Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine #3 by Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine

Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine issue #3

fall/winter, 2015

fiction Andreasen, Liana Vrajitoru

Drifters

Connelly, Mark

The Favored Few

Hill, Mary Louise

From Waking to Water to Walking

Johnson, Thomas Penn

Cora and Martha

108

non-fiction Clark, Carol

Children at the Border

Haines, Gillian

One Volunteer Day in Maximum Security

Wagner, Vivian

Longwall

Webb, Joseph

Shift Mining

Baldys, Alice

Winter Freefall

Boggess, Ace

Her Lawyer

Bucher, Steven

A Man with Tea

February Again

The Grace from Fall

poetry

Casey, Kevin

Old Silver Beach, 1977

107

Erickson, Susan J

Field Notes of Lucy Bakewell Observing the Eastern Phoebe with John James Audubon,1804

Lucy Audubon Tends Her Husband after His Second Stroke, 1847

Zelda Fitzgerald Writes Save Me the Waltz in Phipps Clinic, 1932

Freek, George

At Moon Lake

118

Greenberg, Dina

Wintering

Hanson, Nels

Period of Adjustment

Horvath, Richard

Pocket Watch

126

Jones, Emory D

Heavenly Peace

128

McRae, Bruce

In the Moment

Meszaros, Bob

Hamden High School Rifle Team

Moody, Lynne

Perkins II, Richard King

Lying about My Age

119

Skin

120

Some Day

121

Sunrise Village

122

A Pinpoint Asylum

Machina Post Ignem

The Palatial Circus

Reich, Joseph

The Invisible Plane

Sarnat, Gerard

fathering father

Foiled in the Closet

Ur Bernard

Circadian Sunrise

Promise

Scopa, Domenic

I Regret

124

Strauss, Emily

Vietnam Veteran

Watching Football on TV

Witness to the Tides

Green Itself Growing

Burke, Wayne F

river in winter #2

DeCristofaro, Jeffrey

Crowned with Snow

Haber, Ira Joel

Rain Day

Priyadarshini

Kovil Yannai (The Temple Elephant)

Rogner, Galia

untitled

106

untitled

123

untitled

129

Schnoeker-Shorb, Yvette A

Vivian, Robert images

Williamson III, Ernest

Soul of a Mannequin

The Beauty of Indecisions

front cover: Galia Rogner, untitled back cover: staff

Editor's Note I'm very excited about this, our third issue, which includes fiction from Thomas Penn Johnson, an essay by Vivian Wagner, poetry from Emily Strauss and Ace Boggess, and art from Ernest Williamson. We continue to provide opportunities for senior writers and artists: eighteen of our thirty-four published contributors are flourishing in life's second half. We hope you enjoy this issue as much as we did in putting it together!

Children at the Border “Oh, you.” The student looked at me with a sly grin and hesitated to suggest he was contemplating my question. “You’re the kind of economist who worries about pregnant ladies in Central America.” I chuckled. Like many good students at Guilford College in the 1980s, he had stopped by my office just to chat with me, one of his professors that semester. After his light-hearted descriptions of the different, though conventional economic perspectives of my fellow colleagues in the Economics Department, I had asked, “And what kind of an economist am I?” Since then, my whole approach to economics has changed, but I’ve never forgotten his assessment of my unorthodox economic worries is still accurate, except that now I would add children and the poor to my list of people I worry about. It had not been in my life plans to teach about economic development, poverty, and women and children. In fact, I had cried my way all the way through my only undergraduate economics course and swore I would never take another because economics had nothing to do with people. But as a college student in the late 1960s, and with the first Earth Day fresh in my memory, I eventually decided my life’s calling was to advocate for good environmental policy, which meant I must study economics, to learn to talk “rationally” with policy-makers. As events unfolded, I only rarely used my graduate economics education for environmental purposes (though I was good at it when I did). Other unexpected events took me elsewhere. Now, I am at the age when I look back on my life and can believe those unexpected events led me inexorably to where I am today, where I was destined to end up all along. I can imagine that my life did not unfold simply as a result of quick responses to a long series of chance events. I can believe, for example, that in 1975, when I walked into Boersma Travel Agency in Ann Arbor, Michigan to make plane reservations for our annual summer vacation trip to Mexico, the travel agent was meant to say, “You

know, for $15 more you can fly to Costa Rica instead?” I can tell myself that she was meant to sit back and watch in silence while I processed the new information. Forty years ago, when a dollar bought more than today, $15 was not that much money, even for graduate students on study stipends and the GI bill. “Only $15 more to Costa Rica than to Mexico? Round trip?” I clarified. She nodded. We had fallen in love with Mexico on our honeymoon five years previously and had returned to the country for a month every summer after that to explore different cities, towns, villages, jungles, and ruins; to wander in small markets and talk with vendors of fruits, vegetables, flowers, and herbs we had never seen before; and to taste regional cheeses and specialty dishes. Also, we could afford traveling in Mexico with its good public transportation, whereas in the United States we risked repeated costly repairs to our doddering old VW van. “But Costa Rica is so much farther south. How can that be?” She shrugged her shoulders in response. Even then, airline fares, especially special excursion rates, made little rational sense. Again she nodded when I asked, “And can we go for a month at that same price?” “Could I please use your phone for a minute to call my husband? I’m pretty sure he’ll want to fly to Costa Rica, but we always check with each other before altering plans we’ve agreed on.” It took Tom and me less than ten seconds to change our trip plans, never suspecting this was one of those unexpected events that would shock us into new ways of seeing the world and change the direction of our lives. The whole story is a long one, which took years of study, travel, teaching, research, and living in Central America and Mexico to unfold, but some of my early experiences sowed seeds of doubt about some very comforting and privileged notions I had been taught since childhood starting with my favorite aphorism at the time about the difference between charity

and change: “Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.” Since this would be our first time in Costa Rica, we studied maps and read about its beautiful, pristine beaches on both the Caribbean and the Pacific and vast rain- and cloud-forest preserves. But, at age twenty-eight, I was quite certain this was the only time in my life that I would visit Central America, and I had my heart set on learning about the cultures of the descendents of the ancient Mayans in Guatemala and seeing the exquisite indigenous weavings. Since the three Central American countries between Costa Rica and Guatemala are small, we decided we would make a grand circle tour of Central America by Tica-bus, a bus line somewhere between first and second class. After visiting a U.S. friend working as a Peace Corps volunteer in San José, the capital of Costa Rica, we would take Tica-bus north through Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador, stopping overnight in each country, until on the fourth day we would reach Guatemala. After a week exploring Guatemala, we would take the bus back through the countries in the reverse order to end up back in Costa Rica, with a week left to explore beaches. When we started out, we knew little about any of the countries, but we did know that, unlike the other Central American countries, Costa Ricans had abolished their army in 1948 and devoted that money to schools, health care, social services, and environmental conservation. And the Costa Rican government had assigned our Peace Corps friend to teach music to children and play in the national symphony, rather than the usual Peace Corps assignments of working on extreme poverty and environmental degradation in desperately poor countries. When we arrived at the San José airport, the Costa Rican customs officials set a jolly tone for our anticipated adventure. The two attractive, young men who met us at the customs counter wore pressed, gray uniforms with a patch or pin to indicate they were with Immigration, but with no

stripes or insignia to denote rank. And while I did not think to notice it at the time, they had no guns. They welcomed us to Costa Rica with friendly smiles and asked if we had anything to declare. Knowing of the concern about insect pests crossing borders into countries heavily dependent on agricultural production, I showed them a half-eaten roll leftover from my airplane meal and explained it had butter on it. A mischievous look passed quickly between the young men. Then they smiled at us and one joked, “If it’s good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us.” They never looked at our luggage and sent us on our way with wishes of a pleasant visit in their country. As planned, on our first Sunday morning in Costa Rica, Tom and I boarded a Tica-bus traveling north to the Nicaraguan border. We rode with young families and their children, older couples, and an occasional individual through the rolling, green, Costa Rican countryside. Cool, fresh morning air drifted through the open bus windows, and I smelled a subtle scent of aromatic leaves of some unfamiliar tropical trees. But it was the children’s Sunday morning excitement that I remember best. Even before we boarded, little girls clutched their mothers’ hands and jumped up and down in anticipation. In spite of their fathers’ explanations that it wasn’t time yet, small boys tugged on their fathers’ arms, dragging them toward the closed door of the waiting bus. Once on board, passengers stuffed their cloth day-bags bulging with diapers, snacks, sweaters, etc., in overhead racks and found seats. Strangers chatted with each other about their plans to spend the day in the country, walking and picnicking, or in a nearby town, visiting parents and grandparents. Along the route, the driver stopped to pick up other families standing on the side of the road at informal bus stops. He waited while those parents helped their children climb aboard and guided them down the aisle toward the vacant seats. As the bus filled, seated passengers made room for the boarding ones, scooting closer together or moving children to their laps putting a gentle hand down to calm a child’s leg that just couldn’t stop jumping in excitement.

At one stop, a team of high school-aged boys dressed in sky blue and white sports uniforms, blue knee socks, and soccer shoes clattered aboard. Since by then all seats were occupied, the teen-aged boys stood in the aisle, taking up its entire length, laughing and joking with each other and playing a silly game in which a soccer player in the back tapped one of his team-mates in front on the shoulder. When his buddy turned around to see who had signaled, all his team-mates behind him looked up at the ceiling as if to say, “What are you looking at me for?” Seated passengers couldn’t help smiling at their silliness, and knowing they were the center of attention and amusement, the teen-aged boys kept this up until the little boys, who had been watching closely, took up the game. They tapped their little sisters or mothers on the shoulder and tried to look innocent, though unable to stifle giggles, prompting all of us to laugh. When the soccer players finally arrived at the nearby town where their afternoon match was scheduled, they clattered down the front steps. Just before the last step, they smiled back one last time, and waved to the admiring little boys, whom I suspect were dreaming of when they would be big enough to travel on a bus with their soccer team. We all waved to the players and wished them luck calling, “Suerte, muchachos.” As we continued north, families reached their destinations, stood, pulled their bags from the overhead compartments, and gently guided their children off the bus until few of us remained, smiling to ourselves in a kind of quiet, enchanted calm, which would not last. When we reached the Nicaraguan border, the driver explained to us few remaining passengers that we had to get off his bus, walk through the gate in the chainlink fence, pass through customs, and board the bus parked on the other side bound for Managua, Nicaragua’s capital. Tom and I filed out of the bus, thanking the smiling driver as we passed, descended onto the dry, packed earth, and stood blinking in the tropical, noonday sun. Once our eyes had adjusted, we saw on the other side of the metal fence a squat brown and white building, some portable folding

tables arranged outside in the sun, and armed customs officials wearing uniforms the same olive green color as U.S. army uniforms, which I thought at the time was coincidence. A flat expanse of brown grass with a fringe of green banana palms in the distance surrounded the fenced-in customs area. There were no houses, no places to stay for the night, no small corner stores to buy food, no vendors selling soft drinks and juicy pineapple slices to thirsty travelers. One of the Nicaraguan soldiers stood at the metal gate, glaring at the passengers as we filed through and pointing to a tan, metal, folding table where we stood in a long, single file, mute and sweating, waiting for other customs officials to check our papers and luggage. Two uniformed senior soldiers stood behind the table with holstered guns at their ample waists and studied each passport with eyes which told me that anything even slightly irregular would not be overlooked or forgiven. Behind these senior soldiers, thinner, younger, uniformed guards stood at attention with their fingers on the triggers of rifles, pointed at passengers as we crept toward the customs table. I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to ever arrive at that table and have to hand my passport to one of those men, but, at the same time, I wanted to be through whatever would occur at that table and be gone. I stood in line behind a middle-aged Nicaraguan woman with medium length, wavy, black hair and wearing a gold and brown print, cotton dress appropriate for travelâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;not dressy or expensive but not well-worn or faded from many washings. The facts that she had enough money to take a bus and go out of the country suggested she did not live in absolute poverty like the majority of Nicaraguans. But her simple dress and travel by bus suggested she was not wealthy, and there were few middle-class Nicaraguans. When her turn came, she stepped to the table with her head bowed slightly so as not to look the senior officer in the eye and held out her passport without a word. He took it without even a thank you, scowled at the Costa Rican visa and her picture, and finally looked at her face, which she kept expressionless.

He began his interrogation. Why had she been out of Nicaragua? Eyes lowered, she whispered that she was returning from a visit with her son’s family in Costa Rica. He demanded to know who else she saw in Costa Rica, had she visited any other country during her trip, where she lived in Nicaragua, what she did for a living, and if she had anything to declare. She answered each question with few words and looked back down at the ground between questions. After she whispered that she had nothing to declare, the interrogator commanded one of the armed guards to come forward to help him inspect her luggage. As they dumped all the clothing in her modest, fabric suitcase onto the table, I held my breath. What were they going to do to this ordinary woman, who had only been visiting her grandchildren? I watched shocked and embarrassed, as the official and the guard pawed through her lingerie with their rough hands, exposing dingy lace to everyone waiting in line behind her. The official scrunched up her faded blouses in a bundle, which he tossed to the guard, who fingered each button, as if searching for a secret compartment. The official observed the guard’s exaggerated inspection, as if he suspected the guard of colluding with the trembling woman, and looked up occasionally to glower at her. He finally told her to pack up her clothes, grudgingly stamped her passport, and dismissed her without even saying, “Good day.” I was next in line. I tried to do as the woman in front of me had done— give brief answers, speak only when spoken to, keep my eyes down--but still I felt my heart beating hard against my ribs, and the sweat dripped down my back, more from fear than the heat. “What is your final destination?” the official demanded of me. “Guatemala.” I could hardly get the word out and knew that Tom did not dare help. “Why are you going to Guatemala?” He stared rudely at me. “Travel. Summer vacation.” I knew not to add that I wanted to learn to weave the beautiful fabrics the Mayan women wove on back-strap looms.

“Do you have anything to declare?” “No,” I responded quickly and then remembered. “Oh, except I forgot to throw away this avocado. Can I just leave it here at the border?” He could simply have taken that one, small avocado, but instead he chose to put me in my place. “Take it to the desk that says ‘agricultura,” he commanded. “I’ll keep your passport.” Then, he looked at Tom. “You stay here,” he directed in a gruff voice. Tom and I glanced at each other, knowing we must obey. I walked to the unattended agriculture table, sat in the sun, on a burning, metal, folding chair, and stewed. Why didn’t I throw this tiny, hard, black avocado away before we arrived at customs? I don’t even like avocados that much. How long will these soldiers keep me separated from everyone? What are they doing with my passport? Will they return it to me? What if they don’t? I’ll never get back into the United States. Where will we stay if they keep us in this desolate place for the night? Oh, my god, what if they send Tom on and I have to stay here alone surrounded by these soldiers? After about a half hour, and for never explained reasons, a soldier with more stripes on his uniform than the others marched up and halted just as the toes of his heavy, thick-soled, black leather boots touched the toes of my grey, canvas running shoes. At this unsociable closeness, I had to bend my head back to look straight up into his dark, shaded, eyes, backlit by the bright sun. Holding my breath, I watched him open my blue embossed passport to the first page, scrutinize my picture, and then glare into my face, to check that it matched the picture. Scowling, he leafed through the few, mainly empty pages for visa stamps and, with an accusatory voice, shouted, “It is forbidden to bring avocados into Nicaragua.” “Sí,” I whispered, unable to say more. He grabbed the avocado from my sweaty hand, dropped the passport in my lap and motioned Tom to approach. Then, as if we were nothing more than bothersome gnats, he tossed his head toward the used, U.S. school bus outside the fence. Terrified to turn our backs on him but frightened of remaining, we hesitated a moment

and walked away as fast as we could, trying not to look as if we were fleeing in fear. Our relief at being through customs lasted only long enough to walk the distance beyond the chainlink fence and climb the three steep steps of the old bus. Expecting the same Sunday morning, cheerful camaraderie and conversation between fellow travelers, the giggling and happy chatter of healthy children with their parents on an outing of the Costa Rican bus, the mournful atmosphere of the Nicaraguan bus shocked us. Thin, pale passengers sat wordless, with their heads bowed, hands folded. The men wore clean, white, cotton, short-sleeved shirts and grey-brown pants, some with ragged cuffs, some a bit newer. The women wore simple, cotton dresses of more subdued colors than in Costa Rica, perhaps trying not to draw attention. I don’t remember seeing any children. We found places next to each other on a dilapidated, brown, plastic seat and sat down, waiting in the silence for the bus to start the trip north. At one of the first stops, a large man dressed in a pressed, white shirt and wrinkled, tan trousers with his stomach protruding over his leather belt heaved himself aboard the bus. He stood at the front of the bus beside the driver’s seat and glared as he surveyed the seated passengers. Then he took several steps down the aisle, turned, and plunked down in the second seat from the front behind the driver. He had short, well-trimmed, black hair, and at his hip, he carried a revolver in a holster, which hung into the aisle for all the passengers to see. As we rode on toward Managua, he kept his hand on the gun and watched each boarding passenger, making sure that the driver collected everybody’s few cordobas and gave no free rides to even the poorest of the poor on this route. I assumed the man with the gun was a member of the National Guard, since, in my travels in Mexico and Costa Rica, I had never seen an ordinary bus inspector with a gun. At that time, I did not know much about “La Guardia,” except that the words terrorized most Nicaraguans, and the Guards’ brutal treatment of anyone who opposed the

Somozas had enabled the family to rule the country for thirty-eight years at that time. (Ultimately the family maintained power for forty-three years.) I am not sure I knew then that the National Guard had been formed and trained originally by U.S. Marines during the period they occupied Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933. When the Marines vacated Nicaragua, the U.S. administration chose Nicaraguan Army General Anastacio GarcĂa Somoza to command the Guard. After taking complete power over the country in 1936, Somoza and his two sons after him had used the Guardia to amass great wealth and to insure the family maintained its political and economic power over most Nicaraguans, the majority of whom subsisted as landless peasants or on survival-level wages and lacked health care, water and electricity, and schools for their children. Tom and I glanced at each other and bowed our heads, though I could not keep myself from peeking occasionally to see if the gun still hung in the aisle. The man with the gun remained on the bus all the way to the capital. When the bus arrived in Managua, the driver stopped at the side of a wide road noisy with buses coming and going, gears grinding and brakes screeching. We sat in our seats watching passengers climb down until we were the only two left on the bus and the driver had to turn in his seat to explain that this was the end of the ride. This did not look like a terminal to us. We saw no large oil-stained, concrete bus parking area, or the usual slots covered with roofs to protect arriving and boarding passengers from rain and sun. Nor did we see the usual gray, block building with little, glass, ticket windows inside, the stands to buy coffee and sandwiches, and the wooden benches for waiting travelers to sit. We thanked the driver and climbed down into the tangle of people on the side of the road. Men and women, some with cardboard boxes wrapped in twine, some with plastic bags of vegetables or clutching a childâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hand, climbed on and off waiting buses. More buses, their engines roaring, arrived. The departing buses left acrid, black exhaust hanging in the air, and travelers running for buses stirred up the brown dust underfoot. Since we saw only one

large, beige, stone building without windows across a plain of overgrown grass and weeds, we realized that we were not near the centro (center of the city) where we had imagined the terminal would be and where we planned to find a hotel for the night. When we asked, one waiting passenger told us the building in the distance was the Sears store, built three years previously, after the 1972 earthquake. We asked several other waiting passengers to direct us to the bus to the centro, but most stared at us in disbelief or looked away. One woman stunned us when she said, “No buses go there.” “How do you get there then?” I asked. “We don’t need to go there,” explained a man in a business suit and shoes scuffed from standing in the dirt on the side of the road. “Don’t you have to go there for business? Don’t you have Sunday afternoon band concerts in the park? Isn’t the national cathedral there? Where are the government buildings?” He gave us a quizzical look, shrugged, and walked away without another word. Even though Tom and I had only traveled in Mexico and now Costa Rica, we knew enough to know that it was unlikely a Latin American capital city did not have a centro. Either it was the Nicaraguan culture or something else that made these people act as if it were natural for there to be no city center and park. Furthermore, in Mexico, people waiting for buses would have explained in great detail how to get to the centro, telling us what bus to take, exactly where our stop would be, and what we would see to know it was our stop. Or they would have taken us there. Thinking people must have misunderstood our Spanish, we signaled to passing buses. Finally, a bus displaying an “Out of Service” sign on the front screeched to a stop, and the driver, probably curious about two North Americans on the side of the road in one of the poorest countries in Central America, opened the front door and asked where we wanted to go. When we told him the centro, he gave us a skeptical look and replied, “I’ll take you, but you don’t really want to go there.”

Undaunted and still inexperienced with life under military dictators, we smiled, said, “Gracias, gracias, señor,” and started to climb the front steps of the bus. “No, No, No. Board in the back and stand on the bottom step at the door. If you get on the front of the bus, I have to charge you or I’ll lose my job. I don’t want to charge you since you won’t like where I’m taking you.” We ran to the back door and climbed aboard. Standing on the bottom step, I whispered to Tom, “You know, that driver is really taking a big risk by not counting us.” “Yeah, and we’re probably taking a big risk not being counted.” Maybe Tom was thinking the same thing I was thinking—of a statement supposedly made by Franklin D. Roosevelt that “Somoza [the father] was a son of a bitch, but he was our son of a bitch.” I had heard the same statement about other Latin American dictators who also served U.S. economic interests attributed to Roosevelt as well, so I supposed he had said it. But I was not sure about whom, and I was beginning to realize I should not mention it aloud here. After bumping along a short distance, the driver stopped abruptly and called out, “This is the centro. Go quickly, and don’t tell anyone how you got here.” Glad to be in the centro at last and relieved to end our illegal ride in a country which increasingly seemed to mete out justice with guns and fear, we waved and shouted, “Gracias, señor.” The battered bus was out of sight before its cloud of black exhaust cleared and left us alone to look around in shock. We saw some ruined buildings that might have been government offices and banks, but no important-looking businessmen and politicians, with their briefcases and shiny, leather, dress shoes, hurried in and out of them. No newspaper vendors stood in their kiosks displaying this month’s magazines and today’s papers with giant, sensational headlines and graphic pictures for the many who could not read. No older women with shopping carts full of

fresh carrots, onions, and squash from the market crossed themselves as they passed in front of the national cathedral. No ten-year old boys with wooden shoeshine kits offered to shine the leather shoes of rich men sitting leisurely on the benches around the park. No women with babies on their backs or clutching the chubby hands of their three-year olds rushed home to prepare the midday meal. No old men and women hawked their little plastic bags of cashews and handfuls of oranges on street corners. No birds chirped in the branches of the park’s many trees sculpted into neat, cylindrical shapes. No buses, their exhaust muddying the air, clattered by nor did car horns make us jump. We heard only the eerie whistle of a light wind blowing across the plain of half-standing buildings and piles of rubble. The stone shell of the national cathedral still stood on one side of the deserted main square. Through the gaping hole where the front door had once been, I saw scraggly tufts of grass and weeds working their way through the crumbling stone floor. The altar and pews were gone and the stained glass of the windows lay in shatters on the ground. Large holes in the side walls let us see though to sunlight, sky, and piles of rocks on the outside. A wide gash ran diagonally across the cathedral’s gray façade. Its clock stopped permanently at 12:32, the time the earthquake had struck. Across the crumbling, asphalt road from the cathedral, we saw the unkempt park; the overgrown trees gave only a hint of the past artistic pruning. Tough grass grew through the cracks in the broken pavement of the walkways, and a three-year-old layer of dirt covered the empty benches scattered about the former cool place of respite from sunbaked asphalt and city noise. The national palace, between the park and the cathedral, had steps leading up to heavy wooden doors, locked tight. When we peered through one of the dusty windows beside the doors, we saw a long wooden conference table that could seat perhaps twelve government ministers or cabinet members, covered with a thick layer of dust in a darkened room. A disheveled pile of chairs filled one corner. The building where we assumed

the Congress had met and the President had an office, had not been refurbished during the three years since the earthquake. “I guess if you’re a military dictator, you don’t even have to pretend there is a government.” I whispered so only Tom would hear. Even though it looked like there was no one who might overhear us, it felt like we were being watched and that any look of shock or disapproval would be punished. “Yeah, you just run it from your mansion.” “The bus driver was right, Tom. This is scary. I just want out of here.” “Me too. Let’s look calm and walk casually toward that building on the hill.” Tom nodded toward a large, white stately building on the green hill overlooking the deserted center. As I recall, the building was bright and sparkling with tiny, clear lights, and I imagined people dressed in party clothes and listening to music and dancing at a fiesta. We chose one of the crumbled asphalt roads radiating from the centro, and started walking, looking for, but at the same time scared of finding, some sign of life. On all sides, we saw only the remains of tumbled down buildings—piles of rubble, broken bricks, shattered glass, bent, metal roofing, wooden beams snapped in two by the force of the earthquake. At one ghostly site, paper, used in construction, flap-flap-flapped in the breeze against a standing spar. An old man with gray hair and white whiskers, wearing an overly-large, tattered coat, sat huddled against the wreckage of another destroyed building and followed us with suspicious eyes. We could only think that he had been hired by the owners to guard the loose bricks, shattered boards, and pile of twisted metal. To assure him that we were not homeless Nicaraguans looking for debris to rebuild our home or members of La Guardia, we waved and walked on, trying to look incurious. The elegant white building on the hill was farther away than it looked. Before we could ever enjoy its sparkling lights up close, we came to a humble neighborhood of cement houses, which the earthquake had spared. There we found a basic guesthouse in a woman’s home where we spent the night. When

we told our hostess we had come from the centro, she looked away and said nothing. And when we asked, she said only that the building on the hill was the Hotel InterContinental. In Mexico City or in San Jose, we would have passed the afternoon and evening in the centro, exploring markets, chatting with people in parks, and finding a small, clean, family restaurant to taste a typical dish. But we hid out in our room that afternoon and evening. It seemed safer. In the morning, we drank the coffee and ate the bread our hostess offered and set out early so as not to miss the bus to Honduras. Even though no man with a gun watched us that day, our fellow Nicaraguan passengers were as subdued and meek as the day before. Like them, we bowed our heads, folded our hands in our laps, and said nothing, grateful that we would leave Nicaragua by noon. We did not realize then, however, that we could not leave behind our new feelings, feelings we had no words for, feelings we would reckon with for years. We eventually reached Guatemala where we fell in love with the exquisite, green countryside and with the kind people we met. Since all the hotels were full in Antigua, we stayed in a warehouse on a small coffee plantation and at night covered ourselves with plastic ponchos and newspapers to ward off the cold of the mountains. I spent two days in the cane and thatch home of two indigenous women who showed me how to weave traditional patterns on a back-strap loom. We returned to Guatemala the following year for me to do a project under the auspices of the World Bank, and eventually we lived there three years, teaching, researching, and learning about the culture and language. However, on this trip, we returned to Costa Rica again by Tica-Bus. By the time we made our brief return stop in Nicaragua, we knew better how to protect ourselves and stayed in our room until the bus left in the morning for Costa Rica. We suffered through the torturous, Nicaraguan, customs interrogation, and we watched as the Costa Rican passengers walked back into their country, dropped to their knees, and kissed the ground. I was just

beginning to suspect what Central Americans already knew. It takes more than teaching a man to fish to solve hunger, when all the ponds are fenced and surrounded by soldiers with guns. ... We did not visit Nicaragua again until 1989. In the meantime, we learned that instead of rebuilding the centro, damaged schools and urban water systems, and hundreds of thousands of homes demolished by the earthquake, Somoza Debayle (the second son) and members of the oligarchy spent part of the reconstruction aid donated by other countries to build the Sears store, which only the wealthy could afford, and deposited much of the international aid money in their personal, offshore bank accounts. Some say that Somoza sold, for profit, the blood plasma donated internationally for earthquake victims and charged the homeless for the food and construction materials that had been donated for the survivors. He was said to have destroyed buildings after the earthquake to qualify for additional financial aid. Somozaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s merciless response to the earthquake was the last straw. In 1979 he was overthrown with the support of members of every social class in Nicaragua while the U.S. administration, hoping for what they called â&#x20AC;&#x153;Somocismo without Somoza,â&#x20AC;? (continued rule by an oligarchy with the assistance of a refashioned National Guard to protect U.S. economic interests) negotiated his formal resignation. During his last days in power, he bombed neighborhoods and destroyed as many functioning factories and as much infrastructure as he could. On July 17, 1979, he called the Congress together, at the Hotel InterContinental, announced his resignation, and was flown to Miami (and ultimately to Paraguay), leaving $3.5 million in the national treasury, all that remained from a recent $62 million loan. Nicaraguans we spoke to later told us that before he left he had dug up and

taken his father’s and brother’s caskets with him. Fearing reprisal for their blatant human rights violations, many Guardia members fled the country. While I had thought the Guatemala trip in 1975 would be my last, we returned to Guatemala in 1976 for the World Bank to test questionnaires for low-income people in less developed countries. A well-respected Guatemalan anthropologist and I worked together for a week to make the wording of the questionnaires culturally appropriate. I explained the economic purpose of each question; he reworded it into colloquial, Guatemalan Spanish rather than the Castilian Spanish the World Bank translators had used. He listened, pondered, and suggested wording and format changes, always supporting his suggestions with clear logical explanations of the language as it was spoken by poor Guatemalans and of the Guatemalan culture, based on his many years in the field. We continued this interesting and scholarly sharing until we came to the question: “Are you indigenous?” After reading the question, he jumped up from his chair and raised his voice emphasizing each word.“No. No. No. You cannot ask that! No one will answer honestly. You will insult Ladinos (Spanish-speaking Guatemalans), and they’ll refuse to participate in the rest of the interview.” I must have looked confused because he went on to explain in a calmer voice that some indigenous learned Spanish and traded their traditional hand-woven garments for western store-bought clothing in order to pass as a higher status, yet still desperately poor Ladino. I was shocked. More than half the Guatemalan population was indigenous, and much of its lucrative tourism industry depended on foreign visitors attracted by the exquisite Mayan weavings and artistry, by temples and religious sites deep in luxuriant green jungles, shopping in indigenous markets, and experiencing remnants of an ancient American culture. Those who profited most from Guatemala’s tourism were the lighterskinned Ladinos who tended to own the hotels, restaurants, textile and souvenir shops, and transportation and tour companies. The majority of them were distant descendents of the Spanish conquistadors and colonizers who arrived early in the 1500s with horses, guns, swords, banners, whips, and

grants from the king to turn the darker-skinned, native inhabitants into peons on large plantations of expropriated land and into near-slaves in gold mines the natives had once operated. Since I grew up in a culture, which saw itself as forever moving forward into the future, excused itself for past “mistakes,” and often did not consider the long term effects of those mistakes, I learned only slowly in Guatemala and Mexico how the forms and structures of the Spanish conquest and colonization evolved into 500 years of continued exploitation and oppression of the Latin American indigenous. More than once during the three years (1977-1980) when we lived and worked in Guatemala, a Ladino explained to me that the indigenous were poor because they were ignorant and lazy. Usually I just listened, but once I dared to respond, saying I often saw indigenous women and children walking miles along roads balancing heavy jugs of water on their heads and Mayan men bent double under heavy loads of firewood. I was simply told again they were lazy. I did not go on to ask about the law that had finally been abolished in 1944 requiring all indigenous men to perform a certain number of days of nearly-free labor on the large coffee plantations, or why still in 1977, whole families, including their children as young as nine and ten, still worked on plantations earning below-subsistence wages as temporary labor during cotton harvests. Nor did I dare mention that the indigenous rarely had schools in their villages, and if they did, teachers often did not speak their language or respect their culture. At the same time, U.S. people (often with little experience in Central America and little knowledge of farming) often suggested to me that “we” needed to “teach them how to farm.” Yet, from bus windows, I saw the graceful, green terraces, which the indigenous men and boys older than ten shaped with hand hoes to keep their land from washing down the sides of steep mountains during the rainy season. They knew how to grow corn and beans on some of the worst land in their country, but large growers of coffee and other export crops in search of more land had progressively pushed the

peasants further up the mountain slopes and onto smaller and smaller parcels. The poor, rocky soil bore too little to prevent hunger, not because they did not know how to farm, but because their good land had been taken from them. However, I always found it curious that those who weren’t poor or indigenous, weren’t farmers or sometimes even from the country and culture invariably had explanations and solutions while the poor Guatemalan peasants I interviewed (and who were the experts about their lives and their poverty, after all) consistently prefaced their answers to my questions about their own lives with an apology for being “humilde” (literally, "humble"). Eventually, I understood that “humilde” connoted “poor” or “lowly” and was used as a politeness so as not to offend me when they occasionally dared to describe their lives or state their own opinions and views. However, hearing the word “humble” repeated so often and knowing that they were saying it in a way that suggested they had to act like they saw me as superior forced me to wonder. Was I or did I have to be considered superior because I was educated? Guatemalans with Bachelor’s degrees were called by their title Licenciado, and to call someone maestro (teacher, master, or skilled craftsman) or profesora was to show great respect. Was it because I was white? I don’t recall seeing a single white-skinned Guatemalan who was miserably poor or whose children were malnourished, and the more European-looking Guatemalans tended to have more political power. Was it because I was from a powerful country with immense control over their economy and politics? What made me more deserving of respect than they? An indigenous baby in the Guatemalan highlands provided an answer. Nearly 6500 feet up in Guatemala’s fog-laden highlands among green forests, Tom and I had spent the night in Chichicastenango, a Mayan Indian village famous for its Sunday market. With bundles wrapped in cardboard and twine on their heads, women in their blue, orange, yellow, and purple huipiles (hand-woven blouses), and black and blue skirts and rebozos (shawls) and

Mayan men in loose pants and colorful, woven shirts carrying even heavier loads of firewood and pottery on tumplines had walked miles from their small villages to the market in “Chichi.” Arriving late Saturday night, they had built small fires and slept on flattened cardboard boxes on the cement sidewalk under the stone porticos around a large empty cobblestone square, which they would transform into a lively market early Sunday morning. At dawn, the sleepers awoke, put battered coffeepots and a few plain tortillas on their small fires, and began unpacking bundles of hand-knit wool hats; green and brown ceramic pots, plates and bowls; hand-woven huipiles, skirts, and wall hangings; and hand-carved, wooden chairs and collapsible tables. Tom and I loved the market preparations, the quiet, peaceful, indigenous time when we smelled wood smoke and heard distant sounds of drums and wooden flutes. It was an unhurried time before noisy, insistent, foreign and Ladino tourists, in search of “deals,” arrived in vans from Guatemala City. On this particular day, we walked along the edge of the cobblestone area, watching the men set up temporary stalls of wooden poles covered with blue plastic, while vendors laid out goods in artful displays designed to entice potential customers to spend money. We heard the soothing murmurs of various indigenous languages, and smelled the pungent odor of copal beginning to seep into the air from the steep, fan-shaped steps to the white church towering over the plaza. Only Mayans were allowed to use the front steps. Ladinos and other foreigners had to enter a side door to pray and observe what we experts had told us was a combination of Indian and Catholic worship. However, I had seen little that resembled Catholicism, making me think it was an example of the Mayans’ clever, nearly invisible resistance perfected over five centuries, and of outsiders’ efforts to see what they wanted to believe. As Tom and I wandered, we passed an indigenous woman with her baby wrapped in a blue and black rebozo, secured safely against her back. Over

the years, I had seen many Mayan women sheltering their babies in rebozos, but this baby’s perfect, little nose and lips caught my attention. She was just a few months old and delicate wisps of fine, black hair stuck out from under the many-colored, knit hat her mother had placed snugly on her head to protect her from the chilly, morning dampness. Her tiny, rounded, brown arms were bare below the elbows, but the rebozo, soft from repeated washings, encircled her in her mother’s warmth. Rocked by her mother’s rhythmic walk, the baby drowsed, half asleep, content and trusting. All she had to do was whimper, and her mother would tug gently on her rebozo, shifting the baby to her breast to nurse. Perhaps it was her mother’s hair dusty from sleeping the night on the cement walkway or the baby’s raggedy, once-white, cotton tee shirt that made me consider her probable future. If she did not die at a young age, she would grow up loved and protected by her family and her community. But her life would be difficult—little or no schooling, hard physical labor, barely enough food to survive, watching helplessly as some of her children died from preventable diseases, living in extreme poverty like her parents. Nothing like my life. While I knew from my baby pictures that I had been bald, pudgier, and certainly not as beautiful as she was, it struck me that otherwise I had been basically the same at her age--a tiny human being, entirely dependent on someone else for food, care, warmth, and love. Like her, I had been pure potential and had become what my birth circumstances determined for me. I had learned my parents’ culture and religious customs, but, just as easily, could have learned and loved her parents’ culture and religious traditions, revering nature and recognizing the intimate link between humans and the living earth. She would learn an indigenous language but would have just as easily learned any other language she heard regularly. In that moment, I understood that she could have been born to my parents, and I could have been born to her parents. Each of us would have lived completely different lives. I had done nothing extraordinary before birth

to merit my lifetime of physical comfort and privilege, and she had done nothing to deserve a physically difficult life in a society in which someone had decided the color of her skin made her less worthy. If we ever spoke together as adults, she would have to apologize for being humilde, before telling me the facts of her life, as she knew them, so as not to offend me, a white woman who happened to be born on the other side of an invented border. All that, when the only real difference between us was the luck of a draw. During the nine years following my realization, Guatemalan Army soldiers massacred the inhabitants of more than 625 Mayan villages; torturing village men and women; raping women and young girls; holding babies by their ankles and bashing their heads against trees as horrified parents were forced to watch; murdering adults with machetes, rifles, and machine guns; setting fire to houses and churches (often with villagers locked inside); and burning crops and animals. The few villagers who managed to flee and hide in the mountains would have had neither food nor shelter when they returned. Had I been that Mayan baby, I could have been murdered as a young girl, simply because I might possibly grow up to one day give food to armed guerrillas when they threatened me at gun-point. I would not need to actually feed a guerrilla to be killed. Simply living in the highlands where some of the guerrillas were camped was enough reason to be killed. As Guatemalan Brigadier General EfraĂn RĂos Montt, who became head of state in a March 1982 coup and was overthrown in an August 1983 coup, explained: The guerrilla is the fish. The people (in this case, the Mayans) are the sea. If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea. During his seventeen months in power nearly 69,000 indigenous Guatemalans were killed. Or, I could have survived the genocide, the terror, the model villages, and food-for-work programs to become one of the thousands of indigenous widows and orphans. I could have been one of those survivors who risked their lives to testify before the Guatemalan Truth Commission (Commission for Historical Clarification) in late1997 and early 1998, at the RĂos Montt

genocide trial in 2013, and to the forensic anthropologists still working today to uncover skeletons of their “disappeared” husbands, parents, and children buried in clandestine cemeteries. I would have been listening in 1999 (when my testimony to the Truth Commission was finally heard by the world) to President Clinton’s public almost-apology to Guatemalans for the U.S. government’s 36-year involvement in helping to train, advise, and fund Guatemala’s armed forces to torture, kill, and ultimately commit genocide. I would have wondered when he announced, “It is important that I state clearly that support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression…was wrong,” why he chose the word “wrong” rather than a stronger word. In 1980 and before the rural massacres intensified, Tom and I had been forced by the terror and violence to cut short our research and teaching in Guatemala and leave the country. When we returned to the United States, we found that many U.S. people did not know where Guatemala was. Nutritionists were still trying to perfect nutritional drinks to supplement malnourished children’s diets rather than addressing the reasons they were hungry. Economists I met were not writing about land thefts, state terror, and discrimination as causes of hunger in Central America. Giving fish and teaching to fish, while overlooking access to the pond. But I had seen and heard and felt enough to understand that I could no longer join them to live a comfortable, innocent, and generous life certain in my knowledge that we would find a simple solution to poverty and hunger, one which would not require those of us with privilege to question our assumptions and change how we see and act in the world. These days, I read about the Central American children at the MexicoU.S. border. I read some of the ugly comments people write about them and their parents, and I hear of the good actions of those trying to help, out of sympathy, kindness, charity, recognition of how U.S. policy contributes to their presence, or empathy for heartbroken parents who, like parents in

Europe before World War II, love their children so much that they are willing to risk never seeing them again to keep them alive. When friends ask me what I think we should do about the children at the border, they get impatient at my response, “We have to realize it has been a long time in the making.” “Yes,” they stop me before I can go on, saying “but the children are here today. We have to do something now. We can’t worry about the past right now.” They are right in a way, and, in spite of all the unexpected events in my life which drew me ever more deeply into the lives of poor women and children in Central America, I don’t have a simple answer. I suppose we will come to some half-solution, or we will forget the current children until new children appear at our borders, refugees from yet another human-created crisis, the causes of which we may choose, again, not to examine too closely. It seems to me that the best “solution” is a preventive one--create a world in which children do not have to flee to borders. Unfortunately, I don’t see how we will do that until we stop trying to resolve conflicts with more and deadlier guns, longer and taller fences around the ponds, and the notion that the luck of the draw should determine who has the right to live a healthy, safe life. Carol Clark Carol Clark lived and conducted economic research on schooling, child health and nutrition, and women’s work in Guatemala from 1976-1980. During two years of that time she served as a Rockefeller Foundation Post-doctoral Fellow. She led college study-abroad programs, living six months at a time in Guadalajara, Mexico from 1985-1993. For eighteen years, she taught economics, interdisciplinary studies, and women’s studies at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC.

Green Itself Growing Before dawn a page or two and how they would sing me alive again in the updraft of burnished feathers and lofting, lofting I would come clean away once more upon a blank emptiness, a newborn foal and how every page is like this, every exclamation mark hidden in the closet of a secret excitement, the excitement to be once more and here is a preemptive happiness and rollicking joy that asks nothing of no one, nada, nothing whatever, a pen scrawling across a page, oh, the holy nonsense as every sense is engaged and here now a global awareness in the verb to be and the verb to dance, oh, the holy infinitives and infinite delight for I was a story once, I was a poem in lyrical outpouring and oneman drama on a stage made of cardboard until I learned to soar on a page in delirious flight and homemade wings flapping and flailing, not drowning but waving, waving and there was nothing I could not love and where are the stamps and envelopes, where is the tongue that would lick me sealed to send to addressee Alowishis and Myrtle dear signed your heartmostâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s desire and lip gloss smacked as imprimatur for I want to be sent anywhere to anyone in blind faith and charity and I will not walk daintily among the 10,000 skulls but leap over and between their rounded cairns and may this letter find you wherever you are weary or afraid, unappeasable, inconsolable, in the belly of a whale called loneliness and may this letter reach out to you with its papery hands and address you with praise of a different sort and zip code be damned, be kissed, be lacquered over with much affection as today we rise together or separate and alone to find ourselves breathing and the fey miracle of this and daily tasks to be accomplished and scratched off the todo list, especially the watering of herbs in clay pots on the windowsill and how their greenness reaches out to be touched and whispered to and how love is green itself growing and how the earth is growing all around us, seasons of the earth and the rich dark soil that welcomes each of us to be root and grass and seedling and holy flower, one soft petal proof and writ of paradise here on this earth, all we could ever ask for, our knees shaking, our hands trembling as we read this letter written by a fool who forgot what he was saying in court on trial for his life, the judge nowhere to be seen and the jury walking out in

the holy forest looking for mushrooms on the tapestry of moss, oblivious to right and wrong among the noble justice and forbearance of the everlasting trees. Robert Vivian Robert Vivian has published four novels and two books of meditative essays.

Field Notes of Lucy Bakewell Observing the Eastern Phoebe with John James Audubon, 1804 Early April. The sugar maple buds are fat. Soft sheen of pussy willows near Perkiomen Creek. Reverent as pilgrims we come to the cave. At its arched entrance the phoebes, peewees he calls them, have anchored a nest the size of Mr. Audubonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cupped hand. The birds are as trusting as friends. I expect them to light on his fingers or perch on a shoulder. Like them, I am charmed by this man I call LaForest, imagine settling into the hollow of his shoulder. Fee-bee, fee-bee, fee-b-be-bee the male courts the quiet female. Father, bless him, favors such quietude on my part. But, silence does not become me. I resort to melodic responses on my pianoforte. Before the young fledge, I nest each one in my hand. LaForest ties a silvered thread around the leg. Fortunate birds now carry Audubonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mark. I admit I desire such a band on my life. Susan J. Erickson Susan J. Erickson lives in Bellingham, Washington where she helped to establish the Sue C. Boynton Poetry Walk and Contest. Her poems appear in 2River View, Crab Creek Review, Museum of Americana, The Fourth River, Naugatuck River Review and Literal Latte.

Lucy Audubon Tends Her Husband after His Second Stroke, 1847 John’s “great maxim” in drawing birds— place them on a center of gravity. But his center of gravity has shifted. Birds have flown from his head. Now he obsesses about eating— rings the dinner bell: clang, clang! Again a half hour later. Teeth gone, I feed him coddled eggs and bread soaked in warm milk. Clang, clang! At night he begs for his little French song. Georgianna, our sweet-voiced daughter-in-law, sings for him: Au clair de la lune On n'y voit qu'un peu. . . Under the moonlight Little can be seen . . . Susan J. Erickson

Zelda Fitzgerald Writes Save Me the Waltz in Phipps Clinic, 1932 In this house of the crazy I dance out of step lost in the choreography of myself: three, one, two, one, three, two. The doctor frowns at the faulty wiring of my smile that flashes without reason. At night a girl screams, “Murder in the first degree!” During the day a woman wanders the hall, ghost in a second-rate detective story. Once I was a nasturtium. In this hothouse I smell like the rubbery things that breed here. From a leaky lifeboat of words I write for the allowed two hours a day. But Scott? Scott is a Mad Man at the loose. My novel, He says, poaches on what is His. “Our” life is His alone to put on a page and barter for dollars. I must change my hero’s name, may not imitate His rhythms, am not to damage His public image. I cannot say (except to myself): My book is none of my husband’s Goddamned business. Susan J. Erickson

A Pinpoint Asylum I’ve known madness pursued by hunger and a night absent that assault of gut, the indelicate retraction of mass rhapsodizing in the sky’s upheaval. Cataclysm brings me closer to the fascia of clouds, the casting into spastic injury, seeping to the inside from without. You’ve forgotten me, my body of breath— a momentary celestial blue surrendered to the eyelid of time; uniformity taken for dead. From heliocentric sun to the furthest orphan galaxy; reality collapses under its own weight into a singular point of nothing— just beyond the light’s edge of saving. Richard King Perkins II Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. His work has appeared The Louisiana Review, Bluestem, Emrys Journal, Sierra Nevada Review, Two Thirds North, The Red Cedar Review, The William and Mary Review and others. Mr. Perkins has poems forthcoming in Roanoke Review, The Alembic and Milkfist.

Machina Post Ignem You thought that I would be the opposite of a kiss— a machine of deprivation who pressed an insatiable metallic face upon your mouth. You’ve seen me speaking intimately with fire but there’s no need to be jealous because it’s got no past and no future. Jaws clenched, I would grind your teeth to powder, leaving roots and amalgam shavings— remembering how I once danced beneath the dulcimer starlight in a rave of unseen creatures around a bonfire of seductiveness that endured through the purest all of night. You found instead that my lips were a gateway— parted so that we could pass safely through, flickering unexpectedly in code. I’m beginning to agree with your suspicions that I’m unaware of what ignites me. My thought-stream subsides to inaudible. I’m filling in the perforations of my precious life with cacophony circles and shadows of fidelity only because it satisfies me and then I will unite with fire and burn every bridge, every landscape, every pocket of breathable air, ignoring the screams of a zephyr temple breeze because this is my genetic destiny, my condition; committed to flame and tortured skin the substance of a clockwork kiss and now that I’ve unleashed myself, all you can do is close your eyes and weep when the moon does not follow willingly upon your shoulder. You ask me when my irises became steel machines— interloping bulbs of illusion, agnostic orbs seeking an alien sun, a new reckoning of time, following a comet’s trail— barren and blazing, smoldering alone through the purest thrall, where the deepest kiss is the most unsafe of all. Richard King Perkins II

The Palatial Circus Zealotry of ringmaster potency of star attractions who can take us higher than the big top plying us with warm butter substitute inflating us with carbonation we love the jokes and legerdemain the showmanship and sophistry the promise of vast rewards if we agree to volunteer so five thousand people raise their hands to the sky asking to be chosen which of you will trust putting your head into the lionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mouth an hour and fifteen minutes later five thousand headless bodies jerk and twitch with newfound vigor blindly stumbling home still believing in the innocence of the spectacle they have witnessed. Richard King Perkins II

Jeffrey DeCristofaro

Crowned with Snow

Wintering In their wintering, she knew it was time to set the rows. Root vegetables: carrots and beets and fennel. She dug with her hands, the loamy soil caked beneath her nails. He bent beside her. Together they laid bare: cobalt shards of glass, parings of lemons and limes, a shred of ribbon pinked with age. She tugged at ropey roots, feeling their unloosening, heaved until they broke. He dug out the remainder. Clearing. Sifting. Once they found a watch face, its tiny cogs a filigree of dust. Once his lost gold ring. Year after year, this pleading of soil. Until, finally, their hearts were slaked. Their bed tilled and seeded and tended. Dina Greenberg Dina Greenbergâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s poetry, essays, short stories, and reviews have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Chronogram, Gemini Magazine, The Warwick Review, Lalitamba, Existere, and Barely South, among others. She earned her MFA in fiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she served as managing editor for the literary journal Chautauqua.

Longwall On a cool summer day a couple of years before we divorced, my husband and I drove on country roads through southeastern Ohio. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d left the kids with their grandparents for the day and were going to visit Dysart Woods, an old-growth forest preserve in Belmont County. Seeing the sign for the woods, we turned off on a small gravel road, drove another half of a mile, and parked in a grassy parking lot. Met by a low roar of cicadas, we swathed ourselves in insect repellant and sunblock and started on the trail into the thick woods, with their ferny undergrowth and cathedral canopy. Ohio doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have much wilderness left. Even in southeastern Ohio, which still has significant stretches of woods, some privately-owned and some in state parks, most of these forests have new, secondary or tertiary growth. Not the thick, dark, woods with giant oak, maple, poplar and beech trees that once blanketed the state. A few patches of older wilderness are tucked between and around alfalfa farms, in hidden ravines, behind dairy barns. Accidental, overlooked wildernesses. Dysart Woods, though, is 50 acres of original wilderness, with 300- to 400-year old oak trees that reach up to four feet in diameter and climb 140 feet into the air. Owned by Ohio University, the woods have two miles of trails that pass by about 100 giant trees, curving in and out of the forest, over dead logs five feet high, up a ridge and back down. Massive, old, dead trees lie on the forest floor, rotting into the soil, providing nutrients for the new, young trees sprouting up. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a mature forest ecosystem, with many different generations of trees clambering for the bits of light filtering through the canopy and down to the forest floor. These woods are what Ohio once looked like, back when, as lore has it, a squirrel could hop from one end of the state to another without touching

the ground. These are very near the woods that, just to the north, Ebenezer Zane, the region’s mythical road-builder and frontier-opener, hacked his way through as he made his way into the Northwest Territory at the end of the eighteenth century. Somehow, though, through twists of fate and roads and land ownership, these particular 50 acres had been spared the logging, farming, town-building and surface mining that befell most of the rest of the state’s landscape. They were, on that visit, much the same as they had been for hundreds of years. For Dysart Woods, it might have just as well have been 1407. The fact is, though, the woods that day were on the edge of a frontier, and not the one lying just beyond each of Ebenezer Zane’s ax-swings. The frontier here was contemporary and environmental, the ax the high-tech longwall and room-and-pillar coal mining equipment clawing beneath nearby farmland, and the Ebenezer Zane the Ohio Valley Coal Company, which owned the mineral rights to the Pittsburgh No. 8 coal seam, 500 feet below the surface of Dysart Woods. The fight between the coal company and the Buckeye Forest Council and other defenders of the woods had gone in and out of the courts for twenty years. A decision handed down a few months before our visit by the Ohio Reclamation Commission, however, would allow the coal company to room-and-pillar mine under the woods, and longwall mine right up to their edge. Room-and-pillar mining involves carving out the five- to six-foot thick coal seam in blocks, leaving pillars of coal to hold up the roof of the mine. Longwall mining is the removal, wholesale, of a seam of coal, for hundreds of yards. No one knew exactly what would happen to the forest after the mining, but some scientists speculated that the trees’ root systems could be disrupted, the ground water diverted, the bedrock eroded. The mining hadn’t yet started on the day we were there, but once it commenced, the old trees

could eventually – perhaps decades or centuries down the line – begin to die off. The trees that day stretched up the sky so far that I had to squint at the bright blue light filtering through the distant leaves to make out if a tree was a red oak, a white oak, or a tulip poplar. The impending fate of these woods floated in and out of my consciousness as we walked on the trail. I wished it were 1407 instead of 2007, that some twist of history had foiled Zane’s road, that somehow we’d all missed this particular frontier. I had wanted to visit these woods to capture a sense of being in pre-frontier Ohio, but I could think only of the contemporary frontier we straddled. Impulsively, I wrapped my arms partly around the rough bark of one of the giant oak trees, and I asked my husband to take a picture. “Now I’m a tree hugger,” I said. A ways down on the red trail, before it crossed the road and headed up the ridge to meet the blue trail, we stopped to rest. I took a drink from my water bottle, gave one to our dog, and then lay back on the grass and looked up at the bright blue sky dotted with white clouds drifting past. My husband sat nearby. Across the path, a swathe of blackberries ripened in the sun. For a moment, as the wind shifted, I could hear beyond the cicadan din the faint hum of Ohio Valley Coal Company’s machines, just over the hill, with their sharp metal claws and conveyer belts already drawing deep black coal from beneath farms, coal destined for nearby power plants. Soon enough, that coal would burn into white hot electricity, eventually finding its way to the fragile filaments of bulbs in our own home. “Someday, people will tell their children that there used to be forests in Ohio,” I mused out loud, twirling a piece of grass in between my fingers, trying to connect with a man who had been growing increasingly distant. He nodded. “Yeah,” he said, noncommittally. For a while, we didn’t say anything. Lazily, I looked up through the trees, watching faint, high, wispy clouds high in the atmosphere.

“And when the sky is orange with pollution, they might say ‘One day, the sky used to be blue,” I said. “Hmm,” he said. “Maybe.” Slowly, almost unconsciously, I trained my camera lens to the sky between the trees. Finding a clear patch, I snapped a picture, thinking it would be a nice photo to have. A photo of sky. A record of blue. Something to pass down to my great grandchildren, and their children. Something as soft and warm, as comforting and innocent, as a baby blanket. Vivian Wagner Vivian Wagner's work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Zone 3, Silk Road Review, The Pinch, McSweeney's, and other publications. She is the author of Fiddle: One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music. Dr. Wagner teaches English at Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio.

The Invisible Plane wonder woman we hear stammering slurring her words over the home-shopping network having spent her night taking shots at one of those chain restaurants on the strip mall with leroy from â&#x20AC;&#x153;fameâ&#x20AC;? fame asking if they may have any remaining of those ricochet bracelets or truth lassos to make things right again from all those relationships gone bad left her feeling empty & hollow & deserted & abandoned (no man on the border of borderline & munchausen) abuse a real-life (lowlife) vicious & repetitive cycle leaving you running round & round in circles with more questions than answers desperately searching for patterns but deep down inside (not wanting to admit it) just the fucked-up shit of human nature...

constantly taking it out on yourself asking what did i do to deserve this? eternally stranded with heart broken & soul shattered (futile & forsaken) that invisible plane still running with kickstand down outside her split-level suburban home spitting jet fuel like some souvenir conch shell at the end of the world all the kids next door floating on top the pool from drug overdoses while no one in the neighborhood notices obsessed with their perennials she wonders (thus her derivation) 3 easy payments 5-7 business days sounds perfect can make this her recovery period. Joseph Reich Joseph Reich's most recent books include A Different Sort of Distance, If I Told You to Jump Off the Brooklyn Bridge, Pain Diary: Working Methadone & the Life & Times of the Man Sawed in Half, Drugstore Sushi, and The Derivation of Cowboys & Indians.

Ernest Williamson III

The Beauty of Indecisions

Circadian Sunrise Paint me out of this chemical carnival and these hypnopompic epiphanies where shadowy gods I can’t see writhe in my dreams, pulse in my soul, bring strokes of insight, sometimes simply strokes, when high morning blood pressure may tempt collapse or awaken me to shed all masks, drop all cloaks, feel the flutter of wings—angels, devils, clowns, and other strange things that sound off and utter and sing in the synapses, or maybe it’s just birds being heard beyond the window’s dusky light, until all of us stilled lives take flight to brush ourselves into another day. Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb holds an interdisciplinary MA from Prescott College and is co-founder of a nonprofit natural history press that attempts to raise positive public awareness of some of the least favored wildlife in the American West.

Promise “I’ll live to be 101 if you promise to live to 100,” he tries to bargain with me. He is the sweetest man in the world, but I have my parents’ genes. Sitting upright now, I can see outside the hospital window. I trust the sun is somewhere behind that gray wall beyond the peaks ushering in the day, sure as the rush of raven wings is flap-floating in from the forest. Feeling the birds dark and drifting overhead, a vortex of shadows somewhere up there, I know his hand rests gently on mine; he is waiting for a word, a nod, a smile, a sign that my soul has not already flown. Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb

Her Lawyer I close my eyes to shake away the image of him pressed in charcoal suit hinting flecks of blue like a television screen misfiring I choose another sketch picture him the professor-like rapscallion sand-coated elbow-patched hiding in his sub-basement office at the law school a man who no longer knows what he wants love burns in his every filing as he helps women get theirs he plucks them like raisins from a little box consumes the bitter juice of them never laughing even while he clicks & scrapes his dull leather shoes on his way to the Courthouse wielding his M4 carbine or concealing a dozen copperheads in a bag Ace Boggess Ace Boggess, of Charleston, West Virginia, is the author of The Prisoners and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled. His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, Atlanta Review, RATTLE, River Styx, Southern Humanities Review and others.

Ernest Williamson III

Soul of a Mannequin

Drifters Bird cries splintered in his ear like shards. The forest danced with flickering ghosts. He wondered if water would silence his guilt. He plunged. His body embraced gravity and broke the murky surface. The water covered him like a uniform and the sunlight disappeared. He tasted the swamp, thick in his throat. An image of marching soldiers floated before him. Forlorn soldiers in the frozen swamps of Europe, like beaten dogs. He couldn’t remember when that image had gotten plastered to his brain. His lids struggled in water the thickness of blood, and he reached with his hands to part the grasses on the bottom. Whether the nebulous fish led him to that spot, or his soldier-like instincts, he was now facing a body rolling among the bales of algae. Martha would never forgive him. Online, Kevin had mentioned the war once, in passing. He just thought he’d add a little suffering to his persona—a harmless shortcut. That was the plan. But then her messages started to make him smile. Before they even met, she was already confessing: her failures, her parents’ failures, the jobs she couldn’t keep, the lovers. The flashes of anger and guilt were like wild flowers she was throwing at him. He asked about her boy and, to make himself benign, he evoked his nephews and nieces. They met. He became instantly addicted to her sympathy when she looked at him, the way she tried to see the world through his eyes. The way she would blow the smoke away from him, watching him all the while. The way she was afraid to touch him at first, because she said loving him would burden him, would intrude upon his memories. He said to her things like, “I carried a wounded girl once, and her legs looked melted.”

She would answer in the strangest way, not avoiding the image, but pushing herself upon it, trying to displace it. She would say, “Pick me up as if I’m wounded, as if my legs are gone.” She was light as a child in his arms, and she’d feel his shoulders, muscular, and right then she would kiss him. She asked for a measure of his pain every day, extracting it against his will. The only time when he told her a full story was when she asked—and she asked for days—if he’d lost anybody very close. At first he only said, “Martha, what do you think?” “I don’t think. I know you did.” Her frail, tobacco stained fingers covered her eyes. “When I lost my mother, she was in a dark room for months,” she said. She let her hand fall, releasing the memory. “I cleaned her sheets and I carried her bedpan. I hurt so much for her that I started hating her, because I had to spend my nights worrying, remembering her voice when she was healthy, wanting her to talk like that again. I was sixteen and I could not stand her gurgling voice, and her groggy eyes when she tried to make me stay in the room so she could look at me. I had that chance, to sit with her for days, but I always left her room in a hurry and I went to cry in my room instead of talking to her. It must have been very different for you. One night you were playing cards with a buddy, the next morning he was in a body bag. I don’t know that hurt. It must be something you still think didn’t really happen—part of you does.” “Why do you want to know that hurt?” he asked. “Yes, I’m sure you’re not afraid that when you watch a movie with your best friend Bessie, it could be the last time you see her alive. You don’t have to wish that ‘Get lost’ wasn’t the last thing you ever said to her.” “That’s why I asked, Kevin. Who was the closest friend you lost? I want to remember him with you. Please.” Her cloudy, half-closed eyes were filled with hunger for that something she wanted him to give. “Grief isn’t something you share. You want to hear it, but how can

that possibly help me?” he asked. “Kevin. You grieved for three years,” she said. “Now you’re with me. If you trust me at all, come back to the real world.” “You’re not my therapist. Some things should stay buried.” He let her carry that thought around for the two days he didn’t see her, while he tried to find enough reasons to disappear. He’d allowed this to go on long enough. Yet all he could think about was that viper-like body slithering under a small dress, and he craved the bite. He’d give her the story she wanted. In the end, he patched together the bits and pieces he found online, on the usual blogs he browsed for hours. Five people became one: Garcia, who lost his buddy Mark Logan to a roadside bomb and went on a killing rampage. Two other friends who were killed drinking their coffee together. “The Punk” carried to safety two soldiers at once. He added some details as he looked at blurry war pictures on the blogs. He felt proud of the final product, as if it justified at long last his own inadequacies. He put on a broken face and went to see her, ready to tell. Her hand was on his shoulder. “His name was Derek,” he said to her. She drew breath quickly, avidly. She took his face in her hands and he looked above her, at some suspended flow of collective memory. “If you tell me about him, maybe everything will become real again. Maybe you won’t sleepwalk anymore.” She was beautiful when she said that, and he wanted to touch her light hair. Then his eyes moved past her again, to the story she was hungry to hear. “Derek was a Staff Sergeant,” he said. “He became like an older brother to me. We shared all our care packages, and we read our letters to each other. He always made an extra coffee for me. We bullshitted over that coffee every morning. It was like our own ritual. We were in the same Infantry Regiment. Once we were going from Baghdad to Fallujah, and we

knew it was one of the worst missions out there. I didn’t even see how the attack started—I saw this smoke coming from our camp. I didn’t have time to think about it but I could tell many must have died there. I learned later that he’d died of a gunshot wound to the head. Man, that really changed me. I wanted revenge. But when we ended up blasting this woman with a Mark 19 grenade launcher one time, and she turned out to be carrying a grocery bag, I couldn’t see that as revenge. Nothing, no one I ever shot is going to fill the gap. Revenge is bullshit.” She listened to him go on about how he hated, and how he was sorry for those people he killed. She forgot to draw from the cigarette, her hand shaking. She was always shaky—she said she had an overactive thyroid. “In a way, this is how we felt here at home,” she said. “Sometimes sorry, sometimes hateful. But for us, those feelings came from a blank space, you know what I mean? We couldn’t know what was really going on there, so we imagined. Our feelings were abstract, so sometimes they got stronger that way. Phantasmagoric.” “I know.” “I need real feelings,” she said before she took him to her bedroom. In a few days, she became more concerned about what he was going to do with himself. She asked him, “Would you feel less of a man if I helped you find a job?” He looked at her and tried to smile. “What question is that? Of course I want a job.” “I wish you could become a cop. I always thought cops were sexy.” “Cops?” “At least their uniforms,” she laughed. “I like their uniforms.” He frowned. “Iraqi kids said the same thing,” he told her. “They said they liked American uniforms. When I saw their bodies blown up, liking our uniforms wasn’t cute anymore.”

Her wide eyes made him avert his. “You didn’t have to say that to me.” Martha did try to help him find a job, but it was hard. At Denny’s, where she worked, they were sacking people at the time, so it couldn’t have worked. She asked friends, and got a few phone numbers that didn’t pan out. He said his parents couldn’t support him now, and he couldn’t even stand the sight of them, because he knew they judged him. They did not believe in PTSD, he said, and he didn’t even drink as much as some of his war buddies. They wanted him with a job, out of the house. He didn’t want her to meet them. “Fuck your parents,” she said to him. “You came back, and this is what they do? They can’t even appreciate you? If my last boyfriend was half the man you are, I wouldn’t have kicked him out. In fact, he kicked himself out. Same thing with my kid’s father. Just wasn’t a real man. He couldn’t even stop his friends from groping me in the bars. Now I’m supposed to make a man out of this boy by myself?” She cried then, and said that if he let her love him like he deserved to be loved, he could move in with her. But she said if he planned to run away later, to please tell her so she’d stop caring before it was too late. He moved in. That was when Ted, the boy, finally met him. She’d never brought Kevin home when the boy was there. She had first wanted to see that he wasn’t one of those guys who ended up getting dragged away by the police, drooling and coked out. “I only drink beer,” he had said. He didn’t bring much except some clothes with their hangers, and a grimy shaving kit. She bought a few things for him—they went to Walmart together. “We’ll get through all of it,” she said. “It makes me so angry you can’t get a therapist without insurance. I swear I’ll go to community college to be a

psychiatric nurse. I’m too old for medical school, but that way I’ll treat both of us. Waitress is not a goddamn career.” The boy, Ted, was reluctant at first. He said to Kevin, “You’re worse than my dad.” From an eight-year-old, that hurt a little. In their bedroom, Martha explained what the kid had meant: when he wasn’t at some bar, his dad would just sit around the house and watch TV. He would spit on the floor and yell at the kid to bring him beer. Kevin asked Ted to watch TV with him, and the boy didn’t want to. He’d just stand in the door and stare. Then the boy cursed and kicked when Martha tried to take him to his room, and she cried. Kevin took Ted to his room and closed the door. To talk to him, man to man. “My mom thinks you’re some war hero, but my mom is fucking stupid,” Ted told him. The skin on his face was strangely dusty and sharp, as if he was thirty, not eight. “Why is it always about the war?” said Kevin. “Your mom is not stupid, and I don’t want to hear those words from you again. We gotta learn to get along, Ted. How’s this: you’ll be my hero if you’re nice to your mom.” “Nobody likes her. She’s a bitch,” the boy said. “You don’t like your mom either?” The boy was quiet. “Do you know how lucky you are to have her?” Kevin said. “Lucky my ass,” said the boy, and Kevin raised a hand as if to slap him. “I’m not afraid of you. My mom’s boyfriends beat her, you’re not so tough. What makes you so tough?” “Ted, I promised your mom you and I can be friends. I will never hit your mom—or you. That’s what a tough guy does, buddy. He only hits a man who jumps at him, you understand?” “What makes you a hero?” the boy said. “I think you’re full of shit.” Kevin stared.

“Ok. I saved a couple of my buddies once, Ted. That’s one thing your mom is talking about.” “Like how? Tell me.” “You too with the stories? Come on.” He had no choice. He told the boy that one time a car blew up in front of him on a bridge and he had to dive into a river. It was a very dirty river because that was the only kind of river in Iraq. He saved two wounded soldiers, and another two were already dead. He didn’t want a medal. He heard Martha crying behind the door, and he came out and asked her why. She said it wasn’t sadness. She started laughing while she cried. “I can’t remember the last time a man sat down with Ted to tell him a story,” she said. Two more days passed and Kevin and the boy were shouting at the TV together, at the football players, hurling popcorn through the air. The boy brought out his football and asked Kevin to play. “Only if you stop comparing me to your dad, or your mom’s other boyfriends,” Kevin said. It was about three months after he’d moved in with them that Kevin started sleepwalking. He said he used to do that in his parents’ house, and now it had come back. He would sit up in bed and he would shiver, covering his ears. If she tried to talk to him, or if she started crying, he’d run into the street, shouting, “Don’t touch me!” Even when he was awake, he stopped wanting her to touch him. He told her it was like he was carrying the dead with him, and he felt it was contagious. Making love to her became a fully clothed business, but she swore to him that nothing he did to her would drive her away. What he didn’t tell her was that he felt as if a nail had been lodged into his temple, all the time. A feeling in his throat as if words had been

crammed in there for too long. He almost told her those words, but he stopped. He almost told her in their one fight that convinced him he had to leave. They were outside together, raking the first fallen leaves. “You won’t touch me because of my scars?” she asked that day. They were in the kitchen, eating cereal. “Those are old scars, I promise.” “No,” he said. “It’s not about you cutting yourself. That’s not as weird as you think. It’s just that—it’s hard for me to let my body be exposed. Or to see you expose yours.” “You didn’t feel like this at first. I thought it was all falling into place.” “I know. But things come back.” “You have to let it all out,” she said. “You’ve brought too many demons with you, and they’re standing in the way. Tell me, what were you most afraid of back there, in Iraq?” “You’re crazy.” “But that’s what you said you loved about me.” “No—I mean, you’re fucked up, Martha.” “I know a woman whose husband is also a vet. One day he snapped and he put seventeen bullets into the wall, in their house. Don’t you think her fear was real?” “Am I competing here?” he said. “No, Kevin. The point is that she is still with him, and that’s because she loves him. I just want you to trust me again.” “You want me to shoot at your house or what?” “You don’t need to get aggressive.” “You know what, smoking makes you neurotic. You should quit.” “You sound just like my exes. Does it make you feel manly if you call a woman neurotic?” “Manly? What is this all about?”

“I’m not your enemy. I wasn’t in the war with you.” He threw the rake against the tree. “Will you stop it with the war?” “You want to beat me, don’t you? Come on, hit me, maybe that will make you feel better.” He grabbed her by her elbow. “Kevin, why can’t I help you?” Her face twisted so she wouldn’t cry. “God, I don’t want you to help me.” He let go of her elbow. “Why do you love me anyway? Can’t you see what garbage I am? Human garbage. Don’t you see what you’ve brought into your house?” “You can’t make me not love you,” she said. “How much do you bet I can? Stop sucking other people’s pain and deal with your own, why don’t you? You can’t save me. You can’t love the real me.” “If you think pain is the only thing we have in common, you’re so wrong,” she answered. “When are you ever going to be happy? Are you doing any favors to those who died if you turn away from life?” “What do you know about those who died? I don’t even know anything about them. This has gone too far. This simply has gone too far,” he said, his voice filled with disgust. He stayed angry at her for two days. She stopped mentioning the war, but he noticed new scars on her arm, when her sleeve was up. Her shaking got worse. He could tell she no longer felt it safe to leave him alone with Ted. She’d be somewhere close, listening, waiting. Her steps would go only so far before they’d stop. One day, he heard the boy tell his schoolmates about the dirty river where Kevin had saved the wounded friends. Ted had an actual crowd listening as the school bus stopped, and even the driver gave him a minute to finish the story. The boy’s grin was big as he told his own version of the story. “Gun shots from everywhere.” “Car flipped three times in the air.” “River

was filled with blood.” “They gave him a medal.” He pointed at Kevin taking out the garbage. Faces of children turned to look from bus windows, and Kevin frowned and went quickly into the house. He finally brought himself to tell Martha he was moving out. He would not say why. First, she screamed, kneeling on the kitchen floor. She locked herself in the bedroom for hours, and he took Ted outside to play catch. He told him his mother had a toothache. When she came out, she was calm. She asked him for one more chance. She wanted a family outing, a picnic and a hike in the woods. There was a place with a lake, and she said that was the best therapy, and why hadn’t they done that before. He said yes because Ted was there. Then the boy got on top of a chair and jumped on it, shouting “Pic-nic! Pic-nic!” until Kevin took him down. They took cold cuts and grapes in plastic bags. The neighbor gave them their chocolate lab, Spock, to take with them, because the dog liked to run around and never got a real chance. The boy had taken care of the dog before, so he hugged the dog all the way to the lake. His mother had never let Ted get a dog. Kevin was sitting with his back against a tree, telling Martha she was too good for him. She was crying silently. That was when he saw the dog jump into the lake, from the corner of his eye. That would have been a trivial observation had it not been for the boy’s cry: “Mom, Spock is drowning! I’ll save him, like Kevin did!” The boy made a big splash, with his clothes on, and Kevin knew that the boy did not swim. Martha’s piercing cry happened at the same time as Kevin jumped to his feet. They both watched for only a second how the boy came up—a fluttering shoulder and a head, a swollen jacket twisting with splashes, sinking again.

They both ran. With every step Kevin took toward the lake, one thought punctuated his foot hitting the ground: she would not, she could not, she must not forgive him. If the boy died, he had to tell her to kill him too, for how could he then keep from her the truth, the one ugly truth he hadn’t brought himself to tell her before? He had given her only the stories she’d wanted to hear, but he could not say it was her fault. He had started it all. He hadn’t told her the story about him being a crook and a loser, who hadn’t returned from Iraq but from a year-long stint in jail. The story of him never even trying to enlist, let alone— He had never really sleepwalked, either. As he plunged into the lake and as his body descended into the murkiness, he hoped he would never come out again. Yet when he saw Ted at the bottom, he prayed for the only thing worth all the breaths he had taken from birth up to this moment: let the boy live. Liana Vrajitoru Andreasen Liana Vrajitoru Andreasen is originally from Romania, and currently lives in McAllen, TX where she is an Associate Professor at South Texas College. She has published stories in Fiction International, Lumina, Calliope, The Raven Chronicles, The Horror Zine, The Willow Review, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Interstice, Scintilla, Weave Magazine, and others. She has published academic work in Alecart, Texas Review, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Southwestern American Literature, and The CEA Critic.

In the Moment Not yet dawn, summer in retrospect, September refusing autumn’s come-on as the Earth rolls over on its favoured side, myths lying in late, legends sleeping rough in the broom and ditchweed, sawing dream-logs and sewing nightmares long into the morning; unlike the deer that amble on the lawn and can see into the dark, into the dark’s concerns. . . Rising to the kettle’s hue and cry, the sky a dull amalgam of plum and dun, the Pacific uneasy in its calm, a brooding presence that at any instant could burst its stitches and let loose upon the land. Being here, all my answers in search of a question, looking for a clew to follow in and out of a chary labyrinth, the present now accommodating the future then. Living in the moment but the mind rushing on ahead, towards an inevitable precipice, scouting the geography, the self clambering over its storylines, higher ground proffering little insight, the truth a tangible thing you can ill-afford to wholly ignore or fully envisage. The dance inextricably linked to the dancer. Bruce McRae Bruce McRae is a Canadian musician with over 900 poems published. His first book, The So-Called Sonnets, is available via Silenced Press.

A Man with Tea Little left to choose Between the riddle and the risk So I dance with feet grown numb Along Decemberâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s darkening edge The mug steaming On the farmhouse table Sings silent psalm Of wine dark tea Stiffened hands grasp the cup And find their age In the gathering gray Of this unflinching dawn Fading now the grip Yet fierce the feel And fragrant flame the drink Kindling forest embers of the night Past the kitchen window Trees are gladly freed of fall And I meet hibernal morning In the quickening reflection Of a man with tea Steven Bucher Steven Bucher lives on a small farm in the Virginia Piedmont. An active member of the Poetry Society of Virginia, he has recently been published in Artemis Journal, Calliope Magazine, Blue Heron Review, and in the upcoming anthology of northern Virginia poets, NoVA Bards.

February Again February again Days drawn close to still Nearly frozen streams Murk and mizzle Not quite turned to snow Nor come to quiet end Marrow-cutting chill Laying black The fallen trunks of January This oddly longest month No trace of fall or spring Somehow separate Too simple to move on This long exhale of winter That draws us deeply in Deeper perhaps Than we thought to go Through graying damp Into gentling solitude Faint flicker of season Whispers of a sheltering more Steven Bucher

The Grace from Fall There is a bend in the road Through the woods Where I walk Just at the crest Of a well-worn hill Late September sun Feels its way Through leaf and bark In search of clearing Where brush and bough break free Shining brilliant to the sun But this September light has turned No longer summer flush Distilling clarity This first face of autumn Whispering its winter challengeâ&#x20AC;Ś Am I ready And I am not Not just yet Not just now For summer still is full Upon the branch And ripens yet Upon the vine Such gentle grace we glean from fall Its beautiful and timely turn Welcome in the bitter wake Of sweet summerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s parting kiss Time and beauty So well met in fall So well seasoned to the day There is a bend in the road Through the woods Where I walk Steven Bucher

Wayne F Burke

river in winter #2

Winter Freefall To defy the feeling of falling, to pass the twin poles magnetic would be nothing more than to discover an electric wire seared between cloud and sky, a body stretching forward, bending in the light— a simple refraction through curved glass— of momentum captured there-freeze-frame. Alice Baldys Alice Baldys, originally from Pennsylvania, is a graduate student and freelance writer. She has studied under Pulitzer Prize winning poet Claudia Emerson at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia and contributed as an assistant editor at The Rappahannock Review. Recent publications include StepAway Magazine and Dămfīno Press.

The Favored Few Newman arrived early, wearing his khakis, blue Oxford shirt, and tweed jacket, sans tie. It was all part of the drill, his costume – classy but not formal, sporty but not sloppy. Just the right blend to suit any audience. Some nights he wore glasses and slipped on a blue tie. Other times he dispensed with the jacket and rolled up his sleeves. A non-smoker, he had a pack of Marlboros to stick in his shirt pocket if needed. Every six weeks a new DUI class started, and every six weeks he was assigned to play his part. It was part of the drill. A condition of his parole, his community service. He bought a cup of coffee in the student lounge, and mingled with the crowd, listening in on the conversations. A stocky, thickfeatured man in his forties, Southside blue collar, was talking to two men in Packer sweatshirts eagerly nodding in agreement. “I wasn’t drinking any more than anyone else,” he insisted. “I mean, for Chriss sake, it’s a fuckin’ Brewers game. People tailgate. I mean I’ve been going to games for fifteen years, four cold ones, and bam, they pull me over and ticket me. You know, I was under point one. In the old days I would have been clean.” “What it cost you?” “Hey, the ticket’s no problem. I got my brother-in-law’s cousin to take my case for bupkis. But damn, I have to have my son-in-law drive me to work sites. I mean it’s a bitch. And God knows, if any of those developers, any prime contractors find out? Think they are gonna put me in charge of installation on another job? No way! They gotta know they can call you at two am. so you can rush out to a job site and fix a connection or install a replacement part. They gotta have licensed electricians sign off on every detail.”

The man next to him shook his head in sympathy. “You try driving a truck,” he muttered. “I’m off work four weeks already. And this is prime season in my field. I’m losing major overtime.” One of the men caught Newman’s eye, holding his gaze momentarily. Newman was holding the standard packet, the textbook, the workbook. “Four weeks?” Newman asked sympathetically. “A month’s pay. That’s a fine they don’t count, do they?” The man shook his head glumly, “I’m maxing out credit cards just paying utilities and groceries. I had to take money we’ve been saving for vacations to make the mortgage last month. The holidays this year are going to be hell. I got three kids expecting a big Christmas. Plus we usually have my parents visit from Oregon for a week. We take them shopping, to movies with the kids, dinners at their favorite restaurants. My mom loves us to take her to Chicago during the holidays. How do I explain my wife doing the driving?” “They want to punish you, OK, but they should count your lost pay,” Newman suggested. “Why should you have to pay twice, more than twice?” The men drew closer. “It’s not fair,” Newman said softly. “Four weeks’ pay, so far? That’s just not fair. How many more weeks do you lose before you get your license back? Think the judge counts that? Plus, they make you pay for this class. Listen, your brother-in-law’s cousin? Did he even try for a plea bargain? You can beat the DUI by pleading what they call ‘a wet reckless.’ You plead guilty to reckless driving involving alcohol – not drunk driving. You pay a fine, you get points on your license, but you beat the DUI and the suspension and this class.” The men’s eyes widened. Newman shook his head. “You always find this stuff out too late. You learn the hard way.” “Like I said, it’s not fair.” “Not fair,” another agreed shaking his head. Newman nodded, then backed off, indicating the men’s room.

Inside the washroom, he poured his full cup of rancid coffee down the sink, rinsed it, then headed out to grab another cup. He joined some newcomers. Two young Hispanics. They had tattoos on their necks and long hair. He listened to their border Spanish carefully. “Not like home,” Newman said in Spanish, delicately imitating their accents. “You can’t just pay off a cop here. They mean business here.” The pair gazed at him and smiled, switching to English. “So Mr. Bilingual, your accent is good. Where you pick that up?” “I teach at Esperanza Center.” He tapped the younger man’s textbook. “This happens to everybody. Southside. Northside. Mayfair. Stadium. Irishfest. They bust you everywhere.” The younger man leaned forward, his head bobbing energetically, “I was driving my mother’s Toyota in Brookfield. Nice new ride. Two o’clock in the afternoon. I’m even in a suit and tie. Bang, they pull me over.” “What this set you guys back?” “Three hundred bucks.” “Not fair, ameego,” he said, comically Anglizing his accent. “Welcome to America. No chance of La Mordida in El Norte.” Newman jabbed his shoulder lightly, then moved off, surveying the rest of the crowd. A few housewives. A thin girl with heavy makeup. The usual downcast loners. The just-out-of-college jock in a fraternity sweater. The drunks. The hardcore drunks. The AA dropouts. The neatly composed and utterly humiliated soccer mom with moist eyes. The smug sales rep pounding nonchalantly at his lap top, making money while he can. Newman studied the faces of the downcast, the embittered, the bored, the nervous and lost. At five-fifty, Wanamaker arrived. Lean, graying, he moved with wearied gestures. He unlocked the double doors to the seminar room and snapped on the lights. The students filed in, taking seats in the rear, forcing late arrivals to sit in front. Newman sat by the window, noting how the fading sunlight gleamed on the yellow and copper leaves on the horizon.

Wanamaker took a rapid headcount, glanced at the clock, and stood at the podium. “I’m Ben Wanamaker and this is Traffic Safety 101. I have a roster. It may not have everyone’s name on it, especially if you added in the last two days. But let me go through the roll. Adams? Amarik? . . . .” Newman was reminded of prison. The constant counts. Voices on loudspeakers reading names. The soft hum of surveillance cameras being adjusted. “Toddleson? . . . . Vasquez? . . . . . . Zachary? Listen, before we start tonight, I’d like someone to say a few words to you.” He nodded at Newman, who held up a hand in acknowledgement. Newman got up and positioned himself behind the podium. “My name is Robert Newman, and like you, I’d rather not be here. Like you, I got a DUI. “First, let me tell you what you want to hear. It’s not fair. You guys are not criminals. You have jobs, families, responsibilities. You are knocking your brains out trying to make a living in this economy, paying the bills. You are not taking welfare or food stamps or shooting up drugs. So why should the cops nail you? Why should you be punished? It’s not fair.” Newman paused for a second, pretending to clear his throat. Most were nodding with him. The soccer mom and sales rep were holding back, knowing, anticipating a ploy. “Plus the courts don’t count the inconvenience, the lost pay, the blemish on your record. How this could hurt your career and your family. Try being a truck driver or a sales rep with a DUI. That car, that truck, that’s your office, your place of business. Point oh eight makes sense. You are impaired, but it’s only point oh four if you are driving commercial. What’s that? Maybe two beers at lunch? Maybe less if you skipped a meal. “Plus there is the whole stigma of being arrested.” He glanced at the soccer mom. “I bet like me this is your first arrest, your only arrest. And I bet every aunt and uncle and mother-in-law and ex-boy or girlfriend who never liked you can’t resist telling the world they knew all along. You’re a

deadbeat. You’re a jerk. And it undermines your authority if you have kids. How can you discipline them or give advice after this? It’s not fair.” Sensing the sales rep was onto him, Newman cut to the chase. “OK, let me tell you what you need to hear, what you have to hear, and why I am here. I was arrested for drunk driving, same as you. But I never got the chance to take this class. You are very lucky. I would give my right arm to be sitting where you are. “You were pulled over by cops. I wasn’t that lucky. In my case, the cops only showed up after I hit another car and killed two college girls. Two twenty-year olds.” He let them absorb the moment. The sales rep, his barometer tonight, seemed less smug. He was leaning slightly forward. “Some of you probably have daughters or nieces that age. You drive drunk, you take chances not just with your life but everyone else’s on the road. I pled guilty to two counts of vehicular manslaughter to run concurrently. That’s a ten year sentence in this state. I was fortunate enough to be granted parole after eight years. You think missing four weeks’ pay is rough? Think about eight years. Three hundred dollars? Court costs? Fines? Lost overtime pay? I lost my home, my 401ks, my job, my license. Most of all, I lost the love and respect of my friends and family. And for a good reason. Sometimes you get drunk and do and say stupid things people can forgive or forget. But you kill two people, go to prison where you belong, people never forget. And I’ll ask you, if those were your daughters, do you think you could forgive me? You . . . (he almost slipped and said “you people” ) “guys are so damn lucky to be in this class, in this room tonight. “My case goes back nine years. It was on TV. It was in the paper. It’s forgotten by most people. But I live it every day. I was a lot like you, then. Hell, I was better. I was thirty-one, and in my best year I made six-hundredand-fifty grand.” He stated the number slowly, letting it sink in. “I was a civil attorney. Corporate lawsuits and buyouts. I charged five hundred dollars an hour.” Another pause. “Five hundred an hour. I had two cars. A condo on the

top of the University Tower overlooking the lake. A boat. A girlfriend. We went to Rome, went to Rio, went to France. And I was not a drunk. I drank in college like most of you. I had a few watching a Packers’ game, but I never drank too much. I only got buzzed enough to crash at home or a girlfriend’s. But I pulled off a big deal at work. We were partying. My boss gave me an eighty-thousand dollar bonus. So we did some wine and shots at work. Then some of us went to Water Street for a few drinks. Then I decided to bar hop. I was celebrating. I drank too much. That was a mistake.” He paused for a second, lowering his voice, and holding the gaze of the sales rep. “Then I got behind the wheel of my car. That was a crime.” He cleared his throat again. “You think it’s embarrassing walking around having your neighbors, friends, people at work or church know you got a DUI? Try walking around being the guy who killed two people. Two college girls. Carry that load. I do. Every day. I stop in Starbucks for coffee and get a strange look. . . . I walk around wondering if people know. I try to make a friend and somehow someway someone tells them, and I see the change. Believe me, you are the lucky ones. It ended with a ticket and a court date for you. You showed up for this class and I hope you finish it. Half the people drop out after the second or third week. That doesn’t matter really. Just as long as you never end up being this guy.” He tapped his chest. “Believe me, you don’t want to be this guy. You are lucky. You got a chance to end it here. I never got that chance.” He picked up the workbook and flipped through it casually. “You are going to learn a lot about BAC and traffic laws in this class. It’s pretty Mickey Mouse. Do the drill and pass the quizzes and read your homework and you get your license back faster. Just make sure you don’t let yourself or anyone you love end up like me. I’m a doing a drill, going to these classes, giving my little talks, it’s my community service. But I’ll be honest, you can get your license back, but some things you never get back.” He coughed on cue. “I never know how to end these things. I don’t have any great philosophical insights or quotes to leave you with. So, take this class, drop this class. Just never get behind the wheel drunk or even

buzzed again. And there is something else. You feel embarrassed, like people look down on you? Don’t let them. You can get your dignity back. You be the guy who stops others. Whether you are at a bowling alley or a banquet . . . ,” he paused, looking at the sales rep, and added “trade show, sales convention, and you see someone who has had too much, you can step forward to say something. They won’t listen to their brother-in-law or the guy at the next table, but you’ve been there. You can take them aside, and say, ‘Hey, I think you’ve had enough. . . get a cab. . . have someone drive you home.’ They are going to get offended. You know, ‘who the hell are you?’ Well, you can say, I got busted, and it cost me six weeks’ pay. I had to have my son-in-law drive me to work. They just might listen to you. You do that for others, those people who are sneering at you now will respect you. You can get beyond this, because you are lucky. You didn’t get hurt, you didn’t hurt anyone. You’re not in a wheelchair, you didn’t kill anyone, and you didn’t go to jail. And if a year from now, five years from now, you can prevent someone from making the mistake I did, you might just do the most important thing you will ever accomplish. You just might save a life and prevent someone like me from ruining his own,” he said softly. “Would I have listened to you that night? Looking back, thinking of how I felt that night, I honestly don’t know. But I might have. I might have gone home and woke up with hangover and two girls would be alive. So you learn from this class and teach others. Don’t be silent, don’t feel ashamed, and don’t laugh it off. Just realize how lucky you are to have to it end here. Make sure it ends here and don’t drink and drive again. At the next tailgate party, you be the designated driver. You watch out for your friends.” He shuffled his papers, blinked as if about to cry, bowed awkwardly and left the room. Outside, in the cool breeze, he relaxed. Walking to the bus shelter he reflected he had another year on parole. With breaks for holidays, there would be eight more classes. Eight more first nights. All part of the drill.

When the bus pulled up, the driver, sour-faced as usual, released the door, which parted with a Star Trek hiss. Newman sat near the door. The bus slipped south, rolling through the Village, a cluster of brick and stone specialty shops and European bistros. Stores he had shopped with his mom to buy bread and cheese for family parties were dark but still there. Le Reve Patisserie and Café Hollander where he dined with dates or lunched with suburban clients. The buildings slid by like abandoned film sets, the faces in the lit windows like so many extras from his past. At the halfway-house, he signed himself in and mounted the worn stairs, empty and troubled. Lying on his cot, he remembered his first night in prison. He tried to envision something lighter to help him drift to sleep – a sailboat skimming the lake, a multi-colored hot air balloon sailing away, away, over trees of gold and green. . . but closing his eyes he could only remember the cold concrete cell and sweeping searchlights. Mark Connelly Mark Connelly’s fiction appeared in Indiana Review, Cream City Review, The Ledge, The Great American Literary Magazine, and Digital Papercut. He received an Editor’s Choice Award in Carve Magazine’s Raymond Carver Short Story Contest in 2014; in 2015 he received Third Place in Red Savina Review’s Albert Camus Prize for Short Fiction. In 2005 Texas Review Press published his novella Fifteen Minutes, which received the Clay Reynolds Prize.

Hamden High School Rifle Team December 1940

Standing, kneeling, sitting, lying prone on winter afternoons from two to four in nineteen forty, one at a time, again and again, in the basement beneath the WPA foyer where murals of farmers, ice cutters, and Eli Whitney circled below the sculptured molding, paying homage to the ceilingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s plaster muses, we fired and waited, while the cellarâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s steam pipes banged and hissed and lead-filled gun smoke blackened the asbestos, a year before the battle ships were sunk, we fired and waited, we fired and waited, as if we knew what marksmanship demands. Bob Meszaros Bob Meszaros taught English at Hamden High School in Hamden, Connecticut, for thirty-two years and now teaches part time at Quinnipiac University. He has recently been published in The Connecticut Review, Main Street Rag, Red Wheelbarrow, Tar River Poetry, and Concho River Review.

Vietnam Veteran more than a door opening to something else a new space, a passage to lightness or dark where he hears voices in the water flowing outside confusing his sleep his door insurmountable a path to his bloody past a doorway invitation to a dark hut with her cowering eyes here, now this older woman opening his door, leading him someplace new he stumbles ashamed cannot enter this unmoored time arriving without a knock the force of entry bloodies him again do not view it as solid: ghost a better name for what he must walk through, light streaming in now voices quiet finally the hut dissolves she is still here in the doorway Emily Strauss Emily Strauss, a semi-retired teacher living in California, has been published in a wide variety of online venues and in anthologies in the U.S. and abroad.

Watching Football on TV At halftime in a boring game the ladies run outside to see the goats, carrying spirals of orange peels their high heels sink in dark mud where snow has melted off the yellowed lawn as Lewis and Clark, Alpine goats, run to the fence to nibble the dank fruity swirls, climbing up the wire strands to get a better grip, competing for the last bits and the chilled air is refreshing after the too-warm house with its raised tub big enough for two on a marbled shelf overlooking Mount Ashland soon they return for more smoked turkey and martinis, pausing only long enough to cheer the rout of the favored local team watching complacently as their quarterback is carted off to the hospital with a possible broken neck. By then cheesecake is being served. Emily Strauss

Witness to the Tides I will grow roots one day green leaves from my ankles mud between my toes I will smell like broccoli earth ocean fog between my legs. The plowed rows above the narrow beaches will gather me mist will soak my hair stroke my cheeks. I will become planted visible for seven miles to the pelicans sweeping in waves over the waves, cormorants will roost in my arms. I will watch my stiffening skin like whalebone fossilize my eyes crusted with salt stuck as I freeze into a female watchtower mute witness to ebbing tides. Emily Strauss

Ira Joel Haber

Rain Day

Shift Mining When I finished school, wanting only to write fiction, make sculpture, solve and heal the world and marry my girlfriend, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho was a great town to have been a kid in or to retire in. I’m sure it still is. But in between those happy events – as was and is true of small towns everywhere – if you were not rich you left, went to college if you could, or to where there was work. You’d “join the Army if you fail,” as Dylan put it. You might stay if you found work in a sawmill, if any were hiring. I did some of that: pulling wet, heavy new boards off the “green chain,” “picking stickers” out of a power saw’s voracious mouth, and a number of other mindless, repetitive jobs you can do for years in mills if they keep you on in hopes of someday becoming a sawyer or a millwright. Or, you could do one of the other crap jobs available in our area, to put food on the table and a roof over head. There were grocery stores and shops, the tourist economy created by the beautiful lake, but the pay was the crap part. Or you could commute forty miles up the highway to the mines, which I also did for a time. If you told them you were studying Mining Engineering at some college, they’d hire you for the summer as a “miner’s helper.” The job meant you answered to being called “pard” by everybody in sight while following an experienced miner around and handing him tools when he asked for them; you shoveled muck when he said to, and mostly you tried to keep out of the way. At least that was my experience. The worst part of working underground was going to work. If you could stand going down there every day, guys told me, you could make a miner. Some people are claustrophobic and just can’t, and you never really know if you can or not until you try it. My father had done it for years before it killed him, so I confess I just had to find out whether I could too, or not. Miners came to work in Levis or bermudas or chinos, tennis shoes, boots or sandals, and changed in a locker room into their “muckers.” Those

were thrift-store work clothes, mostly, that would be filthy and dried out, stiff as shingles from the previous shift you’d worked. They would stand up by themselves when you pulled them out of your locker, until you’d knocked your way into them. They would always include a heavy, ancient coat of some kind to keep you warm when you passed through the cold zone on the way down, after which you’d remove the coat and work in a grimy tee-shirt, boots, ragged pants and a hard hat. We looked like bedraggled refugees or a pod of POWs, climbing onto the train. At the Bunker Hill Mine we rode a sturdy, amusement-park-sized train about a mile and a half straight into the side of the granite mountain. Then we’d climb off it and get into what was called a “skip”, a large toboggan-like vehicle that ran on rails similar to a train’s, but canted down a shaft at an angle much steeper than forty-five degrees. The skip hung from a single, greasy two-inch or so cable, which lowered it down and hauled it back up the track, controlled by a hoist-man somewhere out of sight. You’d sit between the knees of the man behind you, with the head of the man in front of you between your own knees, and the thing would drop us down through the black rock, slowly at first but faster and faster as the timbers ticked by over head. That first skip took us down to eighteen hundred feet, where it would slow and then come to a rather springy if not bouncing stop, depending on the hoist-man’s touch and, probably, mood. At that level it’d be warm again, because we had passed through the depths which at first got successively colder as you went deeper into the rock, until ice cycles hung from the ceilings and your breath steamed, and then began to grow warmer again, and wetter, at each level thereafter. The walls and ceilings and floors were solid rock, granite and "mud-stone" with bright shining metal streaks running through it like layers of icing in a huge lop-sided cake. And the warmth emanated from the molten core of the earth, for those of us who did not believe it came from Hades. At that point we’d shed the coats - which had come to be ancient and characterful whether the men wearing them ever did - because they were

only worn for about half an hour a shift, going in and coming out, and were handed down in thrift stores over the years from man to man. Then we’d climb onto another train, and go another mile or two horizontally, through more dripping tunnels, to another skip, on which we’d tear off again down to twenty-five hundred and fifty feet, the depth at which we were working at the time I was there. The shafts and tunnels followed the ore veins down through the rock. The ore was galena, shiny as a new nickel and composed of lead, zinc and silver, mostly. As I said, if you could stand going in there every day, you had the hard part of it licked. Just getting down to the work site took about two hours. With another two to get back out and adding in a half-hour lunch and two fifteen minute coffee breaks, that only left three hours out of an eight-hour shift to get any work done. What the work amounted to, in the kind of shift mining we were doing, was three things: First we had to “muck out“ the heap of ore and broken rock the previous shift had blasted out of the face of our assigned “stope” or working tunnel. We’d accomplish that by maneuvering a cable-powered, airdriven “muck bucket” to scrape that “muck“ down a shaft into a waiting ore car. Then we would measure, cut and wedge into place whatever timbers were necessary to support that day’s newly cleared out work area, or make it look supported. The determination of what timbering was sufficient depended on the miners’ ability to “read the rock” in front of us, its structure and grain and tensile strength. Then we had to drill a sufficient number of six foot deep holes into the new face of the rock we were piercing, using an air drill called a single-jack, and pack each hole with the appropriate amount of “powder” (dynamite), a blasting cap, and a fuse. The fuses were joined together and would be lit off just at the end of the shift, as we headed out to catch the skip that got us the hell out of there. The trips out were always therefore accompanied by the sound and smell of those rumbling explosions below us, blasting out new piles of broken rock and paydirt for the next shift to muck out.

An experienced pair of miners could accomplish that routine in little more than a couple of hours, maybe longer if they were encumbered by a miner’s helper. As soon as the work was done, except for the fuse-lighting part of it, every man would carefully choose a one-by-ten un-planed board and place it on the floor to lie or sit upon, so we could turn off the lights on our hard hats and get in a little nap before departing. When you all turn your lights off at twenty-five hundred and fifty feet, what you see is total darkness. The eye cannot ever adjust to that darkness and see anything at all. It’s either easy or impossible for a man to sleep in such conditions, depending on how long he’s been mining, among other things. I took no pride in being able to stand it under ground. My brain simply wasn’t ever able to accept that I was really there; so, in some corner of the back of my mind flickered the idea that if I were to turn around real quick there’d be daylight right behind me. I’d like to think my brain would make similar corrections and allow me to stand being in combat if I ever had to. In shift mining, all the blasting took place between the shifts, when no men were down there. That was what differentiated it from “gypo mining,” in which men are paid by the cubic yard of muck they remove, instead of by the hour. Those guys, in order to make the big bucks, drilled, set the charges, and shot them off while they simply ran off down the drift and hid behind whatever presented itself, then they’d run back into the smoke and dust and muck it out and start drilling again, as many times a shift as they could. Those guys cut every corner they could, every day, and were therefore most likely to be injured or killed or to contract silicosis early, from all the rock dust they’d inhaled. All in all, being a miner’s helper was one of the easier jobs I ever had, physically. I spare myself an actual calculation, but it’s fair to say that I made more money in the mine that summer than I ever made writing or making sculpture for a comparable period of time. However, I can say that I still exist, while the mines don’t, at least not in anything like the way they did then. By the nineteen nineties, the international world economy had

configured itself in such a way that it somehow became more economical for U.S. corporations to import all the metal ores they need, from places like South Africa, via Japan, or from Russia (in the case of Titanium), or from someplace else, rather than paying American miners to go down and dig them out of our own ground. How that can be, how that makes economical sense, continues to elude me; I think it’s an indicator, if anybody still needs one, that the country’s economic system does not serve the interests of a vast number of us, and does not care that it doesn’t. The Bunker Hill and virtually all the hard-rock mines in North Idaho were closed and their portals boarded up, and in many cases they were filled up with sand to preclude their collapse. As of 2014, however, all of that is being reconsidered. I’m told now that some of them are to be reopened, due to unprecedented surges in world metals prices. To me, those facts are far more bizarre and difficult to believe than any fiction I could build around the subject. Joseph Webb Joseph Webb is the youngest of a large family of Idaho hard-rock miners, loggers and ridgerunners. After attending Reed College and Gonzaga University, he graduated from Portland State University in Fine Arts and Literature. Shift Mining is his first publication.

Period of Adjustment Our poems, paintings, TV nature shows require rework to capture Earth’s latest videos, chameleons flashing manic on hybrid blooms like spun kaleidoscopes and crickets dismayed by subtle lawns’ chartreuse, lush shrubbery evergreen in several shades of Grey Poupon. Blue to orange, orange to indigo – Halloween a pumpkin’s grin never spoke so frankly or scarier. Vampires agree, switched to pink, new capes lemon-lined, no bitten neck caught dead still leaking scarlet as strains of rosined violins drip skyward with limpid notes like perfumed water in tropical array, ten sparkling flavors. Overnight gravity gave up, odd, passé, nudity conceded and at once mankind disrobed, news flash delivered by pretty boy and girl at transparent anchor desk all major cable networks hurried to buy from outlets handling only liquid glass. Ads say improved installments of lake, cloud, green rain, red snow are coming soon for sale or lease on Internet or at huge stores, a human tortoise shell near you, within gliding distance from home or hive high amid your forest branches never shedding a painted leaf or needle

where faces becoming computer screens display smiles popular one second ago. Nels Hanson Nels Hanson has worked as a farmer, teacher and contract writer/editor. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s James D. Phelan Award. Poems appeared in Word Riot, Oklahoma Review, Pacific Review and other magazines and received Sharkpack Poetry Review's annual 2014 Prospero Prize.

Priyadarshini

Kovil Yannai (The Temple Elephant)

From Waking to Water to Walking In a forest fire you make a fire The size of yourself, let it go out, And lie in it. from “Mastectomy (for M.)," by Jean Valentine, as found in The Breast: An Anthology, edited by Susan Thomas and Marin Gazzaniga

The water bursts out, fast and hot, bearing with it a rising steam that fills the room. The bodies move hazily, as if behind beveled glass. The movements are firm, but slow: hands caressing fleshy pink bellies, legs, breasts, armpits. Lather foams. Laughter rises. And the early morning chatter begins. About sons and gardens and daughters and summer cottages. And while one talks, a few listen, faces lifted in catlike bliss, holding in their cupped smiles this moment of pelting water and the sound of a friend’s voice. They often do not talk to me, but they accept me with their silent nods. Though younger, I am one of them: a swimmer, every morning dragging myself to this local high school pool, where after a shivering entry and a few bracing strokes, the rhythms of my breathing and my day click into place. The post-swim shower, of course, is part of it: it is the rite of passage from water to walking. As I stand in the shower room, I am with them, and I am alone. It is a strange shower room: four stainless steel posts stand at equal distance from each other in the center of the large tiled space. Four shower-heads, positioned like points on a compass, jut out of the top of the posts, and each swimmer chooses her own. Silently, thoughtfully, each has her own routine of setting up soaps and lotions, turning on two showers to get the water hot enough, then removing her suit and hanging it in a place where it doesn’t drip on someone else’s towel. Yet even in this private act of cleansing, the configuration forces confabulation. It is a meeting place. For these women, I imagine it has been so for years. They have a practiced choreography. One washes hair while one soaps up legs. Another swirls her loofah around her swooping belly and breasts with such a laugh, as

she listens to another talk about last nightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s phone call from her son, who is defending his dissertation in May. The hair washer finishes, and then, despite her short stocky body, gracefully swoops down to wash her feet. She lingers on each toe, every now and then turning upward with a girlish smile. The loofah-swirler moves to hair and begins to describe her visit to the nursing home to see her aunt. They all finish at exactly the same time, and move to their towels in unison, still talking. My first day at the pool, I interrupted this final move and rendered them all baffled and silent for a few seconds. But then they found a way to fit me silently into their dance. Three times a week appears a woman whom I know. Her name is Lois: she stands next to me in the alto section of a local choir. Lois arrives with a quick, certain step. Of all the older women who meet at the pool, she is the only one who still goes to work afterwards. Everyday she wears a tailored suit, and her silvery hair is cropped around her strong, yet gentle face. In the pool, she is never part of the paddling, giggling gang that the locker room women become there. I watch them from underwater while I swim my laps. Legs and knees of all sizes kick up the tiny skirts on their flowery suits, bodies are made buoyant by blue life vests and kickboards and paddling arms. They take turns swimming the length of the pool along the wall, and occasionally one does two or three lengths, but generally they work together on an exercise routine to which each woman seems to have contributed her own moves. Lois swims her own steady laps in the lane next to mine, her graceful arms cutting through the water like scissors; she does not produce even the tiniest splash. In the shower room, she stands between me and the rest. She is tall, like me, and her lanky body is covered with leathery skin. Also like me, she loves boating. To me she tells her tales of learning to sail on her own; to the others she describes her seaside cottage and its garden, and of course her children. Her son followed her profession: he is a psychologist. Her daughter is studying music.

It is on such a day I notice her concentration break while she lathers her belly, her torso, her breasts. I see her glance down at herself, as if looking at something unfamiliar. It is a momentary thing, like when the water suddenly gets in your mouth while swimming, and you lose your rhythm, and for a second you even think you may need to stop but you don’t. And generally no one notices. But Lois sees me notice her noticing. We share a glance while the nearest woman calls over and asks about the approaching grandchild. When is it due? She calls. End of March, Lois replies, and smiles, and proceeds to her long strong legs. The next week, we do not see Lois. And the following week, she arrives dressed in blue jeans or sweats, her eyes diverted. She swims slowly, thoughtfully. In the shower, her fingers and hands grope over her body as if over alien territory. She tells me, quietly, as we walk out together, into a snowy morning. Yes, it was a lump she discovered that day. It was. It is. Our feet crunch across the glistening crust that covers the snow. We stand together, eye to eye, beside her car. Her face softens to a smile. I may not be in choir practice for a little while, she says. Then she adds: but that’s o.k., it’s just Carmina Burana. I hate Carmina Burana. I read a critic once who described it as what music would sound like if it were written by a hormone. We both laugh, and then I walk away. The water bursts forth, fast and hot. Steam rises. The bodies move. The flesh is all a healthy pink. The eyes are bright. But here and there I see it, though I try not to stare. The bruise that never has healed. The zipper-like scar across a wide fleshy belly. It often arcs low, like a belt or a smile, from side to side. I have my own scars, on my leg, from two attempts to smooth out bulging veins. Some of the others have them, too, or just deep bluish patches or the veins themselves. No one speaks of these, though but we all know each other’s scars. We linger on them when we wash. We nurse them still, absentmindedly, with creams and lotions.

A few days after Lois stopped coming, one of the women asks me what I do for a living. Teacher, I say. The next day someone asks me if I’m married. Yes, but no children. The next day they ask me how long I have been swimming, and they all look up from their various stages of dressing and wave when I leave. In the shower, the space where Lois often stands is empty, so it gets filled with words. I learn of Mary’s Down Syndrome child who is now twentyfour and in the Special Olympics, and Anna’s husband, who just retired and doesn’t know what to do with himself, and the best way to can tomatoes. And Paula heard at the grocer’s that Lois is having chemo, and there’s a new butcher, a real butcher, on Franklin Street. And I tell of my mother in Cleveland, who has fluid on her knee, and the treatment isn’t working, and they are all amazed to learn she doesn’t swim. Water aerobics, that’s the best, and someone saw Lois’ husband, who has taken to walking around the mall with a look as if to say: it must be here somewhere; I’m sure it’s at just the next store. Afterwards we trudge off through the snow, our footprints and our tireprints each tracing their own paths, then joining up with other paths until no one path is clear. But one thing is always clear: the swim, the shower, the bodies, the voices. Anna brings it in the morning it appears, and silently each woman reads it as she enters the locker room. The obituary is long, telling of accomplishments no one knew of, yet no one is surprised, considering the fact Lois worked and never stopped working, all the way to age 65. This too we learn from the obituary. The picture shows the woman we know: trim, welldressed, smiling, succinct. As I look at it, I feel like I am really reading that she just gave a speech somewhere, or accepted an award. Swimming, the lap line passes beneath me, defining the shape of my body and my movement forward. High above me, the skylight is open a little allowing the bright sun outside to shimmer on the warm water. The occasional burst of snow still swirls and falls, and some of it sparkles down and melts into the chlorine-coral waters below. Feeling exceptionally strong this morning, my

breathing and movements become so synchronized, it is almost as if my body too melts into the glistening, rippling waters. I have one of those moments when I can’t understand why I cannot just draw in a long breath of water. The minute that thought enters my mind, I am startled by it, and the swimming begins to become labored, until I know that I am finished. When I reach the shower it is misty already. The bodies swarm and weave and foam roundly. I take my usual place and begin to soap up my body. In the steamy silence, I watch the way I wash myself, I feel the places where my own body is firm and where it is soft and where it is flesh and where it is bone. The voices have risen, in a murmur. They are off to my left. And suddenly laughter bubbles forth – it is Paula – I look over, and she is shaking her smiling face, spraying water, maybe tears, maybe drops from her wet white curls, all around. And they all begin to laugh with her. I didn’t hear the joke, so I can only smile. Move over dear, Mary says to me, and she motions to Lois’ place. Come closer so we don’t have to shout. I do as she beckons. As the other women turn to welcome me, I am grateful. Mary Louise Hill Mary Louise Hill is an Associate Professor of Liberal Studies and Communication at Medaille College. Lately, her work has appeared in ellipsis and The Gettysburg Review.

fathering father The man who bred me breeds me yet. --Gael Turnbull, Bjarni Spike-Helgi’s Son & Other Poems

holy schnikes -grabbing the car keys, 50 Cents’ rap running wild exiled everything about him reviled recalling what he wished to forget a better dad to Dad than I was his child?

am I

softer since Mama who breastfed me died washing beagle hairballs off his wheelchair’s widow’s peak smile so controlled and beguiling piling dear Daddy into the Rabbit, I’m unriled ‘cause the VW’s finally mineminemine! with that tight “Son-keep-things-clean” style he droned I drive Pops’ three-pronged cane to senior daycare ...wait a while (though nobody stayed at nursery school my first time). Oedipus Schmoedipus, Pop’s Alzheimer’s mess spread out like my adolescent room this apprentice somehow survives at a moody master’s knee as he dictates his last CV which I file hiphopping that extra mile as a cold family’s hostile oldest tyke. Gerard Sarnat

Gerard Sarnat is the author of Homeless Chronicles, Disputes and 17s. He’s a physician and has established and staffed clinics for the disenfranchised. He has served as a CEO of healthcare organizations and as a Stanford professor.

Foiled In The Closet The day Dad died I scored his roll of Magnum Trojans wrapped in balled socks inside a shoe box on the closet’s top shelf, covered by the diversionary remains of neoprene ankle braces, a cantilevered one that fit worn knees snugly & my faves, the middle finger splint molded from hot plastic plus a scorned kaput truss. Circling like a hawk ever since Pops handed me too many birds bees books, I never landed any of what I suspected to be stashes of girlie mags or what I imagined to be clear-cut evidence of my Poppy’s philandering.

Ur Bernard Last haimish fest prior to Father’s interment goes off well, right on schedule, although he elects to stay in bed. Bevies of caregivers & caterers help Mom blow out her “9” and “6” -- the latter of which Pops had hoped to rewick/flip on his 99th -- but reserved reverse candles don’t happened. When I get home, there’s a voicemail that he coughed blood. I was fine Dad expired, but died for not tucking him in like he always did me. First Thursday the rest of my life, I thought about dropping by my parents’ place then remembered oxygen tanks stood garage guard like Martians. Was that you calling from space, “Ger, Ger please...”? -- which I haven’t erased. Plan to contact NASA when Mom settles down. Meanwhile I’ll stop by the graveyard to visit little Daddy if his spirit’s still around. Gerard Sarnat

One Volunteer Day in Maximum Security Once a month for seven years, I sat knee-to-knee with four inmates. That day, Ringer came out first. There’s a lot to learn from a man who lost everything but continued to fight without trading on suffering. Of course, it left him reluctant to trust, and for five years, until the Innocence Project took up his case, he kept me ignorant about the harm done. It wasn’t my fault, but I still feel ashamed that at first I’d thought him a whiner. But getting to know him was hard. When he first spoke to me, my stomach clenched. I hoped my mouth didn’t drop. Is he speaking English? It was his lack of teeth. A thick accent didn’t help. After an awkward pause, I smiled blankly. “Sorry, I didn’t catch that.” Ringer was fifty, then. He wore a stubby mustache like a grey scrubbing brush and was bald, tall and loose-limbed like an athlete. A handful of pitted scars were strewn across his black, full-moon face. When first imprisoned, he probably had pimples. With elbows on spread knees, he revolved his hands constantly, as though washing them without soap. He didn’t seem able to stop his head, either, shaking it from side to side, as if every cell in his body were saying: no, no, no. I mistook that, too, for defeatism. Without irritation he repeated himself but I still didn’t understand. After he tried again, he read the dismay on my face, and spoke very slowly. It sounded like, ‘I couldn’t meet … until I’d had time to grieve.” I risked a reply. “I’m so sorry about your wife. How long since you last saw her?” “Twenty-three year. We been … on the phone all… ever’ week.” “Um,” I wasn’t sure of what he’d said. Don’t make him repeat himself again. I took a stab at a reply. “You both showed a loyalty that’s unusual.” And then, “You didn’t get to see her age …” “Yeah,” he said. “She …”

Again, not understanding, I gave a strained smile. It had been noisy. A giggling toddler ran between us, her sandals slapping on the tiles. A few paces behind, an older boy rushed to catch her. “Yeah,” Ringer nodded, and I exhaled. Despite his slow drawl, each new sentence could have been Urdu for all I knew. After an hour, when I stood to say goodbye, I’d learned next to nothing and was exhausted. And yet, Van Morrison was right. There is an inarticulate speech of the heart. Ringer’s eyes had lingered on mine. I was the only person to visit him in twenty-three years, and the responsive tug I felt told me our conversation had touched him. Five years later, I understood him better. We talked about his case. “Why didn’t you tell me you were innocent from the get-go?” My visits weren’t bartered for secrets but secrets make us lonely. “When you in here, people think you deserve it. I never told no-one.” The harsh florescent light seemed too bright to bear. A blaring loudspeaker interrupted, “Chow finished!” I unpeeled my hands from under my thighs; they’d been pressed against the plastic seat so long that they were imprinted with orange peel texture. “How did they find you? How did they pick you?” “Don’t know. But they say I got a good case.” Beside us, a black woman shrieked as she hurled herself at her man, tucking her legs around him and kissing him hard. But my eyes were glued on Ringer. “How did you bear it?” “I knew I had to accept it. Or I’d go mad.” “You’re so close to getting out. The Innocence Project won’t shorten your sentence. All it can do is restore your reputation.” “S’alright.” he grinned. “Done near thirty year. I can wait. I was gonna work on my reputation when I was on the streets but now they gonna help me. When I found out, I walked around the yard smiling. Ever’body say, ‘What you smiling about?’ I say, ‘Never you mind.’” “So what happened?”

“I was in two line-ups. They ain’t supposed to do that.” I looked at him sharply. “The witness saw two line-ups with only you in both?” “Yeah. Lawyer says there’s lots of abnormalities. She got hold of the police report for the line-up. The witness say, ‘It’s either number four or five.’ Sheriff say, ‘You got to pick one.’ So, the witness, she say, ‘I’ll go with number four, then.’ Sheriff didn’t even ask if she was sure. And they’re supposed to. And I had an alibi.” “An alibi!” “Yeah. It was raining. My boss, he picked me up because my car was in the shop. He drove me to work. I punched in. I was there at ten when it all happened. The marshal who took me out the court in handcuffs, he say, ‘I don’t know how they pinned that on you.’” “My God!” “Yeah. My defense lawyer cried when they convicted me. She knew I didn’t do it. The prosecutor knew, too!” Over five years, Ringer had never shown anger, only weary disgust. He still didn’t but that day, he electrified the air around him. “Why was the prosecutor after you?” “Nah. I was nothing to her. She got enough convictions to make judge after my case. They don’t care about the truth. They just want the convictions.” “What was the crime?” “Two counts of armed robbery, assault with aggravation, assault with a weapon.” “Your life was ruined!” He raised his eyebrows. Even with all his good news, Ringer still thought to ask me, “How’s the job hunt?” “Frustrating. Applying online is like casting messages in a bottle to the ocean. You hope and hope but never know if anyone ever sees them.” He

understood. When Ringer cast his bottle to the ocean, against all odds, and after years, it washed ashore. And then another miracle: someone waded in to read his plea. Wulf, my second visitor, was a soldier who’d done tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He’d changed his beard to a goatee. “I want to grow it into a long braid.” He stroked the red tuft thoughtfully, fixing me with iceblue eyes inherited from the fjords of Norway. “I’ve taken up with two penpals, both women.” “Why would a woman write to a stranger in prison?” Lonely, dysfunctional types drawn to bad-news-guys. “What kind of woman does that?” “Beats me.” “Be careful!” I teased. “Those women have warped romantic intentions.” Then I caught myself. “Listen to me!” I spluttered into laughter until my eyes watered. “What the heck are my intentions coming here?” Wulf laughed, raising ginger eyebrows, his handsome face shining. “I’ve often wondered.” A baggy jumpsuit did not mask his strength, not just of muscle and sinew, but of attention. His smile faded. “I’m glad you do. I think about our conversations all the time. I go over and over them. It keeps me going for weeks. I remember them all.” I fell silent, touched. At the same time, sad; he saw no one else. “That makes me feel bad for all those times I forget what you’ve told me and make you repeat yourself. But by the time I leave here, after seeing four men, I barely know my own name.” He looked at me calmly, nodding silently, and I didn’t feel judged. “You’d be surprised at how often I think about you, too.” Blue eyes continued to regard me and I felt at peace with the length of our gaze. “What are your pen-pals like?”

“One’s a goth. She dresses in black. She asks questions about survival skills. I’m teaching her what I know. I think she wants to cross the Canadian border illegally.” “What for?” “You think she’d tell me?” He laughed. “I guess not. But aren’t you Mr. Direct and Honest? Didn’t you ask?” “None of my business.” A smile of pure joy creased his face. “It’s fun! I love telling her what she’ll need, how to train, what to do in different scenarios.” Glancing in each direction, he lowered his voice, “I’m getting a tattoo on my back.” “In here?” How’s that possible? “Yeah. I got good guy. I drew it up and he’s started work. I wish I could show you.” “What’s the design?” “An angel, wings spread, fighting against chains that are pulling him into the pit.” “Wow. Dramatic!” An angel? Pulled into the pit? Does he think he’s innocent? I never asked about the men’s crimes. Surely, Wulf’s not innocent, too. He nodded, searching my face. The metal door to the visiting room clanged open and my third visitor emerged. It was too soon. There was too much unsaid. “I’m so sorry, Wulf. The guards messed up. My next man’s here already.” His shaven head shone in the harsh light. “No problem. See you next time.” “Yeah.” I started to quiver, and then shook my head rapidly, poking out my tongue. “Bllarrgh! Needles! Fluids forced into your skin! I don’t know how you can do it!” Not the reaction he wanted, but he laughed and left me.

I wondered about an indelible symbol etched on skin. One that advertised an epic losing battle. Wulf saw himself as a warrior; he did not identify with losers. Earnest rambled into the visiting room wearing enormous, plastic spectacles, tilting his bald head backwards to peer at the scattered visitors, squinting and then flaring wide-eyed. “New glasses!” I stood up so he could see me; my arms open for an embrace. He bent low to give me a loose hug and a pat on my back. “Nah. They old.” “How come you’ve never worn glasses before?” “They ugly. Great big things.” Lowering his powerful body into the seat opposite, he thrust his feet forward, crossing them at the ankles. Unlike most men in prison, he didn’t lift weights. His strength had been inherited and he wore it unselfconsciously, not like a weapon, ready to strike. With the whites of his eyes showing all around the circles of dark iris, he glanced at the visitors: gaudy parrots in a cage of brown sparrows. “I’m embarrassed. I like to look good.” Earnest shrugged. “But I don’t, but I don’t, but I don’t see well without them.” Tenderness suffused me. He was prepared to face me feeling ugly. “How’ve you been?” “Talked to my Auntie on the phone.” Folding brawny arms across his deep chest, he looked like a football hero, except that he tremored and swayed back and forth like a child on a rocking horse. Then he grinned, with little-boy-eyes full of light. “I love my Auntie!” “I know. She raised you, right?” “Yeah. Like you husband, my Mama had a stroke. Never woke up. She came back from the hospital and they put her on a table in the living room.” “Oh, Earnest. How old were you?”

“Seven. My brothers were doing drugs. In trouble with the law. My grandmother couldn’t deal with me. Sent me to a home. I hated it! But Auntie got me out.” His spread knees and thighs shook, jiggling double time. “My Auntie good to me.” Then he crumpled into a ball, holding his head in both hands. “I wanna, I wanna, I wanna leave this place. My cell’s too small!” Such anguish tripped a cord in my stomach. “Not so long now. Four years is a long time but after all you’ve done, after sixteen…” “I wanna, I wanna, I wanna make good decisions.” As if to deny his hopes, he shook his massive head from side to side. “I can’t come back here.” “You tell me all the time that you’re going to make good decisions. I believe you.” “Who’s gonna hire me?” “A lot wouldn’t. But some people believe in second chances.” “I can’t read. I’m not smart. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t do nothin’. I’m a criminal. No one’s gonna hire me!” I wanted to put my arms around him but embraces are permitted only on arrival and departure. “You can’t read but you remember everything anyone tells you. All the time you’ve been here, you’ve worked in the kitchen. That’s a lot of job experience. You’re reliable. That’s what counts.” My eyes never strayed from his face, although most of the time, he didn’t look back at me. I wanted to bolster him but his chances were slim. “Can you live with your Auntie?” “My Auntie old! Don’t wanna put her out. She in her eighties.” He shook back and forth, striving for a comfort that wouldn’t come. “If I go back to the same streets… I gotta, I gotta, I gotta keep away from drugs and booze. I don’t wanna make the same mistakes.” “Sweat lodge, move,” announced the officer on the loudspeaker, calling Native Americans to worship. “North side.”

“You’re right. You don’t have an ideal support system. But there are some things you can rely on. Your Auntie would put you up, at least until you got on your feet.” “I always got a place to rest my head.” “And your brother, he has a trucking business, right? Your nieces, they like you.” “Let me give you a run down on my family. My brother, his wife hate me. Ever since I told him she was upstairs with another man.” “That was sixteen years ago! Surely she’s let it go.” “Yeah, I was young. He my brother. Of course I told him! But she won’t forget. My brother, he won’t be allowed to help me. My dad, he got problems with alcohol. Elijah, he makes crystal.” He saw my frown and mistook it for puzzlement. “Crystal meth,” he explained unnecessarily. He thought I had no knowledge of the world he was describing. In truth, he was right. I knew without understanding. He continued, “Tanisha, she on welfare with five kids. Perry, a drug addict. There ain’t no one can give me support.” “Ask, anyway. Maybe your brother would give you a job. Forget pride.” He nodded, thoughtfully, I hoped. “You’re a survivor. You survived this place and now you’re getting out.” His huge hand pulled a tissue from his pocket to pat his nose. Dab, dab, dab, as daintily as a mother wipes her baby’s face. “Almost didn’t survive. I messed, I messed, I messed up big time. I overdosed. Tried to kill myself.” “Oh, no.” “I cut myself for a long time. Guards said I did it to seek ‘tention. I wanted to say to them, I don’t want no ‘tention, I’m cutting myself so I don’t hurt you!” Marks of pain, incised on skin so he’d never forget. Where did he hide them? “I’m so sorry. It must have been hard. I’m glad you stopped that.”

His worried face melted into a grin. “You so sweet! I ‘sider you a friend.” I leaned across the four-foot gap between our seats to grasp his knee. “Me, too.” Otherwise, I’d never have let him call me sweet. In my mind it’s a put-down. But if Earnest wanted to move from a position where he felt my concern to a place where he looked down at my harmless sweetness, it was alright with me. On later visits, his vanity won out over ugly glasses. I understood; I have my own vanities. But Earnest would be poor; his glasses always large and plastic. It seemed like a bad omen. “I was one of America’s most wanted criminals!” Dodge declared. Although his brown eyes were flat and his face composed, his declaration energized him. Is he proud of that? The statement didn’t shock me. He’d mentioned so many crimes that I hardly believed he could have fit them into his brief years as a free man. But he’d started his criminal career when he was very young. “I was twelve when I first went to prison and I was raped until I got out at nineteen. I was put in for trying to kill my step-granddad, Vernon. He’d been raping me, but then he started on my sister. I got some gasoline, put it in an open container under my bed and waited until he lit his cigar. I hate the smell of cigars.” I wasn’t sure which part of his story horrified me the most. “You were twelve?” Not seeming to register my reaction, he recounted the facts of his life without a hint of self-pity or even recognition that they were unusual. In partnership with his brother, he’d stolen a FedEx van and sold its contents. Another time he sent a threatening letter to the President. He had manufactured meth, sold his body for sex, robbed this and that, and there were other, darker hints that unsettled me.

“My dad made me and my sister lift bricks in the air. We were small. We could barely get our hands around them. Our arms would shake as we held them up but he didn’t even look at us, sucking on his cigarette. We knew that when we dropped them he’d beat us.” My stomach clenched but Dodge’s face remained blank. Despite salt and pepper facial hair, his heart-shaped face was boyish. It didn’t take much to picture him as a small child. “Oh, Dodge.” “He pimped us.” Solemn, I held his eyes with my own, saying without words that I was willing to hear his story. After a long silence, I said very softly, “No wonder you’re in here.” “My grandfather was really bad. They all beat us but he was the worst.” He shrugged bony shoulders. “They were drug addicts. We lived in a run-down house in rural Pennsylvania with a missing wall. Dad hung a blanket over the hole but it didn’t keep out the snow.” In a casual tone, he added, “I’m a sociopath, you know.” “But what does that mean?” I knew the text-book definition but wanted his take on himself. “That I don’t feel emotions.” How could he? He’s never been loved. I imagined Dodge as a small child, learning to disassociate as the only way to bear abuse. I tried to connect with his suffering by exaggerating the sting of slaps I’d received and remembering the shame of my own scoldings. The comparison was hollow. “Is it really true that you’re a sociopath? You told me you love your pen-pal, Rosa. You loved your wife, and the old woman you lived with. You say that you look forward to me coming to see you. Those are all feelings.” His slender fingers lay relaxed on his khakis. He always seemed at ease. He didn’t fidget, or tap, or finger, and his face was impassive. His lively nature was expressed solely through the music of his speech and his

tremendous curiosity. Never at a loss for words, his voice was energetic in describing both passions and peeves. “I had a cell-mate once. A good guy. I got on well with him. One night, I leaned over the edge of my bunk to see him on the bottom with his blood pouring out.” Dodge’s hands moved up the pale insides of his forearms, demonstrating as he spoke. “He’d slit the veins up and down his arms and across his throat.” A red-hot wire seemed to short out in my stomach and I couldn’t understand why Dodge’s face remained impassive, his voice perky. “I don’t like mess,” he grimaced. “I’m very clean. But I wanted my cellie’s radio. I wanted to listen in bed. So I climbed down and picked my way to his locker. There was blood all over the floor. It was sticky but I made sure I didn’t get my feet wet. A while later, I thought about his food. I climbed down past his bed again and got his pack of tuna. I ate it while he bled to death. The next morning, I got in trouble because I never called for help.” I sat stunned. Why did he tell me that? My mind reeled and my skin prickled. Within a split second, I was beset with what seemed like hundreds of possibilities. He’s testing me. Maybe he needs to know how I’d react before he risks telling me something worse. Dread filled my stomach. If he’d done worse, I didn’t want to know. But I signed up to support him. Unburdening our sins is helpful. Is it part of my role? A conflicting thought further confused me. He’s trying to show me who he is. I asked what it meant to be a sociopath. He gave me an example. I asked for this. Deal with it and move on. He has no idea I’m upset. Then I swallowed, imagining the worst possibility of all. Is he trying to hurt me? I knew him under very constrained circumstances. Like peering at someone through a knot-hole in a wooden fence. Does he enjoy cruelty? The horror I felt seemed a long way away from the bland expression on his face. The visit ended soon after. For weeks, the image of his cellmate haunted me. I tried to forget but it sprang into my head as soon as the sun

slithered past the gap in my curtains and I realized I was awake. It wouldn’t leave me alone. Our relationship had reached a milestone, but I didn’t understand what it meant, nor did I know how to navigate forward. I wanted to erect boundaries. I will never let him tell me such things again. But it’s good for him to tell his unabridged story. But I’m not a therapist. My kindest thought was that perhaps Dodge respected his cell-mate’s decision to end his life. I dreaded seeing him again. Strangely, the thought of ending our visits never entered my head. On my way out that day, a slim, gray-haired visitor sidled to my side. There were soft wrinkles on her powdered face. She said, “My husband and I came from Kansas to visit our son. We saw you visiting different prisoners and my son said you’re a volunteer. You give them a blessing.” Embarrassed, I said, “Thank you. That’s kind of you to say so.” Living in Kansas, she couldn’t see her son often and I thought she was thanking me on behalf of mothers who longed to think that their sons were supported. In a too loud voice, she added, “I’m so happy that you’re doing the Lord’s work.” I stiffened. Later, I was mad at myself for allowing her to hijack my purpose. Seventy percent of visitors to federal prison go to preach, but I am an atheist with no dogma to proselytize. I wished I had told her that in my mind, one ordinary person reaching out to understand another is holy. In my own times of darkness, when shoulders appeared to stand beside me, it felt like a miracle. Gillian Haines

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Galia Rogner

Old Silver Beach, 1977 Clicking edgewise, picking through shocks of cordgrass, the fiddler crabs watched all afternoon while I chased the flash of fin, lifted sucking rocks and knocked on burrow doors throughout the saltmarsh, the tide receding. With only two half-dead snails and a scolding bloodworm coiled in anger at the bucket’s bottom to show, a teenager waded in, leaving me fighting sandfleas on the shore. Standing silent, angled, turning left and right, he stirred the water, studying its surface like a book, slowly scooping now and then. In ten minute’s time he climbed the bank to tilt his paper cup toward me and show just what restraint had gained: the nubbled ruby of a starfish, and a glass eel sewing back and forth above a tiny flounder rippling like a brackish butterfly in the hollow of that diorama’s curl. But the sun began to slump against the beach across the road, so the menagerie was poured back to the brine with care -- a string of mermaid charms mixed with an ocean-full of patience it took me years to recollect. Kevin Casey Kevin Casey's recent publications have appeared in Grasslimb, Frostwriting, Words Dance, Canary, and decomP. A graduate of UMass, Amherst and the University of Connecticut, his new chapbook, The wind considers everything--, was recently published by Flutter Press. He currently teaches literature at a small university in Maine, where he enjoys fishing, snowshoeing and hiking.

Cora and Martha On one side of the seven hundred block of Sevier Street there is a row of identical houses that has been there for about eighty years. Fifty years ago, the last two houses at the north end had been occupied by the same tenants since the Great Depression: The Johnsons--Cora, “Mister Tom” (as Cora always called him), and their son Jesse; and next door, Martha Brown. Cora and Martha were neighbors and the best of friends for more years than any of their friends remembered. They were in their sixties, fullfledged members of a certain class of old ladies that seemed endemic to black neighborhoods throughout America. The most prominent class of old ladies was the church ladies. Refined and elegant, they were paragons of virtue who carried with them everywhere an eager evangelical testimony punctuated with frequent proof passages and the occasional “praise God.” Virtually all the black churches were the exclusive demesne of these ladies— they were the first to fall in on Sunday morning and the first to fall out. Besides their ostentatious reverence for all things good and above reproach, they were inveterate and incomparable gossips with the consequence that they knew twice as much as anyone else about the community’s moral lapses and peccadilloes, but half of what they knew was fabrication or exaggeration. Cora and Martha were not churchgoers or Bible-thumpers. Their homes were filled with as much courtesy and common decency as were the homes of church ladies, and surely they were gossips as much as were the church ladies, but Cora and Martha maintained households that church ladies, in general, would have considered scurrilous. Cora and Martha liked a ribald joke, they both loved laughing. Martha, a large brown-skinned woman, would laugh her baritone “He, he, he, he, he! Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey! He, he, he, he, he, he, he, he!” Cora, thin and dark-skinned, would answer with high-pitched squeals and hooting and hollering and slapping her lap and dancing around. Each lady would sit on her own porch, and they would carry

on with one another as though the porches were conjoined. Unlike the church ladies, Cora and Martha gladly profiteered in illegal business: they played the numbers, and the seven hundred block of Sevier Street was the only block in their Alcohol Beverage Control town where two rival neighborhood bootleggers peacefully lived and practiced business next door to each other. Moreover, Cora Johnson and Martha Brown were devoted radio ladies. Shamelessly lusty and risqué, they reveled in the deliciously naughty sexual intrigues and the exciting danger in the criminal adventures of the characters in what Cora always reverently referred to as “my stories”—the daytime radio soap operas of a Golden Age now passed. Though their tastes in radio shows often diverged, the two ladies shared an incurable addiction to Doctor Christian and Ma Perkins. When these shows were on, Cora and Martha would snuggle up to their radios in their living rooms, often with a faithful companion—Cora with her old friend Mrs. Meader and Martha with her similarly addicted grown son, a self-employed builder of cheap houses for uneducated working folks; they would hang on every spoken word. Afterwards, the two business ladies would repair to their porches to greet customers just getting off from work and to conspire in producing the definitive review of the day’s episodes of their stories. In the world of urban bootleggers there was fierce competition, especially on the weekends, and the more successful entrepreneurs usually appealed to a niche market with their own individual styles and marketing ploys—the price of a glass of whiskey being pretty much uniform throughout the city. The Johnsons provided a comfortable house always full of good humor, but their weekend specialty was the lively game of cards in their dining room. Often there were considerable pots in the blackjack and poker games, but the real crowd pleasers were the raucous, always dramatic games of whist in which certain witty neighborhood characters tried to best one another in displaying their thespian talents and card-playing superiority. Martha Brown’s place was more sedate, it was a place a man might take a

woman for a drink. Twice a month Martha offered her customers a fifty-cent plate--sometimes fried chicken with potato salad, or, less frequently, chit’lins and potato salad. On those days it was the best deal in town, the food and the price were that good! But Martha’s place had an appeal that no other bootlegger’s place had: a singular novelty. Martha had a talking bird. A raven! The homes of esteemed bootleggers ranked among the pre-eminent institutions in the social life of black society in those days, even above the ubiquitous fraternities and sororities, and some would say even above that more celebrated institution, the local barbershops. If one were looking to play numbers or to obtain a nickel bag or to make some serious money playing cards; or if one simply wanted to get the skinny on the latest skirmishes with police authorities, then one would likely head for the bootlegger’s establishment rather than the barbershop. The main drawback of the bootlegger’s place as a hangout was that it was subject to periodic crackdowns by the police, especially in election years. Necessarily bootleggers remained vigilant in maintaining tight security. They never, for instance, sold whiskey to someone they didn’t know; as a matter of practice their clientele rarely changed, all of their customers were regulars. In the case of Cora and Martha, they had customers common to both as well as customers exclusive to each. Up until one fateful Friday about fifty years ago no one from either household had ever gone to jail, though each house had been raided on more than one occasion. On a Friday the thirteenth, in the late afternoon, Cora and Martha had completed their porch rumination over the stories and were sort of laying back, gathering their strength so to speak for the busy Homecoming Weekend they anticipated. Martha would get up shortly to begin frying chicken for her plate sale, a sale that usually generated heavier than usual customer traffic for her and Cora as well. Cora would go in at the same time because it would be time to start the fire for Mister Tom’s dinner; he invariably arrived home at five-thirty from his job driving a road-scraper for the Thompson-Arthur

paving company, which held the contract with the city for tarring and scraping dirt roads. The ladies noticed Yellow coming down the dirt path that ran in front of the porches of the houses along the row. He lived two doors south of Martha, next door to Mis’ Irene’s house. “Yellow coming dis way, Cora!” “Well, I sho’ am glad to see him a-coming, Martha.” Tall and lanky, Yellow was nonetheless a handsome man. His eyes were clear, his hands were those of a mason, and his skin tone was no doubt the source of his unusual sobriquet. He was a polite, soft-spoken man, who went to work everyday and generally went out of his way to be nice to people. People who knew him liked him, and he was a favorite of the neighborhood children. He stopped at Martha’s and rested one foot on the steps to her porch. “Good evening, Mis’ Martha.” Then raising his voice slightly, loud enough for Cora to hear, he tipped his hat at Cora and said, “Mis’ Cora! I was on my way to Mr. TD’s, thought I’d see if you ladies would want anything?” Cora responded, “Oh, Mister Yellow, that is so thoughtful, I was ahoping somebody would come by, I am plumb out of Stanbacks. And you know I just can’t get through the night without ‘em. Bless your heart, you are going to save my life. You hold still there whilst I go in and fetch some money.” “No ma’am. You sit still, I’ll just pick them up and you can pay me later.” “Yellow, I’m goin’ t’ make you my boyfriend.” “Nothing to it, Mis’ Cora. Besides, I ‘spect Mister Tom might have something to say about that.” The three neighbors enjoyed a private laugh. “And what about you, Mis’ Martha? Anything?” “I’d rather not buy ‘em from Mr. Cheat’em-all, but since I know I ain’t going to get up to Gorrell Street to Dr. Ecchels’ Drug Store no time soon, I suppose you better bring me back some powders too. But you know I’m partial to Goody’s.”

“Good as done, ladies. I’ll be back directly.” And off he went. From their porches Cora and Martha could see Yellow, about half way to the corner, pass a tall shapely-looking lady. “Can you make out who that gal is, Cora?” “Why sho’, that’s Mis’ Plink, married Reverend Lawrence around there on Bragg Street, moved in next door to Missus Turner last week. She comes home from work ‘bout this time every day. Gets off the bus up here at Gorrell and Bennett. You know, she’s sister to them Foy girls; you know Grace, the girl that does my hair? She’s a Foy. Here she comes now, Gertrude’s her real name, they call her Plink—well, she and Grace are sisters, old Reverend Foy’s daughters.” “Well, sho’, I know them people. Course, lately, your Jesse, he’s been seeing right much of your beautician, I’d say?” “Right much. They are some pretty brown-skinned girls in that family.” Cora didn’t expect more than a polite greeting from Mis’ Plink as she passed on the street in front of her house, but to her surprise Mis’ Plink turned onto the path leading to her porch. Mis’ Plink gave a pleasant “Good afternoon!” to Cora and a respectful nod to Martha, whom she had never met. “And a very good afternoon to you, Mis’ Plink, and do you know my neighbor, Mis’ Martha Brown? Martha, this is Plink, Reverend Lawrence’s wife.” After an exchange of pleasantries, which naturally included the ladies’ asking after each other’s family, Mis’ Plink declined Cora’s invitation to sit for a spell, but she did broach the subject that motivated her, uncharacteristically, to interrupt her walk home: “Mis’ Johnson, I don’t like to bring this up, I really don’t. But every time I come past this way, going and coming, somebody with a real fresh mouth whistles at me, over and over, you know how they whistle, a-calling after me and making personal comments. I don’t like saying nothing, but I’ve never seen this person, like he’s hiding and a-stalking me. He’s just so fresh! It would make anybody mad.”

Cora had immediate suspicions. “You say you’ve never seen him? Whistles at you real fresh like?” “Yes, ma’am. I sure wish he would stop, I don’t want to have to tell my husband, he’s not the kind of man who would see any humor in it.” Cora called out to Martha: “Martha, Mis’ Plink tells me somebody’s been a-whistling and a-flirtin’ with her real fresh like; says this fresh mouth person has been stalking her from our porches. Can you believe it, Martha? She says she might have to tell her husband if it don’t stop. Oh, Martha! Martha! I don’t think I can stand it!” At that the two old friends let loose howls of laughter: Martha cranked into high gear with ejaculatory whooo-eee’s introductory to rolling cascades of he, ee, ee, ee, ee, he, ee, ee, ee! And Cora held on to her rocker, stomped her feet rapidly in place, and commenced to squealing and squawking as though trying to wake the dead. It had been many a day since the two women had enjoyed such a rollicking laugh. Struggling to control herself Cora called out: “You have to go in and bring that fresh-mouthed flirt out here, Martha. You go get him, Martha.” Straightaway, Martha rocked herself to her feet and went inside her house. Mis’ Plink was completely flummoxed by the behavior of the old ladies. Still struggling to curtail her laughing, Cora spoke to Mis’ Plink: “Mis’ Plink, you just set still, and me and Martha, we’re going to straighten this thing out right here and now.” Martha soon returned carrying a fancy birdcage, inside of which was the shiniest, blackest, prettiest raven Mis’ Plink had ever seen. Martha held the cage up high, and as though on cue the bird looked straight at Mis’ Plink and whistled a loud, flirtatious, and incriminating whistle, followed by a startlingly clear “Pretty girl! Pretty girl!” At this Mis’ Plink stood aghast and, apparently, speechless; whereupon, the bird repeated the whole exchange twice more. At that even Mis’ Plink recognized the ridiculousness of her situation, and she was forced to join the laughing ladies in a memorable moment of lighthearted gaiety. During the merriment on the porches Jesse drove into the Johnson driveway. He was driving for the Harlem Cab Company and was stopping by

home, as usual, before going back to the cabstand to end his shift. Mis’ Plink took his arrival as a good opportunity to resume her journey home; she said goodbye to Cora and Martha, and said to Jesse as they passed one another: “How you doing, Jesse? Gotta run, but I am sure I’ll see you later.” As soon as Jesse was on his porch in clear sight of the raven, the bird volunteered for all clearly to hear: “Give the man a drink, Martha! Give the man a drink!” Jesse ignored the bird. “So are you going to stay for dinner, son?” Cora asked of Jesse as he opened the screen door to go inside. Jesse stopped to answer: “Me and Grace are going out tonight. I need to get a change of clothes and get over to Kelley Martin’s barbershop, he says he’ll take me right away if I can get there by six.” He started to leave but was stayed by his mother’s voice hearkening after him. “Well, it’s okay with me, I mean Grace is a fine girl, but . . . here comes Mister Tom.” Jesse stepped back onto the porch and closed the screen door. As soon as Mister Tom reached the top step, the bird caught sight of him and blurted out: “Give the man a drink, Martha! Give the man a drink!” He gratuitously added: “Out the back door! Out the back door!” Mister Tom, too, ignored the bird, though he did greet Martha Brown by simply nodding and calling out her name. Still in high spirits Cora was not above a little meddling: “Jesse says he is going out with Grace Foy tonight, Mister Tom, won’t be here for dinner. You want anything special? Of course, I always liked that sweet gal Susie McFarland, I don’t know why Jesse won’t stick to a nice gal like that. Sweet gal. What do you think, Mister Tom?” Jesse was impatient with his mother on this subject, and he did not hesitate to make a stern retort: “I’ll let you know who I am in love with, mama!” Mister Tom was a man of a few well-chosen words: “Cora, you done run off the boy’s first wife, leave him be.” Cora protested: “Mister Tom, I never!” He responded: “Well, I’m going out back to check on the chickens

and clean those porgies we caught yesterdiddy. You wanna fry us up some cornbread to go with the porgies?” “Yes, Mister Tom, I sho’ will.” “Night’s going to be tolerable fair,” Mister Tom said to all then went inside. Jesse was about to follow his father inside when Cora called out to him: “Oh, look there, son. Here comes ole Dad, and he is as drunk as a skunk.” Sure enough, there he was, wearing the same tattered blue overalls he always wore, barely making it along. Martha could see the hoary old man better because he was coming down the path after having been ejected from Mis’ Irene’s porch where he sometimes was allowed to nap. Leaning towards the Johnson’s porch and cupping her hand to her mouth, Martha confided to Cora and Jesse: “He’s falling down drunk. I am going to take my bird inside.” Dad was older than Cora, Martha, or Mister Tom. He had been known as Dad forever, no one knew any other name to call him. He was less productive than the lovable town drunk of a western romance, he was totally useless, he had no redeeming wit or talent; he was just a dirty, stinking, pitiful drunk. In speech and manners Jesse Johnson was a gentlemen. He could shoot, fish, drive anything with a motor, and fly a plane. He carried himself with great dignity: he was gracious in demeanor, never boisterous, never slouching; he could give “Dapper Dan” a run for his money. Numerous pretty ladies had pursued him throughout his adult life; they said he knew how to make a lady feel like she was It! He was like his father in that he valued honor and duty. Mister Tom was a farmer who had fought with distinction in “The Great War,” and every day of his life he worked from sunup until after sundown—at work and at home. And no man would ever accuse father or son of mistreating him. The liquored-up and stumbling-down Dad, that unkempt ne’er-do-well incapable of upholding his own, let alone the public good, was contrary to everything Jesse associated with being a man. He became enraged at the sight of Dad stumbling over to the porch to ask Cora for a drink. In a tone as strong as anyone ever heard Jesse use, he looked down at the helpless old man and said: “Dad! I swear, if I was a few years older I’d come down there and whip your ass! You get away from here and go home;

you’ve had more than enough to drink for the rest of your pitiful life. Get along, now! I swear, if you are still here when I come back out, I might just whip your ass anyway. Now git!” The angry young man stormed away, and ole Dad, shushed, sheepishly stumbled off towards Lee Street. With the neighborhood nuisance then gone Martha Brown returned to her porch to work out a proper adjournment with Cora before returning to her kitchen to finish frying her chicken for the weekend. They were there together but for a minute when Cora and Martha were interrupted by the return of Yellow who alarmed them by approaching in a hurry from the back yard of the house at 715 directly across the street. “Well, bless you, chile, what is the trouble?” demanded Cora when Yellow reached her steps. Martha moved to the edge of the porch the better to convene the committee of three. He reported that the A.B.C. was raiding the neighborhoods. Knowing that the ladies had urgent business to attend to, Yellow quickly gave the ladies their headache powders and went on his way. Martha then cried out to Cora, “Lord, chile, I’m here by myself and I done left all my bottles on the kitchen table to be put away!” “Now hold on, Martha,” answered Cora, “we done been raided before. Look, let me go get Jesse and Mister Tom. You open your back door, and I’ll have Mister Tom put your stuff in the chicken coop with ours. Shut your front door Martha, no point in letting them see nothing for free.” “You got that right!” said Martha, and the two old friends dashed inside to take care of things. Seconds later three police cars screeched to a halt in front of the two little houses. In one car there were two white officers from the State’s Alcohol Beverage Control department; they never got out of their cars. In the other cars were officers Montague, Hickman, Massey, and Wiggins—black officers well known in the neighborhoods. They went first to Martha’s house. Montague and Hickman went to the door, while the other two officers waited at the foot of the stairs. Montague knocked. When Martha opened the door, a voice clear as a bell could be heard even from the bottom of the stairs; it said: “Out the back door! Out the back door!” “Check around back,”

Montague ordered Wiggins and Massey. The voice continued, “Give the men a drink, Martha! Give the men a drink!” And again, “Give the men a drink, Martha! Give the men a drink!” No one ever saw the bird again after that day. Martha said merely that she had given it away. Martha loved that bird, but the only person who went to jail that Friday night was Mister Tom. He was caught red-handed in his back yard with Martha’s whiskey in his possession. Mister Tom had gone to jail for Martha, and Martha just couldn’t have that: Cora Johnson was like a sister to her. Though Mister Tom served his time and came back no worse for wear, somehow life on Sevier Street was never exactly the same. It wasn’t only the general increase of caution thereafter, it was also the sobering sense of there being a shadow, as in an omen perhaps, casting a pall over the times. Cora and Martha, Mister Tom and Jesse, are long dead. Surely, like all things, that row of houses will one day pass from the scene, and be replaced by who knows what? But for the time being, there remain a couple of grandchildren, who tear up and drop their heads when they pass by the last two row houses at the north end of the seven hundred block of Sevier. Thomas Penn Johnson Thomas Penn Johnson was born on August 22nd, 1943, in Greensboro, North Carolina. He received a B.A. in Literature & Classics in 1966 from Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne; thereafter he undertook graduate studies in English & history at UNC-G, Syracuse University, & Wake Forest University. In 2009 he retired from then-Edison State College after serving for 26 years as an Instructor of English & Humanities.

At Moon Lake after Mei Yao Chen

I jog a mile and a half. I once did three. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s no point thinking about what is past. Young girls dash by me, as if I were a tree. Half way home, I stop to regain my wind. Once, I looked ahead. My day had just begun. At home, I watch the setting sun. Soon it will snow. The flowers have lost their bloom. Leaves are beginning to fall. But I shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be sad. I should feel lucky to be here at all. George Freek George Freek is an Illinois poet and playwright. His poetry has recently appeared in The Missing Slate, The Chiron Review, The Rockhurst Review, Mud Season, Dewpoint Journal, The New Plains Review, The Stillwater Review, Samizdat Literary Journal, and Blue Door Quarterly.

Lying about My Age I love the way we are getting old how we smile into each otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eyes how our skin comes loose, falls into crepe de Chine folds, how our eyes sink into their bony rims like soft-cooked eggs in fine old china bowls. Young and perfect beauty (which we remember) is a state of grace, undeserved and unearned. We have paid for our old beauty, tendered sins, repentance, wit, desire, and despair. I love the way we are getting old, more or less unconcerned. Lynne Moody Lynne Moody has worked as fashion model, waitress, physician, mother, exhibiting visual artist, and writer. Born in Florida, she lives in Atlanta with her husband.

Skin Once it was bound to muscle and bone as neatly as a living birdâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, the flesh held tight over the long bones and ribs. Tonight I feel my skin as you might: it drapes over underpinnings like the rolled icings on Covered Market cakes, the edges swooning as they meet my bed sheet. I pull up my nightgown, pull down my underpants to feel the long contour running from down-cupping breast, skimming the thorax, down my side, always down along my waist, hip, upper thigh into the puddling bulge like soft candle wax poured along the edges of memory. Gravity claims me, defines the terms of our joining, refashions my beauty. The many years demand of you a loving hand, a tenderer heart and you, eyes full, touch me, seem not to mind. Lynne Moody

Some Day Someday, within imagined years I will be wordless. Names will be slow to come or irretrievable for minutes, hours. Words I know--cornrow, easel, boxcar, stethoscope, roulette: unsummonable. All the lifelong, easy finding and forming will become rough-metered, the pauses too long and uneasy. Already there are fumbles and reversals. I repeat myself. I sometimes halt, searching. I dither, use approximations, synonyms. At some terrible future time, I will manage only babble, speech herky-jerky, a dysfunctional robot, and eventually,

I will be mostly

silent. Eyes wide, I will search the vacancy, utter only uh-uh-uh, like when mama said: Use your words. Lynne Moody

Sunrise Village The peacocks wander as the palms bend in the wind. Old people, curved like question marks before the coming dark, sit wondering: is there a Heaven? Will there be a bright eternal Tenancy? Some elders live for decades, others merely weeks here in these rented cottages, in rooms where their bent fingers leave no lasting mark. They wait and watch bright peacocks as the palms bend in the wind. Elegant birds, the royal palms. The elders feed and tend the peacocks. In winter months, they pick up molted feathers, those stark reminders of biology as destiny: there is no bright eternal tenancy. In groups, some of the old folks tease and talk, others merely try to end their sentences. The speechless ones curl up alone in chairs that overlook the garden. The peacocks wander, palm trees bend. Other questions linger in the air above the benches. The outdoor lights come on. Again the neighborâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s aging Yorkie starts to bark. Where will he go if she dies first? A home for not-so-bright and noisy doggie tenants? Beneath a crescent moon and lightening stars, peacocks roost as inmates of the elder ark subside into their pillowed beds. The palms give up their rustle to the dark, then everyone slides into sleep: crowned birds, the silent palms, curved residents. Restless or serene, all tenants drowse beneath the bright, not quite eternal firmament. Lynne Moody

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Galia Rogner

I Regret I’m not An empty bourbon bottle At a yard sale, Tarnished By time’s grimy touch, Telling myself My final peaty dregs Made her sister healthy. I regret I’m not The cold bangles Of the moon on blizzard nights, Diesel engines droning as The plows clear out the streets. And then there’s this grudge I bear That I’m not a snowball Hurled between two brothers, Always becoming itself. I regret I’m not The rainy wind blowing Across the dock for days, Breaking it apart little By little. I regret I’m not The ocean’s constant Folding and unfolding. I regret I’m not A lobster, there, Among the strange forests Of the sea, Glittering shells bony With light. I regret I’m not A coarse-haired brush

That scrubs Uncovered treasures, Gathering the golden strands Of daylight, gathering All thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s left. Domenic Scopa Domenic Scopa is the recipient of the 2014 Robert K. Johnson Poetry Prize and Garvin Tate Merit Scholarship. He is currently an MFA candidate at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where he studies poetry and translation.

Pocket Watch How pleasing it feels in his small hand like an egg, its magical white face painted with black numbers looking out through the glass cover as he sits alone at the kitchen table. Grandpa's old pocket watch-no longer keeping correct time because the balance wheel is broken. The murmur and drone of the grown-ups' voices drifts in from the near-by living room and mingles with the whir and chatter of the crickets and katydids in the summer evening outside the open kitchen window. He places the watch face-down on the metal kitchen table and carefully removes the backing to reveal a turning and fluttering of tiny wheels and interlocking gears. He removes them and then, one by one, with each slender spindle held between thumb and index finger, gives a quick twist and sets them twirling across the surface of the table spinning and whirling whirling and spinning sometimes bouncing off one another like miniature gladiators in a make-believe arena but more often weaving back and forth gracefully and swaying round one another like dancers he's seen on TV. Again and again he sets them spinning and watches how in time their dancing slows to a saraband wobbling, teetering and finally toppling over clattering down to be stilled in awkward leanings-ballerinas at the end of time. The moon grows fuller and his eyelids start to droop toward sleep. He gathers up the wheels and gears and tries to fit them into their proper place

in the belly of the watch. But he fails. His hands flutter in frustration. He can't put it back together again. He just wants the watch to work again to hear the occasional ticking to see the hand slowly sweep across the dial. But how can an 8-year-old heart know about entropy and time's arrow. Richard Horvath Richard Horvath and his wife moved to Asheville, NC in 2009 from Connecticut. A life-long reader of poetry, he began writing following retirement and relocation to Asheville.

Heavenly Peace A gloss on the following lines: O soft embalmer of the still midnight, Shutting, with careful fingers and benign, Our gloom-pleas'd eyes, embower'd from the light, Enshaded in forgetfulness divine. . . —“To Sleep,” John Keats

O soft embalmer of the still midnight How peacefully we lie beneath your white And gentle hands. You work your magic now, We know, with soothing whispers and endow With strength to take the approaching day’s delight O soft embalmer of the still midnight. Shutting, with careful fingers and benign The eyes too full of beauty to decline Your old companion, the maker of pleasant dreams Who shows each thing much better than it seems By glaring day. Soft hands, almost divine Shutting, with careful fingers and benign, Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower’d from the light. Within a luscious garden of delight We find ourselves enfolded in a pure Fragrance of musky rose, a nightly cure For heartaches we endure to stand upright. Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower’d from the light, Enshaded in forgetfulness divine, Float inward. There our spirits find A citadel secure from every foe And we are made a part of the heavenly flow That gently runs inside the heart sublime Enshaded in forgetfulness divine. Emory D. Jones Dr. Emory D. Jones taught English at Northeast Mississippi Community College for thirty-five years. He has served as President of the Mississippi Poetry Society, who awarded him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015. He has over two hundred and thirty-five publishing credits.

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Galia Rogner

ART/PHOTOGRAPHY

Sue Dolamore Jim Neuner Star Rush FICTION

Susan Coyle Jim Hilderbrandt Gail Hipkins Pat Moeller Jasmine Skye

NON-FICTION

Larry Hamilton Marjorie Klein Pete Solet Steve Wechselblatt

POETRY

Perien Gray John Himmelheber Jasmine Skye Pete Solet

PUBLICITY

Jim Neuner Steve Wechselblatt

EDITOR

John Himmelheber