The four of us—Kathie, Ruth, our mom, and I—drove down to Maryland to visit Annie in the coma hospital where she’d been sent after she opened her eyes and moved one finger. The place was great—therapy six hours a day and nurses like strong, funny angels swooping around her railed bed. One terrifying thing— every week, the team tested Annie to see if she’d made enough progress to stay another week, and if she hadn’t she’d be moved elsewhere, somewhere not so great but nobody knew where, there was no where—we should call our congressman and tell him to do something.
That day was bright and cold. We wheeled Annie outside and sat on a bench by the parking lot, squinting into the winter-low sun amid pocked mounds of plowed snow that had hardened to ice. We chatted in Annie’s direction— about a cardinal in the naked dogwood, about mom’s poodle barking hysterically at a snow woman in the yard, about the balls of yarn slowly morphing into a crocheted afghan on the recliner. I heard us packing the silent spaces, cramming them full of news and pictures. Annie didn’t have many words but she could still make her famous bird face to show a little sarcasm so that made the conversation feel familiar and less desperate. Annie began to fixate on our mother. “She is scary,” she stammered. A kind of miracle— Annie speaking a complete sentence. Our mother blanched, then made a goofy-ugly face. “Scary,” she chimed, waving her gloved fingers. It was the most adult thing I’ve ever seen, the way she swallowed that pain and turned it into a sweet lick of icing, a joke, a little nothing. God it was awful.
Halfway home we stopped for the night at a freeway motel, the four of us in one room. In the lobby, we scarfed down a buffet—honeyed ham and gloppy macaroni salad, dinner rolls spongy and soft as an old man’s belly. There were two double beds in the room and when I plopped on the corner of one, the whole mattress flew up toward the ceiling in a way that I cannot explain the physics of to this day. But I kept doing it, the mattress jack-knifing in the dim room until we were all laughing and laughing—we laughed until we cried we were laughing so hard.
Communication, never our forte: in the ER, I tell you you will be admitted upstairs for observation. You let out an anguished cry worthy of the London stage— This is it, Sara, I’m going upstairs! Your forefinger points up as you give me that knowing eye. It takes me a minute. Not that upstairs! But you swear, this is it, your curtain call, your swan song, the end of your road, your bucket kicked. Still, once on that heavenly floor, you cow the nurses, charm the doctor, vacuum up every last crumb of hamburger and fries.
Years later, on your actual deathbed, you turn red-rimmed eyes to me, barely managing to mouth, I have to go! You can go, Mom, we rush to assure you. Leaning over, I whisper, We’ll be okay. Your face gathers into the shadow of a glare as you try to swing your legs out of bed. The toilet, you gasp, not having the strength to say you idiot. But we can’t let you out of bed; we’ve become de facto jailers, your most private functions now public property, input and output duly recorded, your dignity the last casualty of this war. You give no easy victory to thieving death; not used to losing, you snatch back the breath we think has left you. Laboring for days, your sunken chest rises again and again, while we, your children, fall around you, exhausted. Then you are gone, giving us the slip at the devil’s hour. As we wash your cooling body, your hazel eyes pop open like a doll’s, as if you want to see, as if to insist you are still a part of things.
as she takes off her bra to put on a hospital gown. She motions for me to pick it up off the floor, which still has spots of blood or plasma on it. I glance at her breasts, small-nippled like my own, although one is dented where they did the biopsy. She tells me about that every time, how they deformed her. Then she climbs, regal, into the hospital bed. In the bed, she is pale under the fluorescent lights, although her diamonds wink on either side of her face. Her bedazzling smile is at rest, her cheekbones rise over sunken cheeks, her brow is furrowed, her hazel eyes flutter behind purple lids, her roots need touching up. She’s had work done, but dementia has elided that fact, which seems to me the best of all possible worlds. The gorgeous male doctor comes in with a homely male nurse to report The tumor is bigger and you have to do something. His cobalt eyes lock intently on mine across my mother’s supine body. I imagine swimming in that blue, freestyling, one rhythmic stroke after the other. My weary voice explains We have been waiting weeks to see the oncologist, even as my body is flipturning in his eyes, my nostrils full of chlorine and Coppertone.
None of which my mother hears, as, mercifully, she isn’t wearing her hearing aids. But when the men leave, she slides her eyes over to me and asks Which one was the doctor? The tall one, I answer. She cocks an eyebrow. Fit? The bluest eyes? Yes, I say, that one.
Not that I noticed, she adds, with a shrug and a laugh.
Fifty years ago, a tramp came to our door. I didn’t see him, just heard the rumor ascend the stairs with my clamoring brothers; by the time the three of us thundered down again, there were only wet footprints leading from door to kitchen and back. My mother had fed him, a woman alone with six children in an alien land, wisteria dripping from the porch roof, a green April rain drenching everything. It is the grape-like must of blooming wisteria, its decadence, and the dark empty house, and those glistening tracks that I remember, and the woman with her fierce, generous heart, so that when my doorbell rings today and a large man looms on my porch with his empty belly and full story, I do not hesitate.
Opal had an annoying habit of leaving stuff she no longer wanted on our doorstep. What’s more, she refused to call ahead or send a warning text. She wouldn’t even ring the bell. (She once gave us a partial gallon of rainbow water ice on a warm spring day, and it wasn’t until a neighbor kid spotted it staining our stoop like an oil slick that we became aware of the leaky treat, accompanied by a sticky caravan of ants.) “It’s just Opal’s way,” was how my wife explained it to me the first few times I opened the front door and nearly tripped over one of her sister’s “offerings.” “Tell her we have enough junk of our own,” I would say, or some cranky comment along those lines. “She can take it to a flea market.” Wendy would just roll her wide-set eyes and smile her eternally camera-ready smile. “You’re missing the point, Tom. She doesn’t want to sell her stuff to strangers. She wants family to have it.” “But what if family doesn’t want it?” I’d press. At which point Wendy, who was likely late for an audition, would cut the conversation short. She was done defending her sister. Not that Opal wasn’t a bona fide blackbelt when it came to verbally defending herself.
On bad days, I thought of my sister-in-law as a mangy stray for whom depositing her gleefully eviscerated prey was a sign of great respect. On slightly better days, I thought of her as a kind of half-assed Santa Claus. Not in a million years would we ask for the sort of gifts we were routinely given: A trash bag full of bucatini pool noodles (we didn’t have a pool); a cast-iron fondue pot (Wendy was lactose intolerant); an “autographed” portrait of Kevin Costner atop a horse, dressed in full-blown Dances with Wolves regalia (it was a portrait of Kevin Costner atop a horse). Opal once left us a heaping brown bag of bargain-basement lingerie—assuming the basement was located at the bottom of a brothel. It was coarse, iridescent stuff, as if its wearer’s chief concern was not getting lost in the dark. Its intense color seemed to come off on our hands. Never mind that Opal was twice Wendy’s size. It’s hard to imagine any woman being taken seriously in that sort of underwear, let alone lusted after, coveted, craved. But maybe being taken seriously wasn’t the point. Opal was good-looking, but her sense of humor tended toward the shadier side of the street. In fact she looked a lot like Wendy—Wendy with a perpetual sneer and a little extra face between her features. Once, at the beach, we came across a guy armed with a Sharpie who was drawing caricatures of passersby on balloons. After a few seconds of scribbling, his zany, inflated medium squeaking like a set of handlebar brakes, he handed us Wendy’s likeness. She and I looked at each other and shared the same tipsy thought aloud: Opal.
I watch him drop from the pinch-thin slot above the dishwasher, scale the tube-steel legs of the baker’s rack, skirt the sink’s slick edge and grow brazen: sortie over the runner by noonlight, champion of bagged bread, banana, pizza crust. At night I trap him with a paper-towel tube and peanut butter, whisper apologies and name him Jeff, then knowing nothing of care release him into a brush pile at the edge of the park. I hope against owls and foxes, pray that he finds the dark brownstone basement of Saint Joseph’s Church and lives forever on the unblessed wafers loose in cabinets. At the rehearsal of my first communion Father Las Heras declared them worthless, tossed handfuls at us like tiny frisbees, slid them across the floorboards where he crushed them under his old black Reeboks, and spun one neatly into the chest pocket of my first white button-up dress shirt.
She was going in for new valves and a bypass later that week, so my mother asked me to drive her to the bank where she signed a log the branch manager initialed before he swung the vault open and let us into that metallic space walled with rows of numbered doors. His key first in the one with her number, then hers in the other slot, and the steel box she’d earned by her loyalty slid from its shelf. He led us to a private closet with a chair and small table, and when she lifted the box lid there they were—the deed for a remnant of the family farm, the cancelled house mortgage, a copy of the title for the last car my father owned, his 30-year plaque from the slaughterhouse, and a pinky ring with his initials, a certificate for a stock gone bust, her mother’s gold wedding band, the Silver Anniversary bracelet she wore only to weddings, a lock of hair from my first haircut, and under it all, her bridal corsage, wrapped in yellowed cellophane, and while I stood near she peered inside the manila envelopes that held the legal papers, touched each piece of jewelry, the curl of hair, and tattered remains of the corsage she’d worn just above her heart, a desiccated rosebud pierced with a rusted pin.
Don’t pat me on the back, my heart wasn’t any softer, or bigger than those other kids’ walking home from school that day, but when he called over to me from the crosswalk I put my books down to help after I saw the pastor’s palsied hands trying to re-knot the laces of his spit-shined black oxfords. I’d heard the talk around the table about the old warrior come home with a shrapnel limp, the vet of Korea and, not long ago, our big brothers’ green hell, here to soldier our parish through the end of the Sixties. And when I bent down to retie the knot I got a whiff of the same stale cigar smoke that seeped past the confessional screen the days Sister marched us in to tell our puny sins to this man who spent years hearing the last words of the wounded, then after knotting the loops of his laces, still kneeling on one knee I tried to eyeball the ridges and swirls on his right thumb everyone swore were stained with blood from hundreds of GIs and the sacramental oil of our brothers’ last rites.
There’s no need to be unpleasant on a Sunday afternoon when we have all had such a nice time. He isn’t here to defend himself, and besides, he is a father, and besides, he is a man of the cloth.
We were all having such a nice time, but what you’re saying is very serious. He is a father, and besides, he is a man of the cloth. He has always been nice to me,
but what you’re saying is very serious which is why I am concerned you are mistaken. He has always been nice to me. It’s like you want to destroy his reputation
which is why I am concerned you are mistaken. You come out of the woodwork like you want to destroy his reputation when you never said anything before.
You come crawling out of the woodwork, and we are all supposed to believe you when you never said anything before. Do you know what everyone has been saying about you?
And we are all supposed to believe you? You never stop, which is why I am telling you now what everyone has been saying about you since you were seven years old.
You never stop, which is why I am telling you now that everyone has been walking on eggshells around you since you were seven years old which is why no one has called to apologize.
Everyone has been walking on eggshells around you. We know you will use our words against us which is why no one has called to apologize and besides, we did apologize, and besides,
we know you will use our words against us, you are never satisfied, and besides, we did apologize, and besides, what do you want us to apologize for?
You are never satisfied. I see you’re becoming emotional. What do you want me to apologize for? I have only ever loved you more than anyone has ever loved you.
I see you’re becoming emotional. I am not surprised. I have done nothing wrong, but I am not surprised. I have only ever loved you more than anyone has ever loved you. Some people see the worst in everyone.
I am not surprised. I have done nothing wrong, but I am not surprised. You have been like this since you were a child. Some people see the worst in everyone, but there is no need to be unpleasant on a Sunday afternoon.
Featured Art: “Flower of Love” by John Coey, Cardon Smith, Eric Cranston, and Tanner Ingle (Passion Works Studio)
I went downtown with Fatima sometimes that summer for her big-sistering—San Diego, windows down, the noise from her Mazda just ridiculous. The wind whipping. Fatima in her white sunglasses, laughing, dabbing tears with the back of her hand. Tucking her hair behind her ear. Slapping me on the leg. At Sixth Avenue she’d exit the freeway and park in the yellow zone on Ash Street where electric scooters would be leaning against the meters. My first trip, I thought we were lost—all that concrete, the wide streets. But through a chain-link fence I saw GATEWAY stenciled in fat purple letters on a renovated warehouse. Inside was one of those carpeted gyms with the basketball lines dyed into the fabric. A playdough-and- crafts room. Jump ropes hanging on the wall. Kids screaming and charging around. A tang in the air like old mayonnaise, and the temperature way too hot.
Fatima would sign in at the front desk and chat with the high school kid on duty. He’d squirm in his violet shirt with the Arch logo, self-conscious—not because Fatima was stunning but because she was for you and you felt it, even from the periphery, felt the love. And then Cici would astonish everybody by sneaking into the lobby and throwing her arms around us from behind. We’d be like she’d done magic. “Where’d you come from, girl?!” And she would hug Fatima so hard it was frightening. She was a hundred percent energy, twelve years old, short dark hair, Filipina. Sometimes the mom would be there—slipping away out the side door with an exhausted face. Sometimes not.
When you couldn’t hold your head up, we all sat at the black keys, your 6-pound frame swallowed by a nightgown. New to all this, how’d we know exactly which intervals would hum you back into sleep at 8, midnight, 5:25? Verses we’d shrieked or whispered as kids surfaced, out of nowhere. For our own sanity,
we grew our daily rituals: I love coffee, I love tea-eeeee, crooned into morning through bluetooth speakers until we had it memorized. Dance parties to shake off the electricity of worry or bliss, drowning out the refrain where you might really leave us. I fell again
for your foster Da then, how vast his inner library was, finding the song to make you stop crying. Your toothless grin was wide as your face when the trio of us swayed. Soon, you reached toward mouths, added rhythm at the Baldwin with an atonal foot, moan-humming along like
you knew, already, what breath and sound could do inside a body. I can believe in a God who thought up music, can sit down at a piano in an empty house and be saved by something again. I wonder what Japanese artists would say about our old grand, jagged cracks in its lid where a contractor had
a very bad day. Or about your story and ours, no doubt too much in this house and beyond it to lacquer completely with silver or gold.
but in this moment, from your ginger head dipped toward the song of the faucet to your pinked glossy landscape showing off its recent growth rings, what could I be but yours? “To bring up”—
that’s what fostering can mean. And it’s like this: a poem I knew by heart once, framed or carried in the wallets of priests and au pairs and waitresses dared “let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.” It was written as a simple exercise, not as any lifeline—meant to show a friend how a breath can choose
to break open or rest at the end of a line. Just think what that means for any of us: our beginning can be what we need to keep swimming, or our bodies themselves can turn into dry land.
Tonight, the Pink Moon marks nine months of you + us, keeps us all awake with its bright tunnel of a face. On the couch, a last-ditch effort, you stretch your torso over mine, and I feel you soften, your snore against my neck, hand fluttering. It’s the closest we’ll get to any quickening, my feet cold without a blanket, the furnace on.
I’m ashamed to say it, but it’s taken me this long to pick a carcass clean with just my fingers for the first time, setting aside the good morsels for a soup bright with dill. Which one’s the dead thing, and which one the maker? And when is it again that a shell’s truly useless?
This one will be submerged, savory shipwreck in filtered water, with thick lemon wedges and rosemary. For the first day of a new decade, it will sit atop a burner, heat pulling and cajoling from its bareness the very medicine
I need. I’m no witch doctor, no pagan goddess wanting to read my
future, maybe even change it. My grief tastes of nothing, it’s been boiled for so long . . . But I’m ready now: give me fresh thyme, ginger, salt.
Selected as winner of the 2024 NORward Prize for Poetry by a panel of previous poetry contributors
After tucking in the kids, we tucked in the house— dishes, laundry, prepping the next day’s meals. When the hush finally settled, we’d get in bed read Endurance out loud to each other.
The ship became trapped in ice the night before his surgery. All that week I tried to get back from the hospital in time to kiss the boys but I failed. I sat on their beds, watched them sleep. The day we got the pathology report,
the men, running low on food, put down their dogs. Radiation all summer. The boys played soccer. The oncologist told him to join a gym, get a trainer, go hard because she was going off-label, tripling the usual dose.
They threw everything overboard, but the ship sank anyway. Anemia turned his skin yellow-gray. His body became smooth as a seal. I watched as he denied fatigue, struggled to untie his shoes, get up the stairs.
Shackleton split the crew, sought help: everyone survived. After we finished the book, we never opened it again. I wonder where it went. Years it sat on the bedside table under the clock: last thing we saw at night, first thing every morning.
Paula has some thoughts about what happened at the playground. There are spooky things with children, she says. Kids holding conversations with unseen ghosts, kids with memories of dead people’s lives, siblings with totally opposite versions of childhood memories. It’s theoretically possible in a multiverse scenario, Paula says, that a child could be in both one place and an infinite number of places at the same time, time itself moving simultaneously backward and forward.
I suggest that Paula write a paper on this. I picture her snickering, face illuminated by her phone’s glowing rectangle. The Phenomenology of Freaky Shit, she texts back. I smile.
Or was I just wasted? You. Were. Not.
That she wasn’t there, that she’s not a mother, is no impediment to Paula’s theorizing. But if she’s expert in anything, it’s the outer-bounds of my alcohol tolerance. She’s gotten drunk with me more times than anyone. Our college years were one long rumspringa from our repressive all-girls Catholic school days. Later we both got serious and left town for our doctorates—hers philosophy, mine history—but we kept up weekly phone dates to “wine and whine.” For years we worked as adjuncts in obscure towns, bitching to each other about the apathetic students and the bad take-out and how the drive to the closest airport would be as long as the flight back home. We got tenure-track positions around the same time. Paula’s still at hers, across the country in California. It’s hard to find the time to call now, but we have this text-chain going that, printed out, could bridge the distance.
Perhaps the last two or three of the type I remember— a tank for the water and ice, and a labyrinthine steel rack to hold the necks of the bottles, a cold flap that a nickel would unlock so you could pull out a bottle— haven’t been placed on prominent display in one of those sadly under-funded, just-off-the-highway, Butler-tin county museums, but, on their broken-down casters have been shoved and scraped over the floor to the back to be stored with a surplus of other heartfelt donations, none really rare, and none of much historical interest— the one-hill-at-a-time hand-operated corn planters, grease-stained lard presses and treadle sewing machines— the pop coolers’ heavy lids closed over stale summer air from the late Forties, their bottle openers still functional, cap receptacles hanging below, though containing no pop caps—no Oh-So Grape, Nehi Orange, Cream Soda— all of those caps pitched up onto the top of the bluff that casts a cool shadow over the Standard Oil station owned by my Grandfather Moser, who as a young man played ball for the township team, who is still throwing those bottle caps, one after another, from the oil-spotted cracked pavement in front of the station, showing off, showing his grandchildren his pitching arm, winding up, lifting a knee, then sailing a cap high into a lost world, partially sealed by the dried rubber strips in the cooler.
Featured Art: “White Deer” by Amy Nichols, Scott Brooks, and Wendy Minor Viny (Passion Works Studio)
But for the big empty section of sky that he pieces together, branch by branch, building a forever of light, his work is all disassembly, in deafening noise, today from a cup at the end of a boom that bounces a little, swinging this way and that as if trying to catch water dripping out of a ceiling. He’s taking apart, from the top down, a sick sixty-foot ash, first cutting away its outer parts, feather-light as they fall, each reaching as if to high-five the branches below, a helper picking them up by their ends and dragging them to a big gluttonous chipper that drags them in, screaming and flailing. Bobbing lower and lower, the man in the cup, his saw buzzing, leans out to unstack the heavy spools of the trunk, reaching to tip them away to drop with an emphatic thunk on the litter of twigs and dead leaves on the lawn, the cup bouncing lower and lower, spool after spool, the boom telescoping back into itself and then finding its place on top of the truck, as now he climbs out, lifting one leg then the other, both whole and unsevered, and backs down the steps, stretches, pulls off his gloves in the vast silence that, suddenly, everything’s part of, those few of us watching feeling as if we’ve taken too deep a breath of the sky.
Across the poems in Katie Berta’s Retribution Forthcoming (Ohio University Press, 2024), a self-aware speaker works to come to grips with her complex apprehensions about beauty, identity, virtue, and violence. In an interview with Rob McLennan, Berta affirms that “poems are a place of internal quiet in which I get to explicate what I think and feel without the invading presence of another mind.” The effect is as if Sartre’s play No Exit featured different aspects of only one character having a high-stakes, if informal, colloquy. As with that play, we keep reading for the quality of the conversation, which in Retribution is unpretentious, perceptive, often sardonically funny, and always intensely searching.
The collection opens with “Compact,” in which the speaker’s dog “locks him- self // in my boyfriend’s office while we’re gone” and “chews the clothes . . . to smithereens, maybe to keep himself from chewing / himself.” As Berta’s book explores, a person locked in her own mind without recourse to faith in something bigger has nothing to chew but the self. Berta continues, “Asking questions of god is, of course, chewing // yourself. Though, in some situations it’s practical. / Like when some part of you is / what’s caught.” This “cleaved” self reappears throughout the book, and the poems in which it appears run the gamut from everyday absurdity (“Becky! Are you trying to text a different Katie?”) to existential angst (“Batter my heart, you no-personed god”) to traumatized dissociation (“so I went off into the ceiling’s coarseness . . . until it was over”). This cleaving shows up grammatically in the recurring slide between first- and second-person pronouns that characterizes the majority of the poems.
For two decades now, John Gallaher has been quietly writing some of the most pleasurable and compelling poetry in the United States, including the books The Little Book of Guesses (Four Way Books, 2007), In a Landscape (BOA, 2014), and Brand New Spacesuit (BOA Editions, 2020). In his newest collection, My Life in Brutalist Architecture (Four Way Books, 2024), he is at his very best.
The book begins with a quote from Ruth Graham: “There is something temptingly tidy about the idea of adoption: a family with extra love and resources meets a child in desperate need of both.” From there, through meditations on his own adoption in 1968, Gallaher goes on to show just how untidy his life and thoughts on the subject are. But there’s nothing dogmatic here, nothing sentimental. Gallaher offers no lessons for readers and comes to no solutions. Rather, in poem after poem, he explores the subject with complexity and inquisitiveness, his mind shuffling through his own experiences, memories, suppositions. A photo of himself as a baby removed from its frame for the first time reveals his birth name written on the back. What might the poet have become had he kept that name? Where would he have gone? Is the name dead, or does it belong to some other version of himself, a version he might consult for guidance? “My fear says / these people don’t love me,” Gallaher writes. “They adopted me by mistake.” In poem after poem, the poet offers readers not just a meditation on the complexities of adoption, but on the variations of the idea of the self, on the slipperiness of identity, personality, and all our passages through years. “What,” he asks at one point, “does the self consist of? // The theme is time. The theme is unspooling.”
Jaswinder Bolina’s English as a Second Language and Other Poems (Copper Canyon, 2024) is a delightful political treatise for our troubled world. This poet’s gifts are many. In a particularly brilliant move, Bolina sequences the book’s poems in two ways, with a table of contents both at the beginning and the end. You can read from the perspective of the poet’s childhood to adulthood and parenthood, or from present perspective of parenthood looking backward to childhood. The nuances displayed are tremendous. The foreshadowing works in either order. And both the beginning and ending poems (no matter which way you read) involve the speaker eating hotdogs—in London or Chicago.
In If I Could Give You a Line (University of Akron Press, 2023), Carrie Oeding further develops the voice-driven associational thinking that characterizes her first collection, Our List of Solutions (42 Miles Press, 2011), while recontextualizing and transcending its concerns. The earlier poems are richly populated with neighbors, lovers, friends, and peers as their speaker navigates the fraught social dynamics of early adulthood, repeatedly referencing music/dance as she struggles to map out a workable configuration of intimacies and distances. Primary emotions include status-anxiety and longing—sexual/romantic, and even ontological. In the poem “Joy,” Oeding writes “And if everything is aspiring to be music— / the making and the dancing and the joying, / if they are all dying to be music, why does music just get to be music?” If I Could Give You a Line is continuous with that project in terms of Oeding’s fascination with space and distance; however, in the new collection, she explores relationships (both intimate ones with her partner and her daughter and intellectual/aesthetic ones with the work of a number of artists), questioning the nature of place itself. The book comes across as a series of dance-like thought experiments about motion in poems such as “The Making of Things,” in which Oeding, responding to Richard Long’s conceptual land sculpture, “A Line Made by Walking,” uses a strategy of negation to interrogate a variety of understandings of the line:
Up from the barren, parched earth, a statue grows. A man, for a woman is too malleable to be immortalized in stone. -from The Moonflowers
The moonflower—named so because it blooms only at night—collects its aroma throughout the day, and as it blooms, it spreads an intense jasmine-like fragrance. In Abigail Rose-Marie’s debut novel The Moonflowers (Lake Union Publishing, 2024), the flower is not just a symbol of beauty and enchantment, but also a symbol of freedom, of the “malleable” woman-figure adapting to its conditions and finding ways to bloom even in extreme circumstances.
The Moonflowers is framed as a mystery novel set in a small Appalachian town where secrets have been carried through generations—the secret behind the death of celebrated hero Benjamin Costello; the secret behind the women who have gone missing during the years leading up to Benjamin’s death; and the secret of why the narrator, Tig (Antigone) Costello, left behind a burgeoning career at the Art Institute of Chicago. The book begins with Tig taking up the project to learn more about her grandfather Benjamin and to use her research to create a painting in memoriam. As she reaches the small, dusty town, it’s quite apparent that Darren, Kentucky, is almost in ruins, as if all economic progress stopped after Costello’s death. Tig soon discovers that the town may have never seen any kind of prosperity to begin with, and rotting under the surface is misogyny so deep that, even in the 1997 of the novel, women are treated as second-class citizens by the townspeople.
I feel keen anticipation and anxiety when I start a book that has set itself A Challenge. Will the author pull off a magic trick or will The Challenge become a gimmick? Will it add a new dimension to the characters’ stories or will it become an intellectual exercise, A Challenge for the sake of itself?
In Daughters of the New Year (Hanover Square Press, 2022), E. M. Tran tells the story of the Vietnamese-immigrant Trung family through its women, beginning in present-day New Orleans and moving backward in time through Hurricane Katrina to the fall of Saigon, the French occupation of Vietnam, and finally to fragments of an almost mythic past. The novel is a beautiful example of when A Challenge—here, telling a story backward—can give new depths to classic themes. Tran’s exploration of legacy, family, and cultural memory is complicated and shows us how the past refuses to offer up answers even when we have imaginative access to it.
I first met Zoë Bossiere (they/she) when I visited Ander Monson’s undergraduate nonfiction course. We had an intense conversation about how to balance information and lyricism in our essays. I knew them as the managing editor of Brevity Magazine which publishes essays of writers working in the brief form. Many of these essays lean toward the lyrical side, like Brenda Miller’s “Swerve,” which begins with one very grounded scene but then spins out to include a litany of mini-scenes whose sonic and imagistic connections blow the top of one’s head off. Bossiere also recently edited and published, with Erica Trabold, The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins (Wayne State University Press, 2023) which draws from a broad group of writers to argue that the lyric is indeed a powerful persuasive force for change.
So, I was surprised when I started to read Cactus Country (Abrams Press, 2024).On a flight to Minneapolis, as I turned page after page like the book was on fire, I thought, This book is the most narrative memoir I have ever read. I am prone to exaggeration. I know of many memoirs that move by story more than association, but CactusCountryholds tightly onto narrative and doesn’t let go. And, neither could I, as I fell in love with the author’s rendering of place and of their allegiance to how the narrator’s body moved through that place.
The images for New Ohio Review’s Summer Online Exclusive and the cover art for Issue 34 were provided by Athens Photographic Project.
Athens Photographic Project identifies itself as:
A community of artists dedicated to using photography as a tool for self-expression, personal growth, and social change within the mental health recovery journey. Working in Appalachian Ohio for more than 20 years, we explore the boundaries of photography and mental health while reaching diverse audiences with our images.
I needed two thousand dollars by Friday. You deadheaded a daisy. I googled precipitously. You beat the welcome mat. I had a related question. You wore a hat in a place where it was considered not the vibe to wear hats. I choked on the billowing dust. You buttered a bone surgeon. I listened to a song you said was money. You drew five cards (unlucky) in a row. I dug my heels into the belly of the mule. You ladled bathwater. I couldn’t get the mule to move. You tied a sheet bend in our yo-yo string. I chased a chicken under a canoe. You had a serious moment on the tilt-a-whirl. I rearranged according to aura. Green, indigo, black. You re- heated soup. I smoked one down to the filter. You waltzed with failure in your mind. I possessed a drunk driver. You roadkill. I tried pouring coffee on the music. Why not at least try? You looked at me like a stalled motorboat. I asked how many copies we could move and how fast. You synthesized a boring diamond. I signed petition after pathetic petition. You shook a snow globe. I proposed posting up under a tree until the whole thing blew over. “Darling,” you said, “I don’t have the keys to that apartment.” I focused on a hubcap. You bought a falafel truck because apparently Jesus had a falafel truck, and we can always inch closer. Everything I did to make you happy. Everything you did. You chucked a stick in the river and it floated around.
Sometime last century in Kharkiv, father and I fled the melting August pavement, bribed the conductor of a sold-out train. He jammed us in the luggage racks, and we took off to the Black Sea.
The moving furnace spat us out somewhere in Kerch, the easternmost town in the Crimea two hundred miles from sandy beaches, magnolias, and pine trees, streets lined with vendors selling buttered corn charred shish kebabs and chacha. Predawn Kerch
was drab and empty, last night’s drunks scattered on the streets like seals in their puddles, seagulls feasting on rotting fish. At the port we made a deal with a captain of a cargo bulker Father paid the fare with his life stories, and kept the crew awake.
I sat 12 hours next to the cockpit staring at the horizon changing colors from pink to blue to pink again to black
till the evening Yalta embraced us like an old friend at the party: a little tipsy, a little horny, determined to dance all night under shooting stars
* * *
An arctic snowy owl arrived in the south of France last Wednesday 3000 miles away from home. Her baffled face was captured by the paparazzi. British scientists as their rituals dictate, had offered an explanation:
It’s all about the lemmings: The owl was following the lemmings The spike in the lemming population had lured the hungry bird
There is one person who really knows what happened— the captain of the Greenlandic freighter the stowaway had boarded, heading south
When I come in after shoveling that last round of snow—an exquisite parliament of low-slung brightness even in its groaning down toward the ground, I see my sister has texted QUICK THING. So easy to send such airy unplanned balloons. The ordinary flakes saunter down, will not let go, the white weather not yet leaving its filthy will with car tracks and time. I am her shelter. The snow falls as spheres. I like being inside now watching it. I think of the weight of it, the pile-up as it further neatens. The white at its best is a blur. My eyesight is off. It has been two years and seven months since I peered through one of those devices that brush eyelashes. I haven’t heard a doctor circle those disks and ask this one or that one, this one or that. What I see is another day, the wind sucking about. A coyote walks behind the junipers And now its shadow has become an action. The snow comes down, side by side. I am hardly paying attention; my eye no longer holds what it touches. There is so much noise in life. As children, my sister and I played tag during sermons. I could go on about how her notes bother me. The snowflakes are an arm’s length off. It could be the only thing I do: answering her, filling the white void in my hand. Everything comes from further up. When I respond I can talk now, I am saying no one realizes love without feeling this urgency.
Mine and mill have done their work, the ridge face once lush with fir and poplar now cleared of airy timber, the brow slashed and bored, a strip of railroad curling like a scar up the mountain to the excavation’s cavity, sealed now but still marking its territory, still leaving its lasting impression.
Hidden from sight, a subterranean labyrinth of crosscuts line like stitches the shaft that slopes down and in through folds and plunges to the precious stope that engineers surveyed, prospected, and, finally, removed entire, hoisting out the bituminous ore, leaving behind a sump that time and age will fill once more.
We knew what it meant to grow up in the suburbs, the product of poor beginnings― the progeny of farmers who readied the earth with horse-drawn plows, and women who kept having children
until it killed them, people who didn’t know anything else, surviving the Great Depression by telling ghost stories and war stories never meant to be believed.
We never let on. The girl across the street swore her mother was a full-blooded Spanish princess, when we knew she was Mexican. We were too young to know it didn’t matter.
The Pentecostals three doors down, women with uncut hair and denim skirts, men with lives like any other, were the only ones who were sure in their conviction they were headed for heaven.
The rest of us resented them because this meant we were condemned, like the old tool shed down the dead end where all the kids used to play, scaring rabbits in and out of the rotting lumber.
We just had nowhere to go in the middle of summer. So we dared the clotted vines of poison ivy, itching the next day, and grateful for the calamine lotion pinking our arms and legs
in thick splotches through which our fingernails dragged until the welts broke and the fluid spread. How it ever stopped we couldn’t guess. We ran through the rain-wet grass, mud-soaked when we found
a one-and-a-half-foot nightcrawler. Not even the boys would touch it except with a stick to carry it to the breezeway where we watched the awful thing suffer the concrete, already half dead anyway.
As fascinated as we were by the things of the earth, we should never have realized the sky was blue. But there it was, hanging over us large as any relative who came back
from the front line, shell-shocked and gun crazy, unable to make a living at even the smallest thing he tried, or the girl who hated Christmas for its one beaded necklace,
who never forgave herself for the gift of scarlet fever that killed her father, or any of the rest of us who cursed in the old backward ways, convinced someday we could care for ourselves. We could let this go.
My father told me the story of this big-time gangster from Georgia. The guy ran the streets of Tbilisi but left in the 1990s. He was running from something. He ended up a trash collector on the streets of New York City. I used to imagine this gangster’s thick gloved fingers wrapping around the handles of the plastic bins, lifting them up and flipping them into the back of the truck.
Scoping out the fattened apples and snatching QR codes with an iPhone, Evie, always eager to bootlick, says, in lipstick, What do you think, Addie, babe? Requiring
no official arraignment to condemn herself to death, she proffers in turn Paula Red, Ginger Gold, Jonamac, Jonagold. Her last ditch: How about tonight I make tarte tatin,
or apple crisp? Then, Would you like me to get you another cup? Careful, take mine. There’s a drip. Her voice leaping in pitch, she tries to forget that time she snuck off with fucksome
Lucifer—Dodge Viper parked in the Johnstone’s orchard, midnight cigarettes, a demon pretending his cock’s a rattlesnake to make her laugh. She stifles a rebel guffaw right now, nearly losing
it in front of the key limes. Bitching husbands and fruit can mess with your head, plus you never know when God might appear pink aproned on the porch, pie upfront, and eager to snitch.
First, remove yourself from the plane entirely. I’ve heard about drugs that can help, societies one can join. Some people move to Maine and jar things. There’s a Sun Ra movie where Sun Ra plays the piano so hot the club burns down. A guy from my high school started tracking eagles. I knew a woman who said she meditated for an hour a day, sometimes two. Megan from Wisconsin. You had so many kinds of hot sauce. Sambal. Cholula. Dave’s Five Alarm. Habanero from Hell. Meggy, my days are so long, and I think only of you
The surgeon wants me to remove my prostate. The upside: my life. The downside: no more erections, unless I take a TriMix penile injection, used by porn stars for ten-hour shoots. I do not feel like a porn star. Diapers for a year if I’m lucky, for a life if I’m not. Also for a life: arid orgasms. The upside: no more messes. The downside: no more messes.
II
Reddit-strangers want me basic: every day, I’m swallowing seven teaspoons of baking soda to vault my pH above eight. Cancer struggles to survive, they say, in a basic environment. I shit a dozen times a day. I piss on a plastic strip and it changes color, almost like a game. I live on the toilet but still, that’s a life.
III
The Happy Prostate Facebook Group wants me on everything— milk thistle, black seed oil, broccoli sprouts I grow myself, sea moss, boron, tudca twice a day, a dog dewormer even though I’m not a dog, mangosteen, hibiscus tea, soursop leaves, and never more than twenty pits of bitter apricot, unless I need to end things early (a drop of cyanide in every pit).
IV
The oncologist wants me to annihilate my prostate with targeted blasts of radiation. CyberKnife. Sounds like something Guy Fieri would hawk on late-night TV. This is everything you need, he says, trimming his frosted tips with a glowing scalpel.
V
Randy wants me cumming every day, a frenzy before the famine.
With the patience of an attentive nurse, he helps me arrive,
his finger curling towards the place my prostate takes me— a brief obliteration.
Maybe if I touch the cancer, he says, it’ll leave.
My stupid, silly man. It doesn’t work like that. But even when there’s nothing left to touch,
Three years now, I still resurrect my grandmother, pull her out of that mausoleum vault and bring her back to life. My life, that is. I know she’s tired and wants to rest, but grief is greedy and tireless. When I pull her back, she wears red, which, for now, is symbolic of Paradise. Sometimes, she is a cardinal, especially in winter when the world needs to be reminded of whatever it wants most. What I want is to take her to Kroger, so she can steal a grape or two. I want to take her to a doctor’s appointment so she can complain about the wait. I want to take her to see a movie so dramatic she will pretend not to notice that it hitches my breath and stings my eyes. Three years from now is unpredictable at best. And resurrection is only a way to drag the past with us, lest we forget. Yes, we forget.
Excerpts from The Extant Works of Aretaeus The Cappadocian, translated by Francis Adams (1856), A Brief Discovery of a Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603) by Edward Jorden
In the middle flanks of women lies the womb, a female viscus, closely resembling an animal; for it is moved of itself hither and thither. In a word, it is altogether erratic.
You made an aquarium of my insides. Sculpted salty marshlands out of meaty pulp. Fashioned algae nests from fleshy sinew, white & crooked as the half-moons of fingernails.
You napped in the hollows of my ribcage. Nestled your mighty body into hammocks of irish moss. Smacked on sugar kelp like pink chewing gum, sapped & sweet as the raw nerves under cracked teeth.
In fragrant smells it also delights and advances toward them. To fetid smells, it has an aversion, and flees from them. On the whole, the womb is like an animal within an animal.
From deep inside me you now roar. Crying and howling until my whole belly sometimes lifts.
When, therefore, it is suddenly carried upwards, and remains above for a considerable time, violently compressing the intestines, the woman experiences choking.
My organs; an oblation to you.
For the liver, diaphragm, and lungs are quickly squeezed within a narrow space; and therefore loss of breathing and speech seems to be present.
With teeth clamped shut, our hearts convulse in chorus.
This suffocation from the womb accompanies females alone.
Men stuff partridge feathers and hot coals inside my nostrils. Prod blisters on my breasts—blindly, as newborn kits search for milk.
Those from the uterus are remedied by fetid smells, and the application of fragrant things. A pessary induces abortion and a powerful congelation of the womb.
From me you surface burnt and hemorrhaging on sorrow. Like that of slaughtered swine.
Grief comes with sponge and pail. Scours my soul—barren, we laugh ourselves to sleep.
So many men love my friend: her boyfriend and both ex-husbands build her a three-season porch, all cedarwood and teak. Pine needles from her backyard
cover the almost-floor. I tell her she is sexual, like Stevie Nicks. People can smell it like golden beer. They smell my indifference— it smells like a New England Timber Rattlesnake, all scales,
black-tinged-gold, like a hole. I learned today in a crossword that Venus has no moons. That was the down clue, What Venus lacks that Earth has: _ _ _ _ _:
five letters—O and O—filled in already. She sends me a video of the three men and their equipment: saws, nails, drills, hammers, planes, pulleys, rope,
planks of wood, aromatic as a closet, some tool with claws on both ends they toss back and forth, way too hot.
1.) You Sound Drunk, You Probably Shouldn’t Leave the House Today
We never speak of the reasons for her drinking, though her husband was in the navy overseas, a high-ranking officer, leaving her alone at home. When I was a child, whenever her husband was away, my neighbor would visit my mother, stumbling into our house, reeking of whiskey and crying about her husband, not wanting to be alone at night. She was the type of woman other women called a doll. Pretty, slender, elfin-faced with no children, she was youthful and kind with an aura of fragile, feminine innocence nurtured like a pet in a well-swept house with caramel aluminum siding and wooden shutters painted sunny-sky blue. A divorced woman also abandoned by a man, my mother felt sorry for our neighbor and asked me to stay over with her to keep her company, since my mother had to watch my baby sisters and had work in the early morning as a secretary at the meat-packing plant. I packed my tattered overnight bag and skipped over to the neighbor’s neatly decorated house, where I slept in crisply laundered paisley bedsheets in her husband’s place as she attempted to fall into a drunken sleep, shivering, curled against my back, spooning me. Sensing her dreaming, I woke in the dark with her hands on me. I was thirteen when it started, fifteen when it ended with her fingers creeping inside me. I pretended to sleep. At sunrise, she cooked me a breakfast of burnt buttered toast dusted in cinnamon sugar while warning me about men. She watched me eat as she sucked her fingers while sipping bourbon-spiked tea.
Switch on the car radio, music falls out of the air into my ears: James Brown, Joni Mitchell, Jim Croce. Old gold. Plus, when I got in my car, it cranked like it does every time, so many miracles in that I can’t even count them. Traffic lights that help us get along with one another, scent of roast chicken rising from my grocery bag, which also contains the most delicious bread, whole wheat with flax, sesame and a hint of cherries. That someone thought to turn wheat into bread, miraculous. Yeah, I know, I just had to start on a heart pill, but it’s nothing, a little electrical nuisance, no effect on longevity. And yeah, my best friend has a hurt so deep and wide whole oceans pour through it, and her story’s not mine to tell but jeez, what a soul-shatterer. Yet even she watches bumblebees. She swears they’re her favorite miracle. So aerodynamically complicated in the way they get off the ground you’d think they never would—flapping their wings back and forth, not up and down—yet up they go. She says if they can beat gravity she can too, and I gotta tell you that to see her dressed and laughing, hear her singing with that voice that sounds like water tumbling over rocks in some ancient river, water that’s passed through some murky cavernous places but has emerged into the stunning light of day, to hear her sing again is one big fat black-and-yellow buzzing miracle.
My sister named this venerable maple growing at the edge of the mountain’s gravel road, main trunk long broken, pocked with holes, a once-mighty tree now slowly failing. She’s lost her apical dominance, I say, meaning that when the top broke off, side branches shot up past the injured trunk like raised arms. On the left, one wide kind eye, an open mouth framed by credible lips. Step right, a second eye squinted shut, mouth twisted up, as if she’s yelling at us the way our father’s mother did: imagined slights, our insufferable rudeness, which she thought should be spanked out of us. Mom never laid a hand, which says a lot about her mother, gone too soon for my sister and me to have known. Grandma Baggett and her snarling chihuahuas gone, too, when our parents divorced. No wonder my sister imagines a tree could be a grandmother; she’s been hiding in stories since we were small. I anchored to the safety of science, to cold fact: Trees break. A grandmother can call you Sugar one minute, rage at you the next. Can die without you ever once hearing her voice.
He will come to live with you Make him feel welcome My mother says Her eyes turning away from mine Before I can search for the meaning
I imagine I might have a small, empty room off to the side With a reddish glim That might bother him at night When he takes off his thick, black-rimmed glasses And his eyelids become soft and white Butterflies in his leathery face
I would have to get a night-side table for his glasses And his teeth And his cowboy book So that he feels welcome when he comes to live with me
I think that old single bed will be fine Now that he is alone He wouldn’t want more anyway But I will get new sheets For his old, pale body and his tanned forearms And maybe a soft, new pillow for his sunken cheeks
I will ask my sister for that old painting With the open plains and hazy blue mountains So far, far in the distance The one she took when he died
So that he has something to look at And so that he feels welcome
When he comes to live with me, in me In a small room off to the side of my heart So very far from the plains where he grew up.
You were spinning a top on the bar the night we met at happy hour. We had known each other for years. You gave me a poinsettia for Christmas once and I gave it away, left it in my mother’s picture window so she could end every phone call asking about the boy who gave me that nice flower.
I fell down your stairs. I lost myself in the gaze of your oak trees. I fell in and out of your bed when I wasn’t falling in and out of the Italian tenor’s bed. I met you over and over in the street crossing to the deli. I saw you in the parking lot. I forgot you when the gulls squawked, when my feet were sandy, when I took my lunch in bed.
I forgot you when it rained and the gutters overflowed. You sang to the fax machine. You counted your cigarette breaks. You tipped your hat and loitered by my window. I wore blue when you’d remember it. I drank apple ginger tea with my feet in a desk drawer.
I’d stamp your letters. I’d throw out the tenor’s bills. I was mistress of the postage meter. We’d muse about the smell of death in the walls, the drop ins in the drop ceiling. Some nights I’d roller skate around the file cabinets, overtime under the exit lights. You never let the coffee get cold.
You caught a deer mouse in a file folder. I caught a field mouse in an envelope box and sat by the train tracks watching the hawks pick off the chipmunks. I wore a green dress so the forest swallowed everything but my eyes. I told my mother I’d never love you.
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