wind came & stole our children

from our tongues. This silence remains. Thick. Opaque. I broke the fire from the forest across the river. A one-lane bridge, the body. The sky became the face of grief. We were broken

children. Forgotten in a forest of deer droppings & soot. Are there any accidents? We gave our lives over to chance. It’s not an accident that I loved you. Look up: the stars are still alive somewhere.

The end of night is near.

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KATIE MARYA

Marriage In a FB message a prophet said to watch meat in high heat is to see the dead rising.

A rump roast browns in the oven, fried chicken pops hot confetti into the air, the glaze of ham, pink like the inside of a blood orange— each meat body turning to food under the aura of onion and garlic.

The ocean makes me feel small; its rhythmic gray sends me searching for him—sometimes sex, sometimes two miners underground, every inch the same, even the skin feels like stone.

To watch a thermometer rise, to spoon warmth in the middle of the night is not power. We switch the oven on, wrap the turkey legs in twine, follow the inches toward our life together, white plates tick away time— the knife cuts just next to the spine.

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KELL

EARD Y J. B

WH Y I S T ON IG HT different from all other nights?

I peek at the Haggadah in front of me, hoping our host doesn’t notice that I never remember the answer. In truth, I’m not here for answers to ancient riddles, the brisket, or the litany of plagues. I’m here for the Seder’s scripted buffer. For how it conjures my daughter from her long disappearance into the darkness of her boyfriend’s addiction. I’m here to witness the moment she scratches the head of a wooden match across an abrasive strip, touches the small flame to the Yom Tom candles, and flares them to light. I’m here for the moment candlelight’s alchemy transforms the table to jewels—water goblets glisten aquamarine, wine glasses turn to crystal quartz, the white porcelain plate with its mystifying symbols of remembrance a shimmering, opaque moonstone. I’m here to come as close as I can to a miracle.

I scan the table, wonder at the unarticulated reasons each of us chose to come here tonight, fourteen people crowding a rectangle of oak covered with white linen, sitting on chairs as mismatched as our pasts—Rachel and her boyfriend sit on folding chairs across from me and my husband David on a pair of padded Chippendales; the others span a quartet of straight-backed Shakers; neighbors and friends settle on a canvas director’s chair, a few metal folding chairs, and the walnut piano bench where the two littlest kids squirm. Only the host and three guests are Jewish.

Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe.

My head is bent toward the text, but I’m distracted by the Seder plate in the center of the table. In clockwise order, it holds a shank of roasted lamb bone, a sweet-andspicy mix of fruit, nuts and wine, parsley sprigs, and a brown-speckled egg, roasted and hard-boiled. If Rachel were one of the foods on the plate, she would be charoset, I think, diced apples and walnuts, cinnamon, cardamom, and sweet white wine. David, zeroa, the shank bone. I would be the brown-speckled, roasted egg.

Our host Laurie first invited us to Seder dinner at her home eight years ago. I’d met her only twice before, but David was an old friend of her new boyfriend Eddie, and she seemed eager to forge relationships with his friends. Our friendship developed like a Polaroid, murky images sharpening with time. She and Rachel share a birthday, but Laurie’s twenty-four years older with limbs long and thin as stretched taffy. Rachel is small and curvy with Delphic eyes and a strawberry mouth. When Laurie invited us that first time, I demurred, despite my curiosity.

We aren’t Jewish.

So what? I barely consider myself Jewish.

When I was in my early twenties, I hid my parents’ fundamentalism behind the lie that my mother was Jewish. I loved the romance of it. The idea of living in a family like my best friend’s in grade school. I’d longed to be part of her clan—the Russian grandmother who couldn’t speak English tucked away in the nursery with her youngest daughter’s baby, the obese father who seemed an occasional and marginally welcome visitor, the mother who ferried Suzie and me to and from the library weekly,

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and who once told Suzie, “If I had to choose one of my children to hold a hundred pound dagger above my heart all night and if it dropped it would pierce my heart and kill me, you’d be the child I’d give the dagger to.” * EV E RY F EW M ON T HS when I was in law school my parents saved enough money

to drive from Plains to Missoula and take me to lunch. We’d go to Ruby’s Café and eat burgers and salty fries. Afterward, we’d sip third and fourth cups of coffee while eating fat wedges of lemon meringue, strawberry-rhubarb, or wild huckleberry pie.

All that was fine. It was the few minutes between when the waitress took our order and when she brought our first cups of coffee I dreaded. That’s when my parents extended their arms across the booth’s chrome-ribbed laminate, took my hands, and in fluorescent lighting bright enough to see the pores in my father’s nose and my mother’s downy facial hair, bowed their heads and prayed. Long prayers. Prayers no one in the restaurant could miss. Prayers that—had anyone I knew seen—would have revealed the part of my past I most wanted to hide.

Even so, I was too conflicted to ridicule them or to slip away. How could I ridicule— or leave—parents plagued with loss: a fire, a flood, and two foreclosures. They lived in a bubble of absolute love for each other and absolute faith in God that I didn’t see as a kind of negligence until the summer I turned thirty. Just out of law school, my best friend and I planned to celebrate new jobs with a trip to Greece. In a pretravel checkup, a nurse asked if I’d been vaccinated for polio. I remembered once, when I was three or four, going to a community center with my parents, being handed a pleated paper cup containing a pink cube, remembered the sugary grit dissolving on my tongue.

Polio? Mom sounded as though I was asking her to recall the middle name of Louis XV. How am I going to remember something that happened that long ago? She yelled to Dad without covering the mouthpiece: Herky? Do you remember if we ever got the kids polio shots?

Not shots, Mom. Sugar cubes.

Oh good grief. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Kelly Jean. You’re in the Lord’s hands, so just stop being such a worrywart. * WE H O L D our wine glasses in our right hands while Laurie pours, less this year,

remembering, I suspect, how last year she filled our glasses to the brim, how we’d grown tipsy too early, how, by the time Passover dinner was served, we’d turned into children, giggling and snorting through Eddie’s midrash sidebars, how our voices

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pitched higher—and more joyful—each time we sailed into a round of Baruch Atah Ado-nai.

The month after Laurie met Eddie, she scheduled an appointment with a rabbi from a reformed congregation in Atlanta. She told the rabbi she’d fallen for a Jewish man. The father she’d lost at eighteen, reconstituted as a burly poet and scholar. She regretted her conversion to Catholicism ten years earlier. How could she undo it? She expected a lecture or two. A suggested donation. Maybe a ceremony of some sort.

The rabbi swatted the air between them as though fanning away a foul odor.

If you’re Jewish, you’re Jewish. Nothing you did changed that.

If her urge to host Seder sprang from a desire to fasten Eddie to her through shared tradition, I understood. That’s part of what prompted me to look for a church after Rachel was born. The moment the midwife placed Rachel in my arms, I saw everything that would ever matter to me: the milky shreds of caul clinging to her slicked hair, the blue veins pulsing beneath her skin, the transparent nails on her fingers and toes. I longed to bind us with spiritual thread, to weave us into something eternal, a Möbius strip infinitely bound and unfurling. I have not stopped praying since that moment. Always, even writing this, an endless loop: let her be safe, let her well, let her be loved. Beloved.

The plagues give me a chance to glance across the table again, to catch Rachel dipping her finger into a glass of red wine. Two years later, I will stand at the foot of her hospital bed, watch her writhe in pain as a doctor slashes her perineum in a last-ditch effort to avoid an emergency C-section. The baby will be blue. The neonatal nurses will whisk him across the room. Suction. Pump. Come on, baby. Come on. Blood will gush and pool in the bed. Her boyfriend will be drunk. The doctor will disappear. I will have to threaten the nurses to get them to attend to Rachel, who convulses in the bed, the sheets blooming with the saturated red of tulips.

She dabs the first of ten ruby drops onto her plate.

Blood.

The story of Passover doesn’t begin with the plagues. In Exodus, the second book of the Torah and the Old Testament, Moses—or, if contemporary scholars are right, some cabal of sixth-century Babylonians—describes his initial negotiations to free the Hebrew people from Egyptian bondage. Show me a miracle, Pharaoh says, and I’ll let your people go. Moses turns his staff into a serpent, but Pharaoh barely raises his brows as it slithers across his shadow. His magicians can do that in their sleep.

The next morning, Moses meets Pharaoh at the river. Pharaoh, he says, The Lord God of the Hebrews says let my people go. Pharaoh sighs. Thinks what a nag this man’s become. Wishes Moses hadn’t grown up to become the wild-haired prophet standing in front of him, his rod pointing toward the water. I wonder what Pharaoh noticed first. The smell? The fish flopping to shore? The scarlet water at his feet?

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* I F I WE RE given one moment to live over, it would be this: Rachel is three. She races

into my bedroom one morning, a tiny stitch in her brow.

What, Mama? Why are you calling me?

I wasn’t calling you, honey.

Oh, she says. I must have heard your heart.

And if I were given one moment to erase? This one: Rachel is eight. I am drinking too much, covering the loneliness and dread of my life as a lawyer, the way I cover my class identity with the finesse of a cold-war spy. She comes into the bedroom one Saturday morning, bouncing with joy. She climbs up on the bed. Mama? Want to go do something? My head pounds with a hangover. Get out and leave me alone, I scream, searing the air between us.

She couldn’t know the sweaty fear troubling my waking hours, how I was losing another job after two years, accepting a small package in exchange for leaving without letting anyone know the silk-stocking firm had fallen on hard times. When I teared at the news, my supervising partner startled. But you hate defense work, she said.

Your heart isn’t on this side. She was right. A few years and jobs later, I’d hang my own shingle, taking cases few others would—a Rastafarian fired for smelling bad, a receptionist fired after hearing her new boss say he wanted better looking candy up front, a nurse’s aide fired after complaining that a doctor cornered her in a sedated patient’s room and rubbed something hard against her buttocks. My heart was on that side, but the money wasn’t. After every hard loss, demons whispered in my mother’s voice: That’s what happens to the little people in the world. Other things happen too.

They wear out. They die sooner. An Appalachian coal miner’s life expectancy is fortysix. Childhood trauma shortens a life span by twenty years.

I hid my past from coworkers, friends. And from Rachel, too. I focused on giving her what I hadn’t had instead of giving her who I was. With her private school education and posture straight as a dancer’s, I imagined her walking into any room she chose, the notion of being less-than or outside-of never crossing her mind. As though I could redeem my past through her future. As though I didn’t know how children carry mirrors so precisely reflecting their parents’ flaws. * LAUR I E’S P R EPA R ED an assortment of props to illustrate the plagues. Perhaps it’s

a gesture to her ex-husband who brought his new wife and young daughter. Or maybe she’s tired of the routine, wants to make it more playful. It works. This year, we don’t drone through the plagues. Frogs! We chime as the little girl waves a rubber toad in the air.

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Dab. Everyone my age has a story about frogs, how, as children, summer rains brought out so many frogs the ground popped and shimmied green as far as we could see. Four decades later—less than a nanosecond in evolutionary terms—they have disappeared. * A F TE R RACHEL went to college, I chose a therapist who worked out of his basement.

It smelled of earth, damp dog, and ear wax. He was in his late eighties. Nearly deaf.

I liked that he had a diploma in analytical psychology from the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich and that he’d studied with one of Jung’s protégés. I told him how disconnected I felt from Rachel. How irrelevant. I worked a job I hated to give her what I’d longed for as a kid. I never hit her—not even a swat on the bottom. So why am I closer to my mother than Rachel is to me? He didn’t offer any psychobabble. He didn’t tell me I was being hysterical or overreacting. He looked at me with eyes so pale they seemed clear.

Should I write her a letter, I asked, tell her how I feel, how sad, how lonely? I expected him to nod, to say what a good idea. Instead he shook his head.

What could you tell her that she doesn’t already know? * I AC H ED for the certainty my parents found in faith. I wanted to believe in an eternal

tether to my loved ones. When Rachel was two, that longing led me to search for a church I could bear. We cycled through twenty before settling on an Episcopal one. It was a mid-seventies cedar-sided A-frame set against a backdrop of high-voltage power lines. The single aesthetically redeeming feature that made me willing to go inside was the water oak twenty yards from the entrance. Its trunk was big around as a hot tub, its knobby lower limbs bent nearly to the ground. Rachel joined two little girls under the oak’s lush canopy. I watched them playing in sunlight filtering through the tree’s lacy foliage, their limbs swinging wild, their faces manic with joy.

David and I stayed twenty years. Despite the oddity of calling a pastor a priest, the unfamiliar rituals, and a communal chalice that regularly made me cringe from the sight of lipstick streaks on its rim or flecks of bread floating in the sweet liquid. The water oak seemed a sacred sign. A living promise. * LO C USTS.

The little girl throws green plastic grasshoppers onto the table. Locusts swarmed my childhood house once. I stood on the back porch watching their pale exoskeletons

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shivering across the window screens, saw how they shed their shells facing east, as though walking toward the resurrection. I imagine walking out of my skin, the husk I would leave clinging to the earth’s rough surface.

Dab. Boils!

She raises a skeletal Halloween-hand covered with boils painted in orange nail polish. Dab. Hail!

Tic Tacs skitter across the table. * A F TE R R ACHEL left for college, I had to learn new ways to talk to her. Our

conversations reminded me of cross-examining a well-prepared witness. Under subpoena. One who knows not to say too much. Who knows how to make me work for the answers. When I asked her about the new man she was bringing to Seder dinner, I minced through a series of questions crafted to elicit what I wanted to learn most, before, inevitably, she’d sigh, say she had to go.

I learned this: his parents divorced when he was little. He stayed with his mother the first few years, until losing her in the dark forest of mental illness and addiction.

She lives off the grid now, in a tent somewhere near Savannah.

I did not learn this: he wears gauzy blouses and hoop earrings. A pink topaz stud pierces his right nostril. A black widow tattoo scrawls across his wrist and other indistinguishable ink crawls behind his left ear and down his neck.

I did not expect this: how she takes his hand in hers with such tenderness it makes me tuck my head and pretend a small sneeze to squeeze my nose and staunch the sting of tears. * TH I S I S W HAT I didn’t know that night: the baby will stay in the neonatal intensive

care unit for three days. I’ll watch the nurses tape IV tubes to his arms. Watch him claw them off. Swat at his nose until the oxygen tube falls out. The nurses smile and coo at the fragile being whose wrists they’ve tied with soft restraints. Never seen a baby that determined, they say, he’s a strong little guy.

I bring Rachel Chick-fil-A fries and chocolate shakes, before heading to the NICU. Hovering over his warmed plastic bed, I pray. Or keep praying. The same prayer I’ve been praying for twenty-six years. Only the pronoun changes. Let them be safe, let them be well, let them be loved.

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On the second day, Rachel visits him in the NICU. Nurses pull the clear blue tubes from his nose, help her hold him without tangling the IV tubing, nod and smile when he latches. Hi baby, she says, hi little Wren.

On the third day, they go home. The skin under Rachel’s eyes still a bruised purple, Wren swallowed by his rainbow puffer jacket so that only a small circle of face shows.

It takes months for me to stop shivering in the shower or sobbing in my sleep, for my heart to stop stalling there, in the valley of the shadow of death.

I can’t imagine what’s behind the stilled breath of death. What does the caterpillar imagine when it folds into its chrysalis—the slow dissolve into a soupy mix thinner than egg whites, an amorphous mess holding imaginal discs, the secret code of reconfiguration from a creature crawling on the earth to one soaring above it? * FO R T HE F INA L plague, Laurie hands the little girl a CD, Death Cab for Cutie.

Death of the Firstborn.

Dab. While everyone else laughs, I hold my breath. Knock wood under the table. Pray.

Anything, I pray, just not that. *

BY THE T IM E Rachel was twelve, I was taking so many prescription drugs, a

girlfriend looked in my overnight bag and asked, Do you take all of these? I said, Yes, I have trouble sleeping. Trouble sleeping? If you take all these, you ought to be in a coma.

Her statement sobered me. I didn’t want the last five or six years with Rachel home to be spent in a blur. I quit cold turkey. It was July. Ninety-eight degrees in the shade.

I’d lost my job nine months earlier. With nothing else to do, I walked every day for hours, sweating, shaking. I told Rachel it was the flu. Even this, I hid from her. I didn’t want to poison her future with my past. I didn’t want her to see the brick of depression I dragged behind me; I didn’t want her to think it had anything to do with her. I didn’t know I was mistaking certainty for security. I didn’t know she’d fall in love with a man infected with nearly every virus I’d tried to inoculate her from. Poverty. Drugs.

Abandonment. * I N MY PA R EN TS’ Pentecostal worldview, the lines are clear. You are saved or

not saved. You are with us or against us. Of God or of the world. There is one way

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to heaven; every other path leads to hell. Not some No Exit kind of existential or emotional hell. The real thing: an actual lake of fire where the unsaved masses burn for eternity. No one worried over what it might mean that this notion of hell for all unbelievers is the single area of theological agreement between fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Muslims. No one wondered aloud if this meant two hells. One where all the nonfundamentalist Christians go; the other where all the nonfundamentalist Muslims go. And wouldn’t that mean everyone goes to hell?

I never considered going back to the fundamentalist churches of my childhood. Or taking Rachel there. But once, after Rachel left home, I did go back, slipping into one of the few Foursquare churches that migrated from Southern California to the South.

It was located in a low-rent strip mall west of town. Five or six Harleys were lined up at the curb in front of the church’s mirrored panes, their owners huddled in a circle of smoke. Their leather vests and jeans looked worn, their hair clean and tied back in ponytails.

When I parked and looked over, they smiled, crushed their half-smoked cigarettes against the cracked asphalt with the pointed toes of their cowboy boots. Nodded.

Ma’am. Two of them opened the double-glass doors. Inside, the sanctuary looked recently converted from a Payless ShoeSource. The floor was covered with the short knap of industrial carpeting, several rows of metal folding chairs faced a platform of musicians—a middle-aged man with an Afro and tie-dyed T-shirt played drums, a skinny white boy with a shaved head curled around a guitar, and two round women in peasant dresses shook tambourines while leaning toward a shared microphone.

The pastor’s blonde up-do and lemon-yellow dress reminded me that this particular brand of fundamentalism was started by a woman, Aimee Semple McPherson, a failed Hollywood starlet famed for her Depression-era food banks, her feigned kidnapping, her secret lovers, her suspicious death by drug overdose. She told us that at sixteen she left the protective covering of her father’s house to walk in sin. She did not seem to notice how her son’s face darkened when she said this while pointing toward him, a pudgy pubescent boy who looked as though he’d rather clean toilets with his tongue than hear the story again, of how he reminded her—every day—that Jesus can turn the ugliest sin into a blessing.

I never went back. But I learned this: there is a part of me that stays stranded in the cadence of those early voices. * MY MO T HER’S B IB L E is covered in lavender suede, her name, embossed in gold

italics, scrolls across the bottom. This is not her first Bible. She wears them out. The one I remember her using most in my childhood had a red leather cover. We spent

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more time in church than anywhere. All day Sunday, Sunday night, Wednesday night.

Plus the years Mom and I cleaned the church on Saturday afternoons, the years we tended the flowers growing in concrete planters lining the breezeway, the years of choir practice on Tuesdays and Fridays, the weeks of Vacation Bible School.

Maybe those early years explain how I remain fastened to faith, even though I can’t name it or explain it. Maybe I can’t not believe. How else to explain the way, in my deepest crises, I slip into some precortical chamber without words or thoughts, or how, in the half-light, I sometimes sense a presence. In Flannery O’Connor’s words: “Our response to life is different if we have been taught only a definition of faith than if we have trembled with Abraham as he held the knife over Isaac.” * TH E FIR ST T IM E I went on a field trip in school was in the fourth grade. We packed

lunches for a long afternoon at the Palm Springs Art Museum on Palm Canyon Drive.

I was wowed by a reconstructed skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, not least of which because Rex was the name of a boy I adored. As soon as I told Mom what I’d seen, though, I knew I’d said something wrong. I smiled with my lips sucked over my teeth, trying to figure out what, to let her know I was sorry for whatever it was, that I’d never do it again, that she didn’t have to spank me.

Kelly Jean, you know better than that. There were never any dinosaurs on earth.

I was confused. The teacher told us it was a real fossil. She said it was dug up someplace far away—Montana, maybe. But I didn’t say that to Mom. Instead, I did what I’d learned to do: I mirrored her face.

The Bible would tell us if there were ever dinosaurs on earth.

Ah! I understood. Just in time to avoid a spanking, I nodded. Fast. She smiled. I knew she forgave me when she said, Of course it does talk about dragons. Maybe you just got that mixed up.

Fifty years later, my mother would apologize. Oh honey, I’m sorry I wasn’t a better mom.

You were a good mom.

I wish we could have helped you with college.

That’s okay.

And we spanked you kids too much.

We gazed at each other across my kitchen table, her mirror-eyes cloudy, her brows raised. It’s okay, mom. It isn’t completely true, I know. But this is: I love you. Her gnarly-veined hands rest on her open Bible, the onion-skin pages covered in rainbow scrawlings, ciphers from my childhood. I can’t help wondering if they hold the key to how our family came undone. * 33

WH E N T HAT LAST push conjured the crown of Rachel’s head and tore my drug-

numbed perineum into air, a ghost hovered nearby. I didn’t see it. But I felt it: in the moment I first cradled her against my sweaty chest, before they swept her away, an invisible presence slipped a potion into the solution hanging in the clear bag next to me, poisoning the innocent drip of hydration, flooding me with equal parts fear and love. My blood adulterated forever.

What had I understood about love until then? About how I was loved. Or not loved.

How absurd to compare love. It’s like comparing pain. Or sight. You can only feel what you feel, see what you see. I used to think love quantifiable, expendable. As though at birth an angel handed me a small cake called love, and I spent my life hoarding it, slicing slivers, worried if I gave too much I would be left with nothing but crumbs.

Now I imagine a different gift at birth, one where angels plant a tiny seed of love in each heart, whisper, Tend it, and it will grow. Like Gaia, endlessly self-creating. But we can poison it instead. Just like everything else.

I worry that Rachel romanticizes poverty. She resents her private school education.

Our upscale suburb. I’m not a snob, Mom, she says.

I want to tell her she’s wasting her life, squandering her time and talent working as a server in a diner, wearing torn sweaters sourced from Goodwill bins. I cycle through a litany of blame, landing on the man she loves, the sweet, handsome, mentally-ill alcoholic with the lost, itinerant mother, and the father who disappeared into his second family. I rail against this. Never to her, though. Instead, I badger myself. What did I do wrong? Why doesn’t she do something with her life? How can she choose to live like that? Sometimes I joke with my husband about it. I didn’t beat her, I say.

What else do you have to do to be a good mom? * TH E WAT ER OA K suffocated under the weight of a thousand bricks, each engraved

with the name of a lost loved one. When the priest announced this fundraiser the year Rachel left for college, he assured us that an arborist approved the project, that placing pavers around the oak’s circumference wouldn’t harm it. But I felt the tree’s root-deep sorrow at this betrayal, felt as though my own chest was being wrapped in plastic. I began grieving it, grieving our collective opacity, the poison of greed. By the time Rachel graduated, the oak had died. Its trunk cracked down the center. Broken open. Its core hollowed and black. * A F EW W EEKS before Seder, I asked Rachel what the worst part of being a server

was. She said, Oh Mom, you don’t want to know. But she told me a few stories. A drunk

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frat boy vomiting on her shoes. Men scribbling in the margins of their bills—numbers, promises, threats. A woman screaming at her, calling her stupid, a cow. A table of women insisting on another server, when she declined to answer their question: Do you believe in God? What surprised me—what, oddly, heartened me—was how she deconstructed their meanness from a distance. How she views the world through the lens of a well-tended intellect, with a confidence I never had. Seeing her in this light feels like forgiveness, or a path toward forgiveness, that place where tenderness transforms the past. I see how my mother, as a grandmother, softened; how her tenderness transforms the past.

I see the flicker of our reflections in that twist of infinity. * A F TE R T HE BA BY is born, David and I will move from the suburbs into the city.

I want to be a ballast for the baby. A shelter in these early years. A trustworthy guardian. I want him to feel my presence long after my body has pooled at the bottom of a simple coffin and seeped through its blue pine slats into underground streams, the ones bathing the deepest roots winding beneath us. We move into a house with a water oak in the backyard. An arborist tells me it’s about my age, sixty or so. It has lots of life left, he says, although who can say with climate change? Every morning, I place my hands on the tree’s rough bark and say a prayer. * AS I L O OK across the table, I imagine invisible threads attaching my daughter to

me, me to my mother, to my mother’s mother, stretching into the mists of millennia. I imagine gossamer shreds of webbing fastening us all—to each other, to the frogs, the trees, the angels, and even Elijah. Quiet as the moon’s tug at the tide or the pulse of sap in a maple, I hear an answer to a prayer I didn’t know I was praying.

We snuff the candles and Laurie rallies us to stand. Everyone’s tired. A little tipsy.

A cool breeze blows through the door, still open for Elijah. We struggle to our feet and hold our glasses high, ready to recite the last line, the only one I remember from year to year, Next year, Jerusalem. I want to believe this promise, that each of us will be ferried safely through the years, unchanged, unharmed. The people I love will be spared pain, sorrow, loss. The water oak will flourish. Even as I say the words, I doubt it. I know there will be losses. Some of us won’t return. For those of us who do, the years will transform us in ways I can’t imagine. Rachel will become pregnant. The baby will be strong. The father will not recover. Rachel’s eyes will refract a stunned dazzle for the heart beating in her arms.

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SNEHA SUBRAMANIAN KANTA

Losses for the year 2005 one year god brought me a gift of corpse after corpse & my tongue tasted like ash residues from the bodies of the ones I love. everyone I knew was left as bones. what language is used for limbs or veins when the body is gone? after everyone I loved left, I ceased to romanticize loss.

I knew they will be back in another body I won’t recognize. if someone I loved was reborn into another & the closest we were was in a traffic light in our cars, we wouldn’t know. we would speed off into the night & be unable to decipher the mouths of each other.

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we’d be unable to say the world is a metaphor for small rooms without enough space. yet I dust off the world from my jacket like snowflakes— my body bent in winter as if to pay homage to the labor of empty porches.

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NICK YINGLING

Clay Bodies Woolsey Fire, 2018 Shade of earthenware is determined by the body —the base mixture of minerals and sediments, iron, buff, silica— and the temperature of its firing.

What’s thrown upon the wheel feels uniform but is composed of particles of stone and broken-down tissue. God himself is said to have fashioned Adam out of loam and some happy accident of fire and mud taught his descendants how to craft basins, jugs and wares, how to seal a waterway or shelter from storm, our deepest history pieced from shards.

So we shadow smoke.

Its crude mass of terracotta rising over the mountains.

We watch for what hue and shape will come of the valley’s grit, for art or for utility.

The potter toils piece by piece. She molds a symmetry, letting time compensate for faults in the medium or the palm.

When done it will shine in its new glaze and for this we weather dust and heat: to witness the maker’s hands cupping our tragedy as a servant carries porcelain, or a priest his vessel, or a mother the new urn of her body.

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RICHARD BROSTOFF

Isaac

A pyre and a pyre and a pyre small spikes of fire flicking blue tongues of flame inside a gust of ash the boy in me breaking and floating off among the amber fusings of processional clouds and I kept hearing him the little beast in me breathing a clarifying light that I was meant for this for sacrifice my fear my wildness was meant

to be bound and turned to ash as I Isaac lay passive panicked

calling out lay burned betrayed beloved by him which one or all his all tell me that I might walk in his ways might understand. Father!

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MYRONN HARDY

Aubade: Troposphere I’m mourning what will be lost.

These crystals over us

a castle’s

ephemeral shine. This is what the troposphere makes.

We are watched by something other than eyes.

We see ourselves as beings sprung from river rocks.

We are the only ones aware of a particular chill

the necessity of relentless return.

The café where we decide to wait doesn’t close.

The medicine bottles on each table hold a single ranunculus.

You speak of its rhythm.

Its persistence despite uproot

cutting

cold.

This moment will not survive the constant tug.

I see it.

Oh love

look.

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DA N IEL S ET H K R AUS. Jim Holding His Lost Portrait

That Was Taken 32 Years Before, 2018.

Archival inkjet print. 20 inches x 30 inches.

DANIEL SETH KRAUS STATE M EN T: Plain Ordinary Working People is a photographic project that reveals

the connections between a small town, lost negatives, and Walmart. In 2012, I found a sleeve of negatives on the floor of a log cabin home in Williamsburg, Kentucky.

Upon scanning the negatives, I discovered they were portraits of Walmart employees.

Initially, the deteriorated images sparked questions about their origin, the identity of the subjects, and how they arrived at the cabin. Over the course of four years searching newspaper archives, making phone calls, and writing letters, I located five of the employees—Janice, Tina, Chet, Audrey, and Jim—who helped answer some of my questions. After interviewing them and making new portraits, the personal stories they shared contrasted with the sterile images of them as employees. People and large companies in small towns have dynamic and complicated relationships that can bring benefits but also risks. Using the negatives as a touchstone, the project sheds light on the time, place, and sociological environment the negatives captured during that 1986 summer in rural Kentucky when Walmart came to town.

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DA N I E L S ET H K R AUS. Managers OďŹƒce Featuring Portraits of Sam Walton and Store

Employees, Williamsburg, Kentucky, 2017. Archival inkjet print. 20 inches x 30 inches.

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DA N IEL SET H K R AUS. 30 Years Separated: 1986-2016, 2017.

Archival inkjet print. 20 inches x 30 inches.

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DA N IEL SET H K R AUS. Audrey, 30 Years Separated: 1986-2016, 2017.

Archival inkjet print. 20 inches x 30 inches.

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L ET IT IA H U C KA BY. MaDear, 2010.

Pigment prints on silk. 41.5 inches x 29.5 inches.

LETITIA HUCKABY STATEM EN T: LA 19 did not start recently, but has been developing over the course

of my life. Growing up an Army brat, my idea of what home is became fluid and malleable. The one constant was the family vacations to visit my extended family, who for the most part live on or off of Louisiana State Highway Nineteen. Whether I was in Germany, Oklahoma, Indiana, or Texas, Louisiana never changed. There I was home, but foreign. Having to rebuild relationships constantly and yet always fitting in.

Part of a large family dominated by women. Women that work hard, pray hard, love hard, and laugh out loud.

I began by photographing family quilts as a precious object. Quilts have become a symbol of the African American experience and of those things that are passed down from generation to generation, be it good or bad. Instead of using paper, I printed these images along with documentary-style portraits of my family onto fabric. The printed images are stitched together with various other patches to create the final pieces. These works allow me to speak about family, heritage, and issues unique to my community.

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L ET IT IA HU C KABY. Gran“Daddy,” 2010.

Pigment prints on silk. 29.5 inches x 19 inches.

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L ET IT IA HU CKA BY. Morning Meditation, 2010.

Pigment prints on silk. 44 inches x 31 inches.

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L ET IT IA HU C KABY. 11381 Grant St., 2010.

Pigment Prints on Silk. 39.5 inches x 36 inches.

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A N D REW HUOT. Walks with Rosie, 2009.

Artists’ Book, letterpress and pochoir on sekishu paper, bound in cloth.

15 inches tall x 11 inches wide x 1/2-inch thick closed.

ANDREW HUOT STATE M EN T: I enjoy observing the world’s small, passed-over details; looking at

everyday situations, I distill them down to their essence and then extend it outward to our collective experience. In my current work, I observe my environment and pay attention to things I might miss while I am busily going about my day. I reflect on my own experiences and life, from daily dog walks and trips to visit relatives to interactions with my wife. This book recounts my dog’s journey over a twoweek period, with all the stops and encounters in her daily walks. The pages are translucent, showing the echoes of walks past and future. The dots on the page indicate the type of adventure she had, from barking at a dog to getting a pet by a stranger.

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A N D REW HU OT. Walks with Rosie (detail), 2009.

Artists’ Book, letterpress and pochoir on sekishu paper, bound in cloth.

15 inches tall x 11 inches wide x 1/2-inch thick closed.

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A N D REW HU OT. Walks with Rosie (detail), 2009.

Artists’ Book, letterpress and pochoir on sekishu paper, bound in cloth.

15 inches tall x 11 inches wide x 1/2-inch thick closed.

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A N D REW HU OT. Walks with Rosie (detail), 2009.

Artists’ Book, letterpress and pochoir on sekishu paper, bound in cloth.

15 inches tall x 11 inches wide x 1/2-inch thick closed.

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M IR IA M RU D OL P H . McDermot Avenue II, 2012.

Double-plate color etching, blind embossing, relief roll through stencil.

18 inches x 18 inches.

MIRIAM RUDOLPH STATE M EN T: Mapping Home is a collection of prints which function as visual diaries

narrating my experiences and perceptions of place after living in Paraguay, Canada, and the United States. It is important for me to experience my surroundings very consciously, to be aware of details, and to render the essence of a place. Beneath the narrative of memories and perceptions lies the search for belonging that I experienced after moving from Paraguay to Winnipeg. My work shows places that I feel connected to and serves to document, to evaluate, and to remember. I use a mapping method because maps facilitate searching, way-finding, and revisiting. The prints about Winnipeg have become an important element in my connection with the city and in making it my home.

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M IR IA M RU D OL P H . Red River Trail, 2011.

Etching, blind embossing, hand-colored. 24 inches x 36 inches.

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M IRIA M RU D OL P H. Mercado Cuatro, 2012. Double-plate color etching,

relief roll through stencil. 16 inches x 24 inches.

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M IRIA M RU D OL P H . My Winnipeg III, 2012.

Double-plate color etching, relief roll. 18 inches x 18 inches.

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KRISTIN MACINTYRE

The land begins its vanishing— twilight softens the trees, a butterfly candles the meadow. Low in the hills, sun empties into a deer’s body—kill splayed in the dirt. Bloodroot embers like a shy animal. The throat warms despite. One by one, birds sky home—feathered silhouettes bearing twig. The ivy purples itself like a wound. Dusk prayers the mending. I lower my mouth to the water—it, too, so cleaved of sky.

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SARA BURANT

On & on Was told to put my trash on the stoop & poof

it went off roaming the hills, finding a building’s carcass to squat in

& when a wind asked some plastic to dance spread like skirts

the ghosts of skirts

but my phone’s battery was too low

it did, it did, sacks lifted &

I wanted to capture on video

* On the steps up to Sacré Coeur a musician gave new life to songs we all knew, making us hungry for more evidence of love

We wanted (we really did!) the new

husband to slide his arm around her waist & glide just glide with her around the space we’d made for them Didn’t we whoop when he kissed her, his lips turning the color of hers

& tasting like pink cling-wrap Dancing, her dress another life

her gorgeous polyester dress would have taken on yet swish-swish arabesquing pirouetting

like plastic bags underwater

jellyfish/squid

a sperm whale filling his belly thin, the bonded polymers sittingsittingsitting inside him

growing

like Jonah in a picture book, his oil

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lamp, his stool leviathan architecture diminishing that old man & the stuff that managed to get swallowed too

On a field trip once to symphony hall, the orchestra conversed—how was this possible— with whales

booooom

errrrrhhhh

errrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhh glug bwip-bwip

filling me such that I wanted the other music to stop but the whales to go on & on On the bus ride back to school with me went an ocean I hadn’t yet touched or even wondered much about

Out there . . . how far? how deep? how many? * On a Spanish beach they cut through blubber, bone, & stomach, extracting plastic bags they laid on the sand like bodies recovered from a disaster

Now I want I want to make a list

but resist I resist naming all but the car-engine cover pulled out

of a different whale’s gut

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A TAS H YA G H MA I A N

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Now, armed with a doctor’s note, even a fictional one, she was using it to get on my good side.

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This is it, I thought. I’m beautiful, and getting dressed for Hell.

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I looked at the concrete three floors down and leaned toward its embrace.

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Even if I get away from this marriage, I thought, how will I get away from my mother?

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CHARITY YORO

Inherit the Wind For P’da Hau and Waimanalo this wild coastal grass and lady steelhead sojourn is the windsound i cup my ear against / the song of chipped seashorn trumpet / the call to return home / i hear / the hollow / my heel over throng of bush & bee / snare in this unkempt symphony / territory of unmastered language / brash birdcall above head / how these warbled trees unnaturally bend / as mother trout treads upstream / so small are our worlds / and yet / the fight i’m not home to fight / save the fine rare grains / wooded memory from extraction / each flattened parceled foamed wave stands defiant / the island’s last eastside beach / a wonder how she returns / to birth at the mouth of the river / whose new name she can’t pronounce

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ALYSE BENSEL

Extinction Theory Children practice violence drawing and quartering earthworms.

Their segments survive in the soil.

Final endings: the rodents driven off the cliff, the mastodon’s skull shattered on the rocks below.

With inevitable self-destruction, who am I to nurture the earth, with its fallout etched in half-lives for the next x thousand years?

Breathing pesticides and exhaust, I am laced in a future perfumed with smog, my melody pitched fragments in a dying spectacle.

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S T A CY T RA U T W EI N BU R N S

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TH E C OWS were dead when we got there.

Britney toddled closer for a look. Ben, four years old, cried. Logan didn’t know because he was already inside, checking that the movers had placed everything correctly. I dealt with Ben. The cows were piled in the field across from our new home, and Britney crossed loose gravel while I watched from the edge of the thin, dirt road. Ben was heavy in my arms and I rocked him, shushing, as I looked for dust clouds rising. It was the first time I’d lifted him since rehab, and he was bigger than I remembered. His feet dangled to my knees, his tears slicked my neck.

Across the road, Britney ducked under a wire fence, crawled through waist-high grass; I opened my mouth to call her back, but Logan’s voice cut from behind, barking my name. He jumped from the porch and raced past, reaching Britney and scooping her up. Britney screamed. She beat her head against his chest.

Moving to this place was his idea. The transfer came available while I was still at Stone Hawk and he decided a change was what I needed. Even this house, twenty miles from Dodge City, was his decision. He took it all without asking.

“Close call,” he said.

“Yeah.” I tried smiling.

We set our children down and I reached a hand to Logan’s shoulder, wanting to touch him. The house rose behind, surrounded by fat pines. We stood in a square patch of driveway, where trees didn’t grow, and looked at the flat prairie all around. Logan told me the trees were called a shelter break and were meant to keep out the wind. I slipped a cigarette from my pocket and lit it.

Ben still cried, taking in air with great tumbling breaths. I held the cigarette away from him and brushed the hair from his forehead.

“Big boy,” I murmured.

He stuck his thumb in his mouth and I pulled it gently away, turning so that my smoke drifted with the wind.

O UR N EIG HB OR S came later. They apologized for the cows. The house had sat

empty so long, they said.

It was an old house, stuffed with small rooms. I slid a frozen pizza into the oven and the neighbors stood close behind, crammed in the doorway.

“Religious?” Rosa asked, nodding toward my book, Biblical Art of the Masters. I’d opened it while waiting for the oven to heat, spread it to a print of long-robed priests.

The pizza wrapper lay beside it, dotted with water and hard bits of cheese.

“No,” I answered.

Rosa cleared her throat and she and her husband looked at the brass-knobbed cabinets, the wallpaper lined with rolling pins. Gray streaked Rosa’s hair; her glasses were square and fashionable. Roland was older, his arms thin and his belly paunched.

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Open boxes lined the floor, appliances nestled inside. The coffee pot and blender were out, waiting for morning.

Ben clung to my leg, peered around it to look at Roland and Rosa. Britney held a phone to her ear and said, “Hello?”

“You have your hands full,” Rosa said.

I shrugged like I didn’t. “I keep busy.”

“Thanks for stopping by.” Logan’s voice was loud in the small space and he clapped Roland on the back like a hug, steered him toward the door. He kept his hand there, talking clear onto the porch and beyond. The door shut behind them and still I heard their voices.

A wind came. It moaned over the top of our chimney, rustled the many pines outside.

Ben snuggled close, sticking his thumb into his mouth and pushing his other hand inside my sleeve until the sleeve was tight around my arm and his hand rubbed the skin just above my elbow.

“I don’t like cows,” he said.

“Sh,” I said. “Don’t suck your thumb.”

Britney dropped her phone and wandered toward the box with the food processor. I jumped, making Ben cry again, as she lifted a blade from the box.

“No, Britney,” I said. “Danger.”

I took the blade away, set it high on the counter, and she started crying too. They were both crying when Logan came in. He laughed seeing us huddled that way, and I knew he was faking it but the kids didn’t. His laughter filled the house, covered the wind’s mournful sound, and he scooped them up, one in each arm, so that they laughed.

“They said I was ready to live my life,” I told Logan in bed that night. Our room had once been an attic and a round window was cut into the wall behind us. The shelter break didn’t reach that high and the moon shone brightly in, silvered the edges of things so that my hand, outside the covers, was both light and dark. Wind shook the glass.

“This isn’t it, though,” I said. “This is something else.”

Logan’s hand took hold of mine.

“It’s a new life,” he said. “A better one.”

He left his hand where it was and I fell asleep with its weight on my belly, rising with each breath.

TH E C H IL D R EN woke angry in a new place. Logan was already gone and I crouched

beside the dresser, reading my prayer. Ben’s wail stretched beyond his room; his door opened and he stomped the narrow stairs into my room.

“Make amends,” I read from the other side of the prayer card, and I whispered the words lightly as Ben burst into the room, red-faced and sweating, and flung his arms around me. Downstairs, Britney began to cry too, and I lifted Ben and carried him down to her. We curled, the three of us, on the floor in Britney’s room and the children cried and I comforted them, curving my body around theirs and stretching my arms to 76

reach across. We lay for a long time, until the sun crept high against the wall and the children sniffed their tears. I wiped their faces and hugged them and carried them, one at a time, down the stairs to breakfast, squeezing my fingers into their sides for fear of dropping them.

I made cinnamon toast. Britney sat on the knobbed carpet and watched. Ben knocked over a jug of milk; we mopped it with the one towel we had unpacked. The toast popped, meanwhile, and I let it cool too long while I cleaned, so the butter didn’t melt into the bread but sat cool and yellow on top.

“Daddy knows how to do it right,” Ben told me.

Britney tore bits of toast and dropped them onto the carpet, staring at me like a dare. Ben didn’t touch his; he sucked his thumb and glared.

“Don’t,” I said, touching his hand. He sucked harder.

The doorbell rang and I ignored it, picking up Britney’s crumbs from the floor. It rang again and someone knocked and, by the time I stood to answer, Rosa’s head poked through, smiling across the living room.

“Am I disturbing?” she asked. “Thought you could use help.”

She came into the kitchen and shooed me away, told me to unpack, leave the children to her. I hovered near the door, watched as she took the children’s plates to the microwave and warmed the toast so that the butter melted. They were happy then, eating all and asking for more. Ben started talking about buffalo, which we’d read about before the move, and Rosa told him there weren’t any wild ones left—they were all domesticated, kept behind fences.

I crept upstairs to the window seat inside our room, where I’d set my book and prayer card. The sun fell hot through the glass and I flipped pages slowly, running my hands over images—women with tambourines, a dripping head on a platter, Christ nailed and bleeding. I touched them and tried to feel their passion.

My counselor at Stone Hawk had said to seek daily conscious contact with God “as I understood him.” I repeated it to Logan later, sitting on the bench beside the pond.

“How do you understand God?” he’d asked and I shook my head, meaning I don’t.

Our legs showed like sticks in the water’s shining top. Before leaving, Logan asked why? and I threw a stone just to see the water ripple, our legs blur together.

“Why do we do anything?” I answered, remembering Christina’s eyes that first night—how wide they were, how sparkling—as she lifted precooked bricks from her bag.

The book was Logan’s gift to me later, when he came to take me home. He held colored balloons in one hand and the book in the other, with a card that said Congratulations, as if I’d done something.

DI S H ES CLAT T ER ED downstairs; water ran. By the time I got there, Rosa had

cleaned and handed out toys from the small bag we’d packed for traveling.

“They take a lot out of a person,” she said.

Britney held a doll to her chest and patted its back.

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“Love you,” she said. “Love you. Love you. Love you.” She rocked back and forth.

I got a knife and opened a box marked Toys. Ben lifted the treasures from inside: fire trucks and books, a harmonica. He pranced about the room, blowing his harmonica, and I told him to put each of the toys inside the wooden box tucked in one corner of the room. My head pounded and I wiped my palms against my legs. I poured two glasses of water and drank mine slowly, holding it in my mouth. Tasting it.

“So,” Rosa said. “What do you think of it here?”

I didn’t know what to say. “We just got here.”

“I’ve been here my whole life,” she said. “Mostly.”

She smiled from the side of her face and took a drink. Light reflected from her glasses so I couldn’t see her eyes. She sat on the edge of the couch, hands folded in her lap. She had long hands, brown, with thick veins. The hands of a sculptor, I thought, someone who creates things.

“You must like it,” I said.

She nodded, thinking.

“It’s big.” She spread her arms, then dropped them to her lap. “But also small.”

She peered to see if I understood; I pretended that I did.

I T WAS L ON ELY when she left. I smoked through lunch on the porch. Ben and

Britney dunked carrots in hummus, scooped cottage cheese with their fingers, and I blew my smoke away from them, leaned to clean the mess from their hands with napkins I kept clenched between my knees. It was a gray day. Wind bent the tops of our trees and small, hard-packed flurries drifted the air. I rubbed my hands to warm them.

The kids ran through the yard, dug sticks into the ground, and I left them to stand in the open drive, where I could see around the shelter break to the gravel road and cows piled on the other side.

A man was there, pulling a body from the back of a pickup, letting it drop among the rest. I walked to meet him.

“Howdy,” he said when I was near enough to hear.

He was thin, yellow in the steely light, and he wiped a sleeve across his nose.

“Hello,” I said.

Wind rushed the prairie, bit me, and I huddled inside my sweater. The cows’ blue tongues hung from open mouths.

“You’re Angie,” said the man. He was Mark, Roland and Rosa’s boy. He was young— nineteen, twenty—and licked his lips watching me, his hair pulled into a ponytail beneath a worn cap. He kicked a cow, stuffed his hands deep inside pockets.

“I know about you,” he said, jittering and glassy-eyed, nose a swollen bulb. “Your dick of a husband told us.”

“Oh.” Mark leaned against the pickup, eyeing me, and I knew that he had drugs. I knew it like the pulse that throbbed inside my fingertips. I wanted to ask what kind.

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Instead, I pulled another cigarette from my pocket and leaned close to Mark, who lit it. The wind was so strong, you couldn’t see the smoke I blew out.

Across from us, Ben crept toward the hole in our trees, edging from the driveway onto the road. It was a broad sky, flat land. Nothing showed for miles—just a speck to the west where Roland and Rosa’s trees stood, a line of windmills to the north, spinning like thumbtacks. Ben stood in the road, sucking his thumb. Britney teetered behind.

“How’d they die?” I counted four heads, piled different directions.

“Sick. Tried to separate the herd.” He shrugged.

“What will you do?”

“With the cows?” Mark tilted the brim of his hat back and scratched beneath it, staring away, across the road toward my children. “We usually call somebody to take ’em. Turn ’em to dog food.” He looked at me with a kind of smile. “But these were sick.

Might just burn ’em.”

Ben reached the fence, crawled under. Britney stood in the cutout of driveway, a sippy cup and stick in either hand.

“Ben doesn’t like them,” I said.

“Naw. Best to keep him away.”

He patted my shoulder as I left and it was like an anchor. He told me to let him know if I needed anything. Anything at all.

LO GA N K ISSED playfully, dipping me, so that it felt like a show. Britney clung to his

leg and Ben grabbed mine, giggling. Pasta noodles hung fresh from the cutter and I pushed myself away, dropped them into a pot of boiling water. Marinara simmered on the stove; salad was tossed and on the table.

Logan talked about his job: the people, the town, the office with “a view.” He forgot I’d seen it—the square window, the stoplight strung with wire across the sky.

“You don’t need to pretend,” I said.

“I’m not pretending.” Sauce dotted his chin. “It’s not all about you.”

I waited. Logan cleaned up from dinner, sent the children to bed. He put on a movie and sprawled on the couch, rubbed his eyes. He looked at the toy box pushed to one corner of the room, empty boxes flattened and stacked by the door.

“You did good today.”

“I had help,” I said. “Rosa.”

“Yeah?”

The movie was an old one, martial arts in black-and-white, and the sound jumped.

The actors moved their mouths in wide circles that didn’t match their words.

“Did you tell her about me?” I asked.

“What?”

“Rosa. Did you tell her about me?”

He turned from the movie. “Like what? What would I tell her?”

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“You know.”

He shrugged. “I told them you might need help. It’s a big job, moving with two kids.”

Onscreen, swords flashed. The lead actor was surrounded and outnumbered. He grunted. Logan sighed.

“I just want you to be okay.”

“I am okay.”

He nodded, tracing circles on my hand until I pulled away. My cigarettes lay on top of the mantel; I tapped one from the pack on my way out.

He followed. His arms wrapped me from behind, and I leaned on the railing, blew smoke into the sky. It was a clear sky and the stars pulsed. Logan’s lips trailed the back of my neck; his breath blew down the collar of my shirt. We hadn’t had sex since before Stone Hawk and I thought this might be it. I dropped my head, felt his lips at my hairline. The cigarette dangled from my fingers, which dangled from the railing. When he turned me toward himself, I dropped the cigarette and pressed my mouth to his. We stood that way for some time, lips locked, mouths like caverns.

He was the one who pulled away; we stared in the same direction, arms leaned against the railing, not speaking.

TH E MO RN IN G was warm for November but breezy. We finger-painted outside, the

kids bundled into old jeans and sweatshirts too small for them, squatting on brokendown cardboard and raking fingers through paint. I smoked nearby, moving with the wind to keep the smoke from settling on them. Ben looked at me from time to time and shame pounded my throat, bloomed my cheeks. He was the one who’d found me and called 911 the way he’d been taught. I don’t know how I looked to him. He tried showing me once, falling to his side, clenched into a curved, shrimp shape.

Make amends, I thought, shutting out the paint and the smoke, picturing the words.

I ground the cigarette beneath my heel and dropped to my knees beside Ben. I smeared my hands in paint and waved at his face, whooping so that he laughed and Britney stared wide-eyed across the cardboard. We rolled on the ground laughing, painted hands outstretched; colors stuck to our hair.

Mark’s truck rolled into the driveway; I was glad for him to see me that way. Rosa waved from the passenger seat and I waved back. Paint cracked my hands, splattered my clothes, matted my hair. I waved as she stepped out of the truck, hinges groaning.

I laughed and called her name. Ben and Britney slapped one another, squealing, falling over, they laughed so hard.

They’re happy and I’m here, I thought. I’m part of it.

“Nice day,” said Rosa. Behind her, Mark raised a hand and rolled onto the road, accelerated. Dust rose behind him, snarled in the branches of our trees.

“Yes,” I agreed.

Our chimes shivered in the wind.

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We cleaned, huddled around the faucet, the water too cold and then too hot. But then it was right and ran purple from our hands. We dipped our hair to the faucet, squeezed out the colors. The towel hung limp when we were done.

We worked in Britney’s room, arranging clothes.

“What did Logan tell you?” I asked.

The children were in Ben’s room across the hall; through the open door, I saw him stacking blocks, Britney nursing her baby.

Rosa held a stack of ruffled pants and didn’t answer for a long time. She stroked each pant before putting them away, her fingers long. Wide.

“Enough,” she said, setting the last pair inside Britney’s drawer and closing it. Her eyes were like tears.

“What did my son tell you?” she asked.

“Enough.”

I sat on the floor, putting dresses onto hangers.

“Did he tell you,” she asked, “that I left him when I was your age?”

I dropped my hands. She nodded.

“I know what it’s like,” she said.

“Where did you go?”

“Denver. A little over a year. Mark was five. I missed his birthday.”

“Why did you come back?” I asked.

It was the wrong question.

“Staying is a choice,” she said, the answer to a different question, a better one.

A pair of socks lay in her palm like an egg; her fingers curled around it, traced its laced edges.

“It doesn’t just happen,” she said.

MA R K CA M E at noon. He leaned in the entry, waiting as Rosa washed peanut butter

from her hands. The children sat at the table in the back, sucking jelly from between bread. I stood at the door with him. He smelled like wind and earth and his face was red from those things. He wiped his nose on his sleeve.

“How you doing?” he asked.

“Fine.”

His flannel hung unbuttoned; his pants loose on his waist.

“How are the cows?” I asked.

He smiled like I’d made a joke. “One more sick. Hopefully the last.”

“Hopefully,” I agreed.

“Quarantined.” Rosa stepped from the kitchen. “And pumped full of meds. She’ll pull through.”

“Hopefully,” said Mark.

“Hopefully,” I said.

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I watched the truck drive away, feeling already how the house shrunk in their absence, my head heavy on my neck. A crash sounded from the kitchen; feet pounded the floor. Ben lay a roll of paper towels on top of a milk puddle that dripped slowly from the table to the floor.

I N O N E of the engravings in my book, God was a long-haired man. Sun fell through

clouds, lighting only some of His face as He blessed a man and a woman. Three demons crouched in shadows behind, in pain.

“How do you know they’re in pain?” Logan asked.

I pointed to the claws at their eyes, their curved spines.

“But how do you know?” he asked. “Can’t they just be hiding?”

Carved into the engraving, along the top, was scripture: When He appears, we shall be like Him. I said, “See? It’s over. He won.”

Logan stepped closer, damp and spicy from his shower. A towel wrapped his waist.

He turned the page: a boat, a rainbow, one man building an altar, another leading a bull.

“I like this better,” he said. “A beginning. See?” Knots matted my hair. He kissed them. The colors on his page were garish, a thing for nursery schools.

Logan slid into a shirt, buttoned in front of a mirror. A pine brushed our window; I brushed the bull on Logan’s page, the fire beside it.

“What do they call it,” I asked, “when a grown-up runs away?”

A button missed its hole.

“Are we too old to be called a runaway?”

“Angie,” said Logan, “I don’t have time for this.”

“I’m not asking for myself.”

He leaned, unbuttoned, against his dresser. Below us, a door slammed into a wall. A toilet seat cracked against its tank.

“Mom!” yelled Ben. “I didn’t make it!”

Britney cried.

I pushed a sweatshirt over my head, fished disinfectant wipes from the hall closet.

Logan left while I broke eggs into a bowl, heated syrup, softened butter. The kids were happy, purring at my feet. Logan said he loved me without looking at me; he was late, shoving into a coat as he walked.

I waited at the window as the kids ate.

We scraped plates, rinsed, loaded the dishwasher. We washed hands and faces, took vitamins, dressed, combed. I made more hummus, stirred fruit juice into bear-shaped molds. There was lunchtime and story time and, finally, nap time. Rosa did not come.

The sky lowered and the house glowed. I went outside to escape it.

The ground and trees were bare—white road and black limb, yellow grass, yellow home. The wind was there but it was not windy; it simply was. Chimes rang single 82

tones. Trees swayed. I lit a cigarette and walked the edge of the yard, following the trail of trees. The air held, caught by clouds.

I saw him through the trees when he came, Mark unloading another cow. The road stretched wide as I crossed. I crossed slowly, not allowing myself to run. He sat on the edge of the pickup and waited, the cow unloaded, piled upon the others.

I took his hand and he pulled me up. It was a strong, cold hand and it held mine longer than it should. Our feet dangled from the back of the truck, inches from piled cows. They smelled bad but not horrible. Snow fell flatly.

Geese gaggled, rustling the air. Their shadows passed like boulders over the field.

When they were gone, there was no sign they’d ever come at all, the world silent once more. A solitary chime sounded.

“Where’s Rosa?” I asked.

“Sick.”

His hands balled between his legs, white-knuckled; he looked at them instead of me. His face stubbled black and he smelled sweet, like weed. I leaned toward him. I breathed.

“Damn cows,” he said, kicking at them. Missing.

A cigarette burned on the ground where I’d dropped it when he took my hand. I lit another. Snow fell too thick to see through. The flakes wet my cheeks. I wiped them but my hands were bare and the water smeared and my face was still wet. Mark’s gloved hands cupped my face. He held me, letting the water soak his gloves, so that I was dry again when he pulled away.

“Let’s get inside,” he said.

We crawled through the back window into his cab. He started the engine and air blasted from the dashboard—cold, then warm, then hot.

“I ought to go,” I said.

I didn’t.

Mark pulled a bag of ditch weed from the glove box in front of me. He rolled it thick into paper and lit it and handed it to me and rolled another.

“Do you believe in God?” I asked.

“It helps to.”

I put the joint in my mouth, inhaled.

I thought about how there’s nothing before we’re born and nothing, again, when we die. I thought, We’re candles on a dark and endless sea.

“I’ve never been to the sea,” Mark said.

The snow was a cloud and we its hot, pulsing center.

He gave me another.

Long-haired men stretched their hands to bless me; they bled the necks of animals.

Smoke rose to the sky.

Mark laughed.

I took another.

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We opened our windows and smoke fell out. Snow fell in, freezing.

“I think your husband’s home,” said Mark.

Buttered light shone through the snow, driving toward us from town.

“Shit.”

Mark pulled the truck around, rattled the rutted ground.

We managed to pull into the driveway before Logan, but he followed right behind and kept the headlights on so that I couldn’t see him. I shaded my eyes to see and still couldn’t. Snow fell in curtains.

“Where are the kids?” he asked, getting out of the car without turning it off. “Angie, where are the kids?”

My tongue was hard to move.

“Napping,” I said.

He ran into the house.

“I outta go,” said Mark.

“You shouldn’t drive,” I said.

He laughed. His truck curved a loop through the yard, bouncing over the ditch, between trees to get out because Logan’s car blocked the drive.

I sat in Logan’s car and pulled out the keys. An alarm went off, telling me the lights were still on, and I fumbled on the dash beneath the wheel to find the control that turned them off. Logan met me on my way inside. He wore a knitted cap with red poms that dangled on the side of his face and made him look ridiculous. Breath shot from his mouth in great clouds of steam. I tried not to laugh.

“I came home early,” he said. “Thank God I did.”

“Why?” I asked, my tongue looser now. “They’re napping.”

“But you weren’t here.”

“I was,” I said, waving my arm. “I’m always here. Always. Right here.”

He lurched suddenly, peering.

“My god,” he said. “You’re high.”

He collapsed to the step. I leaned against the pillar.

“After everything,” he said.

Cartoon voices drifted from inside. The window lit with bright primary colors.

“I’ll take them,” he warned. “I’ll take them away from you.”

He pushed himself from the step, went inside. By the time I followed, the heat hurt and I wished I’d stayed in the snow.

MI C KEY CA L L ED for Toodles and asked what tool we needed.

“The hammer!” yelled Ben. Logan carried bundles of plastic-wrapped firewood from the car. He stacked them next to the bookcase and around the front; the stacks reached to the top of the bookcase and spilled away from the wall. The room filled with a bald, splintered smell.

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I heated microwavable bowls of mac and cheese. Logan wasn’t hungry. The kids and I ate on the couch, watching Mickey and him. Ben scraped bits of powdered cheese from each noodle and handed them to me. I licked his spoon and handed it back.

Britney stared at the screen. Her mac and cheese congealed in the bowl in her lap; I ate it after finishing mine.

Snow swirled the open doorway, where Logan marched back and forth carrying his wood. When he’d finished, he closed the door and the room went suddenly still. He knelt beside the fireplace. Ben knelt beside him. Together, they nested bits of packing paper among logs and kindled a fire. Smoke billowed into the room.

“The flue!” Logan yelled, pulling at its chain.

The flue open, smoke went up the way it should. Britney jumped circles, clapping.

Ben poked logs with the poker. It was past bedtime and I waited for Logan to say something but he didn’t, so we sat together, the four of us, for a long time, watching Mickey until the fire died and Logan stood to place another bundle on the hearth.

Britney cried.

“It’s late,” I said.

Together, we walked the children to bed. Ben sucked his thumb the whole way and Logan walked beside him, not saying anything. Britney wrapped her arms around my leg; climbing the stairs was hard. Logan came back for her and carried her to her room.

He lay her in her crib and she clutched my finger, refusing to let go, when I leaned over the side.

“I love you,” I said, meaning it.

Logan watched from behind, turned away when I walked toward him.

Downstairs, he turned on the news while I made popcorn and opened a beer. He eyed the beer but didn’t say anything. When the news ended, he went to bed. The fire burned to embers, crackled red heat. My book peeped from under the couch, where it’d been dropped and kicked. The face of Christ stared from its cover, shifting with the light of the fire.

“It’s a new life,” Logan had said.

“Staying is a choice,” said Rosa.

A log rolled from the top of the pile nearest me and the whole stack fell.

I shrugged into my coat, stuffed paper and a lighter in its pockets, lifted a bundle, two. The clogs I wore were open in the back and snow wet my socks when I stepped from the porch onto the yard, through the shelter break and across the road to the field.

It’d stopped snowing. Moonlight glinted the cows’ eyes. Logs cut my arms.

I dropped them among the bodies and went back for more. Again and again, I gathered logs from the house until new clouds rolled across the sky and the light in the cows’ eyes went out.

Then I scattered the paper from my pockets, gripped the lighter, and searched for words.

“Make amends,” I said. It was all I knew.

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contributors

J A S M I N E V . B A I L E Y is the author of Alexandria (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014), Disappeared (CMUP, 2017), and the chapbook Sleep and What Precedes It (Longleaf Press, 2009). She is a contributing editor for Waxwing Literary Journal.

K E L L Y J . B E A R D has been a lawyer, an activist, a teacher, and a musician. In 2017, her first fulllength memoir, An Imperfect Rapture, was chosen by Janisse Ray for the Zone 3 Press Creative Nonfiction Book Award. Her work appears in literary journals, including Creative Nonfiction, Santa Ana River Review, Five Points, Bacopa Literary Review, and others. She lives in Atlanta with her husband, the poet David Bottoms.

A L Y S E B E N S E L is the author of Rare Wondrous Things, a poetic biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, forthcoming 2020), and three chapbooks, including Lies to Tell the Body (Seven Kitchens Press, 2018). She loves cicadas so much she has one tattooed on her ankle. She teaches at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference.

R I C H A R D B R O S T O F F is the author of two chapbooks: Momentum (La Vita Poetica, 2007), and A Few Forms of Love (Finishing Line Press, 2012).

His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Cincinnati Review, North American Review, Poetry East, Madison Review, Folio, Magma, The Moth, the Louisville Review, Verse Daily, and many other journals.

S A R A B U R A N T sometimes dresses up as the fairy Columbine to protest inaction on climate change, but her favorite role is Prince Uncharming in a drama that unfolds every time her grandchildren come over to play. Currently her favorite poet is William Blake.

C H E L S E A D I N G M A N ’s first book, Thaw, was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press, 2017). Her second poetry collection, Through a Small Ghost, won The Georgia Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press (February, 2020). She is

also the author of the chapbook, What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018). Visit her website: chelseadingman.com.

M Y R O N N H A R D Y is the author of, most recently, Radioactive Starlings, published by Princeton University Press. He enjoys long walks among birches.

L E T I T I A H U C K A B Y has a degree in journalism from the University of Oklahoma, a BFA from the Art Institute of Boston in photography, and her master’s degree from the University of North Texas in Denton.

Huckaby has exhibited as an emerging artist at Phillips New York, the Tyler Museum of Art, and the Camden Palace Hotel in Cork City, Ireland. She is a featured artist in MAP2020: The Further We Roll, The More We Gain, opening in spring 2020. www.huckabystudios.com A N D R E W H U O T is a book artist and bookbinder in Atlanta, Georgia. He operates Big River Bindery, a studio for bookmaking and letterpress printing, book repair, and design. He has a master’s in book arts from the University of the Arts and workshops in his bindery and across the country. His artwork takes his everyday life and uses the patterns, lines, and shapes to create work that is playful and strikes a familiar chord with viewers. www.andrewhuot.com S N E H A S U B R A M A N I A N K A N T A was awarded the first Vijay Nambisan Fellowship in 2019. She is the Charles Wallace Fellow 2019–2020 at The University of Stirling, Scotland. She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journal, and reader for Palette Poetry and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Her chapbook Ghost Tracks is forthcoming with Louisiana Literature (Southeastern Louisiana University).

D A N I E L S E T H K R A U S ’s work blends history with photography to deepen our understanding of places and culture. In practice, Kraus strives to create work that is informed and empathetic toward the subjects and his viewers. Kraus earned a MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University and a BFA and BA from the University of North

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contributors contributors

Florida. Having a background and training in historical research has greatly influenced the way he approaches creative projects. www.danielsethkraus.com L A R Y K L E E M A N is in his twenty-eighth year of public school teaching where he’s known for his birdcalls and deep knee bends. As a young man he built bluebird houses, now he builds houses for native bees.

One of his favorite things is listening to his son play the accordion on summer evenings.

K R I S T I N M A C I N T Y R E holds an MFA from Colorado State University. Her work has been published in, or is forthcoming in Mud Season Review, Sugar House Review, Timber, and elsewhere. She is a 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee and serves as an associate editor at Colorado Review. When she is not writing, she teaches freshman composition and drinks coffee in her small

garden.

E R I N M A L O N E is the author of Hover (2015) and a chapbook, What Sound Does It Make (2008). She lives on the upper left coast of the United States, where the current season is referred to as The Big Dark. She served as editor of Poetry Northwest from 2016 until the turn of the decade, and now looks forward to a little aimless wandering, reading, and writing.

K A T I E M A R Y A is a doctoral student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She holds a BA in Spanish from Westmont College and an MFA in poetry from Bennington College. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Southern Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, and Five Points as the recipient of the 2018 James Dickey Prize for Poetry. Poetry drives her creative impulse, but her artistic interests include translation, sound installation, and dance. Her first translations are forthcoming in Waxwing this year.

M I R I A M R U D O L P H was born and raised in Paraguay. In 2003, she moved to Canada to study fine arts at the University of Manitoba, where she graduated with a bachelor of fine arts, honors in 2007

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and a bachelor of education in 2010. She completed a master of fine arts in printmaking at the University of Alberta in 2017, and is happily settled in Winnipeg with a home studio, a printing press, a big vegetable garden, and her husband and child. www.miriamrudolph.com M E R E D I T H S T R I C K E R is a visual artist and poet working in cross-genre media. She is the author of Our Animal, Omnidawn Open Book Prize; Tenderness Shore, which received the National Poetry Series Award; Alphabet Theater, mixed-media performance poetry from Wesleyan University Press; Mistake, Caketrain Chapbook Award; and anemochore, selected for the Gloria Anzaldúa chapbook prize, Newfound Press. meredithstricker.com S T A C Y T R A U T W E I N B U R N S ’s fiction has been published online at Litro Online, Lost Balloon, and Smokelong Quarterly (among others), and in print by Windhover and Alligator Juniper.

A T A S H Y A G H M A I A N was born in Tehran, Iran, and has lived in the United States since 1990. She is a licensed clinical social worker with two decades of experience working in New York City public schools, and both a founding member and director of Wellness at Harvest Collegiate, a progressive public high school in Manhattan. She is currently working on a full-length memoir entitled My Name Means Fire.

N I C H O L A S Y I N G L I N G lives in the scenic San Fernando Valley, where generations of beautiful midwesterners go to die. His work appears in Colorado Review, Nimrod, Spillway, and elsewhere.

Born and raised on the east side of O’ahu, CHARITY YORO’s current work explores the liminal—bodies and boundaries, motherlines, the latitudes of belonging . . . and occasionally, her two-year old feisty feline guide, Rumi. Her poetry is featured and forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, PRISM international, 14 Hills, and others. Connect with her at www.charityeyoro.com.

last note

I’ve been taking delight in the smell of fresh coffee, the softness of fabric, cold water running over my fingers. I often turn to the domestic, how I keep my house and how it reflects the day back to me. Some days, shoes litter the floor and scarves are draped over chairs. Other days, everything is in clean, neat lines.

Both are a part of living. And then, one morning, visitors outside the kitchen window: monarchs grazing the butterfly bush, a red-tailed hawk perching on the neighbor’s disused trellis. In the everyday something new, something unexpected.

ALYSE BENSEL, POETRY

The ordinary is unstable. It shifts with each increment of attention or distraction. When I head to the wetlands at sunrise, the river never meets the ocean the same way, nor pelicans, seagulls, egrets, or snow geese. Today, the wind is biting, the water a clear steel blue. Later, I entrust the care of my mother to hospice. There’s a quantity of paperwork. Two nurses and I stand in winter sunlight, mottled by oakleaf shadow. The day appears entirely ordinary, the way breathing is ordinary.

The way my mother knows who I am, then unknows. And the way her eyes regain for a moment their ordinary, miraculous comprehension.

MEREDITH STRICKER, POETRY

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LETITIA HUCKABY. Zanetta and Her Girls, 2010. Pigment Prints on Fabric. 33 inches x 23 inches.