The Cabin's Writers in the Attic Anthology: Song by The Cabin, a center for readers & writers

SONG writers in the attic

SONG the attic

writers in

works selected by

SAMANTHA SILVA

General operations of The Cabin are generously supported by: The City of Boise Idaho Commission on the Arts National Endowment for the Arts Amberjack Publishing and the Idaho Community Foundation

Writers in the Attic: Song is sponsored by Capitol Bar.

This is a Log Cabin Book, an imprint of THE CABIN 801 South Capitol Boulevard, Boise, Idaho 83702 (208) 331-8000 www.thecabinidaho.org (c) 2018 The Cabin All rights reserved. Book layout by Hillary Bilinski. Printed and bound in the USA in an edition of 250 copies.

CONTENTS Introduction • 11

REMIX KAIDI STROUD

song of modern mom • 19 ANTHONY MCARTHUR ///

Ghost Notes • 21 CATHERINE KYLE ///

Sirens’ Defense • 25 Prom • 26 KENT MOMMSEN

Mississippi Goddam • 28 MARGUERITE LAWRENCE //

Hey Good Lookin’ • 30 ANITA TANNER /////

Barn Swallow • 34

REVERB ROBERT LEE THORNTON

The Greyhound Home • 39 JOEL WAYNE

SPIES • 40 AMANDA RANTH

songs and sometimes everything • 43

MARY SARAS //

I’m Your Boogie Man • 45 ROSS HARGREAVES //

Degloving • 49 LAUREEN LEIKO SCHEID

Sleep Eludes Me • 51 DYNISHA SMITH

My Only Sunshine • 52 DAPHNE ELIZABETH STANFORD ///

Siren Song • 55 REX ADAMS

13 & 1/2 Hours • 56 MARA NIEMAN-HARGRODER

The Sound of Surviving • 60

BEAT KIM MONNIER //

Soundings • 65 JANET SCHLICHT /////

Chickadee • 66 MAGGIE KOGER /////

Song of the Northern Honeysuckle • 70 CHERYL WEBER RICHARDSON //

Sea Shanty • 71

MARK D MCALLISTER ///

What You Can Get for a Song • 72 AMANDA RANTH

say what you will • 76

B-SIDES LIZA LONG

Lost in Transition • 81 JOEL WAYNE

Songbirds of the Olympic Peninsula • 83 CAITLIN PALMER

Lapse Becomes the Whole Sound • 87 MATTHEW JAMES BABCOCK /////

American Anthem • 89 JULIA MCCOY

CLVII • 90 REX ADAMS

Without a Song • 94 REBECCA LOUISE WEEKS

poets trust • 98 ERIC E WALLACE ///// /

Surface Tension • 99

THE BLUES MATTHEW JAMES BABCOCK /////

Hymn for the Control Freak • 107 HEATHER HAMILTON-POST ///

When to Retire a Rope • 109 JULIE MARIE FOGERSON //

Then and Now • 110 ALAN MINSKOFF ///

Homage • 112 CHRISTIAN WINN ///

Out Here • 113 REX ADAMS

Killer Pen • 114 MARRI CHAMPIÉ

One Coyote Winter • 118 CMARIE FUHRMAN

Grandmother Song • 119

EARBUDS CHRISTIAN WINN ///

Hundred-Year Summer • 123 M R SMITH ////

Canyon Wren • 124

BONNIE VESTAL

Songlines • 125 THOMAS SEABOURN

Strings • 131 MARRI CHAMPIÉ

When Song Comes Unwound • 132 GRANT MAIERHOFER

Seven Drain Songs • 133 MATTHEW MARTENS

The Melody of Mono • 141 JAMES ARMSTRONG ////

Where Poems Come From • 145 JUDITH MCCONNELL STEELE

The Singing Bed • 147

ABOUT

Writers in the Attic • 151 Meet the Writers • 152

/ = number of years published in Writers in the Attic anthologies

INTRODUCTION Algorithms nearly ruined me for music. I was that person. Thousands of songs stashed in my library, but still poring over new music whenever I could—the thrill and urgency of searching for the next thing, however obscure, some mixed-combo of melody and lyrics that would sink into my bones and light them on ire. But what are a song and a ire without people to share them? So, I’d cull my best inds to spread the love on a burned CD, songs handpicked like a nosegay for whichever friend, lover, season or moment needed marking: the holidays, parties, road trips, grand tours, births, break-ups — even one two-cd history of an entire marriage (which maybe I thought could save us). There was the annual catch-all, best of, most-played; my three children each got a personalized playlist, year by year, like marking their height on a wall. And when their own musical taste exploded, our sonic world swelled with hip-hop and rap, mash-ups and remixes, and the occasional sweet rediscovery of the old. (They can sing West Side Story and Sweeney Todd like nobody’s business.) We bonded over Manu Chao, Corner Shop, The Clash. None of us will forget the summer of The White Album or the one when we played a Forty Licks CD till it broke. Kanye’s Dark Twisted Fantasy nearly felled us all, until they heard Judy Garland and a young Streisand sing Get Happy, which we still listen to when we can, to break our own hearts. Even when they’d barely grunt a word over breakfast, we’d sing on the way to school, crooning to the roof of the car, outsized voices, all of us, so much bigger than morning. Back at my desk, like so many writers I know, I made a superstition of not being able to strike pen to paper until whatever I was working on had a soundtrack of its own. (It wasn’t procrastination, except when it was.) But it was another thing, too. I was willing the work into being, giving it the proper mood. Music made an atmosphere, a tone, if I would only live up to it. Those songs, so deliberately collected, signaled my brain somehow: This feeling, here, is what your story wants to tell. So, go on, try.

I didn’t look for the streaming services when they blasted onto the scene, but they were looking for me, the way they look for us all. I dabbled in them, tried to understand. By then, my son had become a DJ; my older daughter, a singer-songwriter, my youngest found her voice, which could shatter your being. They’d still turn me on to music, send me SoundCloud links. I Shazam-ed here and there. But I started to think my own song-hunting days were over. All those hours, the hard-earned victories, epiphanies, seemed pointless when an equation with the mechanical, dispassionate voice of a kind Aussie woman (yes, the voice I’d chosen for my electronic assistant) was telling me, almost insisting, “if you like that, you’ll like this,” as if she’d broken my singular code, quantiied not just my musical taste, but summed and averaged the magnitude of my experiences — solved the great mystery of music and me. I took no comfort in her oten being wrong (like she really didn’t get me at all), because she was now and then right. I felt stripped of the power to curate the soundtrack of my own life. The algorithm had stolen my joy. Then one day I sat in on a mind-bending lecture about artiicial intelligence and the future of being human. Here’s the zinger: What if we’ve thought, all this time, that evolution was a process of carrying our DNA forward, reining it along the way to make us better, smarter, more adaptable humans, improving the chance of our species’ survival, when in fact, information was using us as a carrier? We humans, the lecturer argued, aren’t the most eicient anymore; in fact, we may be obsolete for the job we thought guaranteed our place in the world. The world may not need us at all. I chased him down to the drinks party, and stood, waiting my turn. “What about writers?” I asked, when I got his attention. He looked right at me with a puckish grin, and shook his head. “Oh, artists don’t need to worry. Not yet. We haven’t igured out how to do what you do.” It felt like a reprieve for us all. We humans are still the meaning-makers and seekers; art is how we do it, where

we ind it. A song — like a poem, a dance, a painting — can make us feel things that AI can’t feel itself: all those layers of memory, sensation, emotion. Nor can it intuit what we feel. Even now, machines are learning how to recognize emotions, if not someday to feel them; AI is composing — stringing words and notes together in recognizable forms that quicken our pulse and dilate our pupils. But for a while, at least, it is still ours to experience a song. It happens in some part of the brain that knows where you were, who you were, when you irst heard it, and who you are now, even registers the breeze that lits a wisp of hair and dances it across your forehead, and moves you, maybe, to search for the hand beside you, or wish there were a hand, which makes you think of others held, or lost, and blows an exquisite melancholy across your landscape, making light and feelings and memory — mingling with those notes and words — all one thing, one singular thing that a machine can maybe never know, nor replicate. The great mystery of music and you. This collection is an anthem to that idea: a song cycle, a hymn, an aria, a verse. I love the way each writer expressed not only the magnitude of an experience, but its dazzling minutiae. A coconut thumb piano makes an appearance, as does a violin, a harp, and a big brass tuba; there are bird songs, a coyote chorus, a jukebox; Nina Simone shows up, Garth Brooks, Bon Iver, Bartok in Budapest (where else?), disco days, and Dvorak’s New World Symphony. Each piece is an awakened association, illed with aspiration or regret, melancholy or joy — a call to things beyond the senses: the multitudes within us. A song, we’re reminded, can be a gateway to the whole history of a human heart. But it can be a gateway to the multitudes without, as well, a knowing, deeper than consciousness, maybe down to our DNA, that returns us to our beginnings — that irst song around a campire — when we turned our faces to the starlit sky and crooned, singing the universal story, so much bigger than we are.

SAMANTHA SILVA July 2018

SONG the attic

writers in

REMIX For the irst time, he heard something that he knew to be music. He heard people singing. Behind him, across vast distances of space and time, from the place he had let, he thought he heard music too. But perhaps, it was only an echo. â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Lois Lowry

KAIDI STROUD

song of modern mom she’s lost herself a little in all the assuming of what everyone else assumes and sharing of atoms, etc. sings lullabies vaguely remembered partly made-up, mostly out of key, blends of carols, rhymes and Abba tries to limit screen time, lets kids eat “fruit snack” packaged in plastic sleeps in on weekends even ater kids have crawled into bed… and let… really loafes laundry: sometimes folded, sometimes put away, sometimes forgotten in washing machine doesn’t cook; does do dishes cleans bathroom while kids bathe — glass of wine in one hand, “tea” with bubbles in the other, and disinfectant spray in the other: somehow has three hands at bathtime pushes kids in a trailer to the park to play, to stretch, to sit-up in the grass spears of green stuck in random patterns on her sweaty back:

wears nature like a trend helps with valentines, alphabet, reading, getting all the people signed up for all the things falls asleep on the couch sometimes at seven pays bills (whatever that means to you) survives, dances in the living room on Thursdays, cries in the car loses her temper more than she’d like, stares of into space, wipes faces, hugs, tickles, brushes hair — apparently too hard — paints nails, loses socks, smells socks, totes, drives, manages, forgets, writes it down, checks it of

doesn’t know much for sure anymore but knows well enough at least to stop at every cross-walk and hold hands

ANTHONY MCARTHUR

GHOST NOTES The woman next door was operatic on most Saturday nights. She had a way of singing, chanting, gasping while she made love to whomever she was with. I tried not to listen. I put in earplugs. I listened to headphones, took melatonin, Xanax, Unisom. Nothing worked. A few times out of frustration I had one forearm up against the wall and was ready to start pounding on the wall with the opposite ist. But I couldn’t do it. It would instantly brand me as some kind of ancient, intolerant voyeur. And when we passed in the hallway or out in the parking lot our passing glances would take on a new meaning. It would make me feel even older and out of touch than I already am. Her boyfriend was Roy. He was a garbage man. He was stocky and always had that what-you-looking-at vibe on his face. One night when I was coming home from the university library I saw him arguing with someone in the parking lot. The other guy was taller and looked like he was from central casting for drug dealers on some stupid TV show. He made the mistake of shoving Roy, who with three quick swings of his ists and put him on the ground. Getting up and stumbling away the other guy yelled, “You’re gonna pay for this Roy, you’re gonna be sorry!” That’s how I learned Roy’s name. It was a Saturday, and the song was particularly loud that night. One day I saw her at the market. In the cooler months she always wore an oyster blush peacoat that well accentuated her dark hair and brown eyes. She was looking at handmade jewelry, fondling a faux jade bracelet in her hands. She was wearing sunglasses even though it was a cloudy day. Out of the corner of my eye I kept my look on her in case there were a chance hello to be had. I wish I hadn’t. I had my cheery smile all cocked and ready to go, but when she happened to turn and see me, the bruises on her right eye and cheek were

visible. She turned away quickly from the odd old guy next door. I dropped the smile and quickened my pace. The cold air passed through me. The sky went from seeming a comforting cover to a menacing promise of greater darkness. How could anybody… In recent years I have withdrawn from people for the most part. As age is upon me, I care more for trees and birds. I pretty much can see the beauty in anyone, but the closer I get to them the faster it fades. Small children are diamond stars cascading through crystal light. I go to the store in hopes of only seeing them. I use the robot scanners to avoid seeing the lurid headlines of the brain damaging magazines that groan on about a world not worth knowing. The girl next door, the woman, was young enough to be my daughter. Her night songs I was eventually able to separate in my mind from her body and The Act. I had come to regard her as an embodiment of beauty, however simple, however day to day. She was not beheld out of desire, but as something precious, like a sweet memory that could never quite make it’s way back into view. Seeing her face like that again shattered my frivolous illusion that any form of beauty could exist beyond her own peril. /// Walking through Kleiner Park by the proscenium I came upon a woman with a group of small children. She was teaching them modes of percussion. They had small African drums and some of the boys were pounding on them wildly. Ecstatic was their screaming laughter. I slowed my pace to listen to them and the teacher said, “Remember boys, it’s not always what you play, but what you don’t play. People can feel what you don’t do and much as what you do. You have to know how to play the ghost notes. You can be felt without being heard.” On the drive home I saw the guy Roy knocked down riding a motorcycle in front of me. Some kind of Harley. I had been hoping to see him. I followed him to Meridian and

watched as he parked his bike and entered a bar. Before my mind could catch up with me I was sitting next to him at the plank. “What’s your pleasure?” asked the bartender. “Bourbon. And get this guy whatever he’s drinking.” The bartender returned with my drink and put a bottle of Full Sail in front of the motorcycle man, telling him it was on me. “Yeah,” he said, “and who the fuck are you?” I slid my hand palm down toward him, and then lited it up revealing a silver key. “What’s that, man?” “The key to Roy’s apartment. Neither of them are there during the day. Hardly anyone is in the building between noon and two. Don’t take anything that looks like it’s hers.” His hand slid over and covered the key and withdrew it back into his ist. He looked at me with penetrating suspicion. Then his face sotened. “I don’t know what she sees in that bastard.” I inished my drink and walked out of the bar. I came into the key via the dark side of my imagination from bygone days. Roy always smoked out on the balcony and during the summer I heard him yelling to the inside to keep a spare key up on the hook by the fridge before his sister came to visit. All I had to do was ind a way to crawl on their balcony from mine and I’d get into the apartment. The plank I made almost broke on the way over. It might have done me in. But there are worse ways to go. It was the next day ater I visited the bar in Meridian that Roy came home and lost it. He always got home before she did. Earlier in the day the motorcycle man and a couple of associated backed a van up to the south door of the apartment complex and emptied out Roy’s apartment of all the electronics, furniture and appliances. Roy was screaming and breaking things. The manager came and Roy wound up looring him. Soon the cops came

a-plenty and before everything got unnaturally quiet, I heard the manager say damn right I’m iling charges. I made my way to their door and it was still unlocked. Inside all of her clothes appeared to be in the closets and various items with an obvious feminine aspect remained. I brought with me an envelope and a roll of magic tape. I taped the envelope on the sliding door mirror of the bedroom where all those songs came from. On the envelope I had written: Leave Him Now. Inside the envelope was two thousand dollars. There was a time when I felt like I had outlived myself, a time when the earth seemed empty and the world itself was a disintegrating illusion. But I can still see her face. The echoes in the night like sirens to those lost on the darkest sea. I can see all my departed sisters, with the light in their eyes when they were young. I can see my mother’s eyes, looking at me for the last time beyond the decades. Mine don’t hold much light anymore, but there are moments when I feel things pouring through, as weak as what is let is, something sacred still eddies beneath this weariness. I never saw her again. And so I see her everywhere. I can no longer keep up the apartment, not sure how much longer I can hang on. It’s pretty much going to hell. I can barely make the damn cofee maker work right. All I have let are old jazz recordings that I can barely hear that I play as I watch the birds and trees outside my window. I got new neighbors now, but they are way too quiet. Maybe I’ll start making some noise.

CATHERINE KYLE

SIRENS’ DEFENSE It’s true. We dashed their ship apart. We crooned them to the granite. Jagged edges sharp as narwhal tusks punctured their hull. It’s true. We draped ourselves on boulders glimmering with sea spray, clutching barnacles so sweetly the men’s necks prickled, aching to yield their scalps’ hair to our grip. It’s true. They overlook our dagger-cobalt ingernails. When they scan the horizon, it’s not with their eyes. It’s their ears that urge them on. Our throats open; in they tumble, like children down a well. (It’s true. It’s true. We lured them.) We wanted to gnaw their telescopes. To bite their compasses. They taste of salt and rust and vellum maps, so far from home. We wanted to slip our hands in their collars, strum their bowstring clavicles. And can you really blame us? Look — their bootsoles mar our shores. (Can you really blame us? Look — our bodies, lined with scars.) Whoever said revenge was sweet? Revenge — it parches our tongues. Whoever said our legions were lovely? Our pointed teeth decline. Look — the song is beautiful, but the words, if they knew them, are vengeful. But who could really blame us? Who? Could you? (Could you? Could you?)

PROM Ater Dance Dance Revolution 2ndMix So what if we didn’t have dates to the prom? They couldn’t keep up with our fast feet anyway. Trained as our brains were with chemistry and history, so our arches and toes were attuned to the loppy mat (or the hard-faced arcade platform). The home version slipped all over the place, sashayed across the tan rug. So what if no one held our waists with gloved and gentle ingers? We’d rather have pockets and quarters anyway. Chewing our gum from the sidelines. Reciting the quadratic equation in our heads. Fourcornering the compass of the neat square with our heels. Up down. Let right down. Move over, ladies. This one’s my song. That night we ate Grand Slam breakfasts at Denny’s. Then piled in the van back to your place, right? Remember how our lavender and rosy gauze got crinkled as

we hoisted up our skirts and stomped the plastic arrows hard? Remember how we must have looked like wine-grape-crushing princesses? Tiaras and those techo beats pulsing the darkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s starred heart?

KENT MOMMSEN

MISSISSIPPI GODDAM

Ater Nina Simone

“The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam.” Beloved Stepmother of Fity Years. Home to her. Brother never came to terms with her. Never forgave her for the horrendous damage that she rained upon our loving sensitive family. Not even beyond the grave. I did forgive her. She did the best she could. Like us she loved our father beyond words. In the end we were close. She did however freak me out when in she called me by my father’s name. To tell the truth she is stuck in my head. “A rolling stone gathers no moss. No lies on me. Every tub must sit on its own bottom.” Oh my God. Alcohol doesn’t even get her out of my brain and she’s been gone now for ten years. I have personally seen grown men… Mississippi construction workers cringe and cower at her voice. “Yes ma’am, Miss Virgie.” She was a terror. Taught second grade for forty-two years. No variation. Deep South Virgie. Dad the Yankee. Ater that cataclysmic day Dad was beside himself. The Love of His Life and baby were gone in a heartbeat at age forty. No way to explain it to the eight adoring eyes gathered around him. He tried but that rupture would impact our lives forever. Not in a good way. Within the year, The Committee at the elementary school put them together. I would like to give them a piece of my mind but they are all in the Día De Muertos Book now. An old maid school teacher taking on four children under thirteen. We hated her — especially my brother — but Dad desperately needed the stability. She was a strong cup of cofee but we had no choice. As the oldest I was cleverly let out of the wedding. They sent me to Kentucky to shovel manure at a riding school for highend girls. The wedding photos show an adoring bride smiling with a face that would stop a clock. Dad standing there. A brutally handsome Frank Sinatra type. It was a marriage of convenience. She scored. More importantly she was willing

to take on the task. Things were about to change. Culture clash doesn’t even begin to describe it. It was Hell from Day One. Brother clashed head on. I was more of a Bob and Weave Guy headed for the goal line. Out of this house! It also helped that I had a Serious Love Interest. She thought I walked on water. That didn’t work out but we are still together ater ity-seven years. The Old Woman did her worst to break us up. Separated for six years we vowed to stay together. We wrote every day. Hialeah to Blowing Rock. Hialeah to a nationwide summer camping trip. Hialeah to Mississippi. Hialeah to Tallahassee. Why did she want to break us up? Because she could. She thought. As poor white trash she looked down upon my love who was from the other side of the tracks. Literally. We have 1,987 letters to document the struggle being arranged in chronological order. I Remember You, Fly Me to the Moon, Johnny Mathis, and Elaine Elias playing sotly in the background as these letters are painfully read. Inserted lovingly into plastic sheet protectors. The Old Woman would never stop us. She never did. We were in love and headed for the alter. Fity years later. Four damaged children had struggled through life. One dead at age thirty-four. Trash removal equipment arriving… monstrous truck with huge iron jaws. Photo albums accumulated over ninety years from her only home stacked in the parkway. Oh My God what if she returns from the nursing home? Boise daughter salvaged our family images. The rest? No idea who they were… mostly dead Klansmen from Mississippi Goddam. Iron jaws uncaringly scooped. A Human Being’s Life vaporized on the way to the landill. “Goodbye Mom… I could never call you that when you were alive.” At age ninety-seven nobody let. Nursing home in Miami lost her teeth. Bad odor. Nobody spoke English. Put her on a Lear Jet and lew her home to her beloved Mississippi. Black nurse say, “Oh Miss Virgie be doin’ ine… she been talkin’ since she came in the do.’” A few days later we put her to rest next to Dad by the Little White Country Church where they were married. Our mother still lays alone with Baby Boy in Miami. Heaven? Gentle Dad between two Strong Women.

MARGUERITE LAWRENCE

HEY, GOOD LOOKIN’ It’s June 28, 1970 — the day of America’s irst Gay Pride parade, a year ater the Stonewall riots, and coincidentally, the day Eddie turns eighteen, becomes Eydie, drives from his home in Rexburg to Idaho Falls, and catches a bus. The Greyhound lumbers past farms, wheat and corn ields, cattle, and Mormon spires, into Oregon and its morphing landscapes of desert to forest, across the monolithic Columbia, and into the lush density of Washington. Eydie can’t wait to step of the bus in Seattle, a new frontier (or at least that’s what the magazine with a smiling drag queen, impeccably dressed in a midnight blue evening gown — on the front cover, advertised). “Seattle,” an article in the magazine proclaimed, “is a city where social lines aren’t drawn so taut, where people like us can get jobs, and aren’t judged or heckled by the small-minded masses.” The article was accompanied by photos of men in sequined dresses and tiaras laughing and dancing in clubs, fashionable men on the street in tailored skirts and jackets, pumps, their hair styled a la Jackie O., a smiling couple in blouses and shorts walking hand in hand through a rose garden. The article ended with, “Experience Seattle’s Freedom: Where friendships are woven from black sheep, white sheep — wools of all ilks — where men can be men and men can be women.” Eddie’s parents don’t know that on this summer morning instead of driving to his job at McDonald’s, he is “borrowing” the station wagon and taking it to Idaho Falls. If they would have gotten wind of his plan they would have had a major it, called the bishop again, and hosted some kind of encounter group. All the dissonance through the years, Eddie feeling one way, being told to act another way. The evidence that fueled his parents’ angst — an old Barbie in his closet, dressed in a mini-skirt and coordinating top, lipstick in his sock drawer, his dead grandmother’s silk gloves in an old gym bag. Mom would

cry and beg Eddie to get of the devil’s lap, and Dad would thrust the Barbie or gloves in his face and tell him to choose to become a better man. They took away drama club, made him stay in Boy Scouts, and put him on a very short leash when it came to what he watched on television. None of this changed or afected Eddie’s leanings, hard as they tried. What his parents didn’t realize and what Eddie came to realize by the time he was iteen, tough as this was on his parents and him, he was who he was — there was no choice involved. He spent the next two years hiding his truth, keeping to himself, walking his dog, dreaming — that is till the fall of his senior year. He was in Boise on a marching band competition trip, and the director let the students loose for two hours in the downtown corridor. While the other kids visited the capitol’s rotunda, went to Woolworth’s and the Victorian Shop, Eddie wandered alone. He walked Main Street west of downtown past an old hotel, a bar blasting country western, and a men’s shoeshine and repair shop. He found himself in front of a corner cigar and magazine shop called Hanniin’s. He peeked in through the musty window at long racks of magazines and display cases of cigars and cigarettes. He straightened up to move on but as he took a step the shop’s door swung open and almost hit him in the face. A man in his late twenties, Rod Stewart hair, black jeans, a yellow tailored shirt, and a gold chain around his neck, backed up, looked Eddie up and down, said “My, oh my. Here, allow me...” and held the door for him. In Idaho Falls, Eddie writes his parents a letter. Dear Mom and Dad, I bet you’re madder than a hornet’s nest because I’m leaving Rexburg like this, on my birthday and everything. But I’m eighteen now so I get to make my own decisions. And it really scared me when you had Bishop Hawks come and talk to me about “my persuasions,” as he called it. I can never look him straight in the face again! Maybe, Dad, you just shrug your shoulders when the bishop and everyone else you know asks about me. Delect their questions by

reminding them that at least you have your other son, and he’s on a mission in India, of all places. I’m not sure you get how much I wish I could be like my brother. Jef’s done everything right, and I bet he and Margot tie the knot when he comes home. That’ll be nice for you and Mom. I don’t know why I am the way I am, why I like to dress up, wear makeup, read magazines like the one Mom found under my mattress (still sorry about that, Mom), but it’s the pull of a river. I have to dive into the current and ride it till I ind my destiny. (Mr. Porter would be proud of the metaphor here. At least I did well in creative writing.) Tell my sisters bye for me, tell them I’m sorry I took some of their things. Kiss Ernie, best dog ever. Tell yourselves I love you and it’s not your fault. Love, Eydie (the new me!) P.S. The car is in the Idaho Falls Kmart parking lot, gassed up and washed. Sorry I took it, but it was either that or hitchhike, and I know how Mom feels about that. Eddie folds the note into an envelope, drops the car key in, licks the seal, sticks a stamp on it, and puts it in a mailbox in front of the post oice. He walks to the bus station and buys a one-way ticket to Seattle. Ater locking the stall door in the bus station’s men’s room, Eddie sits on the toilet and strips. He pulls of his boots and socks, and folds his Wranglers and belt, t-shirt, and underwear into a neat pile. He opens his backpack and pulls out a pair of his sister Julienne’s pink cotton panties and slips them on. His sister Barbie, unbeknownst to her, donated her L’eggs taupe pantyhose. He needs to be careful not to snag them. He had snooped through Aunt Mona’s dresser when all the family was downstairs in her kitchen ater Uncle John’s funeral and found the bra. He chose Aunt Mona because they are about the same size around the chest. The cups he ills with toilet paper. He brings a lacy slip down over his head and slides

on the size 10½ women’s kitten heel sandals, both of which he found at a thrit store on the same marching band trip he bought the magazine. The dress is last. It was his cousin Jeanette’s until she donated it to the ward’s annual Boy Scout yard sale. Eddie liked the sleeveless shit because sleeves are usually tight around his arms and he doesn’t like waistbands, so he’d made himself busy hanging other dresses on the rack, waited till he was sure no one was watching, nabbed the shit and tucked it under his jacket, and tried it on late that night. It it like a dream. When the dress is zipped, Eddie pulls a compact, foundation, blush, mascara, lipstick, and White Shoulders cologne from his pack and quickly, expertly applies them. He’s been practicing for a couple months at lunchtime down by the river, instead of eating alone in the cafeteria. There was a nice spot in the willows where he stashed his sisters’ Maybelline makeup and remover, cotton balls and a compact in a Wonder Bread bag. While he’s putting the inishing touches on his face someone comes into the restroom. Eddie raises his sandaled feet, puts his boots in front of the toilet, and sits quiet. Whoever the man is, pees and sings in a gravelly voice a line from an old Hank Williams song Eddie’s dad occasionally sings to his mom. “Hey, good lookin’, Whatcha got cookin’...” The guy hums some more while zipping his ly, doesn’t take the time to wash his hands, doesn’t peek in Eddie’s stall, and leaves the room. Eddie quickly poofs up his red hair with some Aqua Net, scrunching his ingers through the short curls, waves his hands to get rid of the hair spray smell, smiles at his blueeyed relection in the compact and smacks his glossed lips. He stufs the makeup in his pack, opens the stall, leaves his clothes and boots on the sink, peeks out the door and hears the call for Seattle over the loudspeaker. The coast is clear, so Eydie tap tap taps her heels out to the curb and to the Greyhound — its engine gyrating to the rhythm of, “How’s about cookin’ something up with me?”

ANITA TANNER

BARN SWALLOW “True hope is swit and lies on swallow’s wings.” — Shakespeare From the lot I watch your safe return every spring, swallow most widespread, most common. Hirundo rustica, you are anything but ordinary — the way you cup your meticulous nest, pad it with mud, soten it with horsehair lining, the insects and water you catch in light, your swit wing beats — seven to nine per second — your deeply forked tail, beauty in the rictus of your song, incoherent blue of your upper parts, the rust breast. Superstition says if your nest is destroyed or damaged, cows give bloody milk or no milk at all. Nautical men declare you appear at sea out of nowhere,

meaning sailorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; safe return. They tattoo their arms with swallows. All I can decide about you, oscine bird of my heart, bird of my bosom, is this: At the sight of you my mourning dies. You soar more than you sink. Tomorrow again your song will rise.

REVERB Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones. — Keith Richards

ROBERT LEE THORNTON

THE GREYHOUND HOME Ater Jason Isbell I’ll take two of what you’re having, I’ll take all of what you got for as long as we’re sweating to the tune of this old motel room, killing time in Texarkana (or was this San Francisco) and goddamn but I’ve never been this far from lonely since, goddamn but it feels good to put lonely behind the bench seat and drive, love. I’m not falling asleep, because I never could ind another dream. I’ll kill the lights on my way out of this one.

JOEL WAYNE

SPIES Someone was stealing candy from the station. They were allowed three pieces a day; two in the aternoon, one ater dinner. The candy station was a set of glass tubes the size of a grownup thigh, sitting atop the bar. It was as much part of the holiday as anything else; Lily would visit her cousins, aunts, uncles, swim in the lake, choke down bacon wrapped igs that were supposed to be a treat, and line up at the candy station. It was her Aunt Shelly’s house, or hers and the man she’d married when Lily was still crawling. He was older and nicer, but not well, so no one hardly saw him. “Well it’s not Lily,” her mother said. “She don’t really like sweets.” “Oh doesn’t she?” Aunt Shelly said. “Doesn’t she?” Her mother laughed. Oh, why does she do that? Shelly, Shelly, Shelly. I do love her. But sometimes… In the den, Lily wrapped a towel around her head and whispered, “shut up, shut up.” Now Lily and her cousin Howie, Shelly’s son from the earlier marriage, were playing detective, up in the kids’ room. The house was shaped like a giant “U” — you could see across the courtyard and into the bar from the windows over the top bunk. Howie played on a coconut thumb piano, brought back from Aunt Shelly’s Caribbean honeymoon. It was a commodity among the kids, but only Howie could actually play it, and he only knew “Pop Goes the Weasel” in quartertime. He always said “poop” instead, and had the other kids yelling it, whenever the grownups weren’t around. Lily put on her beret, something she’d found in a secondhand shop and wore while she read in the space under the stairs, back home. Howie said: “We’re not spies, dickball.” They were detectives, he said. Spies were bad. “Not all the time,” Lily said. “Dickball.” Actually, she liked them because they were bad sometimes, though she didn’t say it. And she only called him

dickball in her head. All was quiet in the Starboard Bar: Aunt Shelly reilled her drink; a cousin ran inside to use the bathroom; the dog, Shackleton, threw up on the rug; and Aunt Shelly appeared again and began pouring a new drink before stopping to count the candy when Lily’s mother came in to hunt for her sunglasses. Howie fell asleep. With one hand, Lily thumbed the kalimba, humming a song she sometimes heard on the stereo at her father’s house, which she thought was the saddest, most beautiful thing in the world: I’ll close my eyes / then I won’t see / the love you don’t feel / when you’re holding me. With the other hand, she squashed Aunt Shelly’s head between her ingers. Now alone, her mother shut herself in the pantry behind the bar, alongside the extra napkins, bottles, and the red doll sink, no bigger than a toaster. Lily could only see half of her head from the pantry’s porthole window. Denise walked in the side door, from the sun room. She was a neighbor, everyone’s pal, who smoked but always made the kids promise not to whenever she lit a fresh one. Other times, when Aunt Shelly wasn’t around, Denise would make them repeat “vagina” or “penis,” depending on what they had, and she’d reward them with a piece of candy. Denise was hypnotic, with yellow eyes, cut-of shorts, and cropped hair, though Aunt Shelly said this made her look poor. She went straight to the bar pantry, joined Lily’s mother, and shut the door behind them. They leaned in until the tops of their foreheads met, just staring at one another. Then Denise, taller, rested her lips against the young mother’s brow, nose buried in her hair. Ten feet away, Aunt Shelly’s ancient hubby padded into the bar, scooped a handful of lemon sours from one of the glass tubes and melted back into the belly of the house. The women didn’t move. Something cracked inside Lily. A burp, a shattered bone, or maybe like the day Donna Freedman had called, “Happy Valentines, fat stuf,” to her in front of half the class, and she was sent to the principal for clawing her nails down one side of Donna’s sweet face. She loved that face and hated

herself for doing it. That’s what journals are for, the counselor would say, and adults, and reading, and other friends, and being your best self. “Oh yes,” she had thought. “I believe it. I will live well, and better, and show them. The Count of Lily Cristo.” But today, she screamed. It was loud, from the maw of some unholy place, enough for the pantry to empty, for Howie to wake, startled, and give himself a black eye on the bed post. And for Aunt Shelly to not-quite-uninvite them to the lake and Lily’s mother to never really ask why.

AMANDA RANTH

songs and sometimes everything the words sometimes mean nothing bleed of the asphalt of her mind like the chalk outline of a body twisted in light she calls her name like it was her sisters like it was a strangers makes a sound like a seeds head shattering into a million feathery promises when the words wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t come lips continue shaping words that carve a hole like cracking ice or the aching jaw of a gaping chick she holds fast to her skin a seed resting in soil not asleep but patient coiled into the smoothest ball of wanting she licks her ingers crunches down on the hard edges of her life she is hungry for a picture that draws her face as a deinition as a story of wonder as a tiny unwinding root the words take out a window glass shatters, people point

follow her down the dirty sidewalk shrieking this is your fault you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be here she transforms into a snake and takes to the sewers she splinters into a thousand clicking beetles she makes herself clear like the glass so they can see through her so they can use her as an example the words sometimes mean everything they are the paws of the arroyos she treads in every day they are the sinew holding her marble bones together they are the bread she gnaws with her grinding teeth sometimes the words make her hands clench her back ache her breath heavy with birth sometimes they burn fast and blow ash like paper always does and sometimes she holds them close like songs or seeds or bread

MARY SARAS

I’M YOUR BOOGIE MAN Ignorance is bliss — until truth slogs its way to the surface, bit by bit, and gnaws at the edges of your conscience like a scavenger on prey. Sooner or later, bone is exposed; then guilt sets in. I irst edged into a lengthy predicament in 1979, the same year a malfunctioning nuclear plant at Three Mile Island, PA, trickled radiation into American air. For me, however, world events faded to mere background noise wating from the nightly news on the black and white set in my dorm room. Truth be told, in the sleepy college town of Charleston, Illinois, where I was a wet-behind-the-ears coed, a more with-it phenomenon was vying for attention: disco. “Night fever, night fever. We know how to do it!” I’d belt in unison with fellow dancers on Saturday nights as we gyrated to the syncopated beat of The Bee Gees. A new nightclub had opened in town, E.L. Krackers. A far cry from the standard, sour-smelling dive, it lured me like candy. I can still picture its elevated dance platform, mirrored ball whirling alot, strobe lights darting frenzied patterns round the room. A straight-A student by day, come sundown the discotheque seduced me to “Shake My Groove Thing” with Peaches & Herb and mime “Y.M.C.A.” with The Village People. Only there could I quash thoughts of my family back home, struggling to hold the farm together, and of my hometown boyfriend hinting at marriage. Clearer still, I recall the best dancer there, a guy I admired from afar in both my dormitory and business classes. Statuesque and lithe, his dark eyes and black bob glistened under the lights, taut body exposed in skintight black pants and silky shirts open to mid-navel. Coiled like a spring, his torso undulated with the beat while his feet strutted, kicked, and spun. This guy Hustled; he Bumped; he rocked the Bus Stop. Center stage, as sweat caused his shirts to cling, his physique tantalized. I longed for this Adonis to invite me to dance. I tittered like a schoolgirl when I irst met him. “I’ve been noticing your hands,” he called from the next row one humid aternoon as inance class ended. Other students iled from the room. I startled and turned. “I sit behind you in

class,” he continued. “And don’t think I’m weird or anything, but I think you have beautiful nails.” This observation was weird, I thought, coming from a guy. Coming from Disco Man, it seemed downright lyrical. “You’re sooooo sweet!” I managed to half-giggle, stuing papers into the wrong folder. “My name’s Mary. I think I’ve seen you in the disco.” “Michael Taggart,” he countered, extending a hand. “You’ve seen me in the disco, for sure. Wanna walk back to the dorm with me?” Crossing the tree-lined sidewalks of the school, I soon learned that Michael hailed from nearby Paris, Illinois, a rural community with a strangely cosmopolitan name. Unlike me, he said he didn’t go home much on weekends, though, not cottoning to his father’s strict rules and muddy farm chores. Seems his parents didn’t visit campus much, either. That was all right with him, he allowed, since he’d found a best friend in his roommate, Jay, and instant brothers in the Sigma Chi fraternity. Drawn to his warmth, from that day forward I began to sit with Michael during classes and to partner with him at the disco. It took me many months, nonetheless, to discover that his personal life was listing. He irst started smoking, the stale smell of tar clinging to both breath and clothes. A dark stubble crept across his chin. Then his eyes dulled. Asked why he looked so drained, he explained he’d been pulling allnighters to study for mid-terms. Asked about campus rumors of trouble brewing between him and his fraternity brothers, he refused all comment. I, on the other hand, vocalized everything — angst about tests, fury with roommates, doubts about romance. Michael counselled for hours. When at last I summoned the courage to dump my long-term boyfriend, he lured me to the disco to celebrate. “Mar, I’ve got something to ask you,” he managed later that evening, snagging a booth between songs. “My fraternity’s spring formal is coming up in a month,” he started. “Now that you’re single, wanna go with me?” Unsure, I pelleted questions: When? Where? Dress code? One answer troubled me most. Because the dance would be held in a hotel located two hours from school,

attendees would spend the night together there. Despite our deepening friendship, I was no longer attracted to Michael physically and couldn’t fathom sleeping with him. And I sure didn’t want to get caught up in his feud with Sigma Chi. “I’m sorry, Michael, I’d love to, but I just can’t aford a fancy dress and shoes,” I ibbed, tilting my head for emphasis, pursing my lips into my best mock frowny-face. “Oh, Mar, I was afraid of that,” he said, shrugging it of and pulling me back toward the dance loor. “Guess ya can’t help that.” Our disco days ended with graduation in spring of ’81. By this time, newscasts had begun to warn of a rare virus spreading in Los Angeles among homosexual men. Unconcerned, I moved to Chicago to pursue an MBA before migrating to Idaho to work in marketing. Michael landed a coveted accounting job in Dallas. Diving headlong into sixty-hour weeks and business travel, we reconnected intermittently, exchanging an occasional call and birthday greetings each December. It was the winter of 1988 before Michael broke the pattern, proposing to visit Boise. Reunited, we relished a long weekend of skiing at nearby Bogus Basin and chatting late into the evenings. With my latest beau on the verge of ditching me, Michael again listened for hours. Then, inishing one last Winston before lying out, he at last spoke up. “Mar, I’m gay,” he blurted. “I was gay in college, too, but too chicken to admit it. I never told you, but I met men at rest stops outside of town in the middle of the night.” His troubles with Sigma Chi and family swept to mind. Torn between admitting I’d suspected all along and feigning surprise, my now ill-kempt hand reached for his. “You’re still the same wonderful guy I loved in college,” I eased. “Your preferences don’t change that.” Relieved, he added, “In Dallas, I’ve found a community, Mar. There are gay bars there, others like me. I still can’t come out at work, you know, but I can be open with friends.” I imagined him inding new dance partners, twirling at will. His ingers melted into mine. “You’re perfect just the way you are,” I assured. And though I wanted to mean those words, I struggled to grasp his lifestyle. I just didn’t want to see it. At this juncture, the

AIDS virus irst diagnosed years earlier had turned deadly. Now ravaging gay men across the country, its spread and stigma terriied me. To cope, I concluded that as long Michael lived this way in Dallas, I could support him. At least I could continue to send sappy Hallmark greetings each birthday. I remember the shock of opening one exchange several years later — an engagement announcement featuring Michael locked in embrace with his iancé, David. Gay marriage not yet legal in the U.S. and discouraged by my church, I pondered whether I should attend the forthcoming Dallas commitment ceremony or send a git, in lieu. I did neither. A few years prior, I’d married in a Catholic ceremony in Boise, Michael not on the guest list. Now, having just delivered my second child, I penned polite regrets. “I’m sooooo sorry,” I began, “but I’m breastfeeding a new baby girl, so can’t attend your grand event. Sending love instead!” On the eve of my 38th birthday, my husband returned from the mailbox, latest card in hand. “Look at these chicken scratches,” Paul gestured. “Michael’s sent a joke.” Snatching the envelope, I could scarcely read the shakilyscribed return-address nor the scrawls inside. “Mar, Happy Birthday!” Michael wrote. “I’m in a Dallas hospital, weak with pneumonia and complications from AIDS. Doctors are trying AZT. David and I have been having a lot of trouble but are trying to stick it out. He’s been at my side in the hospital. I’m grateful for that.” Stupeied, I read the words again and again. Tears rolled from my face. Heat surged my gut in waves. Although I dashed a heartsick reply the next day, I never heard from Michael again. Since I’d never met David nor Michael’s parents, I was not notiied of his death, shy of his 40th birthday. I found no rhythm to grief. Weeks passed, yet the pain merely intensiied as my ignorance and inactivity crept to light. Like a cruel mirrored ball, conscience served to magnify each sin, bit by bit. When the inality hit bone, I crumpled to my knees in the corner of my suburban bedroom. That’s precisely when the guilt set in.

ROSS HARGREAVES

DEGLOVING “Sailing” is playing when the dog gets its paw caught in the escalator at the Boise Airport. Christopher Cross booming from overhead. Singing “Soon I will be free.” The escalators are always chewing people up and spitting them out. People miss a step, or position their luggage wrong, or pay too much attention to their phones and down they go. Give the escalator teeth a chance to claim a pound of lesh. I work at the airport as maintenance. Like most airports, the infrastructure is rust, held together with shoelace and gum. My job is to make signs of imminent collapse less apparent. Like the time a Smash Burger employee shoved an apron down a drain, looding both Smash Burger and the Einstein Bagels next to it with greasy water. Due to this lood, it began to rain grease and soaked ceiling tile on the concourse below. That shit was spent vacuuming soggy plaster out of the carpet and mopping against a never ending tide of grease. The smell of it, like a carved pumpkin full of paint, kept me gagging for weeks. Working there feels like every part of me is wrapped in wet towels. /// One time the baggage handlers unloaded a South American Maned Wolf headed for the Boise Zoo. They unloaded animals all the time. Usually pet dogs let in the baggage area, alone in their crates on nests of shredded newspaper. Let to whimper, moan, howl. When these songs become unbearable I go and stand by the crates. I stare at the dogs, the dogs stare at me. Maybe for a brief instant we aren’t alone. The Maned Wolf’s crate is a plastic thing covered in holes too tiny to stick a inger in. What I can see through the holes looks more like a hyena than a wolf. The baggage handler standing next to me, a woman with a sharp chin and stars tattooed under each eye, says, “I hate zoos.” I tell her a story I heard as a kid. Of some idiot who snuck into the zoo ater dark and stuck a inger in the tiger’s cage. Of the zookeepers who found said inger a few days later

in a pile of tiger stool. /// The escalator does not stop. The escalator does not care. A woman and her small white poodle come to pick up a returning husband. Waiting to point and say “there’s Daddy!” and the happy yips and leg jumps that would ensue. They take the escalator up to the arrival lounge. When the escalator ends the poodle does not step of. One paw is sucked under. The poodle yaps in pain and jumps back to free itself. The woman looks down and in her panic inishes the job. Leaving behind the top part of the poodle’s paw. All that remains to the dog is a thin pink membrane that covers bone. The woman hauls up the squealing poodle to her shoulder. Her coat and the poodle’s white fur quickly soak. Desperate, she looks to ind her landed husband, looks for someone to hand her a towel to staunch her poor doggy’s paw. And that’s when I showed up. Wandering around aimless, looking for something to do. /// Ater the dog goes to the emergency vet, ater I brush the blood and fur from the escalator teeth, ater my shit ends, I sit in my car. Hopping the defrosters clear the windshield and save me from having to scrape. Katy Perry is on the radio. She has the eyes of a tiger. And we are going to hear her roar.

LAUREEN LEIKO SCHEID

SLEEP ELUDES ME Sleep eludes me I’m a surfer tossed by Paciic waves. I’m a neglected overripe cherry tomato under crisp romaine and alfalfa sprouts. I’m a rotary phone in a digital age. I’m a wedding singer at a funeral. I’m a dandelion in winter, a peanut in an allergist’s oice. A mango in Idaho. I’m a lonely star with dawn soon approaching. Sleep eludes me.

DYNISHA SMITH

MY ONLY SUNSHINE “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy, when stars are gray…” my loud and of key threeyear-old sings, misspeaking a word in the precious way kids do, to her baby dolls. A song that I sing to her oten, one that serves as a reminder to the both of us that on even the roughest days we love each other. I’m taking a moment to collect myself. So much work went into this day; meetings with my lawyer, divulging the story of an angry split with her father not unlike so many other splits these days, the multiple phone calls to his Aunt or Grandma to gather details and information, me cyberstalking his social media to get an address for the paperwork — all this work culminating to right now. I’m early, so I stand in the windy morning air in front of the large building. The courthouse isn’t a pretty place. In fact, it is a place that makes my palms sweat, a place in which a lot of people meet their fate. If you had less experience with the court system you might not think anything of this building standing out amongst apartments, and grocery stores. But I’ve been here before — multiple times — and I know better. Lives change inside this building for better or for worse. Juries handing out life changing verdicts, judges sentencing lightly or not, bailifs escorting people to jail — or not. I catch a faint voice on the wind and my brain hears my only sunshine. Get your shit together. I straighten up and take a deep breath. The courtroom is small, and there are only a few people present. The room itself has probably seen countless parents advocating on behalf of their children, ighting over who gets what holiday, angry, sad, desperate. The walls have heard pleas from mothers, fathers, grandparents, and spouses on behalf of their loved ones who simply made a mistake, who don’t deserve the maximum penalty. From battered men

and women, abused children, anxious loners with no one to speak on their behalf. And now from me. I am asking this judge to side with me in the best interest of my child — that’s a big deal for someone who doesn’t know me. He hasn’t seen the countless nights that I’ve rocked her to sleep, the tears that I’ve wiped of of her cheeks or the ones I’ve hid from her in frustration and insecurity. He wasn’t in the lobby of her preschool with me when her teacher asked if she should make a Father’s Day card for her grandpa, since none of us have mentioned her dad. All he has to go on is the case that I’ve built about inancial and mental stability, and the paperwork citing abandonment that my lawyer has iled on my behalf. The court clerk, the bailif, the court reporter are the only witnesses. We rise, the judge comes in, we sit. My lawyer speaks, the judge asks questions, reviews paperwork. Then he asks me why. Why am I asking for sole physical and legal custody? I’ve thought about ways to answer this question a hundred times. I could tell him that I myself am the product of an absent father; I could explain the years I spent wondering why I wasn’t good enough for him, the thousands of times I dreamed about him calling to show interest in my life, or being proud of me, of inviting me into his new family. I could tell him about the times that her father’s rage terriied me; the holes let in the walls of our apartment, the nights I shoved my pregnant body into the backseat of my car to get a few hours of sleep, or the days I spent wondering where he was since he didn’t show up to work. In the end, I tell him about the last time we saw him over a year ago, because he’s got all the other things laid out in front of him. The last time we saw him, her dad that is, we were at Planet Kid. Planet Kid is a large, rowdy indoor jungle gym where parents pretend to supervise their kids, and the kids run wild up and down rope ladders, through tunnels, down slides, and into ball pits. We get there on time and he is late. I try not to judge, not to be bitter, not to just leave. I’m successful. He comes, and they play, and I sit in the back of the sitting area to give them the semblance of privacy. Every

once in a while she seeks me out panting but grinning like a fool to tell me something cool. And I give her my best smile and I say wow or that’s awesome. I partly mean it. I look around at the other tables of parents, and wonder if they’re married, dating, friends, co-parenting, or just trying to take a break from entertaining kids. And then the two hours are up and he’s bringing her back, weaving through the people. The part of me that cannot let go, that believes we will still get back together, that naïve romance novel reading part of me is remembering what was good about us. Dancing in the warm spring air, discovering new facts about each other, supporting a man that I know won’t stay because I’m too blind, too pregnant to do anything else. And he made it easy, so charming, so sweet, so fake. We agree to meet here again tomorrow since it’s too cold outside for a park — plus it’s free for the adults to get in. The next day we arrive on time, and she takes of to play. We wait, she pops back to me every ten minutes like she can tell time. Thirty minutes goes by, then an hour. Takes an hour and a half for her smile to disappear. The look on her face when it dawns on her that dad isn’t coming knocks me over. The way she holds back tears as she scoots into my lap and asks to go home — the way I know this won’t be the last time she cries over him — that look, forever seared into my heart, is why he doesn’t deserve any piece of her. I do not cry as I say this, but the look on my face must be enough because I can hear the throats clearing, and I catch the court reporter wipe at her eyes. The judge does not grant me everything that I ask for but I win where it counts; she’s forever mine. We leave that courtroom, my lawyer and I, with heads high which is more than I can say for a lot of people who enter the courthouse. That night I tuck her in, and we read Llama Llama Red Pajama. As she is driting of to sleep with her head against my chest, I’m brushing back the thick curls from her forehead and singing You Are My Sunshine, she doesn’t notice the tears on my lashes — and I keep it that way.

DAPHNE ELIZABETH STANFORD

SIREN SONG Your message says, I’m not sure why you called. If you wanted to talk, I’d be willing, but not if you’re going to scream. You cast yourself as Lady Brett, him as Jake: hips & heels twirled tango-walks — despite my pulling hairs out at the root, despite my severed marriage. Hammering stakes in your letter: I think of you oten! You want to be screwed between Jake & me. Your voice is syrup, silkscreen & malice. Look damage in the mouth: my furrowed skin, my blue-green eyes. You materialize as breasted infant rolling, unweaned, in vices; licking — gleeful and seeped in — Venetian gelato, August sun; soaking in my writer beneath whom you bask: I close my eyes & shiver hard. O, unrequited love, forbidden love, love that talks its way into autumn, knowing itself to be storefront dummy. A careful dismantling — blindfolded, one hand tied behind — of one couple’s bonds. But I am real, & I scream. I will sing louder, siren. I will not budge. And your summer dresses, the sunlowers in your head, will combust. Your spirit will howl, a banshee laming down to rotten weeds, sour milk, false thud.

REX ADAMS

13 & 1/2 HOURS When the sun sets Lodi stands on the shoulder of a two lane highway controlling traic with her STOP/SLOW paddle. Nearby a generator hums, powering four overhead lights. The lights illuminate Lodi’s position. Moths hurl themselves against the luminaires’ lenses. Mosquitos bite exposed lesh, oblivious to the bug spray that makes her reek like something repellent and poisonous. She’s still standing in the same location when the sun rises. At eight thirty-six the lagging supervisor squawks over the two-way, “Step of.” She lowers her paddle and plods up the highway to her car. It’s parked in an approach to a corn ield. She tosses the paddle into the backseat and then slides in behind the wheel. Sunlight radiates through the windshield, chasing out the night’s coolness. A foretelling of the heat to come. To sit though, ater thirteen and a half hours of standing, allows relief to travel down her legs, into her feet. Her back and shoulders are next. She places her sticky forehead on the steering wheel, closes her eyes. She wants to sleep. She feels herself fading away. But then an ache starts in the arches of her feet, twitches into her Achilles. Her calf muscles lutter and she knows they will bind into hard, crippling knots if she doesn’t keep them moving. She leans back, works her feet, then bends forward and unties the laces of her boots and kicks them of. The fetid stink of her feet wats up. Her boots are rotten and need replaced, but the extra money she can’t aford. She peels her socks of next and tosses them, along with the boots, onto the passenger side loor. She leans back and stretches out. Blood pumps into her feet. The air cools them. She needs cofee and water, a banana. Energy drinks have let her sour-bellied and hairytongued. She wants to drive straight home, shower and go to bed, but there is Mason, her four-year-old daughter. Mason is with her grandfather, Lodi’s dad, on a job somewhere near Kuna. Mason isn’t supposed to be with him. Lodi should’ve been of the road at ive, but a broke down paver and fourteen

belly dumps stacked up and loaded with hot asphalt pushed the road work into rush hour. She can still feel the eyes of the drivers on her, glaring, see the man in the dark SUV lipping her the bird, see the old lady behind the wheel of the Subaru mouthing, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Fuck of.â&#x20AC;? /// Lodi drives her car up Highway 69. A ive-lane highway busy at nine in the morning. Daylight makes it more diicult for her to keep her eyes open. Her blinks linger, her head nods, she drits of, wakes as she crosses the fog line. Steers the car back onto the highway. She wishes she had someone to watch Mason, someone to care for her through the day so she could get a full four or ive hours of sleep. Not the little catnaps she gets while Mason is at home and wants entertained. She stops at a convenience store. Lodi walks in wearing liplops, aware of the sourness of her bare skin, but her need for cofee outweighs the worry over foot odor. /// The construction site is in a big alfalfa ield. Roads have been cut, embanked, paved, house pads leveled. There are a few complete homes, the landscaping started. Plastic irrigation pipe pokes from raked, black soil. Sod is rolled out in staggered green sheets. But most of the properties are still in stages of earthwork and foundation construction. Lodi locates her father at one of these properties, working the metal chute of a batch truck, guiding the chute with one hand and signaling the driver with the other. Concrete discharges from the upper end of the rotating drum, falls into the hopper and slides down the chute and then into a small gap at the top of the forms. One laborer stabs a vibrator between the forms. Two other laborers screed and loat the wet concrete along the top of the stem-wall with trowels and mag loats. She parks the car and gets out. Glad to be here, but also dreading the drive home to the single-wide at the base of the Owyhee Front, where the dirt is like moon dust and all around their property is bitterbrush and thistle and kochia weeds. Goatheads infest the driveway. The soles of Masonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s feet ind them all the time. Lodi imagines her home is one of the new houses, imagines clean loors, no weeds, central air. She imagines walking in, smelling new carpet, fresh paint,

slipping out of her sweat-damp clothes. She’d leave her boots outside. She wouldn’t want them to foul the air. She can see the tiled loor of the bathroom, feel the soles of her feet touch the cool, clean stone. She imagines taking a shower and then sliding into a bed, hair still wet, a bed that no one else except her has ever slept in. In her fantasy someone else, maybe a husband or boyfriend, is there to take care of Mason, to feed her and play with her and make her feel like a real child and not a nuisance Lodi would be better of without. Lodi spots her father’s work truck. Framed in the open driver side window is Mason. The child’s head is tipped forward, her shoulder length hair falling about her cheeks. Lodi walks up to the pickup and looks in. A clipboard rests on the child’s lap. White paper is clamped onto it. Mason clutches a crayon and scribbles on the paper. In a cupholder is a Ziploc bag illed with other crayons. Lodi opens the door. Mason looks up at her and then back at her work. “What are you making?” Lodi asks. “A picture.” “Of what?” Mason holds up the scribblings. “What does it look like?” Lodi is too tired to play this game. “Tell me what it is.” “Guess.” “Tell me.” “Guess.” Lodi wants to scream at her, but she doesn’t. Instead she says, “I’ll guess when you’re done. Let’s go home.” “Ater I inish.” “You can inish at home.” “I want to now.” “No, let’s go now.” “I don’t want to.” “I don’t care, you have to,” Lodi says, her voice rising. Lodi’s father speaks from behind her. “Listen to your mom.” “Okay,” Mason says. Without looking up she places the crayon into the bag and hands it to Lodi. Lodi takes it, shaking her head, wanting to throttle both child and grandfather. She turns and looks at her father.

“Sorry. Paver broke down.” Under his hardhat her father’s face breaks into a smile. The creases that stream out from under his dark safety glasses deepen. Lines run back to his hairline and down over his cheekbones. Lines form a web around his mouth. He looks almost like he’s been in a ire, but he hasn’t. It’s that once he had the face of a baby, the only marks on it a scar running through his let eyebrow and a wad of scar tissue stuck to the end of his chin like a pale leach. It is years of labor and sun that has his face coming apart, nothing else. “No worries. Mason’s good help.” Mason crawls from the pickup carrying the clipboard. She holds it out to her grandfather and asks, “What do you think it is?” “A masterpiece,” he says. Mason smiles at her grandfather and he bends down and hugs the girl. Lodi rolls her eyes. Ater he lets her go he straightens up and says, “All right, ladies, see you tonight.” A few moments later Lodi sits in the car. In the backseat Mason is strapped into her booster. Lodi would like to lean back and nap, not make that inal drive home. Her temples throb. Her blinks linger even longer. Her next shit starts in less than eleven hours. How will she it in sleep? Lodi realizes she is staring at her father and he isn’t moving. He stands a few feet away from the batch truck and the work, slouching, shoulders rolled forward, a hand on his hip, staring down at the ground as if he can’t bear to look up and see the labor that lies before him. Like the work itself has mass. Nowhere does she see the man who raised her, the man with the kid face and kid laugh, who had once been a bull rider, the real deal on television, a star of sorts. A man so free and happy he had named her ater his favorite song. All she sees is a man worn and defeated, and she feels the same defeat creeping into her muscles and bones. But then her father lits his head, takes a big breath, straightens and moves quickly to his work.

MARA NIEMAN-HARGRODER

THE SOUND OF SURVIVING As I lay on the cold hard table made to feel sot by pillows under knee and head the stanza… “…Fools, said I, you do not know, silence like a cancer grows…” went around and around in my head like a 45-rpm record spinning. Strumming guitars and easy sot voices Simon and Garfunkel repeating over and over “…like the sound of silence…” There was no silence to be found. Silence screamed at me tortured me with lyric sans melody A prayer mantra… Killing the cancer Killing the cancer Finding the rogue cells Kill the cancer “Don’t move,” they said. “Hold up your arms,” they said. “Now, do not move,” they said. I was innocent… yet I obeyed As if I were a robber caught at the scene I tried to tell them I was the good one.

Caught in cross hairs red thin laser lines aiming at me. One red laser dot inding my tattooed blue dot. A giant room Monstrous machines echoes of all who had lay on the table where I lay and their prayers… soundless prayers. Only the scream of silence. I was innocent. It wasn’t my fault. Yet, in the raucous silence Blame still wanted her time with me. As I lay bound… her captive ighting to ignore her inger-pointing songs inding reason for the humiliation telling why I feel such sickening terror laying naked and alone while watched from the side lines. A bodiless voice interrupts… “Are you okay in there?”

BEAT If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know. — Louis Armstrong

KIM MONNIER

SOUNDINGS found rib bones sun-bleached white strung hung together will chime with the wind light as air hardened sponge sac wing bones marrow-hollowed will whistle when blown bone grown solidiied with each bone age picked clean by sure transformers now unmuted by liquid lesh from empty lung bellows will sing our Lazarus song

JANET SCHLICHT

CHICKADEE Have you heard the chickadee in springtime, searching for its one true love? It sounds a high/low two note whistle. That is exactly how my dad would call out to his one true love, my mom, contracting her simple name, Lois, into “Lo—ee,” with the same high low lilt. He always comes to mind when the spring chorus starts in my back yard. Sometimes, I imagine it really is him, come back to tell me that things will be okay. The thing is, it’s not just that Ray (that’s my dad) had such a permanent hold on joyfulness, but that he was able to ind joy again and again in spite of tremendous obstacles, in spite of titanic wrestling against the capricious and indiferent blows of Fate. It’s that when he arrived at the end of his life, having traversed the dark wood, he was able to ind immense joy in the everyday, and to sing it like the chickadee. I didn’t know him as a boy, of course, but I grew up knowing, as part of the foundational story of our family, that Ray’s mother had died when he was ten yeas old. She died, on Valentine’s Day, in childbirth, leaving behind ive young children. It was not uncommon in those days to die in childbirth, of course, but he would neither have known nor cared about that. His father turned to the maiden aunts, Bertha and Myrtle, to help raise the brood. Ray was now no longer the doted-on baby of the family, but one piece in a wagon load of responsibilities. If any equilibrium was achieved ater that, it was short-lived. It was 1929, so in October of that year, when life famously changed for nearly everyone in the country, Ray’s father went overnight from being a successful businessman to being a jobless bum, looking for ways to scrape some kind of living out of the scrabbly dryness of west Texas. Who knows what skills he had to ofer, or whether there was even any work for the skilled? And who was then comforting the tenyear-old boy who was grieving the loss of his mother? Who listened to him cry for her return? Who asked him how he was feeling? The answer, I think, is no one. He was on his own emotionally at age ten, cast adrit.

There is a black-and-white photograph, a moment of Ray’s boyhood frozen in time, that sings out to me like a symphonic poem of his childhood. The baby is toddling in the photo, and the other boys are caught in kinetic, cacophonous motion on the rough wooden steps leading to the front porch. The big sister, Olive, is missing, and perhaps she is the photographer. Ray is trying to corral the dog. His face bubbles over with brightness and joy. The chaotic scene makes me hear a big brass band playing, boisterous and spontaneous. In the background, shadowed by the screen door, Aunt Bertha stands and observes in her lowered skirt and apron. Her expression cannot be deciphered, but I hear her as the mournful cello, hear her wondering how she will ever bring this clamorous cluster of kids into adulthood, never mind to maturity. Her presence ills the tableau with all the undertones of sadness and anxiety that I imagine must have permeated the household. The raucous play and laughter seem to exist as a mere puddle of joy in a surround of bewilderment. What about the years ater that, though, where Ray’s irrepressible brass-band self surfaced against the odds? I can imagine his exhausted father telling him to “stop your crying, boy, that’s not going to bring back your mother.” So, there he is, in a photo clipping from the local paper, selling newspapers on the corner, smiling. And there he is again, older now, playing his tuba in the dance band, his cheeks ballooned out, full of the air that will make that huge tuba sound, oompah oompah. He looks happy, conident, even cocky in the way of young jazz musicians everywhere. He looks like he’s got life by the tail. Then came the War, the relentless horribleness of it, the unspeakability of it. He never spoke much about the War, couldn’t be drawn out about it even in later years. It was crucial to everything about him, but unknowable and unknown, the low thunder of the tympani that drives the emotional tone of the symphony while the violins conduct the business of life. I believe he must have thought that ater the War, ater he met my mom and they got married, ater they had a small stucco house and a car and a real job and there was peace and prosperity everywhere, that he had come through

the tumult to rest on the sunny shore. They had two darling babies, and they adored being parents. But then, things went terribly wrong. Two pregnancies ended in stillbirth or infant death. He began to believe, I have to think, that he could not escape death and loss, ever, that it was a dark angel in whose shadow he would walk until taken by his own death; that believing in connection had been a dream as dry as the desert around the unmarked graves; that the small death notice torn from the paper (“infant girls, twin daughter of Lois and Ray Snelson, died on Saturday and will be interred at Evergreen Cemetery”) was a mark of the wound that he could never hope to rise above. What resonated in his deep heart (is it presumptuous of me to say it?) was the knowledge that he might never expect to know happiness. The aridity of the graveyard, the absence of mourners (for who could bear to acknowledge the death of a baby who never lived? Stillbirth — really, so much better to go on about the business of living), gave him to know that the dank cave of loneliness and abandonment still surrounded him, that there was no escape. My mother’s sobs, deep and mournful, ly around tin the desert air at the gravesite like a Greek chorus while the preacher mouths senseless words that only serve to form the morose bass line. By the time I got old enough to try to make sense of life, my dad had grown a pretty thick crust around the tender core of his heart. He wanted to make sure that no more pain could get inside. I felt that about my dad, felt a deep dwelling sadness, felt his annoyance that I could never, from where I sat in the privilege of a middle-class childhood, know the words to his song. But that’s not how it turns out. The brass band still played deep inside him somewhere. He was an Odysseus, having journeyed through his own modern-day Scylla and Charybdis to return home again. There are more family photos: his arms are laden with irewood and he is grinning the satisied smile of the man who has heard the music start again; he looks like the same irrepressible lad trying to harness the dog. In another photo, he is calf-deep in a mountain lake in Idaho. And now he is sitting on my front porch, ity years gone from that irst front porch photo, sharing a bucket of raspberries with his grandson. The Greek

chorus sounds now more like an operatic aria, a song of the apotheosis of his life. I heard a story from my mother, perhaps ater he died, and though I wasn’t there, I feel nonetheless the warm sun wating in through the picture window; see the pink simplicity roses in their bed out in the corner, see also the ripening vegetables and their intimations of plenty. He said to my mother, then, toward the end of his life, cloaked in the hazy northern light of late aternoon in Minnesota: “Why would a man want to travel anywhere when he has this at home?” As Raymond Carver would have said, he got what he wanted from life, even so. That’s why the chickadee makes me think of him. He struggled in so many ways to ind space for his song to be sung. In the end, I believe he found it. In photos of him in his later years, his smile says, “Look at me now, you Fates!” And he let me with the lingering memory of chickadee song.

MAGGIE KOGER

SONG OF THE NORTHERN HONEYSUCKLE September pruning, buds too high to reach Leave them, let winter play its staccato blast. October frost, November freezes overtop our trellis Honeysuckle clings to her sweet, hum, humble buds. December nudges her song to piano sot Shy notes wating into glissandos Lilting out of reach. What secret Jingle is our honeysuckle thinking? Could be the blue sky blues, maybe baby — No sleighs, or reindeer, or ho, ho, hoing. Honey loves singing “The Holly and the Ivy” Loves solstice, Yule, wassail, and “Auld Lang Syne.” New Year’s sun kisses Honeysuckle’s lips She mouths each bud open, pollen arias rising.

CHERYL WEBER RICHARDSON

SEA SHANTY Maybe it’s not about the happy ending, Maybe it’s about the story. — Anon Sing me a song Oh, sing me a song Oh, sing me a song of the sea of waves and water water and sails Oh, sing me a song of the sea. Sing me a song to help me along to new shores and wonders to see of sailors bold with dangers untold while inned folk swim easy and free. Sing me a song as I travel on to the place where the sun meets the sea of gay youth with chests of dark rum we loved best and lasses that strummed for a fee. Sing me a song and I’ll sing along till I land at a port that’s alee of how it all ends ragged sails needing mend becalmed at the edge of the scree. Sing me a song Oh, sing me a song Oh, sing me a song of the sea. Sing it with heart until I depart but shed me no tears when I leave.

MARK D MCALLISTER

WHAT YOU CAN GET FOR A SONG I have a vivid memory of my dad bringing the Camaro home, even though I was barely old enough to be pushing die-cast cars around on the yellowing linoleum in the kitchen area. I heard it rumble into the driveway, a combination of the crackling and mulching of the gravel and a new sound I hadn’t heard before, the low, arrogant purr of an engine that wasn’t built for practicality. Ater it cut, there was the proud sound of a door closing securely, a smooth lubricated fusing, not like the slam of a pickup truck that was cousin to the aluminum door of our trailer. I wasn’t old enough yet to understand what the ensuing ight was about. I was used to what ighting sounded like, because mom had a short fuse, and dad wasn’t good with excuses. This was the irst time, though, that I remember hearing an excuse that became one of his favorites for the rest of the time we were all of us together. I knew there was some kind of new car, I knew that for some reason my mom was angry about that, and I heard my dad keep telling her that he got it for a song. I didn’t understand how that could be, because a lot of the ights they had were about money, mostly not having any or enough. So I thought that it was pretty good of my dad to igure out how to get a new car for a song. He was always trying to igure out ways to do things, and it seemed to me like this was good use of those skills. The part that was harder to understand was why anyone would give my dad anything for a song, especially a Camaro. When he would play his guitar, usually late at night out in the front room ater my mom and I had gone to bed while he was out somewhere, my mom would get up and yell at him for howling at the moon. This kind of didn’t make sense to me either, because he wasn’t exactly howling, and he wasn’t even outside where you could see the moon, but he wasn’t a good singer at all like the singers on the radio. He could make the guitar sound like them pretty well, but his singing either sounded like he wasn’t taking it seriously, or that he was taking it really seriously and he shouldn’t have

been. He’d sing a lot more oten than he would play his guitar. Seems like his guitar only came out at night during the howling at the moon times, but any other time there was a song on he would sing with it. This mostly happened in the morning when he would switch on the radio in the kitchen and shule around in his socks trying to get my mom to dance with him. She wasn’t ever having it, but he would always try. It was probably in the Camaro that I irst remember how much he liked to sing. When mom was really ired up and had had enough of both of us he would put me in the shotgun seat and we would take of down the long gravel drive and out across long stretches of farm roads where there weren’t enough stop signs to cut in on us. He would turn on the radio dial and he would say, “Songs are about conidence. Someday, someone else will teach you that.” And then he would sing. Clint Black, Hank Williams. Merle Haggard. One time I asked him if he had any of his own songs, and he said, “What in the world would I need them for when I got so many that are just right there, already done, that I can have any time I want them?” One day the Camaro was gone, and there was another ight about a rig he had gotten for a song, this time an extended cab Silverado. By that time I understood what he meant, because during the reign of the Camaro there had been a lot of ights, and a lot of things that had been gotten for a song: There was the pool table he had gotten for a song out on the deck covered with a blue tarp, the silver boxes of the Panasonic hi-i system that he had gotten for a song stacked around the TV, and then inally one day the bass boat he had gotten for a song jack-knifed half way up the drive on its trailer. I’m guessing the Silverado was to pull the bass boat, but a diferent rig didn’t bother me as long as I could sit shotgun and listen to dad sing along to the radio, as bad as he was. The Silverado had a cassette player, but dad would still always put on the radio and sing along to whatever came next. Then one day the Silverado and the bass boat were gone. All the things he’d gotten for a song were let choking out the trailer, sufocating it with stuf that he had thought sounded

nice one day. Looking around it didn’t seem like he did much packing up of stuf, either, except for the guitar, which he had packed into its hard, black case and let on the patchwork quilt of my little bed up front. My irst wife didn’t like hearing me play the guitar. I had picked it up in the years ater dad let, and was as nimble with it as he ever was, or better. But she didn’t like hearing it, so I took to playing it in my truck. I would drive out onto the farm roads like I used to do with my dad, but instead of driving and singing I would ind a canal company road to park on and I would play, looking out over ields of perfect green rows or rich tilled earth. At irst I’d put in a cassette of a song I liked and I would play along and learn it really good, but as the years went by I stopped doing that and started iguring out my own songs and got lost in them. On some of those days getting lost in songs lead to watching the sun dip over the long rows and ind my truck pulling up to our little house ater dark. The ighting started when she asked where I had been so late, and I had to tell her that I had gotten lost in a song. She didn’t want to hear this, but I had no ight in me, and the results of my tardiness over and over again were slammed doors and nights alone on the couch, remembering how my dad had spent those kinds of nights howling at the moon years ago. It was ater my irst wife let that I started playing in a band with guys I knew from around the county. I hadn’t before because she told me that she didn’t want me in bars, and bar bands for sure, probably because we had met in a bar while I was playing covers in a bar band. I’m not sure how that igures, but it did with her. I think she knew that my mom and dad had also met when he was playing covers in a bar band. In any case, I had steered clear, but I didn’t need to steer any more. I liked playing in our band, but I kept my singing out of it. We played country and classic covers, the kind of songs that kept drinkers interested while they were playing pool and shaking of the days. Once in a while when there was practically no one in the bar I would turn of the microphones and self-consciously hum through a song of mine. It was a song about what you can get for a song: You can get a dollar in a jar. You can get scattered applause. You can get a couple

of free beers. Mostly, you can get a chance to be in direct communication with the moon. It was late on a Thursday night that I looked up from my stool and was startled to see that a woman had quietly come over to the stage from the bar. I had seen her earlier, but she didn’t look like she was all that into the music. I instantly felt nervous and self-conscious, like I had been caught in the act. I stopped my song mid-verse and quickly played a few diferent chords to hide from what I had been doing. I said, “It’s just me up here, but have you got a favorite? I’d be happy to oblige if I know it.” She looked deep into me for a minute, like she was making sure, and then said, “I’ve already heard everything Tim McGraw has to say. How about one of yours?”

AMANDA RANTH

say what you will the wood swells where the water drops call me a whore or call me impervious to your dilemma I am no longer asking permission to be call me a hawk moth I will dance around the datura under a swollen moon call me a cedar branch I will burn and smoke sweet call me a teary-eyed child broken heart and bruised knee call me an indian summer I will stretch out for you I will reach call me a tedious task will you unravel the knot? or throw the whole ball in the trash? I have no need for commitment I am not a coward I will climb to the top of the roof and sing the silver moon awake I will sink through the cracks of the skylight and drip all over the wood loor

here you can smell the desire it lutters around like a drunken moth here there is wanting here there are cracks here there is an indian burning cedar tell me do you see her? she looks like a crying child she looks like an unraveling mystery she looks like a woman in wanting she will not apologize for waking the neighbors not when there is so much singing to be done not when the datura trumpets her perfume all over the wet earth she will wash her hair with the roots she will drum and dance with her sisters she will run out into the yard and catch rain in her rough palms and she will be free

B-SIDES Tell me what you listen to, and I’ll tell you who you are. — Tifanie DeBartolo

LIZA LONG

LOST IN TRANSITION One rain-washed evening in early October, on a cobbled residential street in Budapest, Hungary, I realized I was lost. I pulled out my spiral-bound pocket notebook, squinting at street signs as I tried to decipher clues to my location. “Utca,” I mumbled, consulting the scribbled glossary I had begun on my irst day in Hungary: “Alma=apple. gyorgy=health. ut=street.” So utca must mean “lane” or “little street.” I was functionally illiterate in a language that had only one distant cousin, Finnish, thousands of miles from my Idaho home, surrounded on all sides by sloppy new construction, slap-dash stucco and plaster mansions for the global nouveau riche who were coming to the formerly Soviet country in droves. I had a sudden vision of my body, violated and strangled and tossed by Russian gangsters into one of the many battered blue dumpsters brimming with constructionsite waste. That gruesome vision quickened my pace as the rain stung my face in the encroaching dusk. In that moment, I felt a sudden profound truth: if I disappeared into the dark, erased like a statue, no one would miss me. Certainly my husband would not miss me. I had arranged this trip, ostensibly so that he could compete in the Rubik’s Cube World Championships, but actually, though I barely knew it myself, I was trying to save my perfect marriage, to patch the cracks in our foundation before they spread. We had taken a romantic Danube River cruise together earlier that aternoon. On the tour, a video dubbed into bad English extolled the virtues of Professor Rubik, Hungary’s most famous son and inventor of the eponymous cube that dominated our 1980s childhoods — fourty-three quintillion possible combinations and only one solution! We admired the soaring span of the rebuilt Elizabeth Bridge, the reconstructed Parliament building, the bleached bone-white Fisherman’s Lookout. My husband commented that Budapest was the perfect place for a city, with its wide river, arable land, and defensible hills. “And yet Hungary was on the wrong side of every

major war in history,” I replied. My husband turned away, staring at the fairy-tale bridge while his hands twisted the cube he always carried into a jumbled mess. “I want to go for a walk,” I told him when the boat docked safe at shore. I hoped — how foolish! — he would ofer to come with me. “Fine,” he said. “Enjoy yourself. I’ll meet you back at the hotel.” As he turned his back to me and walked stily toward the row of taxis, I saw the façade of our marriage as it appeared to others, so bright, with its fresh coat of paint, its geraniums in window boxes. Now, cold and unprepared for the autumn weather, the unfamiliar language, my utter lack of geographical knowledge, I shivered, seeing the spider cracks beneath the paint spreading and threatening to destroy the entire ediice of our marriage. Our perfect marriage. How much had I ever known? Then I heard violin music. It was Bartok, a melancholy folk song, with words I had learned in English as a child: Give to me the roses red, two, I said! One alone would die forlorn, e’er the morn. Oh, no, no! Of you go! Both of them are mine. I had stumbled in my peripatetic folly upon a music academy, and I was tossed into accidental delight by the clean, crisp, rhythmically surprising music of the Hungarian composer I’d studied when I was young. The song illed me, then and now, with the joy of childhood discovery, the sense that things were possible. I did not know my way yet, but now I knew how to ind it. As the song melted into the night, I climbed the nearest hill. Searching for the constellation of lights that glittered along the Elizabeth Bridge, I saw my way through the penumbral haze and back to civilization. When I entered the hotel lobby, drenched and shivering, my husband did not look up from his varicolored toy. I stumbled to our room and collapsed into a merciful, dreamless sleep. The next day, over our last Hungarian meal of fragrant goulash, when he told me, “You don’t love me like you used to,” I looked away, remembered Bartok’s roses.

JOEL WAYNE

SONGBIRDS OF THE OLYMPIC PENINSULA I. From Ware I Sit: How to Write an Obituary Without Embarrassing Yourself (or the Deceased) - Mar. 21, 2015 Death is always in season. Ater the passing of a relative or close friend, you may be asked to bring a dish of potatoes to the reception, organize a selection of photos, or, if you’re one of the poor poops with a two-minute background in journalism or the second drat of a book in your bottom desk drawer, you might actually be tasked with penning the obituary. Don’t panic. Following, you’ll ind a simple formula for crating a perfectly passable obit. Done right, you can have it inished in an hour or two, with time let over to take a nap or add your own dish to the reception. Start with the facts. Full name, dates of birth and death, and where the departed spent their inal days. Open with warmth, regardless of whether it runs perpendicular to the whole truth. If the decedent went to his maker ater a night of drinking in front of the television, or following a heart attack in the tub of a retirement home, nurse aid still sponging his back, you may write, for instance: “Lawrence Eugene Tolliver, 89, passed away on Dec. 4th, 2014 in Kennewick, WA, doing what he loved most: spending the evening with his closest friends” or “within the warm embrace of his loved ones.” A dash of dishonesty is worth a pound of peace. Remember that obituaries, like funerals, exist for the living. Next are the signposts. Birth and parents, education, partner and marriage, work and other pursuits. Handle the diicult moments like a journalist and the pleasant ones like a novelist. If he had a cruel upbringing or a strained relationship with his family, simply leave of “with whom he remained close.” If she divorced, there’s no need to explain why, like the guilty soul who overshares to the cashier, as if the boy making minimum wage cares why you’re buying a case of red wine and two bags of tater tots. If he was a git or a

loner, 86 that too. Find the warmth and give it a pull, like tafy. Of a remarriage, you might say, “She met and wed her lasting love in ___.” Of children, you might include a singular detail: “An animal lover, like her father, she burst into tears when meeting a zookeeper with a saw-whet owl in his leathered hand, overwhelmed at meeting one of her heroes.” Think of a good obit as neither a book nor a chapter, but a hearty mix of fact and fancy. For instance: “She was the irst in her family to graduate high school, with her sights set on becoming a nurse. Allowed to pierce her ears for the occasion, she lost an earring and spent the evening with a paperclip in its place, the talk of the party. She was the type to walk into her ten-year reunion with a paperclip dangling from her ear.” Details that make acquaintances nod and strangers wish they’d met her. Close things out with a bookend of inal details. Who he’s survived by, who preceded her in death, and where and when the service is being held. Don’t fear the wrap-up. No need for sentimentality when you’ve already put on your coat and said your goodbyes. No late-game surprises about a son you didn’t mention earlier, an endowment he let to the university, a book of poems she published. No tasteless calls for donations to a favorite charity in lieu of lowers; you’ve already praised the dead for a stanza or two, no need to add another sonnet about their sellessness. And for godsakes, don’t billow over 500 words. Less if you can manage. Last and perhaps most important, proofread until your eyes hurt. Hand it to a trusted source, who also knew the deceased, and ask them to check your work. No one in mourning wants to read that his wife was “liked by all and loved by manly — men, women, children, and animals alike.” Or that her husband “served as the pubic relations oicer for the engineering union.” But even a misspelled lake or a misplaced comma can feel like a crime of dispassion to those in mourning. Fight like hell to mitigate your mistakes before you pass it along to the bereaved for their approval. Then take a nap. You’ve earned it.

II. Local Obituaries - Jan. 21, 2017 Hubert Donald Ware, 76, passed away on January 19, 2017, in Bellingham, WA, doing what he loved best: birdwatching in the forest around Deer Creek. Don was born March 18, 1941, to Harvin and Susan Ware in Yuma, Arizona, the younger of two boys. He later welcomed a much younger sister, Cynthia, with whom he remained close. He attended Yuma High School, graduated in 1959, and moved to Tacoma, Washington to pursue a career in journalism. On Sept. 22, 1962, he married Mary Beth Tolsma, a nurse from Indiana, who he met on a ferry in the San Juan Islands. They formed a near-instant bond, both missing their stops, and they were married three months later. They had a daughter together, Kimberly Jay, who brightened their home in Tacoma in the fall of 1963. Don and Mary Beth traveled extensively. They were avid campers — Don was an amateur ornithologist and Mary Beth loved to take pictures. They spent many days hiking in national parks, and evenings baking peach cobblers over campground ires, walking the loops to dole out helpings with a side of rum punch, on July 4th or the odd Friday, Kimberly skipping behind to hand out plastic kazoos. Don wrote for the Tacoma News Tribune and Mary Beth worked at St. Joseph Medical Center. For a short time, they owned a small studio for local artists, “The Winter Wren,” which they closed in 1972. Don and Mary Beth divorced in 1974, whereupon Don wandered, over the next few years, to Baltimore, Cincinnati, Dayton, Ohio, and Kyoto, Japan, before settling in Bellingham in 1978. He wrote for the Bellingham Herald and penned a regular culture and advice column, “From Ware I Sit,” for over 30 years. He spent many of his days reading, writing, or exploring the parks and waterways of the Kitsap and Olympic peninsulas. Every fall, he’d hike Mt. Baker, the state’s secondhighest peak, which he referred to as his second home. He could be an ornery git and a loner, and he’ll be sorely missed by those who dug in their treads enough to know him. Don leaves behind a sister and brother-in-law,

Cynthia and Arnold Amundson of Baltimore; two nieces and three nephews; and his ex-wife Mary Beth Hall, with whom he remained close and wrote letters to at least twice a year. He is preceded in death by his parents, his older brother, Raymond, and his little songbird, Kimberly, who passed at the age of nine ater a brief battle with leukemia. A service will be held at Rohnert Funeral Chapel in Bellingham on Thursday, January 26, from 5pm-6pm. Condolences may be shared at RohnertChapel.com, where visitors can also purchase Don’s posthumously published book, Songbirds of the Olympic Peninsula.

III. Corrections - Jan. 27, 2017 An obituary from last Sunday mistakenly identiied Mount Baker as Washington’s second-highest peak. Mount Baker is the state’s third-highest peak, only topped, respectively, by Mount Adams and Mount Rainier.

CAITLIN PALMER

LAPSE BECOMES THE WHOLE SOUND Bon Iver, “For Emma, Forever Ago,” but what is forever, how long have I been gone and was it long enough, mother, you are ity years old, from a diferent world, mama, I wish there were things I could speak to you, wish in the speaking you would understand. What is it when driving you feel the pull towards an embankment, a hill, a stone, to rather stay in the in-between than get to where you are going. Is this called longing, or nostalgia? Is there any aspect of either deinition diferent than death? Let me be grounded: here, in the Midwest, the plains are covered in sun, a tidy blanket tucked over them, the woods verdant and full. Yet highways connect only places similar to other places, mother. Everywhere I could go here is the same. In my sleep I dream of coasts. Always have. Shapes of islands I know intimately, here sand and there hard ridges, here wating of food smells and on the jutting’s other side, the music, drug-induced. How can I say that I long for a place I’ve never seen, a place amalgamated from other places I’ve lived for only months out of my life? I, some transplant on the wrong end of the world. If you’d take the bet I wouldn’t cut all losses to get back there, you’d be wrong. No, it was the song ‘Holocene’: “And at once/ I knew/ I was not magniicent.” I wish to tell you this truth, wish to break it down like the half-note falls on the keyboard, the strumming that echoes itself like looking irst one way, down the street, then the other: I am not magniicent, I am not the savior you’re looking for, mother, and perhaps all that means is that my pain is too dear to me. I used to dance in buildings of the rounded blue domes you see of Greece, the sky outside, a lost map far away from any other possible point of reference. Clifs, out the window, dashing down, inky stone to inky water crashing in the depths. I was pulled there, mother, like the stories of the selkies, half man, half seal, and like that mythical creature I would trade so much of humanity to stay on the crests. If I’m going to strike to wound you, let me do it quick:

I will not live among your landscape of farms, will not marry here, or keep a job close enough that I can no longer lit my eyes. I will not be one to have children, to keep children’s children, will not perpetuate the happy home. This word may be coming too late. In Greece, wandering, and ater, I went for months without speaking to you, or to any I knew here. Revelled in the way I could be absorbed into the night. Always new city streets (very old), always new towns each like its own strain of song. I could improvise so well. You pick up a note and then you drop it; each lapse is its own sound. Now I’m back here, have been washed up, ater the money was gone, you picking me up at the train station. You bought me food and I was grateful. But I have stopped being grateful here now. Here, where there is only one note played, is it a surprise that I walk around like I cannot hear? Cannot speak? Sounds have stopped making sense to me. Sometimes, feeling this way, I have to drive to the dingy little lake to park, sit in the car, put my hands over my face to keep the shock from coming out too hard, the gulping sounds, not tears, so much, as it is like trying to breathe. Even now, “Someway… it’s a part of me/ apart from me.” Bon Iver croons as if his words can make sense, but I’ve looked up the lyrics, and they don’t. You have aged and my father has aged but neither one of you is as old as I am. Perhaps it sounds gallant to say, perhaps arrogant at the privateness of each our own sorrow, but I wish it was done the other way, I wish you were my children and in running out into your own lives, you would not feel abandoned that I went to mine. If there was a thing I could ask you, if I could have the nerve to say it: Please let me disappear. I can see for miles.

MATTHEW JAMES BABCOCK

AMERICAN ANTHEM Outside Biaggi’s, teens in creamy gowns and tuxes pass panhandlers in the blind parade. Dusk stains sidewalks pink. Busses lurch. Stretched limos promenade. A glum vet, slim as a blade of candlelight, sinks bills in his sneaker, claws a scrawny ankle. At the traic light, Elvis Costello’s scuzzy double begs means to perch bedside for a dying aunt in Canada. Should we wonder that the world is a street corner? Everywhere you wait, the desire of the day scrawls a menu of myths on a cardboard sign. Plush voices crack, ordering a fantasy, and the man pours the wine. This is your country. Land of the Guarded Stare. Hunger scufs the loor in a dim gymnasium of sappy ballads and snags the last slow dance in a room of overturned chairs. In the same half hour, you can meet two women, both in their eighties, one asking about the neighbor boy’s suicide, the other with a snapshot on her avocado fridge — her only son, dead for all she knows. Evenings, shove your toes in combat boots, don a grungy skirt and loose lemon blouse, slouch against a streetlight, boyfriend in your lap, while he cadges smokes from Jazz fans. You can watch mobs of starlings jab rinds of sunlight in the gutter, wear on your exposed breast a corsage of grime. Your standing reservation can be the newest way to seem, to ind a place to sit and never get over the day someone handed you a dream.

JULIA MCCOY

CLVII I kill CLVI with the bottom of a soda glass. Head and thorax pancaked under the circular bottom, back legs still poised, ready to spring. “Got it,” I say, but my love is already scrawling the numerals on the wall with black Sharpie. C. L. V. I. I do the math. Five hundred crickets dropped through living room window. One hundred and thirty ive dead, let smashed on the loor, countertops, tables. Three hundred and sixty ive still inhabiting the walls, carpets, vents. Chirping out with their bandy legs, sounding their existence with each passing moment. “At this rate,” my love has also done the math, “we’ll be killing them for the next three and a half weeks.” Her mouth twists into a knot. “Au contraire. The last ones will be harder to ind.” “Maybe some have vacated already.” That was our hope last week, when the sound of a thump, then laughter, then burning rubber woke us from our sleep. Some harmless prank, I supposed. By the time we roused from bed, the crickets had absconded from their opened container, an Amazon box split down the middle. We, who have no money to even pay next month’s rent, could not aford to call an exterminator, could not aford to tell the landlord. Wife said they would leave. I agreed. Surely they prefer the outdoors. They do not. “We’re not that lucky.” My love caps the Sharpie. She doesn’t like the smell. But at this point, with a week’s worth of decaying crickets littering the ground, there’s hardly any point. The whole house smells like sewer, or the sweet aroma of bread mold, or microwaved broccoli, depending on where I stand. My clothes smell like this too. Coworkers won’t stand come near me anymore. My love does, but that’s because we both smell the same. It, along with the insects, is something to bring us together. “Should I get the broom?” I asked this question ater the irst cricket too,

but then I immediately stepped on the second. We didn’t clean those, nor the ones that followed. What was the point of cleaning, when the loor was a vast, moving colony of insects, and every step killed a few more? Not only that, but it was easier to keep track when they were stickered to the loor beneath. Now that our kills are in the hundreds, I’m wondering if now is the time to rid ourselves of our collection. She just shrugs. “If you want.” So I don’t. We kill more. Under the furniture, between the mattress and itted sheet, behind Target paintings. We turn on our TV, plastic antennae stuck to the window to pick up a free signal, and try to drown out their noise. At night, we sleep with foam ear plugs, but I can’t keep them in all day. My ears start to feel like they’re swelling with altitude and infection. The sound the crickets make is the worst part. Overlapping hymns of high pitched exhilaration, an orchestra without a conductor, let to play whatever they desire to the detriment of their audience. That’s the best thing about killing them. I can hear the rise of silence when they fall, the swelling absence that promises their inal rest. My love yawns. I yawn. There is only so much one can do in a day. It is not late, and the sun is still burning at the edges of the yard. Still, we’ll resume tomorrow. The next day, and the next, and the next. I can’t envision my future without them, anymore. The crickets, and their violin bow legs skittering over frayed strings. My love is asleep before me, voluminous space between us. Her hair is damp with oil, and hangs over her face in sheets that will cause her to break out in red spots. I brush it aside with my ingertips, and asleep, she doesn’t pull away. She roles sideways, revealing the little brown plug that lets her sleep through the symphony. For my part, I have not put them in yet. I twist the foam in my ingertips as crickets weave across our carpet in intricate, shadowed leaps. I could kill them. My work boots sit next to my bed, heavy with protection and large to encompass my feet. But night is overwhelming, and the magnitude of our problem weighs down my feet and arms until they are anchors, mooring me to a dock, waves lapping against my side. Undoubtedly, I am

going insane. I plug up my let ear, resting it against the pillow, but leave the right unencumbered. To truly defeat them, I must be able to sleep through their chorus. Straining against it is no use, so instead I let it wash over me. Every miscounted beat, all the misplaced legato, they consume me. Except there is another noise now. One that was underneath all along, I’m sure. A pulse. Mandibular munching marking a percussive rhythm. I leave my love behind to follow the new instrument. I trace it to the kitchen, stepping so as to not crunch the bugs under my bare toes. The gnawing crescendos over the chirping, my ears straining for the new instrument, a gentle rolling timpani. There is a lack of insects on the kitchen tile, given that the loor is a creamy linoleum and all is visible. There is but one single line of seven, standing guard in front of the cabinet under the sink, a dark particle board door. They are still. I kneel down in front of them, knees cracking as I bend down. Their antennae twitch in strobing gestures, sensing me. Friend or foe? I reach out to one and touch it’s antennae with my pinky. “I come in peace.” They sweep sideways, and I open the door. There, beyond the cabinet door, nestled behind Draino and 409, a bag of sponges and pipes, are dozens of them. They move in simultaneous fashion, chewing through the wall. They stop. They turn to me. Eyes glistening in the light cast from the full moon. “Oh.” My love is there. I did not hear her arrive, but now she is crouched beside, whistling as she breathes through her nose. “They’re coming,” I say. “In from the other side.” “Yes. They always were.” “Yes.” “We could stop them here,” she points at the 409. “Gas them.” “We could.” We share a moment. One of many in our married lifetime, when we are of one mind. A synchronicity whose absence I only understand now on its return. There are things

too awful to undertake. Reaching out together, we press our ingertips against the wall, pushing against the thinned surface. Our hands touch as we crumble the remaining barrier, lecks of paint and wood raining onto the heads of the crickets. We feel fresh air on our ingers, and ind the night. They are waiting on the other side. A hundred or more, hiding among the blades of grass. They chirp at their compatriots on the other side, and now I hear the melody, call and response, completed, conducted. The irst cricket steps through the gap. CLVII. My love and I take each otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hands and step away. It is a shameful invasion of privacy. We must go. I lock the door behind us. We settle on the dry, spiny grass. We settle in the nightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s silence. My love rests her head on my chest. I prop my head on my let hand, the right curling around her shoulders.

REX ADAMS

WITHOUT A SONG You and I never had a song. Is that what doomed us? I wonder if a tune would’ve given us a quiet place to retreat to when it felt like we wanted to tear each other apart. Somewhere that reminded us of the sotness we once felt. /// October 10, 2003. That was the day of the irst miscarriage. You woke in the middle of the night, panties bloody. We thought it was nothing, a little spotting associated with pregnancy. But in was something. Spotting turned to hemorrhaging. I hauled you into the emergency room. You passed out on the mottled tile loor, gray-faced. I was certain you were dead. Ater hours of crying all the pain litted from your twisted and quivering face and you looked peaceful. I don’t think I ever loved you more than at that moment. /// Do you remember the irst song we danced to as husband and wife? I don’t. I only remember two things about the ceremony and reception. Sweating under my suit, and your family and my family, as opposite as the two of us, forced together in that tiny hall. Upper class city stuck with lower class country. We igured we’d overcome it. We didn’t. But I do remember later, in the bridal suite. I sat in the jacuzzi tub, soap suds bubbling up and tickling my chest and armpits. The scent of eucalyptus in the water. Your garter, the one I didn’t toss, was stretched around my head, and I’d stufed hundred dollar bills into it like the feathers of a war bonnet. You stood in the doorway, naked. You were petite then, but there was nothing girly about your igure. You had hips and a narrow waist, full irm breasts. I rose from the water wrapped in a soapy cloak, the bubbles a sock around my erection. I went to the edge of the tub and you met me there. I took your arm and pulled you in. And soon your skin was just as slick and soapy as mine. My hands glided over your shoulders, your back. I gripped your hips. You slid from my grasp. But then I had you again. We watched each other in the mirror.

For us, tenderness was not part of sex. We treated sex like a contact sport. Whenever I think of how it was, before sex let our marriage, I smell eucalyptus and a raw feeling invades my gut. I wonder if your new lover is as lucky as I was on that night. I hope not. /// The absence of a song doesn’t explain why we hated each other so completely and harshly, why we brought the same intensity to our ights as we did to the bedroom, why we whittled each other down to bones and then cracked them open. Do you and your new lover have a song? /// I’m in a relationship. She’s nothing like you. No mood swings, no rage, no passion. She laughs at my jokes, never questions my motives. Our relationship has let me impotent. We have a song, unlike you and me. I won’t tell you what it is because you’ll scorn me. I can’t stand that scorn of yours, not one more moment of it, even if it’s only imagined. Your scorn always started with a scowl that burrowed into my chest, my brain. Your look made me hurt. But maybe someone like you is what it takes to keep me in line. Now I do anything I want. This new gal, I take advantage of her. Ater work and on the weekends I tell her I’m working late, or meeting up with old friends. There are no friends to meet up with. It’s just me, alone, hanging around drinking joints looking for something I once had but lost. I’m not sure why I don’t tell her. She wouldn’t get mad. I know what I lost and where it is, but I’ll never get it back. Do you think our song, if we’d had one, would’ve saved us? I do. /// When I lie in bed with Mary, that’s her name, I try not to think of you. But inevitably I do and usually, especially ater drinking, I go back to the night we met. New Year’s Eve 1999. The dawn of Y2K. You were by yourself, dancing at the edge of the crowd, wearing tall black boots, a short black dress. Your blond hair curled into tight ringlets about your face and over your neck, brushing against your bare collar bone. You

held a glass of champagne above your head. Your eyes were closed. Nobody in the world could break into your zone. I wonder what you were thinking about. Did you really think the world was going to implode and we would be thrown into total chaos? Were you accepting it with eyes closed, thinking, Come and get me. I’m happy? I never saw that look on your face again. Except when I thought you were dead. I kissed you at midnight. Your mouth tasted like champagne and tequila. At three in the morning, in your apartment, you rose and stood in front of a narrow window lit yellow by a street light. You were unashamed by your nakedness. I was drunk, well past my limit to perform a double, but I wanted you again. You went to the bathroom, came back, slid into bed and I crawled over you. I can still feel your hands on my back, your knees against my ribs. Ater, I rested my ear between your breasts and let the easy thump of your heart hypnotize me, quiet my unquiet mind. But then nearly two decades later you are gone, to me at least, even though I saw you last week at our oldest child’s spring recital. I stared at you, searching for some evidence of the woman who stood nude in the doorway on our wedding night. I saw no one who resembled the young blond in black boots and a black dress dancing her way into the end of the world. I saw a middle-aged woman, slightly overweight, with straight blond hair cropped at the jaw. And she was holding the hand of a man with a paunch, thin hair, and glasses. He wore chinos, leather loafers and an argyle sweater. When I saw him, your guy, I chuckled. Mary asked me what was so funny. I told her nothing. She didn’t question me further. But I was thinking, There is no way he gets as hard as I once did. He can’t drive home what you really want. He should be with Mary. Maybe that is my little ego-driven fantasy blinding me to the truth. Maybe he gets as hard as an eighteen year old and has the stamina of an Arabian endurance horse. Or perhaps I’ve had it wrong all along. Maybe I never knew what was truly important to you, what satisied you. I was so wrapped up in the smell of your skin, in the ferocity of your love, I failed to see what you needed from me, especially ater the irst miscarriage and those that followed. Maybe what

you needed was someone to listen without touching, retreat without ighting. Maybe you needed a chest with a calm heart to place your ear against. Maybe the end of us had nothing to do with the lack of a song. Maybe it had to do with me.

REBECCA LOUISE WEEKS

poets trust poets trust the moment enough to write what is hiding â&#x20AC;&#x201D; that smell that rises from the earth when you scuf the top luf of damp dirt and expose the invisible network of mycorrhiza that rises musty to the nose and before you notice youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re tingling and standing there like a tree with roots deep limbs strong head dancing in clouds

ERIC E WALLACE

SURFACE TENSION Bliss. There was no other word for it, Serena thought. Spending part of their wedding anniversary underwater, weightless, driting among schools of butterlyish and wrasses — undulating curtains of subtle hues, sudden upwellings of explosive colors — gliding in a realm of slow motion, sinuous reef plants and fern corals, loating under white-bellied manta rays, swimming with hammerhead sharks: all was incomparable bliss. Serena took a slow, thoughtful breath. The hammerheads, gods of these Hawaiian seas, were not to be feared. There was far more danger in the world above, with its madmen, rampant greed, hubris, fanaticism and disregard for the planet. But this wasn’t the time to focus on the follies of humankind. Serena and Jeremy wanted to dive of uncrowded Molokai, forget the rest. Underwater there was so much to feel, to see, and — there they were again — to hear. Not the steady rasping of parrotish on coral, fun enough, but the sublime songs of the whales. The low vibrations seemed to make her bones tingle. She shuddered in anticipation of the next phrase. For phrase it was, and surely musical, at least in human terms. The humpbacks were singing again. Somewhere in the Kalohi Channel or even out in the open Paciic, the great creatures were communicating. And the ocean was letting her listen. A sonic eavesdropper, and auditory voyeur. She shivered as another note-push of longing — was that what it was? — or love or desire, surely those? — sounded through the receptive waters. A double bass? No. Edgier. A bassoon? No, lower. And a melody? Not in Mozart’s terms, she supposed. But in universal terms, yes. She thought she could feel her skin rise as another profound throb coursed around the reef. And then another. Poignant. Thrilling. A language eons old. Finally, some primeval ticking of her own brain made her look at her dive computer.

She blinked. She’d been too engrossed. A common diver error. Time for their irst surface interval of the morning. She brushed away an encroaching triggerish and glanced about for her husband. Jeremy was a meter or so to her let and slightly below her. He was watching a moray eel slowly opening and closing its mouth. Despite lourishing long rows of teeth, the eel seemed to be conversing, not acting aggressively. Serena swam over, nudged Jeremy, gestured upwards. Jeremy looked at his computer and mocked exaggerated surprise, Charlie Chaplin in black neoprene. Ascending slowly, languorously, they surfaced a short distance from their rented dive boat, Mo’o-town, gently rocking of the edge of the long reef. Small and inelegant, the boat nevertheless was an extravagance. “But,” Jeremy had said, for once not grimacing about money, “you don’t have a tenth anniversary every year.” Their owner-captain, also rented, was waiting with pulpy orange drinks in tall, sweating glasses. Skip was stocky, ageless, brown-eyed, with skin darker than volcanic soil. /// When they irst met him, they’d taken him for a native. “Naw,” Skip said. “Haoli from Detroit. Ater ‘Nam, came over in 1977, married a local, took up boats, divorced, stayed.” He wrestled a dive tank into its holder. “Shark,” he announced, catching Serena’s quick look at his missing inger. A beat, watching her shock. “Naw, Don’t try to gut ish when you’re drunk.” He led the laughter. Their irst day out, Skip had talked about lonely Molokai, the high sea clifs, Father Damien and the leper colony, the pleasures of relative isolation. “Still,” he snorted, “the world tries to get at us. They’re reopening the old World War II bunkers. Testing air raid sirens. Nowadays everyone’s a target. Even ‘way out here.” /// Today, as Jeremy and Serena were peeling down the tops of their wetsuits and toweling of. Skip was back on the same subject. “While you was below, I was listening to the radio.

100

Them idiots is at it again. President Tweet and the Little Guy. Dueling. Heckling. Gimme a coupla mongooses any day. Smarter. An’ they don’t play dangerous games.” “Hey,” Jeremy shaded his eyes. “We came here to escape that stuf.” He watched two frigate birds crossing above them. Skip tugged at a piece of sugar cane, chewed vigorously. “Yeah, well, escaping’s hard to do. An’ that false alert last January didn’t help none. Some fool pokes a wrong computer button, and all Hawaii is at sixes and sevens.” He spat pulp into a bucket. “Nope, ain’t much escaping it. Not even on sleepy old Molokai.” “Let’s try,” said Jeremy. “Look,” Serena said excitedly. She pointed of the stern. Only a few feet away, head rising from the water, a spy-hopping humpback, heavily gnarled and barnacled, was looking at them. “That’s one intelligent creature,” Serena sighed. Jeremy laughed. “He’s giving you the eye.” The whale slipped back under the surface. Serena took a moist chunk of cherimoya from a plate of fruit. “Long migrations for those guys.” Skip said. “Every year, they come down here all the way from Alaska to warm up and mate.” “Tell us about their singing,” Serena said. “What’s that about?” She puckered at the sweet-sour taste of the cherimoya. Skip scratched his nose with his piece of sugar cane. “Just bunch a horny humpbacks.” Serena frowned. Skip grinned. “I’m kidding. Sorta. Scientists think it’s mostly males. Songs of seduction. Showing of. Maybe showing emotions.” “How far away are they?” Serena asked. Skip shrugged. “Well, sound carries like crazy underwater. They might be just a quarter mile away, or they could be of Waikiki, watching the babes suring. Hell, they could be ‘way out in the big blue kahuna.” “God, look!” Jeremy pointed. Less than a thousand yards out, a humpback was breaching. Moments later, another whale surged out of the water, arced, crashed down, the huge

101

splash obscuring Lanai. The dive boat seemed to rock from the primal force. As if in response, Mo’o-town’s radio sputtered crossly, tense voices rattled the speakers. Over the water from Molokai, came the mordant wail of a siren. “Speaking of songs…” Skip joked, but he stepped to the cockpit and turned up his radio. “They’re not supposed to do tests anymore.” Three cell phones abruptly chimed a small cacophony of merry, silly little tunes. “What now?” asked Jeremy peevishly. “Can’t we just —” “Shit!” said Skip. “C’mere and listen, both of you. This ain’t good.” They huddled in the cockpit, listened to the radio, thumbed their phones. It was no false alarm. North Korea had launched four nuclear missiles toward the U.S., three aimed at the mainland and one at Hawaii. “Pearl Harbor, betcha,” Skip said. “The leet, nuclear subs. Plus that fat little dictator knows his history. He’s playin’ at deja voodoo.” “How far are we from Pearl Harbor?” Jeremy asked, his voice unusually steady. “God, not sure.” Skip’s bronzed face seemed whiter. “35, maybe 40 miles.” “Hey,” Serena said, staring at her smart phone. “We shot one down. Headed for Los Angeles.” “One? What about the others? What about here?” Jeremy asked. Serena shook her head. “Shit!” Skip threw down his sugar cane. “Billions of bucks and our defense system still sucks.” The breeze picked up. Everyone shivered. The sirens howled. Relentless. Taunting. “How long?” Jeremy asked. Serena trembled. “They guess eight to ten minutes.” A cherimoya seed tumbled from her mouth. “OK, here’s what we’re gonna do,” Skip said, straightening. “Get your gear back on, grab fresh tanks. We’ll go to no more’n twenty feet, max the air, maybe miss the worst of it, the fallout, all that crap.” They didn’t hesitate. Zipped up wetsuits. Threw on

102

BCs, tanks and ins. “Boat’s anchored,” Skip said, getting his gear. “If we’re lucky, she’ll stay right here. Aterwards, we come up and see what’s what.” Serena and Jeremy hugged each other, their ins entangling. “I love you,” she said. “Me too.” They clumped apart, put on their masks, rolled backwards over the side. Serena stopped at eighteen feet, Jeremy close beside her. Two turtles swam slowly by. A school of blue neon ish came toward them, reversed direction, rippling like an aurora. Waving its tail, a hammerhead rose from below, moved away. Serena watched it all blankly. Dread. There was no other word for it, she thought. It was the sum of fear and doubt, horror and powerlessness. She reached for Jeremy’s hand, and they waited, suspended. Ater minutes, an hour, a lifetime, there was a watery rumble, a slight heaving. Serena looked to the surface. A corrugated light shimmered through the wave-ripple. The ocean-lensed sky vibrated from green-black to billowing orange, to an intense glare tinged with gray. Serena, hyperventilating, fought with herself, slowed her breathing. She heard something. Whale songs. Bewilderment. Inquiry. Sadness. Mourning. She looked at Jeremy. Behind the mask, his eyes were wide. Not with terror. With understanding. They loated, listening. Now, Serena thought, there was no mistaking what the whales were singing: long, sonorous lines of lament. Of soul pain. She understood them perfectly now. She listened, enraptured. Ironically, she realized, despite her grief, sadness and uncertainty, she also was feeling… bliss.

103

104

THE BLUES Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world. â&#x20AC;&#x201D; L.M. Elliott

105

106

MATTHEW JAMES BABCOCK

HYMN FOR THE CONTROL FREAK Lord, scope the skulls of rebels and tell me how they lie to themselves. The Wat Tylers and Boxers of Shangdong, the Angolas and States of Jeferson illed with squatters who occupy and mutineers who march. Open their eyes to the tyranny of nonconformity. Tune the ears of the world to freedom singing in its cage, “Oh, Human Will, Lock without Key.” Add my proverb to yours: “No porch swings without breezes” (Gospel of Me 1:1). The ice cream man needs this the most, the gummy-eyed guy in ragged pumpkin T-shirt who prowls in his wheezy wagon down our street from Memorial Day to the equinox. His mother, wheelchair-bound, rides in back with the fudgesicles like Norman Bates mimicking Whistler’s mother in repose, fuzzy red quilt over her knees. Speakers blast “God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman” through the neighborhood all July, and my six-year old son dashes in to bash his ceramic piggybank to dust then races outside with a buck in change to worship curbside for a frozen treat he could get elsewhere for a dime. He waits, hands raised, a cultist sans culottes, stained copper

107

dripping from his clutches, head cocked for the sultry tune of the Pied Piper of the Rainbow Rocket Pop. Dusk purples the street corner where he searches the ine liberation of this fugitive summer, the anarchy of his blood and August air lavored with the trill of goldinches in a brittle gallery of sunlowers, the chirps sounding like small shears. Make my son come in. Make him stop waiting for delight that never appears.

108

HEATHER HAMILTON-POST

WHEN TO RETIRE A ROPE You want the synthesis of a single moment dripped to you, fed like oil through a paper funnel or exploding from the earth like an angry and predictable geyser, Old Faithful, who is celebrated for her mediocre regularity and sulfur stream of medium height. But me? I always preferred the quiet violence of the slow boil. The moment I come back to, even in new love: a night when we were on a couch and you said We’ve never loved each other the same amount at the same time and then went to bed. The moment when I thought Crazy Little Thing Called Love was an Elvis song and you told the DJ to play Girlfriend is a Centerfold at our wedding And still, nobody told us we were too young. A single piece of string will ware through, telling you that it is done, but strings on strings on strings — how do you know when to retire a rope? Once, I drove through a sky of balloons and it was so beautiful that I welled up on the way to work, though it wasn’t pretty in photographs, the bugs on my windshield obscuring my view. Once, you kissed someone who wasn’t me and I didn’t cry at all. I was hungry for the kinds of things you couldn’t feed me anymore and you weren’t hungry at all. My grandfather, in his wisdom, bakes the best banana bread in the whole world, it’s golden surface splitting into a canyon of sugar and lour, a ravine made from the rotten corpses of old fruit made new and delicious.

109

JULIE MARIE FOGERSON

THEN AND NOW “Your bitch is behind the mailbox!” I hear the words yelled out somewhere vaguely ahead. I am out with my then-iancé now ex-friend, and we rented a van to haul six people to the nearest waterpark. Lauren really wanted to go, and nobody had any real objections. Some of us, Lauren, are full on excited. Others, me, are indiferently interested. Lauren assures us there will tankards of ale to go with our slip-sliding. What could pairing beer with climbing tall, wet, metal structures hurt? We are picking up a passenger, my then-crush, now ex-lover, and though you may pause and ask, “Wait. What about your then-iancé?” I answer that my then-crush is not then known to me as such. He was always what he is, just not known. Not really right then. Not for a few months later ater we spend a lot more time together, and I understand where the pit of my stomach bottoms. I become a raging klutz from not saying things that need to be said — more to my theniancé than to my then-crush, but it all ties together. As we turn onto DeKalb, my then little brother now ex-conidante thinks it would be funny if I jump out of the car and hide a few beats back from my then-crush’s stoop to scare him. He will innocently walk toward the van, while the van driven by my then-iancé hangs a few measures back from my hunched form and waits. Both machine and I are like sharks, moving but not moving forward. I hear Lauren loudly whisper through the cracked window that my then-crush is coming at the same time as I hear his door shut and his footsteps begin. I tense in glorious anticipation because inspired people never legitimately tire of acting like they’re twelve. A vehicle approaches me from the rear and drives on past, the engine sound roaring louder than the approaching feet. Suddenly, there is yelling. “Your bitch is behind the mailbox!” “What?” Loudly returns my then-crush. “I said, your biiiiitch is behind the maaaailbox,” my

110

then-nothing, now-nothing sings to my then-crush from the passenger window of the car that is beyond my then-iancé and little brother, as well as just past me. I don’t really get that the car of strangers is yelling about me. Not really right then. That I’m the bitch, though I am certainly right now behind a mailbox. My then-crush doesn’t understand either. But, my then-crush is nonetheless sensitive to the mailbox as he nears it, and though I still jump out at him, my heart isn’t really in it anymore because I am sensitive to his heightened sensitivity. No one is scared or rewarded. I straighten up. Even though it doesn’t amount to anything in this particular situation, I still feel betrayed.

111

ALAN MINSKOFF

HOMAGE Ike Quebec’s low notes liquefy like love or grapes into wine. His lonely soul compresses into his tennor sax. His mellow rifs make music you hear spill out of jazz joints perfumed with gin. The sweet sweat three-quarter time hours ater midnight. The music’s smooth the tempo so slow the clock backtracks to lonely evenings awash in Cannonball Adderley’s “Jive Samba,” “Solo Monk” when miles of Miles were not nearly enough.

112

CHRISTIAN WINN

OUT HERE We wake up remembering the rhythm of itful moonless hours beneath crackling neon, dreaming up death threats we leveled at the girls three states gone, and it’s another simple collision of days, wishing to return to that unrelenting summer they all died, it doesn’t seem so long ago when as children we came asking, came pleading, arms and legs a tired construct of want and derring-do, and now this. In the end we go out walking, under the threadbare sun, cheat grass reaching brittle from familiar gutters and root heaves allowing us the knowledge that yes we’re still out here looking for the good girls and the guns, but none of that’s easy anymore, so yes we’ve learned to love the simple act of losing and trustless blind luck. This could be any other morning song all tied up and wanting in one of the many folded up outposts of America, the glitter of dust at the horizon, spent cigarettes, the shell casings, spelling out the half-life of extradition, of halcyon hours, and inally the punchline that, when it lands will forever separate the knowing from the all-knowing.

113

REX ADAMS

KILLER PEN Horses mill high-headed inside a holding pen, banging against metal panels, fogged breath exploding from lared nostrils. The boy stands in the alley, peering into the pen, searching for the roan gelding. He spots the gelding in a corner, separate from the other slaughter horses. The gelding’s head hangs low, the coarse, black hairs of his mane dreadlocked around cockleburs, thistle, spiny branches. The roan puts no weight on his right rear leg, holding the toe of the hoof above the corrugated concrete loor. The roan’s ears prick forward when he turns to look at the boy’s face, but then a blue-eyed sorrel peels away from the milling horses. With ears pinned, the blue-eyed horse’s muzzle shoots out, his neck stretching. His upper lip curls, baring his teeth. He buries his teeth into the roan’s hindquarter. The roan tucks his tail, humps his back, attempts to kick the blue-eyed horse, but he can’t get of the ground with only one hind leg, so he trots, limping, out of the corner. The other condemned horses pass the sorrel, engulf the roan. The boy turns away, unable to look, a knot growing at the base of his throat. His eyes burn. He doesn’t want anyone to see him, not here, not in this place, not among these men and women who never show any weakness. He begins walking up the alley, toward his father, who is among a group of men under the catwalk lights, dust hovering over their heads, settling down on their felt hats. His father steps away from the group, a short man under his gray cowboy hat, looking thicker than he truly is in his down jacket. His father walks toward him in a quick, choppy stride. In his hand he carries a Styrofoam cup. His glasses are darkened from the cold and the lights, so the boy can’t see his father’s eyes, but he hopes they aren’t looking too closely at him, hoping his father can’t see into him, see the pain the loss of the roan has caused. /// They chase the glow of headlights out of the saleyard parking lot onto the highway, his father with one hand on the steering wheel and the other clutching the Styrofoam cup. The pickup cab is illed with the harsh scent of whiskey.

114

Dust mingles with the liquor reek, dust from the dash, dust embedded in the cloth seat covers, dust in the vents blowing hot air. The trailer, empty now, rattles louder than it did on the trip from the ranch to the saleyard. “You know we tried,” his father says. “He ran out for a year and never got any better.” “I know,” the boy says, and he remembers the blue roan out in the pasture trailing the young horses, head bobbing, packing that right rear leg, struggling to climb a sagebrush slope. Never recovering, never healing, no matter how hard the boy prayed for it. Intertwined in the memory of the horse injured is the memory of the horse healthy, competing on the horse, gathering cattle. The roan hardy, steady under him. He couldn’t imagine the horse ever giving out. And still he doesn’t know what happened to the horse. He came in one day, packing that leg. No cut, just a swollen rear hock. /// They approach Soap Lake, a small, dusty hamlet on the bank of an alkaline, dead pond at the southern mouth of the Grand Coulee. His father turns the pickup of of Highway 28 onto Highway 17, headed north. The boy watches his father, hoping he continues through town on to that windy stretch of highway that travels in the lee of the lower coulee walls, curves along Lake Lenore, Blue Lake and up the grade above Sun Lakes and Dry Falls to the mid-coulee and home, his mother, his bed. But they don’t make it through town. His father turns of of the highway. His father parks down the street from the Businessmen’s Club and puts the Styrofoam cup to his mouth. When it’s empty he rolls down the window and throws it out. “I won’t be long,” he says without looking at the boy. “Okay,” says the boy, but he knows it’ll be closing time before he sees his father again. His father rolls up the window and steps out into the yellow, cold glow of the overhead lights. The boy watches him walk across the street and stop in front the wooden entrance door. Carved into the false front above his father’s head is the End of the Trail scene, a slouch-backed Native on a horse, the horse’s head hanging low, the animal’s muzzle inches from the ground. He can’t help but think of the roan.

115

On the sidewalk a woman approaches, her face beaming from a mane of big, frosted hair. She throws her arm around his father and he swings the door open and they step into the smoky, crowded interior. The door closes. He is alone. /// Throughout the night the boy watches the door, leans forward each time it swings open, hoping this night he is wrong and his father was truthful when he said he wouldn’t be long. But no matter how hard the boy wishes for his father to emerge, it’s always some other man or woman. The pickup idles while he waits, a country station out of Moses Lake coming from the speakers, distant and tinny. George Strait sings about a fool-hearted memory and the way George croons, the sadness that his voice emits, makes the boy wish for that kind of heartache. It’s a sentimental sadness, comforting and warm, not like the pain he feels over the horse, a deep, grating ache that comes from regret, that comes from wishing he’d done something diferent. Romantic love and loss, the kind George sings about, seems beautiful compared to what he feels right now imagining the roan prodded and pushed up into the big double decker stock trailer, hauled through the night to the slaughter house, popped in the skull. Gutted, skinned, boiled down to glue and dogfood. /// On the let is guardrail, the right the columned basalt of the coulee wall. The pickup’s headlights slide along the guardrail, move in and out with the contours of the rock face. With one hand on the wheel his father leans forward and pulls a bottle of Black Velvet from beneath the seat. He wedges the bottle between his thighs and unscrews the cap, then lits it to his lips and tips it up. Ater he inishes he wedges the bottle back between his thighs and screws on the cap. He exhales loudly and pushes his ingers up under his glasses and rubs his eyes. He rests the hand on his lap next to the bottle. “Sorry about your horse,” his father says. When the boy doesn’t respond his father continues, “You can’t get attached. Especially to the good ones.” The boy turns his face away and watches black rock

116

streak past. “We could’ve just shot him,” the boy says. “That don’t pay any bills.” His father unscrews the cap, takes another drink and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He clears his throat and say, “It’s always the good ones. They’re the ones that destroy themselves.” The boy glances over at his father. A car approaches from the opposing direction. Headlights relect of the lenses of his father’s glasses, chase the darkness of the skin of his face into the deep folds that cut through his temple. The boy sees in that moment his father’s jaw working. His father’s jaw always working, gnawing away at some worry, some burden the boy knows nothing about, but the boy senses the ache that lives in his father, and he knows that it has to do with the war he fought in and the things he saw and did in that foreign place. He also senses that there are present burdens weighing on his father, and possibly burdens from even further back, from before the war, but these things elude the boy. He only knows that he loves his father, so much so it hurts, and he wishes he could ind the language to tell his father this. Maybe if he could the aching and gnawing would go away. But he doesn’t know the language, won’t know the language for decades, so he looks away and rides along, listening to the rattle of the empty trailer.

117

MARRI CHAMPIÉ

ONE COYOTE WINTER When winter’s brittle grip settles sure and deep upon the land, and all the icy creeks and hillsides lay in her frozen hand, then come the ragged midnight minstrels. Their chorus breaks the night when the dark deep quiet lies beneath the round moon’s silvered light. As I lay tucked in the heavy quilt, and hold my breath to hear, voices of these reckless songsters run melodies, strange and clear, that pierce the thin frosty windows of these ancient farmhouse walls, and echo in the silent room with familiar, timeless calls. Then, lo, this winter, another sound that lung me out of bed, for from the henhouse came the protests of awful fear and dread. In longjohns, drovercoat, and boots, I hurry through snow, kneedeep, with rile slung across my shoulder to try to stop the thief. Yet he stole away with that poor hen (the one I liked the best) and came again bringing several friends to whittle down the rest. Bolder as each week went by, they even appeared at midday to mock me from my own backyard then vanish quickly away. I’d see them through the kitchen window and run to get my gun. Though range was less then forty yards I’d never hit a one — ‘til one morning, across the ield, at six hundred yards or so, with gun a-rest on the top fence rail I laid one trickster low! So the tally remained, as winter passed: eighteen chickens gone. As for the thieves, though I’d many chances, I missed all but one. Now, nights I lay and listen to the midnight minstrel singer, howling the mournful, haunted dirge of “One Coyote Winter.”

118

CMARIE FUHRMAN

GRANDMOTHER SONG We banked the ire and fell asleep listening to the trees drink. Rain drops and pine needles made percussion of our tin roof. Ater the storm and before the sun, we heard the earth give way to the grandmother snag as she laid herself down. The sound of a giant falling so near our window was anything but startling. It was a pardoning, it was the sound of forgiveness: a giant sigh and a gentle crash. Two hundred years spiraled in the rings. The cry of osprey, the song of the Nez Percé, it was the last of its kind. The power went out. We stared out the window until C broke the silence “I’ll miss all the birds that sang from that tree.” Then we walked hand in hand out into the night where we found the old sentinel, lying with purpose resolute in her inal repose. We woke this morning to a chainsaw cavatina cutting the silent rain. Black coated neighbors gathered ‘round the old torso like crows, muttering, picking its limbs, carrying of the old one, to feed their own ires.

119

120

EARBUDS We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams. — Arthur O’Shaughnessy

121

122

CHRISTIAN A. WINN

HUNDRED-YEAR SUMMER I woke in time to see the church lots illing with Corvettes and mini-vans. The clouds peeled away above the Baptist’s steeple, the Catholic’s contoured sandstone, the Methodist’s loral rounds of stained glass. I found you eating fruit, down 9th Street. I ordered cofee and we talked. My head was in my stomach, and we both knew too much about regret and liquor and chance. Two months was a lifetime of weather and love. A summer. What can you say but be thankful, be helpless. Hymns were rising everywhere, but the way we added it up was nothing like their collective of-key chant — “trust and obey, trust and obey” — which sometimes sounded like wisdom, so nearly like your friendship in the hot midday.

123

M R SMITH

CANYON WREN We send out our letters from the canyon, this hard schism where light gives up early, but inds its way around again for the cold mornings. Trees thrust up around me like ideas, leaving their roots in safety, in rocky beauty. Looking up at night I watch stars move against these immutable stone curtains. It took my lifetime to realize the canyon moves, dragging pine tops across the tickled sky. Good ground below my tingling feet shits silently, slowly grinding against a universe that grants me not a single secret. Now she sings out in the early darkness tra-la, tra-la, while my hands on my thighs play along da-dum. All sound will be gone long before reaching any other ear to listen. In ink I stain my steady words to gather direction and speed, like this frictioned earth at the edge of space, our notes hurtling along with the endless expansion.

124

BONNIE VESTAL

SONGLINES She’s on the edge. The cold Atlantic surf pounds the beach outside the hotel where the conference is being held this year. It’s December, 1994. She’s come here alone, doesn’t know a soul, desperate to ind a way forward into something better. The hotel hallways are teeming with name-tagged participants, mostly professionals, from disciplines diferent from her own. She joins the tide of seekers, craning to see workshop titles posted on ballroom doors. Then she hears it: the unmistakable lilt of Loreena McKennit’s voice, singing. Someone’s playing her newly released album, The Mask and the Mirror. She pauses, thinks she’ll only listen for a second, just for the pleasure of it. But wait — the poster on the door says she’s reached her destination. She’s chosen this workshop for its practical utility. Even if she never moves on to the career she imagines might be possible, she can use these techniques in her demanding clinical practice that has her close to the breaking point. Either way it’s a win. She inds a seat toward the back and listens, spellbound. He’s a seasoned presenter, has most of the 90 attendees engaged and participating late into the second day. He’s draped his sport jacket over the podium, loosened his tie, rolled his shirt sleeves up to the elbow. Brains are overloaded, fresh air is in short supply, and he wants a volunteer for the inal exercise of the day. She ofers, has nothing to lose, and surprises the crowd (and herself) by breaking through to someplace new. Right there, during the demonstration, something beyond them both settles in.

125

The hotel feels conining, the dining room is uncomfortably formal and expensive. He’s been here before and knows of a diner out on the highway. “It’s within walking distance,” he assures. The walk is dark. Gusty winds bend the palm trees, rain starts to spatter. They pick up the pace, grateful for the glare of oncoming headlights lighting up the narrow road. The diner is bright and bustling, a welcome reprieve from the weather. They settle into a booth opposite each other. The menu is classic. Choices are easy. Every table is taken by now and even the counter is full. Two strangers sit there across from each other, waiting, oddly at ease with it all. The jukebox comes to life, and Garth Brooks’ voice loods the diner: “Life is not tried it is merely survived if you’re standing outside the ire.” Recognition registers on both faces. He’s just let go of his career. She wants to end hers. That’s what the demonstration had opened up: now is the time. Garth’s second song starts. Someone has sprung for a set of three: “Don’t sit upon the shore,’ til the river runs dry. Choose to chance the rapids, dare to dance the tide!” Stunned silence. Then dinner arrives. Garth opens his last song: “If tomorrow never comes...” Conversation suddenly seems irrelevant. When the check comes, they split the tab and head for the door. Naomi Judd’s voice trails ater them into the rainy night: “Love can build a bridge...” He suggests keeping in touch. “Tape letters,” he says.

126

She’s heard of them but has never tried one. Months later, the irst one arrives. It’s early summer and she’s driving up to the mountains for a weekend getaway. She pops the cassette into the dashboard tape player, smiling at the sound of his voice. Then a surprise: he’s recorded a song at the end, says it’s from the movie, Thelma & Louise. “I’m a part of you, you’re a part of me...” She sucks in a breath, inds a pullout and stops the car, rewinding the tape to listen again. What? She plays it once more, this time listening extra carefully, in case she had missed something. NO, she hadn’t. “It’s a song,” she says to herself as she pulls back onto the blacktop, picking up speed. Her tape letters in response were, well, less. Her only prior experience recording her own voice had been all those years of dictating charts. She was really good at documenting, remembering all the details, and keeping the chronology precise. He coaches her patiently. “Get past the current event report,” he says, “Tell me how it is for you, what do you think of it, how do you feel about it? And maybe think more in terms of metaphor.” She has to look up “metaphor.” He’s ended his marriage, wants to take his work in a new direction. Her long postponed divorce is getting underway. She’s bought a ixer-upper house. He’s got some time, says he loves to paint and he’s happy to help. Before noon on the irst day of painting, splatters everywhere, he says: “Why don’t you cook? I’ll inish the painting.” He likes country music. When Lonestar comes on, singing Amazed, he lays down his paint brush, turns up the volume

127

and asks her to dance. He’s established in New England. Her life, family and friends are in the Northwest. That’s irm. Next tape letter has Dave Mallet’s song, Red, Red Rose: “You may wonder if you know me, you may wonder if I care...” CD’s replace tape cassettes. YouTube becomes a thing. A quick click on an email link brings a song to life. Every now and then, there’s an email with Today in the subject line, and Brad Paisley musing: “I don’t know about tomorrow. Right now the whole world feels right. Then Tim MGraw’s You’re My Best Friend: “As the seasons change and time goes by and your hair turns gray and so does mine...” The economy collapses, his business slows down. He remains optimistic, writing and speaking on how to build a better workplace. He believes in his mission and the potential in people. She continues the work she loves, helping people ind the best in life’s tough situations. He steps up his home itness routine, meets new friends, and surfs the beaches of New England alone when the waves are up. She’s up early for yoga before work, walks the foothill trails and cycles long country roads with her neighbor when the weather’s good. She still laughs out loud almost every day when they talk, sees more movies, reads a little poetry and tries a writing class. He appreciates the writings of modern mystics, wants to talk through diicult encounters he would’ve pulled away from in the past, and adopts a blind shelter dog who takes centerstage in his life.

128

She’s reading the signals, seeing the signs, says it’s time to go solo. He graciously concedes, adding “Please, let’s keep in touch... phone calls at least?” “Of course,” she says, “I’d like that, too.” And the music fades. He’s unsettled, not looking, but out of nowhere someone shows up. It lasts a few months, a “thing,” just not the right thing. Then it’s done. She retires late, gets sidelined with melanoma, comes through strong. Her face, already lined, now scarred and surgically rearranged, has a “lived in” look. Silence suits her well... except on Saturdays while cleaning house. Now and then an old familiar tune on the radio has her dancing with the broom. The local country station ills his kitchen with song each morning. That’s when he sends her Blake Shelton: “Whats the greatest chapter in your book? Are there places where it hurts to look? What’s the one regret you can’t work through? That’s easy, girl, mine would be you...” He proposes a reunion: a weekend workshop together, with a renowned poet they both admire. They fall back together lawlessly. Wrinkles, scars and thinning hair receive no mention. Soon aterward he sends Ed Sheeran, previously unknown to them both, singing Perfect along with Andrea Bocelli, a favorite of hers. Together they harmonize in a glorious blend of English and Italian: “ You look perfect to me.” She listens over and over and over again. He sometimes asks her to edit his writing. She tells him she

129

is busy helping a friend reine a piece that she’s doing for a writing competition. The theme is “Song.” “Why aren’t you submitting something?” he asks. “I’m not musical,” she says, “I don’t resonate with the topic.” Silence. “WHAT?” he says, “Ater all the songs we’ve shared over the years?” “Oh NO!” She’s mortiied. “Oh no! How did I miss that? How can it be?” “OK,” she promises, holding her breath. She still has some old CD’s, inds The Mask and the Mirror, pops it into the deck and presses PLAY. She listens dreamily, pen and paper sitting on the table in front of her. Leaing through the cover insert she inds the words for the track now playing: “Oh night that joins the lover to the beloved one, Transforming each of them into the other.”

130

THOMAS SEABOURN

STRINGS A touch of burled wood, polished and careworn by the grace of a thousand performances. The tightly strung strands of steel sitting perfectly underneath calloused ingertips. Jangling notes fall out jarringly, eventually settling into a satisfying rhythm of deliberately chosen pitches. Melody weaves itself from the strings of hair loating in a mesmerizing pattern, dancing with reckless abandon. Inevitably, with imagination worn to pieces, the song ceases, just as it began, a connection of lesh to wood.

131

MARRI CHAMPIĂ&#x2030;

WHEN SONG COMES UNWOUND If unspooled wire wakes up as harp strings the fault is mine if I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t sing. Can Winter murmur something warm from wire taut with age? I once believed all love was Spring begun as new wire twined around a half-dreamed trellis untuned caterpillar imagining a butterly lighting on morning-glory notes. But love is not wired by Theory of Invariance since no law binds a body in emotion weightlessly reaching light-Fall and unable to decelerate without detuning. You are my favorite song so if the strings have unwound, then I will play without a drited silver of leaves slipping into Winter tuned to the peg of you instead of Spring.

132

GRANT MAIERHOFER

SEVEN DRAIN SONGS ater John Berryman Drain Song #1 He leaves his home near campus, bear and notes follow; he clinks within a glassine liquor marveling at vitrines of forget. A pipe loads, becomes smoked. He’d been interviewed in multiple capacities and begun his novel. Recovery would be a treatise to complicate Henry and Mr. Skull & Bones. He felt leaden and empty. The winters in Minnesota were sorrowful. Saul was transcribing his likeness. He stood on the corner and watched the evolution of snow to mud. A bridge, some fabric in wind. Skin on face dry and hair bristling uncomfortably. Mind awash in language, image, boredom. A simple white wooden chair on which to sit and bed one’s woes for good. He wondered. His eyes sunken in beneath the plastic frame and he’s worn holed socks inside an elderly pair of Florsheims that hug his ankles yet chafe when he steps to readily. His coat swallows air around him and to see him coming you’d worry at what length of accosting might ensue. He’d wavered and wavered and raised hands maniacally against various podia lamenting the word, the boredom, the utter utter boredom of every bit of breathing. It was closing in on him. Today he’d led earlier than typical and soon the wife would question, interrogate. He remembered the feeling of interrogating E. at St. Elizabeth’s, of trying to ascertain just where the work might lead for him. Already though the fascism had let his grimace, what remained was mere vocal wandering. Pound the saint reduced to his demoniacal inkling. He had great contempt for all his schooling, all this schooling. He could stand before some lot of undergraduates vying and sleep on feet while prattling on toward Keats or Coleridge, a deadness, a boozy wettened deadness emanating at all of them like so many rips in their potential. The students, the citizenry.

133

Drain Song #2 Boys and girls surround a writer asking at his state. His hands are noted. His veiny hands gesture at the air and they feel they leave trailings of insight. Dust, an old man besotted with dust. Every wince and movement leaving a puf of intellect awat and they cannot keep up. They’d gone to the Fitzgerald theater together and seen Wilde perform. This was their evening’s seminar. He gestured seated within the living room smoking and the walls and wood made waves of emotive beckon. Long yawping phrases let his mug as a young undergraduate with child held his hand to help him through. He’d created a beheaded corpse of sorts with what he’d done. Pieces were released. People spoke. He began to see the literary enterprise bleed over to the drinker’s enterprise and on to the recovery enterprise. A community of souls who wanted most to say exactly the right phrase leveling their guts. Le mot juste. The Dream Songs, the Cantos, and the Wasteland enter a tavern, Li Po is serving tea. Drain Song #3 You cannot engage the critical impulse alongside the creative. The two eat their skins as acid. J— utilized the way furnaces utilize coal. It would enter and over time would be found a poet’s happiness, an emptier notion. Nothing is working. His hands are sucked trees of no living. Dementia praecox onset wife and let me record a sea of possible scatters for the legacy. Wool. The Twin Cities. Bellowman. He would be great, of greatness. Let us slowly sip cofee and teach our students well to mop. Plomondon his favorite had working class potential. A working class boy. They’d sit on stairs at day’s end as Plom held mop and talked over the state of the city, the state, the nation. He was emptied. Things were falling bit by bit from memory. Nothing held. Drain Song #4 This literature becomes the new vogue and his Golden Valley is his Avalon Valley is his Stoney Lodge is his St. Elizabeth’s is his Ivry-Sur-Seine is a rose is a rose. The smells in those meetingrooms was godawful. He feels the work begin to

134

leave him. Analysis has begun and countless pictures are taken of him on his visit to Dublin, various spots in Europe. People are concerned. Had he truly thrown a woman down a light of stairs? Had he done this? Had the muses enacted some disgusting bacchanal? He didn’t care. The beard it grew. Plaguey plaguey beard. A reticence anymore at discussing literature with anyone. He prepared his cards for lectures and sweated through them until his back was soaked through and only felt at home in rooms illed with drunks and plumbers. He’d speak then as a poet then. He’d articulate things well and they seemed to appreciate his manner. He’d quote from scripture or Yeats or Coleridge on matters and compare their alictions their innercity Midwestern alictions to the stuf of history. He’d begun a project that would boil him down into a bit of muck, dross. Do his fellows understand him? Does his child understand him? His wife? How soon ater achieving success will dementia entire set in? His life will be spent in those halls the last vestige of a dying need for spoken discourse. On entering the place he’d remembered days in Cambridge when the world seemed to coil around his whim. There were suicides then too. Emptinesses then too. A city eating itself as always. He thought over Pound then, the attempted reconciliation of the whole of history with the individual presence and the desperation to collapse a culture by way of language. He wanted none of it. He wanted a sort of remove. An abjection but made thus by its distance from commonality. He was bored. He was absolutely, terriically bored. Every coat smelled of thorough smoke. Every room he entered harbored the same mumbles but he loved them more than university halls. The work was rejected too. Edmund Wilson a hero rejected the work from Hecate County at his remove. He understood. The work was easily marked through and erased. He’d remove things from present editions. Run through tearing it all away. And something good was given him, not from him, but given him from elsewhere. His conscience wore heavy. Life was so much misery, friends. Life, friends, is boring! Minneapolis and St. Paul were emblematic of his distemper.

135

He’d walk hours until his shoes wore through and socks were wet trying to ind something. He’d search endlessly for something. Never inding it he returned home to write and came up with halfdone work that referred endlessly to the twelve steps. It was an ordinary life. It was a bloody life. It was his failure as a poet, his poet’s happiness, his endless emptiness. He wanted badly for death. He’d slither through undergraduate faces eating at his Deans’ or bosses’ shoes for updates, upkeep, something to continue his forward movement. The only people who seemed to care he’d done a thing at all were those in meetings, and even they had something to sell. Everywhere a memoir. Everyone a genius in those rooms, every story the darkest saddest thing you’d ever heard and every bumbling drunk who’d shit themselves at family gatherings suddenly a hero touched with divine let. Every child-leaving wife-beating scum of the earth toad pustule-tinged heap of being sitting there was limbed with light and it was light he couldn’t quiet. He didn’t want to. He wanted their light constantly and became addicted to its pull. The wools of his coats came close around and he’d pull them tight while smoking and mumbling about the word and its nature. Drain Song #5 P—‘s unwillingness to discuss himself as a sin second only to his anti-Semitism. Someone’s unwillingness to solipsize being close at all to anti-Semitism would seem a huge problem with his historicallybound poetics. The anti-Semitism itself is a deplorable state that in large part should disavow the works from being considered. Yet his own appropriation of a kind of Leadbelly-inlected voice throughout is equally suspect for the time in which the work was writ. These are things that needn’t bother the twentieth century. Perhaps the poet is little more than a bigot and their addictions are about as interesting as Richard Girnt Butler’s sorrows. Hitler’s dependence on dark chocolate. Take your pick. These are self-obsessed lives. The personal becoming the universal and all that is a crock of shit. Great works existed aside from this tendency that will never be appreciated and even the lagrance of a Céline seems more palatable than this impish racism this impish antiSemitism this need to veil one’s ineptitudes in the sheath of

136

one’s project. Everything is overrated, always. Everyone could be better, always. Every single living person could do ininitely more on a given day to ensure the comfort and stability of their fellow citizens. People are scum. Hurt people hurt people. Self-mythology. Struggles take on the stuf of history. Histories take on the earmarks of struggle. Become whipped. Become martyred. Become beplagued spectacles and addiction only makes it worse, alcoholism only gives it shape, a name, a place in society that can in turn ofer some narrative of redemption. Life is a kind of scum. Scum around a drain. Existence is by its very nature parasitic, and even typing his works he can’t hold fast to this Cioran vein. Their selishness makes him nauseated and yet he can embrace its utility. The lines not written in a kind of wha dey gon tink o’ nezt aping are palatable and sometimes moving. It makes you wonder at the heights of genius, is all. These apparent deviants only oferings extremes of the culture they’re purporting to reject. Pound worse for Pound’s indecipherability. A maze and the key is buried in a select body of work that also resulted in a demeanor that embraced whole hog fascism and the rejection of a race of humans. One would do well to wonder. Everything is political even the old chestnut. One would in turn rather have the arrested, bloated, irascible body of D.A.F. Sade than these hidden, sufering bodies. Perhaps this is the diference. A loss of energy. One continues forth in all its squalor making moments, the other leaves a trail of apologia to continue slightly unreadable in their determination to be hailed as Genius, Signiicant, Strugglers. Drain Song #6 Look at the way he’s cultivated space. There’s an outwardness to poets, maybe. Inside there’s an assumption of beret gut and bones and so much smoke, out there’s frailty and just beyond the skin a singing that lets him feel alive and alright on earth. He smoked almost constantly, smearing ash against a sea of modern works of poetry and dissertations, prose and theses, countless things for his review. Papers on any number

137

of subjects all somehow tied to the lectures he’d strung together, some even featuring notes concerned at his state, wondering if he truly felt OK. He truly felt OK, little else. He did enjoy the groups, the meetings, but even they wore on a bit and lost their height. He became stuck pondering imagery ater life. He became stuck in Irish mores. What, Beckett. What, Molloy. What, Godot. Walls of galleys lined his front hall and he pulled from them at random occasionally picking up interesting bits. A poetry collection dedicated to the journal Merlin and made of debauched nods to various personae therein. A new study about the occult and Pound. Reinterpretations of the Pisan Cantos. He became lost in thought a bit then. His lineage undeniably bound to His. He thought of the brawny chest in pictures seemingly having ripped through shirt and whitened hair and always that aquiline goatee constantly villainous, tyrannical. He wondered about the caked dirt upon his skin while jailed in Italy. The fascist tracts that bled out there. An addict, perhaps? A neurotic? Schizophrenia? Time won’t ofer these answers. The extreme of any art might very well be fascism. Pound embodied this. Drain Song #7 A life is an awareness a consciousness of certain matters of breathing of hunger of desire perhaps desiring machines he’d considered this and thought endlessly in theoretical terms about his poetics and how it its within a larger canon the work seems to fall to bits but he’s sticking with it due to something some drive and this might be the French duet’s desire he’s uncertain but keeps pressing on. There is a push, something guiding him perhaps or at least propelling and when he swills and when he drinks and when he squalors and when he writes it’s all the same he leaves a mess. Somewhere, he vomits himself upon something some page and it becomes a work of something abstraction expressionism he wallows in his own ilth and organizes it into poetic works. He wallows in absolute entropy in uncertainty in near-death and it’s only here he seems to ind his happiness that starved starving state of near-unconsciousness that takes him far and far from life.

138

He wants to live there he’d like to live there buried there where nobody touches him or wants to he’d like the courage to place the cold of a gun toward his temple he’d like the courage to swallow his wife’s medication he’d like the courage to slit his wrists within the tub perhaps he’ll read irst something good something excellent a review a piece of newsprint something that touches the living just one last time before he ends it all. He’d love to end it all see what death feels like deep within its clutches a nice sentiment a great notion he’s pressing for it vying toward it and all he feels is tired. All he wants is sleep he wonders did his mother have it did his father have it this desire this yearn this tendency to move and eat what came and throughout Minneapolis throughout Minnesota throughout the Midwest and campuses everywhere there seems to be this leap to death this tendency to want the world to fall apart and this feels nice like the clutch of a warm wool sweater against the radiator sitting there some morning sick with atermath and children weeping and his wife dissatisied and his life a selish trap of nonbeing he’d like to end it take the pills cut the wrists intake the bullet and simply let things stop but something will not let him it makes him sick it’s impossible to stomach he wants to go to treatment again he wants to be hospitalized again only in there did it make sense where is his St. E’s he wants to bury his head beneath the loor in his St. E’s and welcome the inanity of not cohering with reality with their reality he wants to assist Whitman during the War he wants to transcribe for Chaucer he wants to lend his life some meaning in service of their poetics and all for naught he snifs the air before his face and wonders at his body on the bed in St. E’s weeping there clutching his sheet there sweating through everything muttering about Li Po and the rivers muttering about Joyce and the rivers wondering about the storm he visits his withering bare chest pressed against the light and nurses they both drink cofee he asks ater progress everything has become political and steeped in bureaucracy and he inds himself yearning for the comforts of the old campus there is something in his demeanor that makes him feel as though a plagiarist as if his entire modus operandi had been lited from his living but then he thinks over the mistakes he thinks

139

over the years he thinks over the work written and the radio broadcasts and something lessens something starts to feel OK and he notes that he won’t likely leave but there is something foundational in his state of course D.A.F. Sade chimes in at witnessing his gut but this seems new this seems diferent his status isn’t quite like the status of those old artists he is living in the modern world he is compulsive he is obsessive he is monomaniacal and his afectation is apparently derived from the state of modern things not unlike the emanating tendency of his Cantos the outward glance always always sampling from history always taking always giving always appropriating and rendering new and (ha) it makes him shake a bit with something foreign some leaving of the past behind his hospitalization paves the way for something his madness paves the way for something for the hulking state of the WRITER the ARTIST the GENIUS in the twentieth century and it becomes terrifying again as he remembers his missteps and he too yearns for Europe he too yearns for something older the simplicity of D.A.F. Sade’s desired grave perhaps the acorns they’ve stuck inside his skull and taken growth there.

140

MATTHEW MARTENS

THE MELODY OF MONO I’m going ishing today. I went ishing yesterday. And the day before that. Maybe the day before that one. I can’t remember. Fishing is the only thing I know to do, like hunting and writing. And making a mess of things; mainly by doing what I’m not supposed to do, like holding down a real job. My dad told me once that he never wanted to do what he was supposed to do. But what the hell are we supposed to do? And who decides this? Our parents? Our God? Our government? Our spouse? Sometimes it’s hard to tell the diference. Parents neglect children. Spouses cheat. Governments do both. And gods? They’re mysteriously ambiguous, like the rainbows that won’t take my ly. I tied it just for them. I know they’re there. I can see their outlines. At least I think I can. Maybe it’s the clouds. So, I go ly ishing and listen to the river. The more I walk and the closer the sound gets, the more I forget about the civilized world that scares me into lethargy. If I sit indoors long enough, I’ll believe there’s a grizzly around every tree. There isn’t. There are only dog tracks and sneaker prints. I walk until both are gone. Then the river, inally in my view, bigger than I anticipated, a long slow stretch. A ish rises, and I forget about the email that’s probably in my inbox — the one telling me my account is overdrawn. I tried to blame my wife but it wasn’t her fault. We needed groceries. The kids eat like wild hyena’s. Like I did at their age. Now, I scour my Chick-Fil-A app, waiting for free treats like a crackhead on the corner of what used to be and what is. There was a time I never looked at my bank account. That was years ago. It was full of money. I was a consultant. Telecommunications and enough acronyms to make a Silicon Valley lifer reach for a shot of tequila. The money lowed like the river I ish now. The river I couldn’t touch because of time. The time I traded for money. Now it’s all I have. Time to worry about making this month’s mortgage payment. Time to igure out which gun I’m going to sell to pay the hospital bill. But not today. Today there is only the thought of Salmonlies — those wonderful

141

big bastards that bring accented Alabamans to Idaho. I talked to two of them on the water. They said they “slayed ‘em.” I never saw them catch a damn thing. John Gierach was right. All isherman are liars. Especially strangers from Alabama. I should explain. I gave my life to writing. Jim Harrison told me to, so I did. This was in a book, not in person. He died ater I read the words; before I could thank him for them. It cost me. I quit my job. Almost quit my marriage. But the hell with all that. This is supposed to be a ishing story. The Stonelies don’t erupt. Just a handful of scattered showers. I catch a 14-inch brown that feels four inches bigger than he is, bigger because of the current and because he’s the irst ish of the year — an embarrassing but glaring fact. Somedays I only hear the noise of regret, like heavy metal music. Somedays I throw line in the water, but my heart isn’t in it, enthralled instead, in debt. Somedays I only stand and watch the churning run-of. This winter’s record snowfall is really putting a pisser on my spring ishing. I catch two more rainbows and two more whiteish, all small but rejoiceful in hand. Three boats loat by, all guides with clients, some jovial and interacting, some apart and rigid, the guide apparently hungover and the client not yet allowing himself to be instructed by the pimple-faced twentysomething with skin darker and younger than his own. The world is a loat trip down the river to hell and we can only choose to be the guide or the client. Maybe that’s a little grim. Maybe that’s the overdrawn bank account talking. Still, it doesn’t bother me as much as not catching ish. When I go ishing and don’t catch ish, I am an angry and inconsolable lout, usually quick to drink and always quick to quibble. But when the ish rise, I am lited. I ind myself singing. There is hope again. Maybe the manuscript will get picked up ater all. Maybe the kids will go to college. Maybe we won’t have to sell the house and downsize. Maybe I won’t have to go back to lame retardant blue jeans and safety glasses, a balefully uncomfortable combo. Or maybe I’ll sink everything I’ve earned or been given into this dream. That’s what they call it. But a dream is something you wake up from. This is a ire. It’s forever been burning in my gut and I

142

can’t snuf it out. Every time I move a little closer, it enlarges, consumes me. I try to run away, but you can’t outrun your stomach lining. I stop when the ish stop. I sit awhile on the bank. I’m the only one in the canyon which is rare on this river, especially during the Salmonly hatch. But this spot isn’t on any map. It’s of the main road, can’t see it from the center line. That’s where I try to put my ly. On the center line of foam twisting south. The foam carries bugs and hope. We are all ishermen casting into foam. We catch one or the other. There. That’s a little less apocalyptic. I sit on the bank and watch the forest sun work its way over the west side. I pull out A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. He tells me that “The life of every river sings its own song.” I understand this and agree. I can hear the notes swimming by. I can hear the buzzing Salmonlies too, what few and terrible liers there are. I hear the song known only to this river and this canyon. I don’t know it as well as some. I haven’t been raised alongside it. But I can hear it nonetheless. Then Aldo reveals: “But in most the song is long since marred by the discords of misuse.” I look down and see the beer can, lattened and faded by time, far from erased. It will be here forever unless I pick it up, which I do. The mark of man is here, littered throughout the topography, and there’s little I can do about it. What a day it must have been to hike this trail when it wasn’t one, to cast to these ish when they had never seen mockery, to watch this river low for hours and never see thrust upon its shoulders a litany of ballooned vessels — all illed with the bureaucracy of money and imaginary lines. The men that loat it want to take something from it. I guess I do too. And although we both use numbers to measure the day, I can’t help but feel that I am here for purer reasons. I like to think the ish I catch are more appreciated, more reveled. But that’s only the vainness within myself. Maybe I don’t want to admit the sad truth — that I’m the problem. My boots leave tracks just as impressionable as the ones I try so hard to avoid. I make a few last casts at the bend, my backpack laborious on my shoulders, the bear spray unreachable, my fear evaporated by small mayly shadows and trout wishes. I stand on a boulder the size of a small camper, the kind pulled

143

behind almost every Subaru Outback and Toyota Tundra zipping up and down this National Forest. But I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t hear the noise anymore. I can only hear the river song. I move my arm and hand and sorrows and feel the melody of the monoilament. I watch my backcast, and behind the thin green strand, I see the canyon water. The sunlight trickles down and the water trickles on. The rocks push it one way and gravity moves it another. The trout dodge somewhere underneath, waiting for morsels. I step to the last perch, my torso and body leaning over a deep pocket. What a good bath and swim it would it be. But the tremors are gone. I am an eagle standing on top of boulders listening to music, the rhythms of the casts, the cadence of the currents, the notes of lips breaking surface bars. The ly lands where it does, and no ish takes it, but something watches it go by and thinks about striking. I pick up and reel in. I step of the boulder and my feet hit the trail. Back to emails and debt. Away from music.

144

JAMES ARMSTRONG

WHERE POEMS COME FROM If I say Talking with you makes my spirit sing Let me clarify. ...makes my heart sing is so romantic And not what I mean, dear friend. This feels more like the thrill and delight From running in the hills with other kids, The dialogue between chasers and the chased Punctuated with bursts of speed to tag or dodge. Trails winding through oak savanna Revealed postcard views like insights. This feels something like the tug That furrowed my forehead and Cut my breath to half-gasp-half-sob When the women’s chorus opened The largo from New World Symphony. Wells behind my eyes illed full for weeping While lips quivered dry with nothing to say. Lips — where water wets the whistle. Lips swell slightly with sips of warm purée, Ginger-carrot soup that ills my mouth-cave With glow and sends me a spice-scented vision Of ancient caravan camped under stars. Gingered soup lickers like irelight From tongue and teeth to cheeks Roofed with imagination, where bison appear As the artist grips moss pad to draw black outlines Then blows ochre and brown pigments through a reed To lesh out the herd grazing on cave wall.

145

In spaces where brimming moments overlow Where a chorus makes the human voice divine Where warm soup kindles candles along the spine A poem may come to me Ater we sit here together In the glow of the song our talk creates.

146

JUDITH MCCONNELL STEELE

THE SINGING BED “In the early nineteen-forties, a brisk trade emerged between German death camps and German manufacturers who used the prisoners’ hair in the production of thread, rope, cloth, carpets, mattress stuing, lining stifeners for uniforms, socks for submarine crews and felt insulators for the boots of railroad workers.” From “Evidence of Evil,” by Timothy W. Ryback, “The New Yorker,” Nov. 15, 1993.

Pulled of the train by my braid, I stood naked with my mother. You sat in a wood chair, legs spread apart. The pile of hair beside you reached higher than your thigh. “Come to me,” you said. I knelt between your knees. You held my slim braid taut, sliced it from me, scissors brown with old blood. My hair, my hair that no man ever touched. “Sing for me,” you said. I sang. “My heart is as a broken lower.” My mother could not look. Someone, not you, threw a dress at me. Black cotton, smelling of another woman’s fear. “My eyes are dry of tears,” I sang. “My mouth can never say your name.”

147

Now your childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s children wake to strange music, notes that echo in their throats. They rise, white nightshirts stained with sweat, walk to the window. The street is calm. Lulled by old lies, they fall back into bed. And I keep singing.

148

149

150

THE CABIN

is a Boise, Idaho literary arts organization. We forge community through the voices of all readers, writers, and learners.

WRITERS IN THE ATTIC

The Writers in the Attic Program, or WITA, is an annual publication contest for Idaho writers, both emerging and established, to publish work related to a one-word theme chosen by The Cabin. This publication is meant to be platform for building an inclusive community and provoking creativity and experimentation through a love of writing. Work is blind-judged by a local literary notable and selected works are published as part of the Writers in the Attic anthology. Past themes have been Rooms (2012), Detour (2013), Nerve (2014), Animal (2015), Water (2016), and Game (2017).

SONG

We sing in the shower. We hum in the rain. We serenade our pets and family members while cooking dinner, or cleaning house, or driving cross-country. Soundtracks trigger the waterworks and signal goosebumps at the movie theater. Many of us have personal theme songs, favorite love songs — we use music to pump ourselves up and to calm ourselves down. We tell stories orally and oten through song: to celebrate and to protest and to praise! Dear Songbirds, warble a story that contains some element of the magic of music. Feel free to channel Beyoncé or croon of-key. We just want you to belt it and burst it in a 1,500 words-or-less poem or prose piece containing, somehow, the element of “Song.”

SAMANTHA SILVA

is an author and screenwriter based in Idaho. Her debut novel, Mr. Dickens and His Carol, was published by Flatiron Books/Macmillan in 2017.

151

WRITERS IN THE ATTIC 2018

MEETTHE WRITERS Rex Adams was raised on a farm and ranch in the Grand Coulee country of Eastern Washington. His work has appeared in Confrontation, Bull: Men’s Fiction, Sky Island Journal and elsewhere. Currently he lives near Marsing, Idaho with his wife and two young daughters. James Armstrong is a founding member of The Live Poets Society, a writers’ group that originated at The Cabin and has been meeting there for 22 years. He has published two books of poetry and now lives in Mendocino, California, where he joins The Live Poets’ meetings via Skype. Matthew James Babcock is the author of two poetry collections, Points of Reference (Folded Word) and Strange Terrain (Mad Hat Press). His debut creative noniction collection, Heterodoxologies, is available from Educe Press. His two debut iction collections, Four Tales of Troubled Love (Harvard Square Editions) and Future Perfect (Ferry Street Books), are forthcoming in 2019. He teaches composition, creative writing, and literature at BYU-Idaho in Rexburg. Dell Award winning author, Marri Champié has ridden horseback into the heart of the world — The Sawtooth Wilderness — countless times, and holds a MA in English. Pushcart nominated for poetry in 2015, her work has appeared in Cicada, ROAR, The Tishman Review, Alcyone, Abyss & Apex, and others. She received the Boise State University President’s Writing Award for Fiction & Poetry in 2013, & an Oregon State Poetry Award in 2018. Her novel, Silverhorn, releases from Kasva Press in 2018. She works as a wildire support driver, and lives on a small ranch overlooking the Idaho Prairie with her horses and Jack Russell terriers. www.writeidahowriter.com

152

Julie Fogerson has a BA in Communications, an MS in Dispute Resolution and is currently a doctoral student. An ocean ogler and tireless traveler, Julie is back in Boise ater life in Honolulu, Seattle, New York City, and Antarctica. She has swam in the Amazon with piranhas, the Indian Ocean with great whites, and the Ross Sea with penguins. Julie published two short stories in Writers in the Attic: Game and was a Brooklyn Literary Upstart inalist. She wrote and acted in a short ilm, which was named a Seattle Times 3MM winner and screened at the Seattle International Film Festival. She is a family gal and gluttonous polyglot. An indigenous daughter of the West, CMarie Fuhrman was born in Colorado and has lived in various rural towns all along the Rocky Mountains. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Idaho where she is Program Coordinator for IKEEP (Indigenous Knowledge for Efective Education Program) CMarie’s writing, both poetry and noniction, can be found in Broadsided Press’s NoDapl compilation, two anthologies, and several literary journals including Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, Whiteish Review, Yellow Medicine Review, High Desert Journal and Sustainable Play, among others. CMarie is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Native Voices available January 2019 from Tupelo Press. Heather Hamilton-Post is a freelance writer and mother from Boise, Idaho. She is a graduate of the University of Arizona’s Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing and the winner of the Two Cities Literary Review Prose Contest. Her work is forthcoming, and forthcoming, and forthcoming. Ross Hargreaves has an MFA from the University of Idaho. He lives and writes in Idaho. Maggie Koger is a school media specialist with a writing habit. Her poems have appeared most recently in Juke Joint,

153

Little Rose, Amsterdam Quarterly, and “Ripe Figs,” a inalist in the 2018 Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize competition, The Heartland Review, Spring 2018. This is her ith appearance in Writers in the Attic. Catherine Kyle is the author of the poetry collection Parallel (Another New Calligraphy, 2017), the hybrid-genre collection Feral Domesticity (Robocup Press, 2014), the poetry chapbooks Flotsam (Etched Press, 2015), Gamer: A Role-Playing Poem (dancing girl press, 2015), and Saint: A Post-Dystopian Hagiography (dancing girl press, forthcoming). She teaches creative writing at the College of Western Idaho. Marguerite Lawrence is a retired music teacher. She taught elementary music and orchestra for 32 years, mostly in Boise. During those years she wrote several children’s musicals and songs about the environment and conservation. She is now focused on writing iction and considers herself a student of the art of stories. She is a member of Christian Winn’s Writers Write group and thanks him and all the other writers and readers, for their continued critiques and support. Marguerite was previously published in The Cabin’s Writers in the Attic anthology, “Animal,” and is a past contributor to the Boise Weekly’s 101 contest. Liza Long is an author, teacher, erstwhile classicist, and mother of four. Her book The Price of Silence: A Mom’s Perspective on Mental Illness (Hudson Street Press) was a 2014 “Books for a Better Life” award winner. Liza teaches writing and composition at the College of Western Idaho and blogs at www.anarchistsoccermom.blogspot.com when she’s not busy solving the Rubik’s Cube or reading medieval Latin. Grant Maierhofer is a writer and lecturer at the University of Idaho. He was the University’s Hemingway Fellow in his inal year pursuing an MFA, and has published several books, the most recent of which is CLOG (Inside the Castle, 2018). He’s a

154

husband to Kelsey and father to Ada and Hollis, and currently lives in Moscow, Idaho with their dog, Joy. Matthew Martens lives in Idaho Falls with his wife and three daughters. Between volleyball practices, cheer competitions and swim parties, he hunts and ishes in the surrounding mountains, where he inds most of his inspiration. He has given his life to writing, which is what Jim Harrison suggested in the epilogue of The Ancient Minstrel. His work has appeared in High Country News, Backcountry Journal, Elk Hunter Magazine and Wide Open Spaces. Anthony McArthur has his ith story appearing in Writers In The Attic: Song. He Iives in Boise with his family. He writes about the struggle to recognize beauty in a time of accelerating peril. Julia McCoy is a teacher in Meridian. In her free time she likes to bike, travel, and write. This is her irst publication. Alan Minskof moved to Idaho in 1972; he lives in Boise and teaches journalism at the College of Idaho. The author of Idaho Wine Country, he is at work on The Idaho Traveler, scheduled for spring 2019. His poetry has appeared in Eight Idaho Poets; Idaho’s Poetry: A Centennial Anthology; Things To Do in Idaho and two chapbooks Blue Ink Runs Out on a Partly Cloudy Day and Point Blank. Essays have appeared in Where the Morning Light’s Still Blue and Boise @ 150 among others. Kent Mommsen CCIM, PhD (Florida State University, 1970) is a commercial real estate broker with Cushman & Wakeield Paciic specializing in single tenant net leased investments in all ity states. He moved to Salt Lake City to professor at the University of Utah for iteen years before transitioning into real estate. He enjoys reading irst novels, biographies, and short iction. Relaxing daily walks along the greenbelt help to coax out the “stories in my head” which transform

155

to 100 Word Stories. Kent has published numerous articles in sociology and commercial real estate but “Mississippi Goddam” is his irst published story. Kim Monnier has a BA in English literature from Indiana University. He taught English at Mountain Home High School for twenty-eight years and is now retired and living in Boise. He is on the editorial staf of The Whistle Pig, a literary publication of Mountain Home Arts Council. Mara Nieman-Hargroder is a native Californian transplant who moved to Boise over a decade ago. While missing the ocean, she’s found comfort in the City of Trees. Mara has been a poet and writer for thirty-ive years, keeping most of her work to herself until inally joining the literary community. Four years ago, Mara published a book called Letters I Wish I’d Found. Along with Words Work Wonders, Demystifying Death, and Let’s Work Together, Writers in the Attic: Song is the fourth anthology she is honored to be a part of. Mara inds it comforting to have her work lay on pages in such good company; poetic voices, each one beautiful becomes even more so when joined together. And so it is in this beautiful book, “Song.” Caitlin Palmer is a writer from the Midwest. She has attended the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and the Hellenic International Studies in the Arts Program, in Greece. She has work published or forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Under the Gum Tree, Midwestern Gothic, and ‘museum of americana’, where she was nominated for the 2017 Best of the Net Award. She is the iction editor for Fugue Literary Journal, and the 2018-19 Hemingway Fellow at the University of Idaho, where she’s pursuing her MFA. Cheryl Richardson is a charter member of The Cabin and a recently retired teacher of gited elementary children who is enjoying having the time to focus on her writing. She gave a

156

public reading of a selection of her poems with BSU professor Dr. Janet Holmes in May 2015, and has been published in The Cabin anthology, Writers in the Attic: Animal, and in Working Together, 2018. Thirty-four years ago, Mary Saras moved from the plains of Illinois to the mountains of Idaho to pursue a marketing career with Ore-Ida Foods. Having since married, raised two daughters, and retired in Boise, she now inds ample time to explore new interests — writing being one of them. Two of her short memoir pieces have been published in The Cabin’s Writers in the Attic anthologies. A dear friend encouraged Laureen Scheid to write. This is her irst contest and publication. Laureen was born and raised in Honolulu. She’s thankful to have a wonderful family and live in beautiful Boise. Laureen is honored to be a part of this year’s anthology. Janet Schlicht was transplanted to Boise from Wisconsin in 1973. She has always loved to read, and retirement has opened up time for her to explore the crat of wring via The Cabin and some other avenues. She loves the worlds that writing has opened for her. Thomas Seabourn is a rising senior at Boise High School where he plays cello and golf. He is a voracious reader, outdoor adventurer, aspiring ly-isherman and enthusiastic sports fan. Thomas received a Gold Key for Poetry and Silver Key for Personal Essay through the Scholastic Arts & Writing Awards. In years past, he attended a couple of The Cabin’s summer writing camps. Dynisha Smith is a Boise native who studied English and Political Science at Boise State University. She’s currently a student pursuing a Masters in Counseling. When she’s not writing, reading, or chasing her four-year-old through town,

157

she’s probably enjoying a cocktail, or ice cream, or both! M R Smith is a technology executive writing in Boise, Idaho. His work has appeared in publications such as The Cascadia Review, Camas, The Literary Bohemian, Punchnel’s, The Red River Review, The San Pedro River Review, The Innisfree Poetry Review, Blacktop Passages, The Centrifugal Eye, the FutureCycle Press anthology What Poets See, and the Western Press Books anthology Manifest West, as well as multiple Writers in the Attic anthologies. Daphne Elizabeth Stanford writes poetry and noniction. Since 2012, she’s hosted “The Poetry Show!” on KRBX/Radio Boise. She holds a BA in English from Reed College, an MAT in Secondary English Education from the University of Iowa, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon. Her work has been published in Caesura, Lingerpost Press, The Monarch Review, Cliterature: All My Relations, and The Cabin: Writers in the Attic. Judith McConnell Steele and her husband, Richard, moved to Boise in 1978 ater living in Europe, where their eyes were opened. Judith is a published poet, writer and teacher, the author of two books of newspaper columns and a novel, The Angel of Esperança. She oten inds her way into a poem with short quotes from newspapers, magazines or noniction books. Born in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, Kaidi Stroud attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and studied English Literature and Creative Writing. Logically, this led to a short-lived but adventuresome debut with the Orange County Animal Shelter. Having her ill rescuing midnight road deer, wrangling oversized beavers from stairwells, and shooing bats out of homes (technical term for a super skilled maneuver), she moved West with her now husband and earned her M.A. in English, Education from Boise State University. In a crazy

158

twist of fate, she is now an educator and freelance writer with two kids and a dog. Anita Tanner was born in Star Valley, Wyoming. She is the mother of six children and grandmother of seventeen grandchildren. In addition to Song, Anita has also appeared in Writers in the Attic: Nerve, Animal, Water, and Game. Robert Lee Thornton lives in North Idaho with his wife, Courtney; their dogs, Poppy and Les; and their cat, Chester. He works as a carpenter. Bonnie Vestal is a recently retired long-time Boise resident, delighted with her freedom to explore new frontiers. Everything she loves: long foothill walks, yoga at the downtown Y, road bike rides out west of town, gardening, cooking, road trips, and more...gets even better when shared with beloved family and dear friends. Ever in search of adventure, she’s taken a few writing classes at The Cabin and is thrilled beyond words that this is her irst ever published work. Eric E Wallace writes iction, plays, poetry, and humor. Eric’s work has been published in many journals and periodicals, in twelve anthologies, and frequently online at www.writersweekly.com. He’s the author of three books of literary short stories, Undertow, Hoar Frost, and Stonerise, and one novel, Emperor’s Reach, all published by BookLocker. Eric’s stories have appeared in ive previous Writers in the Attic anthologies. A member of the Idaho Writers Guild, Eric lives in Eagle. Joel Wayne is a writer and producer from Boise, Idaho. His iction, articles, and short ilms have appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, The Moth, Salon, and at the Sun Valley Film Festival, among other places. He’s won the Silver Creek Writer’s Residency, the Lamar York Prize, and is a Pushcart

159

nominee. Wayne produces the NPR-ailiate programs “Reader’s Corner” and “You Know The Place” for Boise State Public Radio, serves as a judge for the annual Scholastic Writing Awards, and can be visited at www.joelwayne.com. Christian Winn is a iction writer, poet, and instructor of creative writing living and working in Boise, Idaho. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, The Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Journal, The Masters Review, Phoebe, Santa Monica Review, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. His story collections, Naked Me, and What’s Wrong With You is What’s Wrong With Me is recently out from Dock Street Press — www.dockstreetpress.com. He is the 2016-2019 Idaho Writer In Residence. Find more information at www.christianwinn.com.

160

SONG writers in the attic We sing in the shower. We hum in the rain. We serenade our pets and family members while cooking dinner, or cleaning house, or driving crosscountry. Soundtracks trigger the waterworks and signal goosebumps at the movie theater. Many of us have personal theme songs, favorite love songs â&#x20AC;&#x201D; we use music to pump ourselves up and to calm ourselves down. We tell stories orally and often through song: to celebrate and to protest and to praise! Songbirds, warble a story that contains some element of the magic of music. The Cabin is a Boise, Idaho literary arts organization. We forge community through the voices of all readers, writers, and learners. Writers in the Attic, or WITA, is an annual contest for local writers, both emerging and established, to publish work related to a theme chosen by The Cabin. This anthology is a stepping stone for new writers and a venue that showcases the talent in our community.

THE CABIN Log Cabin Books LITERATURE / POETRY