Featured Art: On the Shore by William Trost Richards
One of the abounding miracles of life on Earth is that somewhere at this moment a couple is sitting in their backyard drinking alcohol together. The lawn might be manicured or it might be overgrown with Devil’s Trumpet and Lantana weeds. The backyard might belong to one of their elderly parents who is lying in a darkened back room watching television as the couple imbibes India Pale Ale and mulberry wine. Though maybe it’s ethanol, because they just got news they can’t have children. Or cartons of coconut water because they just came back from the gym. Regardless of what they are swallowing and whether or not the backyard smells of cut grass, Asian barbeque, or the pheromones of raccoons, together they are watching the stars enter the sky one by one, like teeth rising up into the gums of a toddler as the crying of mosquitoes and horseflies being electrocuted in the iridescent bug zapper over-occupies the atmosphere. To the point that when the man says Freud would find the above metaphorical reference to teeth sexual, the woman can’t quite hear him. Instead she is contemplating the exacting way the man lifts the brown beer bottle to his mouth, as if he is heralding hound dogs through a horn; and about the way he opened his car door last week for the neighbor woman with olive skin and tattoos around her ankles, because she said her car wouldn’t start and she needed a ride into town to return an overdue library book and to euthanize her ferret.
Featured Art: Man Wearing Laurels by John Singer Sargent
What if I were not a shallow person. Did not need an Arapaho blanket swaddled around me in order to sleep less fitfully. Did not need honey in my mouth. Or a handsome man to motivate me to shower.
What if we were all made of light. What if I was able to mimic an aviary bird, could hide all signs of sickness, did not spend hours making rubber band balls. We are all made of light. Yet we still make excuses for our egos’ devastations. Such as my mother preferred her polo ponies over me.
What if the seesaw were to come unhinged. And your dog bit you in the femoral artery while you were teaching your child to ride a bike. What if I did not need opiates to talk to you, could dress in a color-coordinated manner. What if I were backseat enough to never need to say another word.
After a year of rehab and therapy, the country western singer went back to writing songs; but he had changed.
Lyrics like, “Good Boundaries Make a Better Kind of Friend,” and, “When You Say Bye, I Feel So Violated”
—they simply didn’t have the punch of his best work.
*****
In New York, Famous Joe’s Pizza Parlor on Travis Street is suing Joe’s Famous Pizza on East Ninth Ave for stealing its name.
The battle rapidly grows vicious. The courtroom smells of melted, burning cheese.
If he wins, Famous Joe says that his attorney will get free slices for life.
*****
“Jesus had a great career,” says one of the students, on Monday morning, reading out loud from his assignment; then, sensing an uneasy silence, “Well, but he was famous, wasn’t he?”
*****
The mountain climber who actually made it to the summit, the place so many of his friends had failed to reach, got one great photograph, plus permanent damage to nerves in his nose and his ears, both hands and feet.
*****
“If I hadn’t dropped out of cooking school,” says Gretchen, happily, “I would never have mastered my Sunday morning waffles for screaming kids, which I believe will be my greatest legacy.”
*****
Why don’t you tell me about your life for a change? Did you carry it carefully, like a brimful cup of water, bound for a particular flower?
Or did you keep accidentally turning around to look at something else, and slosh it all over the place, like me?
Featured Art: Crouching Woman by Ferdinand Victor Eugene Delacroix
Sweetheart, if I suddenly flop over in the mall one afternoon while taking my old-person-style exercise and my teeth are chattering like castanets, and my skull is going nok nonk nok on the terra cotta tiles of the well-swept mall floor;
my tongue stuck out, my eyes rolled up in my head— Don’t worry, baby, we knew this kind of excitement might possibly occur, and that’s not me in there anyway—
I’m already flying backwards, high and fast into the big arcades and spaces of my green life where I made and gave away and traded sentences with people I loved that made us all laugh and rise up in unpredictable torrents of fuchsia.
Dial 911, or crouch down by the body if you want— but sweetheart, the main point I’m making here is: don’t worry don’t worry don’t worry:
Those wild birds will never be returning to any roost in this world. They’re loose, and gone, and free as oxygen.
Don’t despair there, under the frosted glass skylight, in front of the Ethiopian restaurant with the going-out-of-business sign.
Because sweetheart, this life is a born escape artist, a migrating fever, a convict tattooed in invisible ink, without mercy or nostalgia.
It came down to eat a lot of red licorice and to adore you imperfectly, and to stare at the big silent moon as hard as it could,
then to swoop out just before closing time right under the arm of the security guard who pulls down the big metal grate and snaps shut the lock in its hasp
as if it, or he, could ever imagine anything that could prevent anything.
Featured Art: Breton Girls Dancing Pont Aven by Paul Gauguin
All this passing on going on, almost as if it were contagious. Words you’ve recently learned spill easily from your lips: Wenckebach, biliary, Cetuximab, granuloma, the new bright colors of life. Just when you were getting bored with the pinks, purples, and greens on offer for almost seven decades,
you’d happily now trade blasts and plasma cells for brown or black or tan. But as surely and hard as you know how many platelets it takes to sustain life, you know that more new words will show up soon. Months ago you learned that “consistent with” means you have it, and, last week, that “refractory” means the treatment has quit working.
Now that you realize you’ll never learn Swedish, in secret and as a joke (to surprise your daughter-in-law with at dinner time), you understand it’s not that you’re running out of brain cells, you’re running out of time. You can’t learn sjuka and middag while you’re learning leukopenia and transampullary.
You never expected this. You never thought it would come to this! (That’s the funny part. Has it ever not been there?) Wake up and you will see it even now, gliding merrily in your direction, not even bothering to look you in the eye, as if you are the last thing on its mind—and if
you squint you will notice it gather a little speed (the teensiest of fuck-you’s), like a sailboat in languid waters a moment after the wind has shifted.
Let me begin by offering my condolences, I said, holding out my hand. She shook out her umbrella and placed it open, just beside the altar. They thought it was an ulcer, she said. They gave him some tablets. Did he have any special requests? I asked. Favorite hymns? Or something for Communion, like maybe Water Music? He was worse by Christmas, she said. He couldn’t manage the pumpkin pie. He always loved my pumpkin pie. The King of Love is nice, I said. I opened the book to page 64. As an alternate to Crimond, you know. Most people don’t recognize it as the 23rd Psalm. In January his feet turned black, she said. Toe by toe. It took exactly ten days. The shadow of a branch moved slowly back and forth behind the stained glass. I thought: When I get home I’ll check my toes. Will there be Communion? I asked, finally.
The last three days he started to hiccup, she said. He wouldn’t take any water. It never stopped, the hiccupping. Not once, not one minute until he went. I could play Pachelbel’s Canon. That’s very popular now. There’s no reason it can’t work at funerals as well as weddings. At the very end, she said—then stopped, her eyes squeezed shut behind her glasses—as if the rejected water, each wretched hiccup, and every blackened toe formed a chain she could use to haul herself back to September, when she would claim him, finally whole again. She reached for her umbrella and frowned. Play what you like, she said. He was never fond of music. Not hymns, anyhow. Only once in fifty-three years did I catch him singing. You are My Sunshine, I believe it was.
His kid doesn’t want a smartphone. His fourteen-year-old flute-playing boy is saying, “Nah, I don’t really need one.” Mitch’s wife Shelley says, “No one’s forcing you, honey.” She beams. The boy beams. Mitch feels a faint nausea. There’s something wrong with his kid, who still likes Legos and watches network TV and keeps his room clean and calls his two nerd friends on the landline.
“Well, that’s fine,” says Mitch. For some reason, he’s pitched his voice like an actor from a 1950s movie. He tries it again: “That’s just fine, son!” He’s speaking like a man wearing a fedora, a man carrying a briefcase. But nobody seems to notice. “So what do you want for Christmas?”
His kid, Ernie, frowns as if Mitch has just asked him to poke a kitten in the eye. “I can’t think of anything at the moment,” he says. “Can I go practice flute now?”
“Yes!” says Shelley. She rises from the sofa and kisses Ernie on the ear. “I’ll let you know when dinner’s ready. I’m making your favorite.”
“Brussels sprouts?” he asks brightly. “And Salisbury steak?”
“You bet,” she says. When Ernie has disappeared down the hall, she turns to Mitch. “Don’t force him to grow up before he’s ready.”
Mitch knows better than to argue, but he can tell that his thoughts—not grow up, just join the 21st century like a normal kid!—might as well be floating above his head like a comic book bubble. Not that Ernie would get such a reference, because he doesn’t read comic books, either.
“Okay,” he says, but Shelley has stomped down the hall to prepare the kid’s Brussels sprouts.
Featured Art: Ancient Roman Ruins by Giovanni Paolo Panini
–Rome
1.
My father fills a syringe with insulin, pushes the needle through his shirt into belly skin, looks through the window at his dying lawn. He writes a note to me: Summer’s early here, bud. Your mom’s still on me to lay off the Snickers. She means well, of course. The oak tree’s about to go—groans all night long. Caravaggio is one of my favorites. A sensitive scoundrel. Go see Conversion On The Road To Damascus. All is of Grace, Dad.
2.
Four lions stick out hollow tongues in the middle of Piazza del Popolo. Each tongue spews water—spilling down stepped plinths into four collection pools whose surfaces are mildly disturbed but never overflow. With their perspective of stone, the lions have remained unmoved for 200 years. How, I wonder, can they gaze without weeping at the sun-burned stoner strumming a distorted “Stairway To Heaven.” I stumble from one to another, dropping coins until my pockets are empty.
3.
When he baptized me, my father’s robe floated up around him like the wings of a manta ray, revealing the soft skin of his shins to the believers. We stood in a glass tank, with nothing to hide. He covered my eyes with a handkerchief, dipped me backwards into new life. I trusted his strong arms more than God.
4.
Fountains fill my photographs: pissing cherubs, horses with fish tails. Granite seashells emerge amid glistening mermaids— breasts taut in the exquisite way stone has of lying about flesh and time.
The nice teachers at the kindergarten open house point out the Unifix cubes and color game; they are professional in their analysis of play. Later at Lainy’s party the operators of Jump ’N Bounce just look away while the kids wrestle into an idyllic sense of self. A mother tells me, hushed, how one November morning Jason’s father parked the car and blew his head off. Then it’s time for cake. The kids are sweaty, tumbling over each other for a spot at the table. I search Jason’s face for a sign, a scar, but don’t find it—he’s waving a noisemaker in Sean’s face, his mother chatting pleasantly in the corner. Cue the birthday music. Next day, we’re late, and I walk my distressed son into school. “We might miss the eggs hatching!” he yells, bounding down the stairs. The class is huddled around the incubator, the glow from the heat lamp flushing their faces. This must be a rite of passage, watching a chick’s birth surrounded by friends. It’s on the docket, tailored to the lesson plan, deemed developmentally appropriate. It’s March, after all, when the world glosses over its losses.
I sit, Sister Mary, among the other relics in the Mission courtyard— a cracked vat for boiling blubber into lamp butter, a wood-wheeled cart to haul bear carcass to the butcher. Underneath the bricks, all the smallpox bones. And these three bells, Sister Mary, named Joy, Sorrow, and Gloria. What am I to do when they toll? Cast before I was born, each sings to me in a different key: G, E minor, and Chumash. Joy weighs 279 pounds and wakes roosting starlings, launches them from the parched oak tree, black leaves falling upward. Sorrow makes the wooden Indian in front of Founders Smoke & Tobacco weep. Gloria, Sister Mary, makes me shake. Sounding wilder as I grow old and tame, they ring in three tongues: red, wildfire, and October. Three bells, Sister Mary, three roads back. And one says you are the green-eyed devil. And one says the bears are gone. But one says, Glory, you are here, open your green eyes. There is a fountain, Sister Mary, a fountain not deep or wide, and into it tourists toss coins bearing the heads of our fathers, white and solemn and gone. A fountain with a bear and a girl and three fish all bronzed and greening from the air. Water spews from the paw of the bear, and the fish leap on their metal spindles, always inches above the troubled waters, and the little bronzed girl sees nothing with her blank Chumash eyes—not the fish, the white fathers tumbling head over tails, or me on my bench in the sun sipping from a bagged can while three bells toll their braided song. We are nothing to her, because she is long gone. And what am I to do? Bells tolling my guilt, solitude, privilege, joy. One, Sister Mary, sings the beauty of milkweed tufts blown down dry creek beds. One whispers to me the forgotten dreams of steelhead trout, and the sins of the fathers visited unto the third and fourth generation. And one orders my fingerprints pressed onto the black wings of starlings. And I can’t tell, anymore, Sister Mary, one from the other
Featured Art: Evocation of Roussel by Odilon Redon
The letter came back from the post office so mangled it was as if the mailman had plucked it out of my box before being jumped by a clot of street thugs. Then, still carrying his mail bag, stumbled into a bar because it was the third time this year that he’d gotten jumped in my neighborhood, and why do guys gotta pick on him just because he’s short (under five-six don’t make a man, his father always said). Then drank scotch and soda until the bartender made him stop, walked the dimming summer streets in search of his truck, slept in a doorway, woke up and vomited into his mailbag, found his truck and skulked home to his wife, who had sent all four children to the neighbors and was waiting up in yesterday’s clothes, with a suitcase and a left hook brewing. Because she hated the late hours the USPS forced him to carry, and by “late hours” they both know she meant his cheating with the tiny Castilian woman two zip codes over, and this thought that poisoned her days now propelled her to stomp on his mailbag and kick it off the porch for all that the mailbag stood for: the overtime, the philandering, the childless Castilian with the twenty-two inch waist. But then when she saw his face with his eyebrows tipped and sorry, and she knew that he hadn’t been sneaking around, but had gotten into trouble, she sat him down, fed him coffee, and washed his wounds before sending him back out for his morning shift, because they both needed him to keep this job (there was a pension attached, she had secretly started divorce proceedings, was hungry for the alimony). And so he got back to work and wiped off the fouled, wretched letters in his bag, feeding them through the system before getting called into the supervisor’s, and because the letter was wet, it got mangled in the maw of a sorting machine, the address smeared and clotty, the stamp curled and dystonic, and three weeks later, once the mailman was off probation, the letter came back to him, smelling like machine oil and vomit, clawed and shredded, stamped “Return to Sender,” and he shoved it back in my mailbox with bite marks from the beast that had mauled it, this letter to my father on his deathbed, explaining why I wouldn’t be going to see him.
As my father hands me a bouquet of roses dyed the shade of a dozen sinking suns, my mother grasps his steady arm, teetering. Her body has begun its slow revenge for what it begrudged all along, and she’s afraid to walk since her last fall, which snapped her hip in half. My father is tired of holding her up. He scolds, Just take it. Her hand shakes as she holds the iPhone to get a photo of me in my mortarboard and hood. Let go and take it, he says, and she tries a one-handed snapshot, her trembling arm still looped through his.
I stitch a smile across my face. The phone flashes. As she grips his wrist, I can hear him in Greek, the language reserved for anger and, once, for sex. The language they speak and still think I don’t understand. Can I live this way, Tia? he asks.
I clutch my bouquet to my chest, trying to pretend these flowers aren’t lopped off at the stems. Trying to move into the next phase of realization that love is unsteady on its feet. That two people can resent each other, but care for their daughter and each other enough to stay put. Refusing to wilt into that place I’d go as a child—when I’d hear their fights and retreat to the backyard to play with cats, praying to make something else of myself, however small—I stand tall. How can I live like this? he says to her again. Still, I’m posing, smiling into the face of their slow decline. And all three of us trying, best we can, to hold each other shakily, and steadily upright.
By the third martini, he’ll ask her to marry him. She’s a tourist, he’s a captain, home by chance. I stand at the window, watching. I want to walk into that bar, order an ouzo, and tell them that, together, they’ll create a new generation of pain. I want to tell him to court the island girl, the one who, forty years later, will see him, run to the restroom, and return with a fresh coat of lipstick. I want to tell my young mother, in the words of the great North American philosopher, Pamela Anderson, “Never get married on vacation.” But this is long before Pam and Tommy Lee, before I existed. Before Reagan reigned over his long line of wreckage, and couples shot themselves, together, in their cars. The Vietnam War has ended, but here I am standing at the window, watching while they meet, both oblivious of wars they’ll wage. They’ll move from Greece back to the Midwest—she’ll drink, alone, in her kitchen. He’ll return to the island every chance he gets. When he’s back in Illinois, he’ll stare into the aquarium and long for water. She’ll look at him, frozen, behind her highball glass. Still, I stay at the window of the bar, wanting to use Pam’s biting wit. But this is long before Baywatch, and they’re gazing at the bay. I tap the glass like Morse code. Sealed in my own tank of silence, I say, Please let go. But as they take each other’s hands, I softly touch the pane and turn away. Because they, too, have the right to plunge. Even if they’ll swim out too deep: holding onto each other until death.
I was one of those kids that spent a lot of time on the internet. Chat rooms, message boards. ASL, S2R, and some gender tricks too. That stuff was normal in the Nineties. And it was all good clean fun until I fell in with some gun nuts when I was fifteen years old, the type of people that encrypt shit. Way down in the web. Amateur blacksmiths and whatnot. I got so into it I ended up putting together a makeshift muzzle loader out of Schedule 80 piping, cold American steel, something I saw on the blacksmithing forum. I tried it in the basement but it didn’t work so I got a slightly bigger ball bearing for ammunition, about the size of a marble. I took it to the backyard, propped it on some dunnage, put a flame to the fuse. And by god, it worked. There was this huge discharge, a cloud of smoke. It shot wildly though. Fucking hit my kid brother square in the leg. He was clear across the yard. Dad came running from the house. There was so much blood that none of it seemed real and after Dad stopped the bleeding he came at me and that’s the deepest fear I’ve ever felt.
But that all happened fifteen years ago. I’m an adult now, turned thirty recently. Lacey’s my girlfriend these days. We met at a support group for those that’ve been injured by firearms: Tuesday night, St. Vincent de Paul, where I was the only one whose wound wasn’t visible. It’s like Lacey says: “Pretty baby’s hurt on the inside.” When she was ten years old she was making herself a necklace out of scrap—a little bit of twine, whatever else—then she found the perfect final piece, this shiny gold thing. All it needed was to be flattened. She grabbed a hammer and that was that. It was a live .22 round. Went off in her face. Took a half-dozen surgeries to put her back together. As a result she’s permanently blind in the right eye, with a spiderweb of ice covering the whole thing; little scars that don’t look like much until they’re pressed together.
In Denver all days end standing up packed like dried fish dry-humping each other on the H Line. Some passengers in their drunken wobble or even in their haze of sobriety pull down hard on the rubber handles, the ones meant for standing, the ones that swing dumbly above our heads. They think this action stops the locomotive but the train is automated, stopping itself at Broadway then Osage, Lincoln Blvd. Since the train, as it always does, stops— the travelers learn to keep tugging & I can’t help but think this is how prayer works. Like when I prayed to a god I don’t believe in that your morphine drip might soothe the wounds that chemotherapy would not & how I swear it worked sometimes but didn’t others & yet in my drunken sobriety I believe that it was me who eased your pain, that it was my failed pleas that bleached your blood.
Featured Art: Seated Youth Writing in Book by Raffaello Sanzio
This all began because Mother was making tortillas. This all began with mothers and kitchens. We live in Crowley, Colorado, or maybe Rocky Ford, Colorado, a place where there are not a lot of doctors. We live in a place where there are always mothers in kitchens and daughters who wait nearby to watch their mothers watch the tortillas.
The year is 1949 or 1950 or 1951. I am nine or ten or eleven and not allowed to touch the stove. We have a wood-burning stove with a large at surface for cooking. I stand on the pile of wood at the edge of the stove to see the tortillas. I like to stand close to watch Mother. Father has a habit of kissing me on the back of the neck and I fall. It is the middle of winter and water from the well is cold.
I want to be like Mother. I have a rolling pin Father made me, small enough to fit inside my hands. Father is always making things with his hands. He makes things for me out of wood. Father has a habit of kissing me on the back of the neck. I am the youngest of nine and they say I am his favorite.
Mother hands me a small mound of dough and I flatten it with my rolling pin. I watch Mother put dough on the stove. I stand on the pile of wood at the edge to see the tortillas. I stand close to watch Mother place dough, perfectly round, on the stove. I am not allowed to touch the stove. Father has a habit of kissing me on the back of the neck and I fall.
I can hear the sound of my hands sizzling on the stove. My hands sound like a stick of butter in a frying pan. We have a wood-burning stove, with a large at surface for cooking. I like to stand close to watch Mother watch the tortillas.
Manuel relayed buckets of moist earth to the concrete stairwell. It was Héctor’s job to hoist the buckets up and ferry them over to the dumpster. They had to work quickly to keep the buckets moving or the Bangladeshi contractor, a slight man with a beard, would start yelling at them, “Taratari koro.”
The workers down below had broken up the existing basement floor of the six-story building with jackhammers and then used pickaxes to pry out the concrete. Now they were excavating eight to ten feet of earth to increase the height of the basement.
Héctor was grateful to work in the open air instead of underground like a mole with the thick damp air and the artificial light from lamps. It was also safer up here. The men in the basement would dig themselves into three-foot-square holes up to eight-feet deep and there weren’t even any planks of wood to brace the sides. Suddenly someone would look up to see the sides crumbling in on him. He suspected that the contractors didn’t know what they were doing. It was only a matter of time before a worker was buried alive.
Still, it was regular work, something Héctor hadn’t had in a while. He had spent several months going to the parada on Roosevelt Avenue, getting picked up occasionally for one- or two-day stints in demolition or renovation. He found this job through Jesús, a slim Oaxaqueño, always clean shaven with dimples and a broad smile. Jesús used to talk big on the corner about his influence in the construction world. The men would rib him. “So why are you here at the parada, dumbass?” It didn’t bother Jesús.
Featured Art: Hollywood Africans by Jean-Michel Basquiat
The person who took this picture took it well above the parking lot across the street. “Malted Milk with Ice Cream” cost five cents once. Leroy’s on the corner sold “knishes frankfurters and root beer,” and the cars and everyone stopped moving for a moment so this proof could be snapped of the way a few things stood at the corner of Essex and Delancey sometime between the Fall of Rome and now. Which is also falling.
In the upper-right-hand reaches of the shot, a line of laundry sags out of a tenement window. The other end seems suspended in air, like everything else, both in and out of the window, the photo, the cowl of dust that wraps the earth in its own heat. Damn, said Napoleon, and he turned his horse and started back across the steppe toward Josephine.
The half dozen newly planted trees lined up in their iron jackets along Essex were leafless, so winter must have been on its way, in or out, we can’t tell. The little lie the picture tells is that, though everything is about to change, it brought life to a halt, so someone could open the door, now, and let in a large whack of dust and noise, the kind they make no room for in pictures, passing them on to the woman in the next booth who is giving, maybe the air, maybe her mother, a colorfully athletic lesson in Spanglish, involving, from what little I can make out, most of what we call history, as it’s apt to look when the future gets here, and “that fucker Reynaldo.” I have no idea what Reynaldo’s crime is, but, if you are listening, Reynaldo, get over here, quick, if you don’t want to be history.
Every Thursday, on his way to therapy, he drives past the house of the woman he’s having an affair with. What interests his therapist isn’t the sin, which she views as a symptom, but the root. So they dig, or seem to, and today he talks about his wife— how, before they take a trip, she makes him connect those timers to lamps in certain rooms, and how much this annoys him, even though it didn’t used to. As if their belongings were of value. As if an automatic light might stop an addict from breaking in. As if the thief, awake beside her, had not already come and gone.
You taught me how hands could be laid, how they could touch a head and heal, but all of those hands eventually fell limp like a field bent by threshing or a lit match dropped in water. Once, we used to dance in The Corner Tavern’s neon light where the pickup exhaust wafted inside like harvest dust. Life in the Midwest is like one long goodbye because it is the same every day, and I didn’t realize you had left until there was nothing but hard work and long days ending with the wind’s silent dirge that sounds like trying not to die but always dies in smaller ways— screen doors that slam closed but don’t shut all the way because the house has settled and the roof is warping from the sky boiling over with thunder and rain. I wake up now to the flashing falling from the gutters and the water dripping through the holes in the ceiling. All I do is recall your voice like a prayer thrashing my skull that mines the night begging our fathers our fathers our fathers in prayer, but they are off begging other women in other towns. This town is not the memory I want, but I know how sadness works. It’s like a kettle-bottom collapsing onto the details of every thought. I shouldn’t have, but I stayed in town to try and keep what I love alive, but no that never works. We were a long time ago and a long time ago is too hard to get back. The last time we talked you said, We will end up like our mothers— waiting for nothing. Then you didn’t come back. No. Not ever.
Featured Art: Murnau Street with Women by Wassily Kandinsky
She took him as one would take a deep breath or a second chance, though some days she doubted her own judgment, as when his silence held them hostage at the dinner table or rode with them like a soldier sent to notify the next of kin.
She wondered then if she could ever know him beyond the familiar stirrup of his collarbone, moles forming a perfect Cassiopeia on his back, fingers tying intricate knots in monofilament line. And what could he possibly know of her? Dust, a whirling skirt,
between the windmill and the barn? Scent of juniper, wild onion beside the garden shed? Her mother’s curls pinned tightly against her scalp, or her father’s glacier blue eyes gone milky with forgetting? How could these mean anything to anyone but her, divorced as they were
from the lazy swing of the pendulum? And what of those other lives smoldering now under dry grass? Their stars are still there, she tells herself, even in daylight. Even at night, their suns continue to circle and burn in a world of space and time. We all should be so lucky.
Sarah worked with Beth at a public library downtown. Chris was a biology professor at University of Louisville. They met at Beth’s birthday party.
At the party, Chris quoted Winston Churchill and Hemingway in the same conversation, and Sarah couldn’t tell if she liked him. When she went to smoke a cigarette on the back porch, he followed. Muted voices came from the re pit at the side of the house, but they were alone on the porch. He took the lit cigarette from her fingers and flicked it over the railing. When he kissed her, she blew the last of the smoke into his mouth. They ended up at his apartment. The sex was drunk and sloppy. They kept laughing. Everything seemed hilarious back then.
Sarah woke up buzzing the next morning, as if Chris had flipped a switch somewhere inside her. Driving home, she had the thought that she would put up with a lot from a man who made her feel this way.
A month later, they walked in Cave Hill Cemetery behind his house while red sauce simmered on the stove. Sarah told Chris about her father’s death when she was twelve and how she still sometimes visited the funeral home. “It’s on my route to work and back,” she said. “When the parking lot’s packed, I can’t resist.”
She was embarrassed when Chris took her hand and squeezed it.
Move to a different country. Take a new spouse. Make beautiful different-country babies with soft, different-country hair
and only speak your old-country language late at night in between dreams. Your new husband will ask the following morning who this person is; you keep repeating his name.
Oh, you say, in your new language. Don’t worry about it. Just an old friend.
Option Two
Build a house. Bake your late spouse’s remains into the walls. Like the spectrophiliac Amethyst Realm, feel paranormal hands on your legs and back as you rub yourself on the corners of the foyer.
Moan the name your ears haven’t heard since you reopened the coffin and saw silver bones.
Option Three
Meet a woman with dark hair and patience longer than yours. Tell her a lie: you’ve never done this before.
She’ll grin and say, “Sure you haven’t.” Later, in her shower, pressed against the pink tile wall, you can’t help but notice she uses his same shampoo.
I went on a date with a girl who knows how to live her life. On the restaurant patio where we sat, I told her I needed to finish my novel. And “Do you really?” she asked. She runs a kindergarten business from her house. And she put up a chicken coop out back. In overalls and workman gloves. I saw the process later in pictures online. Dirt on forearms, easy smiles. A stack of notebooks sits on a table in one shot, and she peeks from behind with smiling eyes. Her book is complete, she writes. She’s writing a book too? I am surprised. And then the shot of the back windows of her house, and suddenly I am looking out. At scraggly bushes and trees far back. And I picture her standing before that glass, mug in hands, in a sweater she knitted from yarn. And daylight wanes. She turns off the lamp. The crickets chirp wild.
With a blunt knife, cheap, he slices the out- of-season apple, applying reasonable force, thump, thump, and the hiss of cells torn open.
Window beside him a polite shade of blue, not too, too, and the maple gracefully conveying leaves so tender and appropriate.
This is a civil kitchen. No need to explain itself. Gritty clouds of fur beneath the fridge vibrate in silence. Onions too chilled to express themselves.
No news of what’s mortgaged. Who ripped that marble counter from what ground. Where the apple grew. The grievous rain that swelled it.
Featured Art: The Trojans Pulling the Wooden Horse Into the City by Giulio Bonasone
The magnolia drops its anger pink by pink. Eighteen-wheelers loaded with it rumble down interstates aroused by their own dark momentum. Cats rake claws through anger then nap on shredded upholstery. Cables fizz high above gutters, looped and twisted, twanged by doves. Flags snap in it. It propels the old woman and her encumbered cart. A suburban circular. A city racket. A maritime breeze. Some people give it away, but when they drive off the cur of anger follows, homing unerringly. You don’t love me, it snarls, but I will always want you. Each cloud an anger of its own, dimming the alfalfa fields. Some people exorcise it, smudging sage through anger’s rooms, rinsing walls with vinegar and bleach. They claim to have forgiven anger. Burned it off. God or Clorox granted peace. Look, no anger here, I’m not angry, that’s not how I feel. But you can detect the scent even on the street, rising from his wool suit’s weave, caught in her hair, samara’s wing, even in sighs, sick and sweet, because anger is born in the gut, feeds on your nourishment, and you’ll never in life starve yourself clean.
Featured Art: Still Life with Flowers by Odilon Redon
Cathy sat at the bedroom vanity and used a comb to separate a few of the dull curls in her hair. They always tightened up into something ugly by the afternoon. She thought about what she might buy when she and Bill got to Flower World. Maybe some flowers for the kitchen, fresh flowers, something red or orange to shock the dull ivory Bill had insisted on painting the kitchen walls, counters, trims, cupboards—what was it, twenty years ago? “Ivory is universal,” he’d said, as though their kitchen needed universality. The kitchen had faded now into a boring beige and all the flowers that came to mind were out of season—tulips, lilies, stuff like that. It was mum season and mums smelled like the dead. Maybe she wouldn’t buy anything. She would just accompany her husband like she promised. Smile when he put a garden gnome in the cart. Question whether he really needed two bags of fertilizer. She hoped they could just slip in and slip out without talking to a soul. Cathy could push an empty cart down empty aisles, unnoticed by anyone, some old tune from The Mamas & the Papas echoing from above. “Monday, Monday.” Was that the title?
But they would probably see someone. Likely the whole world.
Cathy dabbed on a little bit of lipstick. She didn’t need any more. It was just Flower World. Why did everything have to have a gimmick in its name now? she thought. Donut Den, Hot Dog Haven, Flower World. Cathy snapped the lipstick lid down tight—Ruby Roo—and dropped it on the vanity. No, she was going to be positive, she told herself. This outing was for Bill. Outing or outage, she couldn’t remember exactly what Bill was calling it. Whatever the name, for the first time Bill was going to leave their home dressed in one of Cathy’s old dresses, and likely wearing her exact shade of lipstick. Cathy kissed a clean tissue, looked at the red stain, then wiped off as much as she could and threw it in the trash can.
Winner, Editors’ Prize for Poetry, selected by Bianca Lynne Spriggs
In Texas, near the Gulf, a man wakes up and pulls on coveralls and heavy boots. He drives his truck along a narrow road to the strip where jets line up for fuel, heat already shimmering near the ground.
He works alone all day in the exhaust and roar of jets, as planes take off and land. He’s paid to save their engines from the birds. All day, the heat accumulates; his clothes go dark with grime and sweat, while sickening
fumes waver in the air. He knows this dance; the quail softly tumble in his net. He closes it to carry them across the runway to where the tarmac ends, then frees them in the sedge where he knows they nest.
Some mornings, when I would rather sleep than go to work, I remind myself that in Texas, near the Gulf, a man wakes up and pulls on regulation boots, then goes to sweep the quail gently in a net.
Squint at the barred owl, then race down the steep hill of your childhood. You lost the dog but found your grandmother who drank a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Shake her ten times. Prepare a fine cheese, sliced peach, hazelnuts. Drizzle with honey. Slide it under the bed to the monster. Hear the crack in a mother’s voice who says it would be so easy to go down to the garage, turn the ignition on. What will you do with all this moonlight on the pond, at once galaxy, scattered photons, shards of glass? If you want to know Truth, see the Pope’s Swiss Guard cursing at tourists, throwing stones at pigeons in the square. Play a game of Chase the Trees for leaves like wine in a human heart—darker than the blood it pumps, the beating silence in those hours cleaning after they took away your father’s body. I tell you, we cannot say love enough times. The vacuum’s defective, so it sings. Write until the sage & fir candle kills the smell of the wall’s rotting mouse. Look over your shoulder for the child you never had, the sibling you left in the front yard, the dog returning, bread in her mouth. Revisit title. Now your words are the loose parts of a rocking chair, the longing for meadow— some ground of consciousness, what the philosopher called the dialectic of inside-outside. And when you’re close, smear the shapes of ghosts. Draw grief a warm bath. Lately, there is little spring or fall, but keep the large bright mum in its pot until the flowers are dull, their necks broken.
Ohio. How is the state, the landscape, the word itself used in literature? As a community to be idolized or escaped, as a locale of unexpected mystery? Or, simply, as a bouncy amphibrach (unstressed-stressed-unstressed) to end a line?
In stories and poems, Ohio often seems to stand for America itself, or at least a certain slice of America. It is sometimes meant to indicate Industrial and Rural and Suburban. It can be gritty or pure, used for nostalgia, or to create a par- ticular kind of speaker. And its history has certainly contributed to its literary import. But we were curious about the speci c ways writers have employed our home in the past, and how they might use it today.
Certainly, it is a place that characters love and hate, an idea that must be contended with. And we are convinced, having read thousands of poems and stories mentioning particular spots, that Ohio is one of the most versatile (and sonically pleasing) of all of them.
For the following feature, we asked five writers to reflect on the state that’s often referred to as “The Heart of It All.”
Featured Art: In The Sky SomewhereElse by Emma Stefanoff
In his preface to The Marble Faun (1860), Nathaniel Hawthorne infamously recounted the limitations of America as material for art and artists, citing the “difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.” Hawthorne’s words were and are astonishing in their obtuse, perhaps willful ignorance of one particular “gloomy wrong” shadowing America’s “commonplace prosperity” as the nation careened toward the Civil War. But they also set up the persistent idea that America is a contented and peaceful country, one without a shadowy past that is ripe for romantic literary exploration.
The notion of America as a young, fresh, tabula rasa had its inception long before Hawthorne set pen to paper, and even then, in its earlier colonial and Revolutionary-era iterations, it was a lie. While Hawthorne’s description of America suggests a blithe happiness that characterizes the nation and its inhabitants, the specific literature of Ohio, for instance, would suggest otherwise. In fact, literary portrayals of Ohio seem particularly in tune with the tension between shining surface and hidden shadows. It is as if Ohio is, as Bill Ashcraft notes on returning home to the fictional New Canaan in Stephen Markley’s novel Ohio (2018), “the microcosm poster child of middle-American angst.”
Featured Art: People Growing Pink by Emma Stefanoff
In an interview with Claudia Tate, Toni Morrison had this to say about her home state of Ohio:
The northern part of the state had underground railroad stations and a history of black people escaping into Canada, but the southern part of the state is as much Kentucky as there is, complete with cross burnings. Ohio is a curious juxtaposition of what was ideal in this country and what was base. It was also a Mecca for black people; they came to the mills and plants because Ohio offered the possibility of a good life, the possibility of freedom, even though there were some terrible obstacles.
In Ohio, there’s a distinct feeling of being in the middle—not only in the physical middle, mostly landlocked near the center of the country, but also in the ideological middle, politically, morally—having been on the right side of history regarding the question of slavery, but, even during the same time period, often in the wrong on questions of justice: at least as supportive of fugitive slave laws as of the underground railroad. Morrison not only grew up in this contradictory state, it pervades her fiction. “In my work, no matter where it’s set,” she once told an Ohio audience, “the imaginative process always starts right here on the lip of Lake Erie.”
In their emphasis on a non-linear historicity, their cyclicality, and through her comprehensive storytelling, Morrison’s novels are intimately tied to her Ohio roots. The distinct seasons of northern Ohio—its agricultural rhythms and proximity to the eternal crash of recycling Lake Erie waves—inspired an aesthetic insistent upon return. Central to that aesthetic is Morrison’s initial refusal to reveal everything straight away. Early in her novels, readers are left momentarily confused, uncertain we have what we need. And often, we don’t, yet. This aesthetic style models a return to history that Morrison encourages—both in her novels, where she ashes back to revisit stories and add details from characters’ pasts to illuminate their complex realities, and in our own worldview, where we’re encouraged to look again at our own stories and the injustices that are never merely past. Ohio’s specific place in United States history and its natural rhythms inform Morrison’s style—which we can see from a brief look at her widely explored Ohio novels The Bluest Eye and Beloved. Moreover, the spirit of Ohio—its promise and precariousness—is so strong in Morrison’s work that it extends to later novels set outside of Ohio as well, particularly her slightly less appreciated Great Migration novel Jazz.
In poems, Ohio—as word, as a set of landscapes, as a cradle for psychological, emotional, and cultural exploration—exists with significance and versatility. Derived from the Iroquois word that means “beautiful river,” Ohio, as a name, is vowel wealthy, bookended by o’s, assuring that its mention brings a sonic vitality and depth. Ohio, in terms of topography, is rolling plains, glacial plateaus, Appalachian hills, stretches of bluegrass. Due to its proximity to the Great Lakes, and its general position on the continent, Ohio has hosted all of the following: major, ancient routes used by Native American tribes to travel and trade; pivotal exchanges between Native American and European fur traders; the ruthlessness and violence brought on by the heightened European demand for exportable goods and by the grueling process of colonization; numerous battles fought during extended, armed confrontations or wars (Pontiac’s Rebellion, the American Revolutionary War, the Northwest Indian War, the War of 1812, and the American Civil War); hubs and final stops for freedom-seeking slaves along the Underground Railroad; early industrialization; and destinations for African Americans leaving the Jim Crow south during the Great Migration. To many poets and readers, the mention or involvement of Ohio can at least subconsciously educe some of the locale’s extensive identity. Looking closely at two poems by Rita Dove and Ai, we will examine a few of the elements and forces that the incorporation of Ohio brings to the texts.
Ohio and Science Fiction. Perhaps unexpectedly, given the overwhelming normness of Ohio, the two have become inextricably linked. So, for the bene t of colonizing aliens and future AIs, busy consuming every spec of human information in an effort to understand us—where we went wrong, what were our occasional successes, what is meant by “Cincinnati Five-Way”—I’m happy to set out on a kind of fantastic discovery of my own, seeking to answer: Why do an inordinate amount of authors and directors set sf works in Ohio? What could the place represent that makes it such rich soil for these stories? And how might sf itself be enriched by Ohio-ness? Dust off your ray gun and wearable OSU memorabilia, I’m going to need some help.
First, to situate us. This essay will focus on two sf novels by Kurt Vonnegut— Breakfast of Champions (1973) and its “sequel” Deadeye Dick (1982)—both set in the fictional town of Midland City, Ohio. These novels propose, among other things, that a neutron bomb has destroyed Midland City, that an inconsequential sf writer named Kilgore Trout had been set to keynote the Midland City Arts Festival before its annihilation, and that one of Trout’s novels, which supposes that every Earthling but the reader is a robot, is about to be taken as gospel-truth by the dangerously unstable Dwayne Hoover. We’ll also look at Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011), among other Spielbergian nuggets of pop culture, which casts Columbus, Ohio, as the technological mecca of America and features a fully immersive virtual reality called the OASIS which people prefer to reality.
Here in the backyard of our mutual friend in San Diego, holding a beer while a balmy twilight coats us in aquatic hues, a woman talks about Norway. Norway by way of Bulgaria.
“Bulgaria is awful,” she says. “But Norway is expensive.” She’s a systems analyst for a cyber-security company.
Another woman says San Francisco by way of Hong Kong by way of, originally, Thailand.
Among others in this six-week writers workshop are a couple of New Yorkers, two Baltimoreans, L.A. folks (with stints in Poland), a South African, and an energetic woman from Lake Charles, Louisiana, whose pale hands utter like scared doves when she revs up for a joke.
Chatter. Writers talking shop, life, travel.
I say Ohio. “I’m from Ohio.”
Someone says, “Oh.”
Like the abbreviation of the state itself.
Oh.
A sip of beer, eyes downcast, searching the dirt for a lost thread of conversation.
In an interview with Claudia Tate, Toni Morrison had this to say about her home state of Ohio:
The northern part of the state had underground railroad stations and a history of black people escaping into Canada, but the southern part of the state is as much Kentucky as there is, complete with cross burnings. Ohio is a curious juxtaposition of what was ideal in this country and what was base. It was also a Mecca for black people; they came to the mills and plants because Ohio offered the possibility of a good life, the possibility of freedom, even though there were some terrible obstacles.
In Ohio, there’s a distinct feeling of being in the middle—not only in the physical middle, mostly landlocked near the center of the country, but also in the ideological middle, politically, morally—having been on the right side of history regarding the question of slavery, but, even during the same time period, often in the wrong on questions of justice: at least as supportive of fugitive slave laws as of the underground railroad. Morrison not only grew up in this contradictory state, it pervades her fiction. “In my work, no matter where it’s set,” she once told an Ohio audience, “the imaginative process always starts right here on the lip of Lake Erie.”
In their emphasis on a non-linear historicity, their cyclicality, and through her comprehensive storytelling, Morrison’s novels are intimately tied to her Ohio roots. The distinct seasons of northern Ohio—its agricultural rhythms and proximity to the eternal crash of recycling Lake Erie waves—inspired an aesthetic insistent upon return. Central to that aesthetic is Morrison’s initial refusal to reveal everything straight away. Early in her novels, readers are left momentarily confused, uncertain we have what we need. And often, we don’t, yet. This aesthetic style models a return to history that Morrison encourages—both in her novels, where she flashes back to revisit stories and add details from characters’ pasts to illuminate their complex realities, and in our own worldview, where we’re encouraged to look again at our own stories and the injustices that are never merely past. Ohio’s specific place in United States history and its natural rhythms inform Morrison’s style—which we can see from a brief look at her widely explored Ohio novels The Bluest Eye and Beloved. Moreover, the spirit of Ohio—its promise and precariousness—is so strong in Morrison’s work that it extends to later novels set outside of Ohio as well, particularly her slightly less appreciated Great Migration novel Jazz.
In The Bluest Eye, set in her hometown of Lorain, Ohio, Morrison employs agricultural metaphors inspired by her home state but does so for her own purposes. Having divided her first novel into four sections following the four seasons, she subverts Western symbolic meanings, as she does throughout The Bluest Eye, to draw attention to the fact that not everyone flourishes under a hegemonic worldview. The protagonist, Pecola, who desires blue eyes, is raped and impregnated by her father, Cholly, in the springtime—resulting in a baby doomed to death and a child doomed to insanity. All of this is set against the expected rains of rebirth. Likewise, the novel borrows its closing metaphor from gardening, but it evokes sterility not fertility: “it was the fault of the earth, the land, of our town. I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear.” The soil’s hostility toward narrator Claudia’s marigolds provides an immediate metaphor for Pecola’s stillborn baby, but it’s also a metaphor for Ohio’s inability to welcome Pecola or her father, and for a country whose people and systems continue to perpetuate racial humiliation.
In the Pulitzer–Prize winning Beloved, this time set in Cincinnati, Morrison uses the seasons to deepen our investment in her characters. She writes, “In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it. When Paul D had been forced out of 124 into a shed behind it, summer had been hooted offstage and autumn with its bottles of blood and gold had everybody’s attention.” Like the Ohio seasons, Morrison’s characters are tempestuous and demand attention. Even her secondary players are full enough to remind readers that everyone’s story is central to herself—that no one, fictional or otherwise, deserves to exist perpetually on the margins. “The fact that I chose to write about black people means I’ve only been stimulated to write about black people,” Morrison has explained elsewhere. “We are people, not aliens. We live, we love, and we die.”
In Beloved, Baby Suggs urges her congregation in the Clearing toward a similar realization: “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it.” “This here place” might not represent the totality of Ohio, but it is in Ohio: “to get to a place where you could love anything you chose,” Paul D reasons, “well now, that was freedom.” “Yonder,” on the other hand, certainly represents parts of the South, but it’s also the Ohio just beyond the Clearing, which can turn on you as fast as the Sweet Home slave catchers arriving on horseback. And when the imperfect protection offered by Cincinnati can’t keep “the bloody side of the Ohio River” on its own side, Sethe—in one of the most heartbreaking moments in contemporary literature—kills her daughter, Beloved, and tries to kill her other children. Sethe, like Margaret Garner, the real-life woman on whom the story is partially based, knows—at least in her panic—slavery to be worse than death.
Although her Ohio novels are some of Morrison’s most celebrated, they’ve also faced severe scrutiny. The Bluest Eye and Sula were originally met with dismissive criticism, and they, along with Beloved, have been banned and challenged by censors. Now widely viewed as the United States’ greatest living novelist, Morrison called reading early reviews of The Bluest Eye a “depressing experience.” For instance, a 1970 New York Times reviewer asserted, “Morrison has gotten lost in her construction.” And in a now infamous 1973 review of Sula, Sara Blackburn initially responded to The Bluest Eye by writing that “socially conscious readers—including myself—were so pleased to see a new writer of Morrison’s obvious talent that we tended to celebrate the book and ignore its flaws.” Blackburn even went on to suggest that Morrison should turn her attention away from “the black side of provincial American life” toward more “serious, important” topics. And as recently as 2013, the president of the Ohio Board of Education tried to remove The Bluest Eye from an 11th-grade Common Core reading list. Many people defended the book—most notably Morrison herself: “To be a girl from Ohio, writing about Ohio, having been born in Lorain, Ohio, and actually relating as an Ohio person, I resent it.” To ban a Morrison novel in Ohio feels like banning Ohio in Ohio, like keeping Ohio history from Ohioans: this is our past, such a move insists, but we don’t want to look at it.
Through researched historical description and intense aesthetic beauty, Morrison forces us to look. In her 2019 essay “Peril”—a preface to her newest collection of writings, The Source of Self-Regard, which was released this February just before her 88th birthday—Morrison highlights the power censorship tries to conceal: “the efforts to censor, starve, regulate, and annihilate us are clear signs that something important has taken place.” One of the many important things taking place in Morrison’s Ohio novels is their investment in history. Seeing no memorial to slavery, she dedicates Beloved to “Sixty Million and more.” She creates Sula in rural Ohio and charts the capitalistic displacement of black communities. She sets The Bluest Eye in her hometown and chronicles the internalized effects of centuries-long racism. And she does so in sentences you never want to stop reading. “My sensibility,” Morrison has insisted, is both “highly political and passionately aesthetic.”
*
Michael Hill’s 2013 book The Ethics of Swagger argues that a compelling aesthetic experience is capable of opening ethical paths that might otherwise remain unopened—that prizewinning black authors, especially Morrison, accelerated the canonization of African American literary texts, thereby increasing their visibility and making more people more aware of black histories and black realities. Hill evokes, as a foundational example of the ethics of swagger, basketball legend Julius Irving and the introduction of the dunk: “Dr. J’s dunks embraced black styles and revised the agendas of basketball’s white creator. This combination of cultural affirmation and institutional critique showed his expressive authority. [. . .] Swagger here involves more than just ego; it entails cultural recovery.”
Born just fifty miles from Morrison’s hometown, the current best basketball player in the world, LeBron James, has been forced to navigate some of the same issues as Morrison. For example, a 2010 Bleacher Report article began with this sentence: “LeBron James is the most hated player in the NBA.” This came just after the Akron native left Cleveland—the first time—when he announced on national television that he was taking his talents to South Beach. Even though James donated the six million dollars the broadcast generated to charity, drawing special attention to himself hurt his reputation, especially among white fans. The Midwest is a place where the fundamentals are preferred to the flashy, where modesty and humility are exalted, in particular and unjustly for women and people of color.
I was living in Ohio when James made his announcement and I personally know people who burned his jersey in 2010. More interesting, though, is that some of these same people also shared this meme in 2018: “Excellent father. Greatest player on the planet. Same dude, same maturity, same family. Reputation intact. Ladies and Gentlemen, LeBron James.” As with the literary world’s eventual embrace of Morrison, we might be inclined to see progress in these Cleveland fans’ change of heart—a change of heart inspired not least because James returned to Cleveland and led them to their first NBA championship before leaving—the second time—to play in Los Angeles. But I think it speaks instead to an unhealthy conformist mentality: one reflected in the reception of both James and Morrison. If a black person doesn’t fit mainstream ideals for what it is to be a writer, a leader, a role model—if, essentially, she doesn’t please white people on white people’s terms—then it doesn’t matter how talented she is, she’s likely to be marginalized and her abilities downplayed. That is, until it’s impossible to ignore her talent and charisma, and only then is she championed by the mainstream and tokenized as misleading evidence that a person’s reception is based solely on merit and not at all on race. The answer for icons such as James and Morrison has been striving to be better than everyone else, regardless of reception: “I am giving myself permission to write books that do not depend on anyone’s liking them,” Morrison has insisted, “because what I want to do is write better.”
And writing better for Morrison is always grounded in Ohio—even when she’s writing novels set in other parts of the United States. Jazz (1992) is this sort of Ohio novel. Set in Manhattan in 1926, Jazz offers insight into the psychology of moving from the South to the North, a journey both of Morrison’s parents made when settling in Ohio in the early 1900s. In her forward to the novel, she recalls one of the first things she did as she began to imagine it: “I remembered. My mother was twenty years old in 1926; my father nineteen. Five years later, I was born. They had both left the South as children, chock full of scary stories coupled with a curious nostalgia.” Although few of Jazz’s plot points parallel Morrison’s real-life family, the novel explores the fresh, expansive hope provided by moving away from the Jim Crow South, while at the same time acknowledging the South’s clutches. It encapsulates both nostalgic memory and the South’s destructive foundational histories, pulling characters back into a painful past they can’t totally escape.
We learn on the first page of Jazz what other novelists might reveal on the last: Joe Trace has killed his much younger lover Dorcas, and his wife Violet has tried to disfigure Dorcas’s face at her funeral. What follows is a thorough exploration of the immediate and distant past that helps to unearth how the protagonists came to be who they are. Employing a storytelling strategy owing its origin to her Ohio–derived aesthetic of return, Morrison digs deep into Joe and Violet’s arrival in the North, their histories in the South, and the histories of their parents and grandparents. As she revisits the same stories over and over, we learn, piece-by-piece, more about the characters and ultimately understand their struggles a little better each time we look.
When Violet and Joe first arrive in New York, the North is bliss:
They weren’t even there yet and already the City was speaking to them. They were dancing. And like a million others, chests pounding, tracks controlling their feet, they stared out the windows for first sight of the City that danced with them, proving already how much it loved them. [. . .] When they arrived, carrying all of their belongings in one valise, they both knew right away that perfect was not the word. It was better than that.
The North offers Violet and Joe a chance to “dream tall and feel in on things,” it provides streets where black people “owned all the stores,” and it gives them a place where they feel “top-notch and indestructible.”
In its hopefulness for a new start, Jazz is a migrant story: like the story of Morrison’s parents, like that of people waiting right now to cross the Mediterranean Sea, like the story of many in Mexico and Central America. But the promised land is not paradise; not everything is made perfect for migrants even if they arrive at their desired destination. The Cincinnati of Beloved offers a loving community and a passionate life, but only until the slave catchers come searching for Sethe. Lorain in The Bluest Eye ends up not as a place of infinite opportunity, but as a land where the “soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers.” Consequently, when Morrison’s young, excited narrator exclaims early in Jazz, “History is over,” we—author and readers—know better. History is not over for Violet and Joe: “Twenty years after Joe and Violet train-danced on into the City, they were still a couple but barely speaking to each other, let alone laughing together or acting like the ground was a dance-hall floor.” Like other Morrison characters, they are haunted by their incurable southern histories.
Initially, Violet fears becoming her mother, who threw herself down a well after the men evicting her family from their southern home dumped her out of her chair and onto her face, degrading and breaking her: “the biggest thing Violet got out of that was to never never have children.” When she changes her mind about children, she tries, in her loneliness, to steal a neighbor’s baby and begins sleeping with a lifelike doll. Her fixation on the past—having no children, remembering her mother’s death—causes mental lapses and hallucinations that limit further and further her human interactions: “Over time her silences annoy her husband, then puzzle him and finally depress him.” Even her decision to remain with Joe after his infidelity is couched in Violet’s southern foundations: “Everybody I grew up with is down home. We don’t have children. He’s what I got. He’s what I got.” Joe, for his part, claims he shot Dorcas because he didn’t “know how to love anybody.” Raised by an adoptive family in Virginia, Joe learns that his biological mother seems to be a woman nicknamed Wild, who lives in the woods and doesn’t talk to him or to anyone. Violet offers Joe a new family and the North offers him a new place, but the move furthers the institutionalized separation he and Violet face. Joe has to give up his best friend and adoptive brother Victory, whom he never sees again and whose memory casts a shadow on all of his future relationships: “since Victory, I never got too close to anybody.” And although the North—New York, Ohio, and elsewhere—offers an escape from the South, it’s also foreign and potentially alienating. This is a heavy consequence of the Jim Crow South: beyond its sanction of bodily violence and humiliation, it drove millions to leave behind the people they loved.
And yet, despite the novel’s violence and pain, Jazz ends with a surprising resolution inspired by the improvisatory nature of the jazz music evoked in its title. The disarmingly honest narrator—perhaps, here, reflecting Morrison’s own process—admits, “I missed it altogether. I was sure one would kill the other. [. . .] I was so sure, and they danced and walked all over me. Busy, they were, busy being original, complicated, changeable—human, I guess you’d say.” Joe and Violet stay together, become supplemental parents to the children in Harlem, and venture occasionally into other parts of New York City: “A lot of the time, though, they stay home figuring things out, telling each other those little personal stories they like to hear again and again.” Morrison remarks, in her forward, how she was struck by jazz’s “unreasonable optimism. Whatever the truth or consequences of individual entanglements and the racial landscape, the music insisted that the past might haunt us, but it would not entrap us.”
The contradictions evidenced in Jazz—the highs and lows, the hauntings and hopefulness—relate to the way Morrison sees Ohio as both “ideal” and “base.” It’s not exactly that New York stands in for Ohio, but that Jazz as a novel reflects the Great Migration experience, what we might call the Great Ambivalence. As it was written after the civil rights movement, the novel comments also on the American experiment as a whole, and if Jazz engages the American experiment, jazz music represents the best version of that experiment. As a metaphor for the promise of the United States, jazz music acknowledges difference and relationality, improvisation, originality, invention, pain, and struggle. Morrison wanted Jazz not just to be about these elements; she hoped “the novel would seek to become them.” The fullness of Morrison’s novels and, all too consistently, the social realities of our world reveal that we’re not there yet—and that maybe we never will be. But if experience tempers the “unreasonable optimism” of jazz music, experience even further recommends the spontaneous, transformed hopefulness of Jazz. It’s a hopefulness grounded in history and in the promise and peril of Morrison’s Ohio: a petrified promised land whose soil may not always support marigolds but has helped to produce the essential literature of the United States.
Dustin Faulstick is a Senior Lewis Lecturer in the Lewis Honors College at the University of Kentucky. His critical essays have appeared in Studies in American Naturalism, Literature and Belief, Edith Wharton Review, and Religion and the Arts. He is working on a book about Ecclesiastes and early-twentieth-century U.S. literature.
Newohioreview.org is archiving previous editions as they originally appeared. We are pairing the pieces with curated art work, as well as select audio recordings. In collaboration with our past contributors, we are happy to (re)-present this outstanding work.
First we come to the field where I did not hit the winning home run, where no cheers rose up and the game ball went ungiven
Beyond left field, the bleachers where I did not make out with my high-school crush, did not taste her perfume or dodge her brother’s freckled glare
This is the house where a family of color did not live, there, where that guy is hosing Chinese menus off his car
Then of course this tax attorney’s office, once the bookstore where I stole Helter Skelter, which I still visit in my dreams
Finally, this empty lot staring up at the sun like a vast gravel eye, formerly the school where I never thought to imagine a future, where no one told me and I did not listen
that life could be a wave beating the rocks or
a wind bouncing a kite—
taut string pinwheels, dips and swoops groundward only to right itself, to stay resolutely in the air
He’d wanted the persimmons and asked her for them, but when she gave him the brown paper bag, brimming over, he was taken aback. Did he really need that many? Still, he brought them home to his wife, and soon there were persimmons ripening on the kitchen counters, lining the windowsills. Each day, growing more and more succulent until the air was thick and sweet with their scent. At breakfast, he’d break one open with his spoon—the skin supple and ready to give—stir it into his hot cereal. Indescribable, the taste. And a texture he might have described as sea creature meets manna from heaven. When he ate one, he thought of her. And when he saw her, he thought of the persimmons. When her arm brushed, just barely, against his, did he imagine they both felt the same quickening? In myth, fruit is usually the beginning of disaster. And the way they made themselves so obvious— an almost audible orange against the white walls— made him wish he’d never asked her for them, didn’t have to smell them sugaring the air with ruin, as he sat there, face lowered to the bowl, spooning the soft pulp into his mouth.
Featured Art: Young Woman on a Balcony Looking at Parakeets by Henri Matisse
We were sitting on the couch in the dark talking about first pets, when I told him how, as a girl, I kept a blue and white parakeet I let y around the house and, sometimes, outside, where he’d land on the branches of pine and eucalyptus, balancing between seedpods and spines. Only, while I was telling it, my companion began to stroke, very lightly, the indent of my palm, the way you do when you’re sitting in the dark with someone you’ve never kissed but have thought about kissing. And I told him how my bird would sit on a high branch and sing, loudly, at the wonder of it—the whole, green world— while he traced the inside of my arm with his fingers, opening another world of greenery and vines, twisting toward the sun. I loved that bird for his singing, and also for the way his small body, lifted skyward, made my life larger. And then it was lip-to-lip, a bramble, and it was hard to say who was who— thumb to cheek to chest. The whole ravening. When I told him I did not clip my bird’s wings, I was talking about hunger. When he pressed me hard against the back of the couch, named a litany of things he’d do to me, I wanted them all. I, too, have loved to live in a body. To feel the way it lifts up the octaves of sky, cells spiraling through smoke and mist, cumulus and stratus, into that wild blue. And though I knew there was always a hawk somewhere in the shadows ready to snatch his heart in its claws, still, I couldn’t help letting that parakeet free.
For a while it seemed one thing could be righted. One small piece at the ocean’s bottom corner or the bottom dresser drawer with the scuffed baby shoes and shoeboxes full of snapshots of kid parties, holidays, school picnics etcetera.
A comfort, even knowing that wrong can’t be undone, is more like oceans plural rushing in weighing in with their trick of no light, unfathomable.
The idea was to inscribe the back of the photograph taken on our last anniversary. Simply to write, in everyday permanent ink his name in the possessive then “Mom and Dad.”
Featured Art: Shop Girls by Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones
What if you haven’t enjoyed dating for a while? You’re tired of sharing pieces of your life story with men in crowded restaurants all over the city who you know within five minutes you won’t want to see again? What if you get too excited when you find a guy you like at a holiday party? Becoming very forward while wearing a Snoopy Christmas sweater, because you believe it’s your power-outfit and you only have a three-week window to rock it? What if you’re having fun on a date swapping embarrassing stories and then somehow you’re outside the bar and he’s shaking your hand saying it was nice to meet you, and you realize that you’re actually in an embarrassing story? It’s happening to you right now. What if everyone keeps acting like this is simple? You’ll only find love when you’re not looking! To find love, you have to put yourself out there! And you don’t want to be dramatic about it, but some days your heart feels like an ambulance stuck in traffic. What if you keep trying everything and nothing? And when you look up at the sky and spot a perfect hole-punched moon you want to tell someone that, if they hurry, they can see it completely, all that brightness at once.
Featured Art: Landscape with Two Poplars by Vasily Kandinsky
Did you have any fun? Tell me. What did you do?”
—from The Cat in the Hat, by Dr. Seuss
Never speak aloud the thing that first pops into your head, pops like a balloon, black, bursting in a shock, pops like your bubble burst, pops like a blister of blood, a BB gun at a bird, a red blot on a white backdrop, thought precedent to mismatched utterance precedent to the stare, the crash into
silence, the inevitable turning away as you stand there (again) staring into your wine glass and facing newly open space
between yourself and a back. Never speak to strangers, never say that first thing
(defined as material object without life or consciousness; as inanimate object; as cannot be precisely described) thing thing thing
no matter how often you say it, nothing comes to mind except Dr. Seuss creatures cursed with dumb grins and bad hair and toys that crack walls and priceless heirlooms now look what you’ve done and though they meant no harm harm they did and ruined everything
and they are the only specific things you can conjure but you should definitely never speak of Thing One or Thing Two, much less their leader who should not be about
much much less that first BUMP of a thing that popped
into your own social klutz of a mind, that perpetual source of embarrassment, that maladroit blundering thing.
Sometimes I talk too much. I tell myself it’s good to socialize so I say almost anything to get the conversation going, something like “What’s your favorite crime film?” or “The media really needs to tone it down.” Then we’re off and talking about what kind of dog to get or whether garlic belongs in guacamole. I might not know the person I’m talking to but we can work that out on the fly like rolling a car down a hill to get it started but what if it has no brakes? Sometimes that happens and you have to steer away from the river rushing over the black rocks and turn onto the lane that snakes through the trees beside the reservoir and I’m still talking trying to get a sense of this person who tells me about her grade school and the re drill that turned out to be real but no one knew until years later and in the room below the gymnasium was a wallet-sized photo of a woman who went missing and I wonder whether the person telling me this is the person in the photo or if there ever was a photo how would I know? Then I’m telling a story I’ve told many times but it’s going to be good this time with the part about the voices on the dunes and the man waving from the other shore and I realize the person I’m talking to reminds me of the girl I went to camp with but can hardly remember except for the birthmark and that night I heard her crying in the tent while everyone slept. She seemed fine the next day and I don’t mention any of this but I wonder how my story has changed over time. You’d think I would know but I don’t. Anyway, I’m still on the road that snakes through the trees. Here comes a tunnel.
Featured Art: Under the Lamp, c. 1882 by Mary Cassatt
It’s made to make you glad on dull cold days, keep you from crying over car insurance, made to stop the visions of flogging your flesh with barbed wire, gouges gone rust-brown, swelling with tetanus. Full spectrum, mock sun; maybe it helps. At least it makes nothing any worse. Until you realize there’s pressure. Even the lamp is anxious as a border collie, wanting work and reassurance. Leave it on while you go to lunch and afterward its white radiance is trembly. It whispers, I shone and shone and no one came, no one saw. Aren’t I bright enough? Are you glad now? And you don’t know what to say. Its light quivers like unfallen tears. You sit still, regarding the light like a dangerous lunatic, like you’ve never heard of barbed wire, trying to look happy.
I first heard his name in passing. Someone was rinsing coffee from a spoon, saying, “That’s just how Merriweather is . . .” I was new to the city. I was emailing my CV around and smiling politely at new faces. I noticed that people really deferred to this Merriweather—his first name? A man I met at a potluck had camped with Merriweather in Patagonia. Merriweather had gotten him and his friends out of a jam when the stove gas ran low and a sharp sleet hemmed them in for days. Another guy explained that Merriweather had secured for him and his fiancée a cherry farm where they could have the wedding they’d dreamt of. Merriweather’s band played, and his bass solos shook bits of hay from the dusty catwalk. People danced and cried out to Merriweather for more, then laughed as a bale tumbled from the loft, just missing the sweat-drenched drummer. Couples snuck off to the guest cabins, and a young woman claimed the pomegranate punch tasted like starlight. A boy found a silver dollar on the freshly laid macadam. Merriweather’s band debuted a Sam & Dave tune they’d rearranged so that people looked at each other like What the fuck, how can they be this good? During the break, Merriweather spoke to a woman about her father’s death. She was moved by how closely he listened, and by the questions he asked that showed he understood. She inquired whether Merriweather was married. No one knew. Someone had glimpsed him at the wharf with a much younger woman. The two stared across the bay toward Bronson Island where wild boar still roam and clusters of purple lichen hang from the limbs of the vast spidery trees that vivisect the tarnished sunlight. Tears filled Merriweather’s eyes and the unreal eyes of the young woman beside him.
I was sent a how-to-carve-a-whistle book. I thought of whistles. I thought of carving. I bought a whistle-carving kit. I stuffed tobacco in my pipe and sparked it. I opened a buck knife, put a willow stick in my lap. I carved a whistle. I blew. I tossed it in the fire and looked at the flames. I carved another whistle, then another. I carved nineteen whistles, the ground strewn with chips. I carved the last one to sound a quarter-step above high C, a tone only I and my soulmate could hear. I blew it every morning, then listened. I heard soulmates blow back from their graves. I heard whistles from the Mariana Trench. I heard them sound from Pluto’s moon. I blew the other day, but no one blew back. I blew louder. Still, no reply. I filled my lungs with all the air of the garden. I blew the loudest. And nothing. Only the neighbor calling if I could keep it down.
It wasn’t the voice that woke me, but the jolt of the trailer. It was Dad. He’d lurched out of bed. Fumbled upright as if in a dream, as if he’d skippered a boat upside a pier in the dark, struck a piling and—pow—off the pitch of the deck and onto the dock he stumbles.
Not that the camper was what you’d call terra firma. Less like a home on wheels and more like a traveling dollhouse, everything pretending to be more than it really was—parlor the size of a bathroom, bathroom the size of a fridge, fridge the size of a toaster, toaster the hearth around which we’d huddle when the rain shattered and the dark thickened and the cold rose up to stab us in the ankles. The Cookie Tin’s what Mom called the trailer. Dad and Mom in the fold-out bed at the back, at the foot of which you got a curdle of flannel, Ben-Ben, not a toddler anymore but still squat enough (Tater-Tot we called him) to wedge in cross-wise. Up top of that the rack for Cece—canvas on a pair of poles, like a stretcher. Down below a carpet runner rolling out a luxurious four feet to the front-end boudoir—Len and me bull-dozed into the same bed together, head-to-toe across a table-top that, every morning at eight, we’d pop back up into place.
Oh. And Sal. Little Miss Bon-bon. Seems like the second a girl gets a couple of—what would be the polite word for it?—bosoms—you got the whole damn troposphere torqueing up to accommodate the blessed event. The VW van should’ve been for Len and me but no, Sal’s gotta have her privacy, her womanly solicitude, as if a girl who burns a whole afternoon spot-welding a girder of curls into a confectionary (what would be the word?) spectacle could give a damn about privacy.
Written on the side of a payphone lashed to the wall of the bathroom in a Montreal café is Annie Oakley’s telephone number. I see it while I’m peeing. That’s how close the payphone is. Annie Oakley in black marker and then her number. I’ve only touched a gun once. Or maybe I didn’t touch it, I just thought about touching it and then said, No, thank you. It was my father’s gun. It was small, perfect for fitting into a lady’s hand. Is that called a .38 Special? Annie Oakley would know. I didn’t grow up with guns. I didn’t grow up with my father. People sometimes think that is a great tragedy. I did grow up near a little lake, beside which lived two goats and a horse. In spring and summer I would walk with my sisters the dirt trail overlooking the mountain to the gravel path to the stables. If the goats were out, we’d pass them cabbage through the fence. Back then I thought the greatest tragedy was August ending or my eighth-grade crush dumping me for a girl with nearly my same name. I’ve always had trouble locating the appropriate level of sadness about the father thing. I’m not saying it doesn’t register. I’ve just known from a young age there was nothing to do about it. Here is me. Here is my father. The distance between us could be as close as me to this payphone or as far as the mountain felt from the lake. Either way it changes things. Either way it’s done. Annie Oakley shot a squirrel’s head clean off at age eight. It was her first shot. Here is me, I hear her saying. Here is the squirrel. Right through the head or right through the thigh or right through the gut. Either way it’s done.
It’s ’68. Whatever he saw, whatever he smelt In that smoky, dripping handful of purple entrails Just thawing out from the freezer, the news from Athens
Was ominous, and he wouldn’t haruspicate On how and when the Colonels might react— But the gobbets of offal keep piling up in the pail.
It’s not that he fully trusted the lordly voice Of the BBC, but hearing Vietnam He drops what he’s doing, and cranking up the volume
On that crackly plastic Panasonic— That’s when I hear it too: Khe Sanh. It’s what Comes through the speaker’s throbbing bamboo mesh
As I’m stamping prices on jars of baby food: A staticky hiss like burning jungle grass . . . My father wiping his hands on his butcher’s apron,
Oblivious to his customers as he listens To a transistor radio broadcast the blood Of a world in shambles. And then he’s back at his block.
Khe Sanh. My older cousins, Kosta and Jimmy, Are loading up the van they’ll drive around Winthrop, Delivering groceries and checking out girls.
I’m stamping the little glass jars of applesauce. Nobody knows whose number will come up. But our Calchas isn’t taking any chances.
Already he’s built another hecatomb, And now he’s scrutinizing some gristly turkey Intestines unfurling for all I know like the coils
Of giant lianas he saw in Guadalcanal As a young recruit. But through that throbbing bamboo Mesh I hear the Hydra’s serpentine hiss
He heard as a village boy way up in the Peloponnese.
They’re so meticulous, aren’t they? They take such care that I am ashamed for my country, that impatient farm boy, that factory hand with the sausage fingers. First there’s the fragile object itself—vase, jewel, ornament—then tissue, stiff paper, bubble wrap, tissue again, tape, a beautiful bag made from something more like gift wrap than the stern brown stuff we use here in the States, then the actual carry bag
that has a little string handle but which is, in many ways, the loveliest part of the package except for the object you can barely remember, it’s been so long since you’ve seen it. In America, we just drop your trinket in a sack and hand it to you. Oh, that’s right. We have cars in this country: whereas Stefano or Nathalie has to elbow his or her way down a crowded street and take the bus or subway,
you get in the car, put the bag on the seat next to you, and off you go, back to your bungalow in Centralia or Eau Claire. Of course, this doesn’t mean you’re culturally inferior to Jacques or Magdalena just because, as Henry James said in his book-length essay on Hawthorne, we have no sovereign in our country, no court, no aristocracy, no high church, no palaces or castles or manors, no thatched cottages,
no ivied ruins. No, we just do things differently here: whereas Pedro and Ilsa take the tram or trolley, you have your car, and now you’re on your way home to Sheboygan or Dearborn, probably daydreaming as you turn the wheel, no more aware of your surroundings than 53-year-old Michael Stepien was in 2006 when he was walking home after work in Pittsburgh, which
is when a teenager robbed him and shot him in the head, and as Mr. Stepien lay dying, his family decided “to accept the inevitable,” said his daughter Jeni, and donate his heart to one Arthur Thomas of Lawrenceville, NJ, who was within days of dying. That’s one thing you can say about life in the U.S.: we have great medicine. Mr. Thomas recovered nicely
after the transplant, and he and the Stepiens kept in touch, swapping holiday cards and flowers on birthdays. And then Jeni Stepien gets engaged to be married and then thinks, Who will walk me down the aisle? No cathedrals in America, says Henry James, no abbeys, no little Norman churches, no Oxford nor Eton nor Harrow, no sporting class, no Epsom nor Ascot.
Indianapolis, Indiana. Somewhere near Keystone Avenue and 62nd Street my iPhone pings. A college student from Hyderabad, India. He is pleased when I tell him he’s my first customer. He tips me two dollars.
*
I pick up my second customer in front of a bar in Broad Ripple. He gets in the front seat. His hair is grown to thigh length, and he is on some kind of party drug that makes him want to touch things.
“Please stop rubbing my arm,” I say.
He apologizes.
Near Rocky Ripple, he takes off his shoes and socks and rubs his bare feet on the windshield.
His feet leave little rabbit marks. He is a large man with very tiny feet. When I drop him off at the donut shop, he doesn’t leave a tip.
Featured Art: The Poet’s Garden by Vincent van Gogh
Swept up so suddenly in parabolic spasms like a starling flock or curtain swelling, billowing out while all along the edges this or that leaf frays from the pack the force keeps driving forward over the courtyard bricks—
while in ear muffs and face mask he points the havoc this way and that as if to see what happens because he’s in no hurry, he’s peaceful, calm, Laplace’s Demon out for a stroll, cool source of all that whirling, lost in
contemplation of the incalculable force of every movement from the greatest body to the smallest atom, holding it all in mind— working it out, in ear muffs and face mask following behind what whirls before him, fleeing, which is why he strolls.
Since my dad was blind by then, when David and I led him from his apartment to the tee of the shrunken one hole golf course that served as kitschy courtyard for the complex of retirees only well-off enough for this unironic aping of the rich, it was by habit only that he looked down at the ball he couldn’t see, then up and out into the void of stunted fairway and green while first this foot then that foot patted the fake grass, almost kneading it cat-like till the tight swing arced the ball up high
as the second-story windows and I swear it was like a trick ball the pin on an invisible line reeled in straight down into the hole—his first and only hole in one, on the last swing of a club he ever took, though we didn’t know this then, and how we whooped my brother and I as we jumped and capered throwing the other balls up into the air while the old man baffled said what? what happened? what? already wistful for this best moment of a life it was his luck the blindness made him miss.
And now it’s my luck, isn’t it just my luck, to be the last one remembering, as if I’m not just there with them but also far removed above it all and watching as through the block glass of an upper-story window high enough for the ruckus not to reach me but too low not to see the filmy blur of bodies hugging one another pumping fists as arm in arm the three of them head out across the fake grass of that single hole.
How the great closer—when the batter lunged and swung through the curve for strike three— turned his back to the plate as if there were no batter, and his one concession to the moment (that there even was a moment) was to hitch one shoulder as if to shrug off a slight annoyance while his face unbothered by expression measured its mastery by what it wouldn’t feel, or show, was like and not like us, our faces, lips, how, when I tried to kiss yours, they shut tight against what up to then, it seemed, they’d opened to so eagerly I never thought they ever wouldn’t or imagined you might ever turn away not just as if I wasn’t there but never had been. And weren’t we, maybe, like the batter too, and not, the way he flipped the bat and caught it and as he strolled back to the dugout, holding the bat up, seemed to study it with such rabbinical amazement you could almost think he’d failed on purpose so he could finally see within the bat whatever lack the bat, not knowing it was lacking, had hidden in the grain to show him now.
Wind hits the cliff face and climbs the palisade as three men at a slatted table play cards. Two wear hats. A third faces the sun and smokes. All three are gray-haired, but none is my father. He wouldn’t have played without scotch on a Sunday or sat on a park bench, anyway.
2.
A man holding a child speaks to her in Mandarin as he touches a small seat attached to the back of a bike. He pats handlebars and points to spokes, saying bike every twenty words or so, then taps the front wheel gently, the way you would touch the shoulder of an old friend.
3.
Some Sundays even if I’m not near the bay, I imagine my father playing solitaire at a slatted table as I lean over the cliff rail, watching waves that grapple with the beach as they leave it.
On the bike path below, grit spins under a stream of cyclists as a man wipes a child’s tear with the edge of his sleeve and speaks to her in a language so soft and low the bay curves like an ear to hear it.
Slipping through the shadow of trees at dusk to the old strip mine, we took off our clothes under the wide catalpa’s strung slender pods. The lake shone with the last evening light, cicadas casting their long call over the water.
We both dove and you didn’t come up for a while. Then, you broke out, fist first, and shouted for me to come look. I sheared the dim surface with dark strokes and found you gripping a watersnake that curled and whipped your wrist.
You were delighted, and I tried to imagine the impulse, impossible for me, that made you grab the slither against your ribs underwater. And the jolt you rose with, the triumph of your quick hands, and the body with which you felt the world.
Lorna tells her fiancé that we met in the cemetery. “Chloe was writing a paper on the War of 1812 graves,” she says. “And I was taking photos for my photography class. It’s a haunted site. Paranormal investigators have looked into it and everything.” This is partially true.
The Riverside Cemetery is known for disappearing children and hovering orbs, but I wasn’t writing a paper. I was writing an article for the supernatural edition of the school magazine.
And we didn’t meet there.
Lorna’s fiancé, Caleb, tells us how he and Lorna met, and she folds her hands in her lap, like a child at Sunday school. Whenever one of Lorna’s roommates stands to get a wine cooler, or giggles purposelessly, he starts his sentence over, so I’ve heard his story approximately three-and-a-half times when he finally lets someone else talk.
They met in high school. They met in high school. They met in high school. They met . . . Lorna and I met at an abandoned mini-golf course. The castle’s peak looked like a crumbling monument, and I was sure it would lead me to another gravesite for my article, but past the thick cattails, there were toppled bridges, a sputtering stream that emptied into a square-shaped pond and Lorna wearing a university T-shirt.
It’s dead August, a go nowhere night, and I take Mom’s Chevy Monza, pick up a girlfriend, head down to the Nu-Pike amusement park at the shore. We’re sixteen and sunburnt, peasant blouses, short-shorts, ready.
Dad taught me to swim in the park’s domed pool, ankles glitter-kicking past mosaic tile, but only the Cyclone Racer’s left now, a tattoo booth, dime-toss swindles, some freak shows. Mary Lee says the senior boys hang out by the roller coaster
and heads that way. A hand holds me back by the arm, hoarse voice coaxes Hey girlie, wanna see a man hard as a rock?
Shoved from behind—I stumble—almost fall onto a body, ageless, naked, diapered like a baby on a table. It’s airless as a crypt. His face narrow. Is he real? The barker’s dank breath, a nudge toward the table, Touch him.
I reach my finger to the dry, shinydrab thigh. Nothing moves but a black electric clock jerking second-to-second, hands vacuuming time from the room. The carny demands a dollar, I pull
a crumpled one from my pocket, back out like a low-slung cat. The Bearded Woman leans against a wall, cigarillo loose on her bottom lip. She spits, Look, it’s the girl who touched the Petrified Man.
I’m sixteen, sunburned, picking my way along the gritty beach, screams falling from the shuddering coaster. The moon stares me down, the sand swallows my steps, and the tide rushes forward, slick with neon.
Parked next to its German cousins, the van’s a message to the office bourgeoisie: Hey look, not me. I’ve got a 4-cylinder pop-top escape pod back to 1983 with a picnic table in back, motherfuckers. I could be a tortoise, tent in shell, ambling away from a mortgage. The kind of tortoise that shows up in Tallahassee after ten years of grazing on roadside dandelions. Driving home, I keep an eye out for Gandalf like maybe he’ll have his thumb out at the city limit sign. If I saw him I would stop like it’s no big deal and tell him to throw his staff in back. I need to believe there’s still time for me to take a bro trip in a van with a wizard. No questing anymore. No destination. Mount Doom’s done its thing. Sauron’s dead. Just a sort-of-old guy and a wizard in a VW van, sharing a bag of Cheetos and a Dos Equis six-pack. Maybe we’d drive back East where things are still green this time of year. It could be a little like rewinding time, headlights unwinding the two lanes up ahead, “The Grey One” pointing out a barn owl flashing through the highbeams. Maybe after three beers and a full moon I’d finally see the really big picture— how we’re all just hydrogen squashed into other stuff by stars. It could be the KLUV-in-the-desert- Jesus-is-your-friend-drive-until-dawn road trip. All my life I’ve tied my ties, polished my shoes, said my vows, then let my people down. But Gandalf doesn’t care. The road trip would be all honesty and wonder: The you’ve-made-your-bed-and-slept-in-it-for-too-long- now-drive-away-with-it-in-a-van road trip. Road trip of acceptance. My arches have collapsed and occasionally I shave my ears. Who cares? No one’s coming to rescue us because we’re way past rescuing. I loved you. I hurt you. I changed the tire and drove away in a VW van. And maybe just before dawn, the wizard would elbow me and point with a shrug to a Waffle House like why the hell not? Inside, the night-shift waitress would be taking off her apron and moving to a window to watch the sun come up. Maybe she’d call me Love and serve me bad coffee in a chipped mug. Maybe her name would be Grace. And maybe she’d pull off her hairnet and take out the bobby pins one by one, shaking her head, letting her long hair down at last.
To adopt a highway, say between Kettleman City and Coalinga, you don’t need to love the shorn stockyards or the Holsteins drowsing in the haze of their own stink. But it helps.
You don’t have to sing to the rows of uprooted almond trees next to the angry sign about the “Dust Bowl” Congress has created. You don’t even have to believe “Jesus Saves.”
To adopt a highway, you need only walk its shoulder, bending from time to time for a plastic lid skewered by its straw, a pair of pantyhose with reinforced toes and a crotch thicket of goat head thorns.
When you come upon a ruptured suitcase at the center of its galaxy of intimates sprayed across two lanes, look both ways before stepping onto the scarred asphalt to harvest the cloth pieces, worn soft on a stranger’s skin.
To adopt a highway, say between Avenal and Chowchilla, you don’t have to listen for the inmates on their side of the gun towers or even remember their names, the ones whose sins you spoke aloud to cover your own.
If you walk the shoulder long enough, stepping over roadkill gore and tire carcasses, your face may dry up and Haggard may rise from the heat shimmer to sing his creosote songs; and still you need not let the lonely in.
But it helps. To adopt a highway you must walk through the fumes of a spent afternoon looking for its leavings. And if you’re lucky a red-tail will swoop ahead of you in the dusk, a hawk-flame lighting post after post.
Oh blind digger, furred borer, miner of nothing at the end of a tunnel to nowhere. My nocturnal brother, I can report up top the screech owl sounds like he’s ripping holes in a paper sky. Tonight’s scent salad: honeysuckle-jasmine served under a thin glaze of starlight. Nothing between me and Venus but goosebumps. What gets you through the long hours down there? Now and then when I go inside to pour coffee or smash graham crackers in warm milk, I read a few lines of William Carlos Williams who can get high on open scissors, or a waste of cinders sloping down to the railroad. I’m looking for things to tie myself to. Maybe the chain-link backstop that, right now, is making diamonds of the backlit clouds, or the trembling peppercorn tree. Anything to stay topsoil-side for a few more decades. Do you fear the sky as much as I fear the press of earth? Do you stay awake imagining the unbearable lightness of air? The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions, rises to drunken heights, says Williams, and I walk outside again. Everywhere new leaves, so thin the moon shines through. My neighbors cling to each other in their sleep. A three-legged stray totters out from shadow to beg with a lopsided wag. Dig oh warm-blooded rodent. Bore your tunnels though no one sees their dark patterns. Come morning, the three-legged dog will hobble from fresh mound to fresh mound, quivering at the scent of your passage.
And they did all eat, and were filled: and they took up the fragments that remained, twelve baskets full. —Matthew 14:20
Today, my people—the people Jesus loves— are shopping at Costco. Membership checked, we’ve entered the light-drenched Kingdom of More. We’re sampling Finger Lake Champaign Cheddar morsels nested in tiny paper cups. We’re watching golden chicken carcasses ride a Ferris wheel to nowhere. Our carts are full to overflowing with applesauce squeezes and shrink-wrapped Siamese twin Nutella jars. Take. Eat. Take some more. But it’s not enough. Here you can buy a theme park for your master bath, on credit. You can buy buckets of pain killers, boxed sets of princesses, a Rebel 4-Pack of Star Wars Bobbleheads. The crushed-ice battlements of the seafood kiosk frame Wild Cooked Red King Crab Legs so big it looks as if a dragon has been dismembered by retirees in hairnets and aprons. Though abundance assumes satisfaction, maybe this is a place of famine. But why shouldn’t a miracle happen at Costco? Up the frozen-food aisle now comes a woman on her electric “Amigo Value Shopper” with a cow-catcher-sized basket up front and an orange safety flag in back.
Like the dry, hot winds of Santa Ana itself, the sound came in waves. Pop-pop- pop-pop-pop. Weanie Tender didn’t know from where. Weanie Tender didn’t know from what. Staccato bursts of varying lengths and speed, then brief respites. Now, however, is a different story. There’s a constant vibrato. Take any moment—take this moment—Weanie can hear it, by God. Pop-pop-pop-pop- pop. He can feel it. He need only focus his mind to detect what’s on the order of a cosmic palpitation. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. Weanie is a low-level PO. He wants to be a detective someday.
“Force’s under attack,” says his partner, Dom, wolfing Chick-n-Minis from his own private 20-tray, steaming up the cruiser. Bag-of-bones Weanie is crumpled in the passenger seat.
“You hear it now?” says Weanie, drawing in a sharp, short breath.
He and Dom are on break outside the Chick-fil-A on Bristol. Weanie can’t sit still lately. He jiggles his legs and wrings his hands, listening, deeply, to what he’s now thinking must be an engine running—that’s it, an engine running rough, like an outboard motor, and snappy, pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. But that would require a boat, and water. And the city, the entire county, is landlocked. And the seismic index is low. Weanie checks daily.
I shudder when I think of the giant beavers— tiny-brained, squinting Pleistocene thugs— they bared rotting incisors longer than a human arm, they infested ponds and rivers, smothered gasping sh with their acid-spiked, toxic urine, they slapped their murderous tails—bleating, they dragged themselves up the riverbank, spied sweetgrass; they charged the crawling babies, the tiny baby bones, trampling, they didn’t care— hurray for the naked, fierce, yelling Stone Age grannies— they dropped their hammer stones, they grabbed sharp sticks. Who can forget their skinny, bouncing breasts? They beat the giant beavers, they speared; they smeared hot, thick beaver blood over each other’s faces, their bony, serviceable buttocks—who can forget the grannies—
Our fathers never spoke to us of their wars. Each morning, they girded their loins with tool belt and slide rule, according to their appointed trades. In the summer, as they backed out our driveways, we ran after them. In the winter, they left, whistling, as we slept. They created Japanese–style goldfish ponds, built backyard gazebos, sang barbershop harmony and strummed the ukulele, but they refused to call themselves makers of beauty. They woke us at midnight to see the Aurora Borealis, carried us out to the rose and white light-waves streaming, named for the goddess of dawn who brings life, and the god of the north wind who brings death. Our fathers grew restless. They started to pace, walked outside to gawk at the stars. When we asked, Can we come, they said, No. When we asked Why, they said, Hush. Our fathers stopped kissing our mothers. They came home midday: red, laid-off, warned for swearing at the foreman, said they were sick unto death. They slammed screen doors, bedroom doors, storage shed doors. They started to drink. They stood up from couches, pushed dogs that nosed them, stumbled outside, yodeling. Said they felt bigger than the sky. They drank in bomb shelters, at the Legion Post, watching TV. They drank driving us to Scouts, bottles between their knees. They drank when we begged them not to and when we tried to ignore them. Sometimes they slammed us against walls, sometimes said they were sorry. One by one, they left: in their sedans, vans, the pick-up, walking to the bus stop. They left in the morning as we sat, silent, at the kitchen table, eating cereal before school. We watched them leave with their suitcases. They left a goodbye note for us to find after track practice. They left at night after fights. Some stayed, but stopped talking, or faded fast, eyes rolled back, clutching their heart. Others left over time, from their wasting diseases. They said they would never forget us. Our fathers said they loved us, and we believed them.
Woman is not yet capable of friendship: women are still cats and birds. Or, at best, cows. —Nietzsche
Love, I’m sorry for the time we were walking home with groceries in our arms—you carried the chicken and potatoes and I held the chocolate. As we
laughed about something I can’t remember, our dog barked at someone, and I just bolted, ran off. Also, love, there were all
those mornings you’d wrap your arm around me—your hand spread across my spotted stomach. Good morning, you’d whisper
and I’d reply, Moo. I’m sorry for that. I also hope you’ll one day forgive me for the time you were weeping, your mom had just died,
and I charged as though you were red. Love, I regret all the evenings I’d drive home from work and open the door to smell
roasting squash and garlic. We’d sit at our tiny kitchen table, and you’d say I love you, but then I’d regurgitate the ratatouille. I’m sorry about that, too.
Love, I apologize for my aversion to leather and how we’d snuggle on the sofa, my nose in your neck, but then you’d cry, Ah, my back
because unfortunately, I weighed 1,000 pounds. And Love, what remorse I have for leaving you, for wandering away to graze in another pasture.
Our parson to the old women’s faces That are cold and folded, like plucked dead hens’ arses. —Ted Hughes
An old woman thought her face was a dead hen’s arse. Maybe it was all the years of plucking and waxing. The woman had no idea what would make her think her face was a dead hen’s arse and not a live hen’s arse, and why the arse and not the beak, but she did. It couldn’t be my age, the woman thought.
It couldn’t be the men, not when everyone knows men love older women, especially much older, especially with all the grandma porn, all the old women sex costumes, all the men who ogle elderly women in walkers. She had read so many books where men longed for older women, where old women seduced helpless wide-eyed men. She saw billboards where old women modeled teenage clothing, modeled Brazilian bathing suit bottoms. And she knew the trend: folding wrinkles into one’s face using a Dumpling Dough Press.
People would stop her and take selfies. You look like a movie star, they’d say. They wouldn’t leave her alone. She’d shrug. Maybe it was the way she’d sometimes cluck when she made love to her husband? This could be the reason he’d whisper, One day I may trade you in for an older model. Or maybe it was all the eggs she ate. Or her penchant for feathers. Or how her mother used to call her my little chickadee. The woman was unsure why she thought her face was a dead fowl’s feces-extruding cloaca. She only knew she was tired of seeing twenty-year-old men with women who could be their grandmothers, old women who treated the men like so many dimpled birds.
Coach Oberman watched from his office window as a group of students prepared the bonfire by the south end zone. Two kids stacked tinder while another knelt beside a papier-mâché buffalo they would throw on the fire at the end of the pep rally. Oberman couldn’t wait to watch it burn.
He’d just gotten off the phone with Mike Treadwell—coach of the Ashland Buffaloes—who’d called to wish him luck in tomorrow’s game. Mike had been Oberman’s assistant for three years before taking the job at Ashland High. And now, after back-to-back state titles in his first two years, he’d been offered the defensive coordinator position at Emporia State University. This would be the last time they’d face off.
“I’ll miss seeing you across the field,” Mike had said. “Although I sure won’t miss trying to stop that Oberman offense.”
This was pandering bullshit. In their two head-to-head contests, Mike’s Buffaloes had routed Oberman’s Hornets by at least four touchdowns.
“I just wanted to say thanks,” Mike had said. “I couldn’t have gotten this far without you.”
He’d said it like he meant it, with no hint of sarcasm, but Oberman knew there was venom behind those words. In Mike’s two years as assistant, Oberman had treated him badly. Mike had a good mind for the game, there was no denying that, but he was a scrawny wuss with thick glasses and a girlish laugh. He didn’t belong on a football field. Oberman had banished him to working with the punter and made him the butt of jokes in front of the players. When Mike’s brother-in-law became superintendent at Ashland and handed Mike the coaching job, Oberman had scoffed. And now Mike was moving on to a Division II college while he was stuck muddling through another losing season with an eight-man team in Haskerville. He knew the irony wasn’t lost on either of them.
Why had I not noticed them before? The women in treatment on every block, it seems, leaving the library, walking their dogs. Once they hid themselves beneath wigs, fashionable hats in the city, or entered softly in Birkenstocks and baseball caps, stayed out of the way. Now they show up, unannounced. In offices, in waiting rooms, in aisle seats with legs outstretched, the women in treatment flip the pages, reach the end, bald, emboldened. One outside a florist today arranges lantana in time for evening rush. A bright silk scarf around her pale round head calls attention to her Supermoon. And one woman my own age, in my own town, takes up a table right in front. She nurses a chai latte in a purple jacket, her hair making its gentle comeback. What she pens in a small leather notebook: a grocery list? Ode to her half-finished French toast? The kind of poem living people write.
We’re waiting for our copying jobs at Staples, so she starts chatting me up, says she’s a retired math teacher. When I tell her I taught English, she says that English teachers are the worst and she always kept her mouth shut at the book club because they always wanted evidence and she just wanted to talk, have a cup of tea, what’s the big deal? And I’m being too nice as usual making it clear to her I’m not one of those book bitches.
Now I’m hearing about the math museum in New York and I can tell she wants someone to go with. I’m brainstorming excuses but it’s my turn to say something so I say how much I like zeros and that I even tried to read a book about them.
Now she’s telling me how she used to prove to her students that she can get 2 to equal 1 and keeps saying, Let A=B and it’s like God’s saying it, but now she’s saying, Anything can be anything and this is starting to sound like patent bullshit and she’s droning on and I’m so glazed out I can only nod and say hmmm like I’m Bertrand Russell finally grasping the true nature of mathematics when all she wants is some tea and company and it’s her bad luck that it had to be me she ran into, the Queen of Zero.
Featured Art: Still Life with Cake by Raphaelle Peale
It was spring and I walked the streets in the late afternoon with the best poet I knew. She was tall with a severe face like an early New Englander. Her ancestors survived genocide. We didn’t discuss our work, only the weather, how the blossoms were upsetting. The war was on. We bought a hefty slice of cake and walked slowly under a murder of crows back to my apartment. This seemed too evocative, almost to the point of embarrassment. The cake was coconut. We split the slice, sitting at the small table in my living room, away from the sun. At the time, it was the present. Here in the future, I sometimes forget to breathe, waiting for the next catastrophe. That cake was pure in its sweetness, the poet alive with me, her eyes scanning my face, both of our histories neatly bound in our throats. I wanted to ask if she was frightened by living, by the change in the light. Instead, she slid the plate across to me, a Ouija planchette, insisting I take the last bite.
So, as I understand it, none of your children have died?
They die all the time, she says. Over and over.
The doctor, young as ever-dying sons, suggests a short course of medication and refers her to someone who might help her to change her thoughts.
On the way home her walk’s different: rocking, dodgy. This is how the embarrassed go. Shanks’s pony won’t trot nice: one two, onetwo, no, one, two, for God’s sake. She keeps a Bonaparte hand to pat the phone in the pocket of her shirt, there, there; can’t let it lie at the bottom of her bag, roofed over by crap and the birthday card for Lance. Her middle lad hasn’t answered the text she sent from the doctor’s reception area: he’s got an away game today, rugby, that bloody rugby; he must be injured, quadriplegic, on a ventilator, brain dead. How can she go on? She smoothes out the prescription in her hand, crosses the road to the chemist.
A text comes as she waits for the tablets to be dispensed. Her son is fine, all good, they won. She pictures him downing celebration pints, shots, being a daft sod, succumbing to fatal blood alcohol levels. She makes the pharmacist bide there for payment, stood like a plum, while she texts back. Well done son but mind you go canny x. As soon as the first text has gone she sends another to say on the coach journey home he should sit in a middle aisle seat opposite the driver’s side for she’s heard it’s the safest place in the event of a crash.
Words in an old notebook prove (I was twenty-ish, then) that mind-mud and dismally tangled brain material have causes other than old age or illness. At the time, they might have been explained by the rum or beer in mind- blowing excess the night before. I don’t remember. But surely those episodes of binge and babble are far outnumbered by drier spells of helplessness: me, frozen over the neat rectangular form of a blank page, compelled to write totus to avoid writing nothing. It’s reason enough for terror or self-pity, the thought that those very things—the booze- blasts and blackouts—were then and are now the efficient cause of wex and taggle: furrows of gray matter, tilled for art and wisdom, laid waste, and the flood of those young insults cascading still. But no, I’ve heard that it’s very common: this empty gaze, the pen loose between a finger and a thumb, its tip hovering over absolutely nothing. And so, as tragic as it all may be, finally, I won’t let it bother me too too much. Why taggle over wex totus? I’ll pour myself a glass of wine and see what comes spilling out.
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