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.
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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.
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.
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 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.
Nobody, speaking of fluency, would remember that party where I told the young woman seated on the floor: this food tastes good. Nothing untoward. She surprised me by crawling on all fours, her blouse fairly open at the top by way of happy gravity, to gently take the food from my hand with her teeth; alarmed me because I was not young and what could she be thinking by doing that?
Around us on sofas and out under the trees hummed the language I would not understand after years of trying and also of trying to understand why I couldn’t, an easy-to-employ tongue with few options and simple structure but when they speak to each other it’s unintelligible, a giggle-babble, a bubbly stream of what I guess are words, vain emptying of thought from one head to another, like all language, really.
Why not give it up and run silent miles through the mud and rice paddies with my jogging buddies, or ride miles on a motorbike alongside a mute, jiggling citizenry, my face contained and content behind its polycarbonate shield, my mouth behind its filter mask, and who on the back not speaking, only chewing?
Winner, New Ohio Review Fiction Contest selected by Mary Gaitskill
By Analía Villagra
He was gone for eleven years, and Jackie is still getting used to the idea that Victor is out. Exonerated. His release had warranted a few sentences on the local NPR station, so Jackie knows that he has been at his mother’s place, three blocks away, for a week. She has not yet run into him on the street. Each time she leaves her apartment she scans the sidewalks, and when he does not materialize she feels equal parts relief and disappointment. Thursday afternoon she goes out of her way to walk past his building, willing him to be on the front steps or looking out the window. She slows down. Would he even recognize her now? Her hair is short, with a few stray glints of gray, no longer halfway to her waist and shimmering black. Her eyes have shadows beneath them. Her hips have spread. She’s thirty years old, in good shape she thinks, unless you’ve spent a decade fantasizing about a nineteen-year-old body. Jackie blushes. This is the first time she’s admitted to herself that she wondered—hoped? assumed?—that Victor thought about her while he was away. Eleven years. Maybe he’ll recognize her, maybe he won’t. She can’t decide which is worse, so she stares down at the sidewalk and hurries past the building.
She goes to the Y to pick her daughter up from camp. Graciela is running around the outdoor play area with a group of other kids, their hair wild, their clothes and faces filthy.
“Mama!” Grace shrieks when she sees her.
Jackie waves. She locates the teenagers wearing staff T-shirts, and they hand her the sign-out sheet without pausing their conversation. Jackie half-listens to the latest counselor drama while Grace gathers her things.
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after. —Wallace Stevens
1. The Beauty of Innuendoes
Meaning in poems comes and goes like a car speeding down a tree-lined road sun-shade-sun-shade-sun-shade . . .
Poems’ secret places: fleeting, hidden, close.
Closer yet I approach you, Whitman warmly says; and then, We understand, then, do we not?—never saying what it is we understand. As I understand a poem by my friend but mustn’t tell him what about the poem makes me feel so not alone.
2. The Beauty of Inflections
Yesterday I called my friend. He was in a peaceful mood (which he would be the first to say is kind of rare). As if bubbles of CO2 some clams or scallops had exhaled were calmly rising
in a steady/wavering surface-seeking
kind of way
up through his contentment effortlessly rose some words of praise for me. Plain
and unadorned; clear; direct. The blackbird whistling,
you might say. In fact,
if my friends didn’t tell me plainly that they
love me sometimes, I wouldn’t understand a single thing I try to read at all.
We were seated near the back of the Chinese restaurant, and waiters were rushing in and out of the swinging doors to the kitchen. At the time we had not as yet so much as brushed shoulders. Resting on the formica table top, my hand began to feel odd. Not bad-odd; but most unusual. Trees in early March, aroused, their branches slightly reddened by the slightly stronger sun, may feel something similar. They have a new sense of their importance in the scheme of things; they remember (if I may say so) they are divine. He was looking at my face, not my hand, so I don’t know how my hand, resting near the remains of the General Gau’s chicken, intuited its sudden access of significance; but it did. It had aura you could cut with a knife.
—For Chris Bullock (in memoriam) and Carolyn Bernstein
In that world people are not discussing The End of the American Experiment.
Yo soy de los Estados Unidos. ¿De dónde es usted? (I am from the United States. Where are you from?)
In that world people are not in a rage at their relatives for voting wrong and sticking to it.
¡Tu hermano se parece más a tu abuelito que a ti! (Your brother looks more like your grandpa than you!)
People there are not tortured by thoughts of what they should have done to prevent this; they do not endlessly analyze the causes of the disaster; or notice how many of their friends are independently coming up with the metaphor of a tsunami wiping away what is precious from the past and has been defended by their devoted work.
No llame a la policía. No es una emergencia. (Do not call the police. It’s not an emergency.)
In that world they do not sit glumly when friends excitedly tell of recent protest marches; they are not thinking, “Great, feel inspired; meanwhile, they’ve got all three branches of government.”
¡Me encantaría que me dejaras accompañarte a la esta de Pablo! (I would love it if you would let me accompany you to Pablo’s party!)
People there are not suddenly crossing the border into Canada in the snow with children in their arms; or trooping out of Jewish Community Centers on a Tuesday because of death threats; or writing emergency numbers on their children’s forearms in indelible ink in case Mamacita doesn’t come home from work that day.
Every morning I cross the border into Mango Languages, my ticket to oblivion. “Loading your adventure,” says my computer when I boot it up. Every ten minutes a woman’s joyful voice says, “Isn’t this easy?” to encourage me, and I admit I feel encouraged.
Córtalos en pedacitos y échalos al agua que está hirviendo. (Cut them in little pieces and throw them in boiling water.)
They are speaking of nothing more precious than carrots and onions; not, for example, the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. We are learning to use the imperative mood, that’s all; and today we are making soup.
Featured Art: A Rocky Coast by William Trost Richards
De Sandro’s café with the orange tablecloths wades into the one stone street without tourists, all the Venetians pushing their big delivery carts at first of morning. From what I understand of it, the shouting is voluble, happy, glad to be alive, almost never without reference to anatomy.
Nine years after your death it is still your birthday. I’m treating you to cappuccino and showing off my lacework of Italian. Ecco, I cry, pointing to the beautiful faces, the beautiful things.
Everything was outlandish to you. Nothing is to me. In that way balance is achieved across the long years.
But I think you would like these people. They would pull out the orange chairs, sit down, listen to what you have to say. You would be old and wise in a city old and wise, and that would be enough.
I’d better think of something else before the mood turns heavy and hard to carry over the Rialto Bridge with the shops just opening. All those selfie-taking children, all that brightness bearing down.
Happy birthday, I want to say, from the last place on earth, where the earth dissolves and the crazy towers lean out over watching for what comes—sinuous, flowing, unexpected—next.
In the beginning, I did not see but heard: news over the radio about the bombing of Gaza in 2014, triggered by a whole series of events—we say “triggered,” as if history itself were a weapon ready to be fired. Voices untranslated, the tone of panic rising, sometimes breaking into anguished cries, the wail of air raid sirens, and the smooth voiceover of journalists, trying to tuck the adrenaline beneath the language, trying to strike a tone that seems fair and balanced.
As poets, we often assemble language to disassemble meaning—or we disassemble language to assemble meaning—and this is all an effort to translate the ordinary (a pair of socks, the name of that place, subway car, chair versus shadow, the front of a sparrow, something afloat like a naked rock) into an extraordinary textual or speech act. The result, we hope, is something new and transformative.
If a poem, as William Carlos Williams claimed, is a machine made out of words, the sonnet can be viewed as a particularly compressed, dynamic, and efficient little gizmo, one that poets have been tinkering with since the 12th century. These tinkerers, of course, have included some of the most foundational poets of Western literature—from Dante and Petrarch through Hopkins and Frost—all of whom have used one variation or another to perform what Phillis Levin classifies as “a mode of introspection, a crystallization of the process of thought.”
There are currently three kinds of human in the world: the non-digital; digital natives; and adapters who have learned to communicate digitally but still remember an analog society though they cannot fully access that prior consciousness, just as no adult can fully access their sense of self prior to their awareness of death and sex. Susan Blackwell Ramsey’s “Ode to Texting” speaks in the voice of the third kind of human, a member of this historically unique transitional species, embodying a before-and-after in our culture in which babies swipe insouciantly on screens almost before they can sit up on their own. Interestingly, rather than relegating texting to the status of object, Ramsey personifies it as a shapeshifting subject she addresses in order to explore the range and complexity of an adapter’s experience. Consider how she opens the poem:
After my mother died, I kept reaching for my phone. I’d talked to her almost daily during the last years of her illness, when she’d been mostly housebound, watching Hallmark movies and BBC mysteries alongside my patient father and an ever-present small plate of toast she couldn’t bring herself to eat. Because I couldn’t reach her now, I found myself instead playing the matching game I’d downloaded in case I needed to occupy my young son on the flight back to Denver for the funeral. For brief periods, the game let me put my grief in the background and focus on the simple task of matching little clusters of fruit or flowers to earn points toward restoring a cartoon estate garden that had fallen into disrepair. The game offered order and arrangement, a small sense of accomplishment when other tasks (or even former pleasures, like reading) seemed to demand too much concentration.
When W.B. Yeats dismissed Wilfred Owen’s World War I poetry as “all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick” (and omitted Owen, Sassoon, and Rosenberg from his 1936 anthology), he was making a powerful statement, not just about distaste for sentimental language and the role of pity in poetry, but about the poet’s duties and limits. He had already excluded writing war poetry from his own list of obligations in 1915’s “On Being Asked for a War Poem,” but only later became more coherent on the abjuration of pity as an unfit subject.
A few years ago, I attended a literary gathering and heard four poets and memoirists read from their work. They were all accomplished writers, varied enough in their approaches to evoke laughter, sighs, nods of acknowledgment, a collective gasp at one point, and, toward the end of the evening, some tears as well. Tears are not uncommon at readings, of course—I have cried at several—but in this case the tears came not from audience members but rather from one of the readers, who had warned us that she might “choke up” because of the emotional content of the autobiographical piece she was about to read. Her introduction, followed by a tearful presentation, suggested either that the work was too new to share publicly or that she had planned her reaction and was intentionally manipulating us. As she spoke, I sensed listeners growing more and more uncomfortable, as I was. Some leaned back into their chairs, some crossed their arms. The more emotional the reader’s performance became, the less effect it seemed to have, an unfortunate outcome, especially given that the work was potentially moving in and of itself. But it was as if the writer did not trust the work, or perhaps did not trust us to do our job as listeners: to bring our own emotional response to the work.
Argos, the loyal dog of long-suffering, well-tanned, always-oiled Odysseus, appears only once in The Odyssey. At the sight of Odysseus, who returns to the island kingdom Ithaca after 20 years, Argos dies. Bam! Kaput. Struck down by a Zeusian thunderbolt. At this point in Book 17, no one other than the reader knows the true identity of the disguised and smelly Odysseus, who dresses like a beggar. Escorted by his loyal swineherd Eumaeus, Odysseus pauses to observe Argos from the distance of a few steps. But he can’t even pet the pup before steering back toward his wife’s suitors, whom he’ll slaughter in due course. Argos dies almost immediately after Odysseus turns away. Though the encounter takes fewer than one hundred lines, its brevity should not trick us into thinking about Argos’s death as a merely sad aside. A closer reading reveals how Homer manipulates his audience before the final act, using Argos to orient our empathy toward Odysseus. Moreover, if we stay with Argos a little longer, he reveals something essential about fiction’s capacity to wrap epic emotions into even the tiniest moments.
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.
Featured Art: Position Interplay: Midnight by Samia Halaby
The building is boarded up, but we know how to get in. It’s the end of summer and we’re seventeen. We don’t have a car and there’s nowhere to go in this town except down
the huge hills gliding our bikes past the A&P, the Ben Sun store where my mother buys my gym uniform, past the funeral home and the corner bar where Eddie’s father sits
in the same chair every afternoon. The air is humid, and the stars look stalled out in the sky. Maybe they’re waiting for us to try something or to grow up already like my mother tells
me to do. A train goes past and faces stare out of the fluorescent lights. My flip-flops ring on the metal stairs. Eddie puts his shoulder on a board, and we’re through. It’s just the way it always is—
the way they left it. Eddie sweeps his flashlight across the cables and cogs and steel beams, the stacks of papers next to the stapler. This place is leaking
PCPs into the Hudson River, my mother says, but we don’t know what PCPs are. All I know is, this is where my father worked before he left my mother. Eddie and I grew up two brick houses
away from each other. Tonight we’re here to take one last look at the muscley machines. I’m leaving for school tomorrow. See, some things last, Eddie says to me. I don’t tell him different.
Featured Art: Motorcycle Race (Motorradrennen) by Oskar Nerlinger
I can recall riding a Kawasaki 750 down Sunset Boulevard on a Saturday afternoon in light traffic. Cruising along at thirty mph in fourth gear, I let go of the handlebars, braced myself on the fuel tank, and slowly rose to my feet. Helmetless, I stood like a surfer in the wind on the imitation leather seat, my longish hair blown back, sunshine bursting through my goggles. A thin membrane of fear lined the inside of an urn made of pure joy. After about an eighth of a mile, I returned to the legal sitting position and only then did I notice my runaway pulse. When you’re twenty-three years old the saddle of a thousand-pound motorcycle feels as firm as the ground you walk on. You get full access to your inner maniac. Nowadays, doctors and sounder reasoning have rescued me from worldly vices and a rapid heartbeat often provokes alarm. But I miss the brash torque of myself, the quality of light in that urban desert, all the midnights and years out in front of me like the beautiful stupid jewels of infinity.
Featured Art: Glittering the Being by Roberto Matta
May he wake to an empty house. May every pleasure be interrupted. May every wheel squeak. When he reaches the front of the line may he return to the end of it and may everyone before him pay by personal check. May he receive a thousand e-mails a day, none of them personal, every one of them personal. May he go nowhere in metaphor but travel everywhere by bus. May every road be under construction. May he lose the last page of every book. May he find no pillow in the field. May he find no field. When faced with stone, may he see only stone. Because he is narrow, may he hold no one but himself. There is power in forgiveness. There is power in withholding it. May he have the life he wished for me. May every way be the dark way home.
A woman steps off a bus or a train, and something about her— the way she holds her shoulders, that straight-on walk— swings my head around.
I am here, not over there. But maybe there’s an occasional breach where the skin of time thins, and I glimpse unlived versions of myself on a crowded street, or through bookshelves in a library.
Where do lives go when they peel off in parallel?
I could be the ghost of a small girl who drowned, now hovering like an imp over her mother’s life.
Or a woman married, now forty years, a circle of pale skin under her ring, eyes dimmed from years of looking away—
some might-have-been me is a doctor who teaches psychology and practices Tai Chi alone on the beach.
Or is this an alternate life I’m in— my real self’s hologram, crept in under the tent flap while
embodied me pulls tankards of ale in a pub in Dublin, relieved she left Denver and loving her life as an expat part-time bartender?
Ms. Gardner had not been in support of the plan to drag Roland Raccoon to every middle school science class, but the principal said they’d paid Margery Martin a flat fee for the school visit, and it would be a waste if every student at Grisham Middle School did not have the opportunity to visit with Roland. Ms. Gardner was certain the eighth graders in her sixth period class were too old to learn life lessons about kindness and compassion and giving everyone and everything a chance from a twelve-year-old blind raccoon that was also deaf in one ear. “But he loves to be sung to,” Margery Martin had informed the class, adding, “in his good ear.” She cradled Roland in her lap as if he were a baby.
Margery leaned down, put her lips unsavorily close to Roland’s ear, and sang something that might have been Frank Sinatra. The boys who were sitting against a bookshelf near the rear of the classroom, as far away from Margery as they were allowed, snickered, and Ms. Gardner heard the word “rabies” whispered several times. Margery was in her seventies, wore a baggy sweatshirt with a large cartoon raccoon’s face on it, pink elastic-waist pants, and thick-soled orthopedic shoes. Perhaps the fifth graders might find something charming in her, might think she was similar in some way to their beloved grandmothers, but the eighth graders were surely too jaded to believe that spending an hour sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounding a woman crooning to a raccoon splayed on her lap was a good use of their time. There were twenty-four of them in a semi-circle on the floor. Well, twenty-three of them cross-legged on the ground and then Julia Fredericks in a wheelchair. During the summer, she’d been in a boating accident when she’d gone to visit her cousins on Long Island, and her legs had been crushed. Doctors were unsure if she would walk again. Some of the girls in the class treated Julia as if she were their wounded pet, making sure to follow her everywhere, offering to help her at all times, even when it was clear that she did not need help. These girls were well-intentioned, even though they were mostly unhelpful and in Julia’s way. Julia had been remarkably patient with the girls fussing over her, and Ms. Gardner had thought of nominating Julia for Eighth Grade Student of the Year for this patience and for her resilience in the face of adversity, but she was afraid others would believe Julia’s nomination (and likely win) to be the result of teachers feeling sorry for her.
Featured Art: Two Human Beings. The Lovely Ones by Edvard Munch
Not the zebra but the horse; not buffalo but cows, maybe camels, who traded the wild for the stable, a stall lined in straw, the house with wee gables and eaves, their name over the door— Biscuit, Coco. Snowball, Ranger. Traded the hunt for the daily bowl and dish, predators for owners, collar and leash; agreed to be a tool—plow or cart or confidant—to breed in captivity.
So when the man in the elevator at the Venetian holding his cardboard tray of coffees and muffins heading back to his room says to no one in particular, but most likely to the other man, the three of us strangers, I better get something in return for this, he means fetching breakfast so his wife can sleep, I better get something for all of this, gesturing with his head, meaning the hotel, the dinners and shows, I think about women who prowl the midnight streets in their staggering heels, breasts like missiles because they’d rather be feral than kept. And about men who gave up wilding to name their offspring, their known code continuing on forever.
I’m carrying my own tray of coffees and muffins, will soon press the card against the lock, open the room, rip off my clothes, throw back the three hundred thread-count sheets, waking my husband. He’s met someone new and now wants both of his lives at once. He can sleep later. These untamed weeks, we’re savaging, flesh against flesh, ravishing our marriage.
Featured Art: Murol in the Snow byVictor Charreton
« For three days, no coffee; there were headaches »
« On the fourth day, I have coffee again » « My frozen intelligence melts open, sizzling with otherworldly light, but two hours later a slight sadness and a fading of the perfect coffee feeling » « Then comes a desire for beer » « Then a quick feeling that now is a moment I could be bored, if I was a person who got bored, but I am not » « It is, however, too early in the day for beer so I do the dishes, and observe that soap bubbles are sly jokes told by the goddess of spheres »
« I drive to the dump, aka, the transfer station, where I will transfer the waste of my life into a cavernous compactor » « (Other, more privileged things get to be recycled) » « I behold the shapes of packaging that held the things that I used— that I used up » « They are not lacking in beauty if looked at correctly: plastic casing with two bulb shapes for headphones; wax paper in the shape of a soap bar; browning skin of a banana » « Someone else will worry about them now »
Featured Art: Committed to Tradition (Uberlieferung verpflichtet) by Monika Baer
I’m not drinking anymore. It’s not a court-ordered thing or medical imperative. I didn’t crash a car or assault a neighbor or luridly graze my cousin’s leg at the reception of her wedding. No one has ever even told me to “take it easy there” as I poured three, four, five fingers of scotch over ice. As a drunk, I’m purely congenial. Maybe I’ve tipped over a plate of food here and there, fallen asleep on the toilet once or twice, sung in competing volume with the Midnight Mass choir, but who hasn’t? After a nightful of drinks I am more inclined to turn embarrassingly casual with my affections than to become anything close to mean or combative.
So this is a self-imposed drought. Denial might be the word.
The shit thing is it’s July. Beer’s favorite month. Because after mowing a lawn or trimming a tree there is no reward like the reward of beer, and because to swim in the lake, to rest tired and near-naked on the shore, and to not drink a beer feels an affront to God’s finer generosities—July demands a beer.
Featured Art: Blue-tipped Dragonfly illustration from The Naturalist’s Miscellany by George Shaw
I wish you could see them: two thin blue needles hovering above a bed of loosestrife and clover, slivers of electricity, humming, almost invisible— a glimmer of azure against the hillside. How do their bodies hold the requisite organs? Never mind the pull that makes them want to wend their forms together this way. A tangle of wires working themselves into union this Sunday afternoon. Which, come to think of it, is something I’d like to do with you, the portion of desire I carry that much greater—as are the consequences of crossing over into that lush country of dry grass and end-of-summer weeds, where, if we weren’t otherwise attached, we could make the most of our own fleshly burden, lay it down on the soft earth, its fine dust and buried flint, the scattered flecks of fool’s gold. Don’t you want to? Doesn’t it seem unfair to be outdone by these mere fragments? Almost more air than matter? But timing, after all, is everything. And it looks like I’ll have to appease myself with this tableau: these two writhing out their little ecstasy in broad daylight, coming together and then apart and then together again, as if they had all day. Which, given the brevity of their lives, is quite a decadent expanse. Let’s try and be happy for them, living into their late hours with such abandon, while we are still relatively young, the gift of want stretched out before us, limitless and absolute.
Featured Art: Sketch for Beach Scene by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida
The town decided that blowing up the body was the best way to move it, but the only explosives expert was a groundskeeper who’d planted mines in the war. Still, people set up beach chairs and umbrellas on the dune to watch. When it blew, slabs the size of picnic tables crushed cars a quarter mile away. One man was killed by a bone shard through the heart. Another still walks with a limp from the impact of blubber.
For days the town pretended this had all been the plan, everything was good, but then under cover of night, we rented front loaders from the neighboring towns, buried what we could and burned the rest in smoky mounds that choked us when the wind blew in from the ocean. The beach was unusable all summer.
Featured Art: Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz by Amedeo Modigliani
—For Amy Dickinson
You be a rubber bullet, and I’ll be fireworks on TV. You dismantle your prejudices, and I’ll acquaint myself with all the latest fads. You drag the river, I’ll manage expectations. You shake your head and say yes, I’ll nod my head and say no. I’ll call you Texas, and you can call me Nancy.
Practical and precise, we will compile a list of things we will need. Warm clothes and synchronized watches. Miniature technology and hand-drawn maps. Invisible ink and antique stationery. The music of Django Reinhardt and a list of all the patron saints.
Things we will avoid? Strict adherence to dogma and barbed-wire fences. Left-handed compliments and uncomfortable shoes. Complex algorithms and attempts at perpetual motion. Sing-alongs and potluck suppers.
We will travel by train under assumed identities and ride facing backwards. We will explain ourselves to no one. Let’s be clear about one thing, reinvention is the key. Look, there’s an abandoned car with a tree growing through it. There’s an old bathtub with flowers planted in it. There’s a fence made of old bicycle frames. There’s a car with an antenna fashioned from an old coat hanger. These things were one thing, now they are another.
“He goes on wings of wind,” is what a psalm says, one of the psalms. Another one says, “Happy is he who shall grab your babies and hurl them against a rock.” When I try to explain these scriptures to Miriam and Cassie, they look at me like I’m stupid. Do you call that a friend? In the Jesus times, friends even kissed each other on the lips for hello—Miriam would be caught dead first. Cassie, okay, actually, even on the lips, which I am going to tell you about it, except for the fact that she is damned to Hell.
Like, I’m the one who is stupid! This is what the Bible says about sinners like Miriam and Cassie: “They have their reward.” Namely, shit.
Miriam wears this, like, Nazi dirndl, which she thinks is cool, with her curly once-upon-a-time blonde hair and with sunglasses with red rims, and she looks like melted cheese with a worm in it, but she walks like she thinks she is a beauty queen, you know, with, like, her one heel right in front of, like, the toe of her other foot, in a straight line, supposedly, except that it’s crooked!
Let us not speak of God As if He were the nightmare of a naughty child, Or a white lie for a widow, Or a conscript’s consolation on the battlefield. Let us instead be awed By the nothingness we’ve chosen not to be awed by, The shade whose earthly shadow We’re standing in, the lie cast by a happy lie. The face we turn away, Let us turn it toward the others, let us find them out, The ones who know the way A sure thing looks when rounded with a little doubt, The same ones every day Who, kneeling all together in a common room, Pray for their pets and pray As well for us, their company in a common doom. Let’s take no satisfaction, But concentrate on what we say when we say no: That dead we are the same, That time falls fast across the fading light like snow, That man is an anxious motion Of matter upon matter, liquor upon tongue, The neurotransmitter’s flame Upon the dendrite’s kindling—bright, and not for long.
Featured Art: Children’s Games by Édouard Jean Vuillard
came early, sputtering and spilling Kumbaya from the windows, the little punks inside eating a breakfast of Pop Rocks and candy cigarettes left over from Halloween and hiding the wrappers in the creases between seatback and seat. I never sang but floated instead in my own world of thought. All you had to do was look at an issue of National Geographic to know everything was extraordinary and people’s bones were full of stars. Cecil, the driver, got his neighbors to help paint the Jesus bus into a roll of Lifesavers candies— all bright and vertically striped—green, yellow, red, and orange, Lifesaver in perfect white script across a strip of blue. Cecil, tenderhearted conveyor of children to the terrible glory of New Light Baptist Church, Cecil, who after nearly hitting a squirrel, had to pull to the side of the highway to pray. Who could blame him for not understanding that the grace he sought was already on his bus, packed into forty-two little sugar-smacking bodies? And hadn’t I once killed a frog by trying to save it? Spilled it hard on the sidewalk like the spoils of an egg? If the sky had ruptured above me, I would have cleaned up the clouds and apologized for the mess. But the rebel gods kept hanging around me like Woodstock hippies, so I dared some revival to happen with the Christ frog. I was six and still decades away from translating the voices tiptoeing through my mind. Everywhere I went, I looked for spiderwebs with secret messages. Maybe there was a pig to save. And when the bus backfired, I thought I saw an afterlife emerge. Weeks later, when I awoke screaming the fourth night in a row, I wanted my parents to tell me it was possible for us to be alive without hurting each other. I wasn’t dreaming of squirrels or frogs. Just the Sunday School lesson on wartime and atheism: how the good of us, when commanded by soldiers, refused to stomp on a picture of Jesus and so had their heads chopped off, how I too should be willing at all costs to keep my feet clean of my lord. I was a good girl and learned my lessons well. From others’ non-Christian necks would grow something as secular and boring as heads. But from my neck, an endless field, and in that field, congregations upon congregations of daisies— all of them wearing the sad face of night.
Featured Art: Christ Blessing by Martin Schongauer
How am I? Blessed. Blessed. I am just blessed. God is good. Not afraid to brag on God. Brag all day on Big Man. My fiancée just graduated. Junior college right across the street. Four point O. See? God. He’s good. I’m looking for work. The other day who do I happen to meet but the owner of Huntington Steel. If that’s not God right there. You can’t tell me that’s not a God Thing. He’s workin’ it. Every day. Everywhere. I’m going to Israel, by the way. Jerusalem. Judah. Judah, you know, was Jacob’s fourth son. Now Moses, though—God didn’t let just anybody bury Moses. Dude was holy. An angel had to put old Moses in the ground. Archangel Michael. Jude 9. Look it up. Good Book. Moses was so holy. Up there two weeks with God on that mountain. Gettin’ those Commandments. No Moses, no tablets. Moses got blessed like nobody’s business. Love me some Ten Commandments, though. Love me some Shalt Nots and Covets. Don’t Covets. God bless Moses. I’m just blessed to be able to tell you about Moses. Share that Word with you today. The man was like God’s Number Three. Maybe Two. Right behind Jesus. Blessed as hell. I’m about to be blessed with that steel job, though. Think how hard Moses would work that. Mr. Bulrushes. Mr. Burning Bush. Mr. Hold Up That Rod, Throw Down That Staff . . . but now he’s dead and can’t so I’m the man. Work my ass off get that good reward.
Featured Art: The Lonely Farm, Nantucket by George Inness
Knee surgery? Hell no I didn’t have knee surgery. That’s a .50-caliber wound. I got bullet holes up and down this leg. Running through rice paddies. Never mind that. I need people to work. Know anybody? People don’t want to work no more. I need people to throw hay. People can’t throw hay no more. Hundred-thirty-eight-pound bales, all day out in the sun. It’s good work. If you’re strong. I pay twelve-thirteen dollars an hour so spread the word. The silt in the air’s a bitch to deal with, though. Especially if you’re not used to it. I’m used to it and still it gives me fits. I got to cough and puke it out and believe me, it takes a while. Purple Heart? No. No I didn’t get one. It’s complicated. I wasn’t that “good” a soldier, we’ll say. Purple hearts are for . . . Never mind. It’s just—it’s not worth it. Never worth it. Especially today. Kids come back fucked. I’d never go. I’d stay, work the family farm. That’s where I am. Now. I’ve got five brothers, four sisters, and we keep about three guys full-time. And my dad keeps timberwolves. Gets ’em from a friend of his in Canada. We got so many deer out there—we shoot about ten a year for jerky. I only come into town to donate plasma. I hate the city. And I hate people, to be honest. Know anybody up for throwing hay, though— send ’em my way. I need people.
As the stone shrinks, the form expands. —Michaelangelo
It’s like sculpting in reverse, learning about love: Here’s a Maiden or Aphrodite or Venus, naked and polished or is it the Doryphorus or David or . . . Isn’t s/he nice? The Ideal in spirit and form? Miss or Mister Universe!
Then, in reverse, as you learn about the apple of your eye in revelations you can hardly believe, (marble with veins like that! granite with such cracks!), the stone chipped away chips back chip by chip, and chunk by chunk, all superfluous fugitives reuniting, and not without the dusty air re-ringing with the tap-tapping of chisel and mallet, point and hammer,
refilling all the subtle negative spaces that defined the planes and rhythms— mound and hollow, ridgeline and gap— and the warmth that passed from the sculptor’s hands into the work, all his perseverance, passes back . . . until before you grandly stands, unhewn and cold, a breathless, glacial block of stone, Lovelessness now reappointed whose last words (whispered with chiseled lips lastly parted) were, “Darling, are you disappointed?”
Featured Art: Composition with Black and Gray by Claude Ronald Bentley
In the straight-backed chair for hours for hours after a drug-stilled night for hours after dream-hungry sleep she sits in the straight-backed chair unmoving for night after night after leaning spent against the steel surface of sleep after staying by habit on the right side of the bed as if as if—
although some time does go missing
as if an owl passed like a ghost its wing-beats deepening the silence before the milkweed from that half-dreaming streams away.
And because the skin knows after the brain does and the reptile brain knows after the self the arm believes and reaches palm held out flat seeking that other skin and animal comfort.
Because the palm is capable because a limb if lost may still feel and because it feels may find grass-itch, wind-brush, the love-mad path of fingers, and pain. Because this is so
the palm believes and finds the ghost it seeks but the streaming milkweed is carried away by the sun that leaps onto the bed and sinks its claws in.
Then dream-hungry she sits on the straight-backed chair a figure in gray and black.
Featured Art: The Customs House at Varengeville by Claude Monet
In the movie I’m watching with my husband, “A Ghost Story,” a woman lies in bed with a lover and tells him a story. “When I was little and we used to move all the time, I’d write these notes and I would fold them up really small. And I would hide them.” “What’d they say?” he asks. “They’re just things I wanted to remember,” she says, “so that if I ever wanted to go back, there’d be a piece of me there waiting.”
*
We were in elementary school when my best friend moved out of the red house on the lake. She was moving hundreds of miles away, the rooms had been emptied, and we ran all over the house leaving tiny notes about our enduring friendship. There was a door in the upstairs-hall ceiling with a ladder to the attic, where we tucked notes in hidden spaces under the eaves. There was a small door allowing access to the bathroom pipes on the second floor. A dark basement with several rooms and pipes on the ceiling. Our footsteps echoed as we ran up and down stairs.
