Jesus never looked so jittery— jacked up on caffeine and testosterone, sporting a backyard haircut and home-sewn mask. I walked the same two-and-a-half-mile circuit every day: up Sunrise to McCombs, McCombs to Radnor, Radnor to Wingate, Wingate to Antioch, Antioch to the Bi-Rite grocery and Our Lady of Guadalupe and back down Sunrise again. The blue blooms of the hydrangeas and the pink blooms of the dogwoods came and went. I played “Losing My Religion” on repeat. I voted. I went to bed each night with yesterday’s cold coffee ringing the coffee table. I crucified time.
At the all-girls school they taught us don’t fight back: the rapist might get mad.
Against my will, I remember this
when I need to takea walk to clear my head. When I fear the sound of feet, a distance
closing. When I drop my eyes in passing,
my neck for decades bending. On the train a man asks me what I’m reading. Show me
the Great American Writer; I’ll show you
a man who finds by walking out alone what freedomis,
and, so, America, I want to be
the kind of woman who walks into night, a fine rain, her own thoughts.
If at dusk I hear a clutch of cries
and rush of wings from powerlines. If I love a spread of stars, dark wind in trees.
If walking is a bodied way of thinking.
If I love a subway map, a screech of trains. If walking out and back intact is luck.
If I have been a long time without thinking.
If I wanted to go there by myself
thinking. If I just wanted to go somewhere.
Quoted phrases and lines are from Robert Frost, “Acquainted With the Night”; Judy Grahn, “A Woman Is Talking to Death”; Kim Moore, “On the train a man asks me what I’m reading”; June Jordan, “Power”; Lisa Shen, “Sixteen Seconds”
Smoking against the façade of a moon- bleached gas station she listens with a waitress’s patience to the local boy’s prattle —her senior year of high school
& already the air stinks of coveralls. Her hair is black. Brushed out long. Flyaways. The occasional breeze & his good blue eyes. A mile from here the highway shakes.
Featured Image: Forget the Flowers by Tanner Pearson
Twenty-six years have passed since you tried out mattresses at Macy’s, hands folded over your chests as if laid out for a viewing. No, that was not how you lay on a mattress at home. You had read in the paper that couples who rated their marriages “satisfying,” slept spooning and those who rated their marriages “highly satisfying” slept spooning with their hands cupping their spouse’s breast or penis, so nightly you wrapped your hand around his sturdy cock believing that you secured a happy marriage in your grasp. But after googling “how to” diagrams of spooning on the web, you’ve learned that as the smaller spoon you should have been the spoonee all those years. So now you are shopping for mattresses by yourself and the sleep expert at Slumberland wants to upsell you a queen even though you are still weepy and lost in your own trough within a double, a sinkhole of busted continuous coils. He asks how you sleep. Badly. You need something supportive, he says, but with plenty of give. Yes, absolutely! Memory foam, he says. Oh God, no. Knock me out on horsehair or kapok, sheep fleece or pea shucks. Give me a nightcap of nepenthe. Certainly not memory.
Featured Art: Open Lock, Akron, Ohio by James Henry Moser
complain about the weather. wait five minutes watch the boys you grew up with outgrow you bury your cousin. go sledding on the tallest hill you can find keep a family warm until their son thaws out of prison ice skate between the skyscrapers downtown inherit an emergency exit sign from your father spray-paint your best friend’s brother on a t-shirt daydream your way through a semester-long funeral watch jeans and sleeves and family portraits unravel play soccer with the black boys who almost evaporated with the icicles. kick it outside with the skeletons from your childhood. go to columbus and pretend to be a grown-up. spend a weekend at kalahari resort and call it a vacation. go back home. leave. shoot dice with the dead boys playing dress up. stay long enough to become a tourist attraction in a city nobody stops in mount bikes and ride until the sun dribbles out of the sky’s mouth. wade through the oatmeal july makes of morning air. swim in a public pool where everyone is drowning and no one knows how to survive what happened last month. stop runnin in and out unless you got somethin’ on the gas bill. seal yourself with cold air while the trees melt. bet the boy down the street, who’ll have the best first day fit. come out amid orange leaves lookin fresher than all the food in a five-mile radius of granny’s house. eat jojos from rizzi’s on sunday after pastor guilt trips you on your way past the pulpit. dream about a city where headstones don’t show up to dinner unannounced where fried chicken isn’t on speed dial and diabetes isn’t the family heirloom. where grief isn’t so molasses root for lebron in whatever he’s wearing. become an athlete as a way out of corner sales. never escape. start a pickup game that never ends. rake leaves with a rusted afro pick your older brother left you in his will. let the leaf bags melt into the chimney on the side of the house. play basketball with the ghosts who don’t know what year it is volunteer at your local funeral home. open a cemetery across the street from the playground. mow green. cut ties with your grass-seller. survive the summer.
I am two vowels strung twenty years long. My life a ransom letter written by a cardiogram, tympanic as traffic & the lights of traffic
that renew the tercets of Esso stations standing violent as macaws in the ululative night. I need lithium or language, nurse.
I need words to fall like ricin from an envelope. Clearly, my synapses need seeing to. So, please, repo the verb of me.
Conduct me swiftly through the conjunction of Tennessee where nouns loiter like limbs languid with Quaaludes, where daylight breaks
like a mouthful of fentanyl over the teeth of a country that cares not for such news. Should a poem be the pill or the pharmacy?
Should I pledge myself to this business as if it were Gerard Manley Hopkins or Jesus Christ? Here I am, Lord, earnest as a rice cooker, lively as Superman
in his leotard, my spiritual fizz empirical as Pepsi & just as cheap. Jesus, Gerard— who will irrigate these ears from error?
Who will whisper that in the empire of swans the black cygnet is Elvis? All around me the malady of my unmaking
unmans me: roadside trash, unrecycled recyclables, my shadow laid like a new suit over the bus bench & birds behind it. All this urban tumbleweed,
all these words for worse. When whoever’s kingdom it is comes calling for it will the last televangelist of grammar go angled like an angel in the direction
of their god? Or will America just eat my opioids as it like Nemo poisons its seas to peace?
When I was a verb I thought as a verb so I did as a verb, just like the police. Tonight the moon slouches in its straitjacket of stars. There’s a multinational
wind afoot, some merry beast loose, all pronoun without surcease. What rooky woods will it rouse first? What islands will it make of our bodies yet?
You should have seen me then, under those yellow stadium bulbs, my lips so full they’d burst in your fingers. I had this top on: a floral print and ruffles, red, to match my lips, and my tight Levi jeans. And my sun-kissed cheekbones and the sun-kissed bridge of my nose. And my smile was just like America—like a cornfield stunned by its own golden beauty—my gorgeous delight! I went braless, wore no makeup. It rained and the grass was slick. The way it goes is that something happens next. It happens by a lake or in a parked car. You take one look and know I’ll never survive it. My teeth were like a horse’s. A feeling they mistake for a girl. A feeling they write songs for. The kind of songs that played in pickup trucks and there’s me standing in the bed of one, hurling my top into traffic. Could be a hitchhiker. Some guys carry knives. What is it about blonde girls and America? Blonde girls and wherever? I was so all–American. So cute I could have murdered my own goddamn self. What is it about a blonde girl that breaks the world’s heart? I miss those days. Not Bobby or Leo or James. Just miss that particular ache, which was not unlike a bulge in shorts, that summer rage that could break my chest apart and hurl my beating heart into the bleachers. Like them I could not keep myself. There is the stadium again. There is Bobby, cheering. Isn’t that how it happens in America? Topless in Texas. My little red shorts. In the back of a pickup, again. The window breaks. In Tennessee? In Indiana? The sound of a power drill, a chainsaw. The sound of summer. The bleachers, those bright white lights waiting to throw my shadow to the ground, and there I am, arriving, and it’s always like what happens to me next has everything to do with every one of us.
I’ve met my fair share of honest hunched-over-the-dish-pit-scraping- nibbled-on-fork-fucked-duck-confit-into-trash-bins-SOBs.
You’ve hauled that trash to the alley tons of times. I’ve seen beads of sweat on many American faces. I’ve seen a bead of sweat catch the right light
on a man’s brow and then fall into a scrap-metal bin like a lost diamond. Each of us should have how-we-made-it stories, instead of stories about waiting
all day in a line that runs down a city sidewalk for nothing. Man, I’m tired of only knowing broke-ass-just-tryin-to-get-by-motherfuckers,
tired of seeing skinny dudes my age at intersections twirling cardboard arrows or watching mothers put items back on grocery shelves after silently adding up
the contents of their shopping carts. America, by now I thought I’d know one millionaire, at least, ‘cause I’ve seen enough bootstrap-pulling
to pull whole ghettos out of crab grass and chain link, enough to pull the bars off every window and every kid off stray-bullet-stray-chihuahua-streets—
There’s a bouncer in this poem, watching you read it. His name is Vic. Vic won’t make eye contact, won’t bug you unless I signal distress. I’ve never had to do that in poetry yet. He was in the army. Discreet as a landmine. As long as you keep still and do nothing while I work, he won’t interrupt this lit experience. Vic may or may not have killed. He may or may not use meth. He does work out. He does know my routine. He’s seen me do it dozens of nights. He knows all the words to the money songs. His peripheral vision is muscular. It sees every crook and swerve of me, though he and I don’t speak and I have never touched him. It’s crucial that you fear him while my naked’s in your face. Only sometimes you need more. The dog tags looped through my shoe strap, those aren’t Vic’s. I can defuse a bomb with my teeth.
Selected as winner of the 2020 NORward Prize by a panel of previous poetry contributors
Featured Art: by 2 Bull Photography
Tonight is a rodeo night, the announcer blaring his bull and clown doctrine so loud it carries two miles east to our block, where just now a hummingbird hawk-moth drinks from the pink phlox with its long wand and I’m alone for a moment and the sky is bleeding itself out over the train tracks and the brick abandoned factories. The lights of the carpet store by the mall flicker carpe and I wonder just what I can seize. The homeless shelter bearing some saint’s name fills up every night and spills downtown next morning, wings of strange creatures brush our flowers while we sleep, and a hapless moose wanders a schoolyard before it’s caught, tranquilized. Everyone’s looking for it: a warmth, a softness in the belly, in a bed of grass. Take it when you can. Seize it.
Lately sleep is a myth and my brain is so hard-wired for worry my whole body crackles, then a deep fog rolls in and all day I’m lost. Unlike this moth, greedy in its guzzling, drinking sweetness without asking, and now the buzzer of the bull riding sounds. I think of the grace of that single man, one hand on the saddle and the other a flag waving violently above him. A wild show of surrender.
Some days it’s like this: one part anchored while the other begs for mercy. And some days it’s the other, the posture he begins with: both hands together, holding tight. Sometimes you hold your own hand. That’s all there is to take.
We buy hot dogs at a gas station of broken pumps and eat them on the pier, watching ratty shrimpers limp in for new bandages, sit there in the cold for hours, thinking sunset will fill the bay with the blood of the Brazos, do something holy to us.
This is after Ganado, and Victoria, and Refugio, and Point Comfort, and Blessing.
We’re newlyweds, willing to burn fuel on skywriting if it can make marriage feel less like living in Houston.
Sunset hangs around like a towel that won’t dry, and when we tire of waiting, we leave the dim, fuming galaxy of refineries for home, bright and deadly as a hospital circled by ambulances, the music off.
Today on the back-roads, where Connecticut and Massachusetts bleed together unnoticed— the large, gangly silhouettes of two llamas weaving across the road ahead of me, not where they are supposed to be, where I always pass them, stoic and shaggy amid a spread of crumbling outbuildings.
A young woman has stopped. She gets out of the car and I stop too, and more llamas rush out from the broken gate, ears erect like horns on their pert pedestal heads.
I wonder for a moment, could they hurt us? These animals we usually see standing still, chewing dumbly while we gawk? We forget their long legs, forget they can move.
But they head for the field and there’s something exhilarating about their sudden temporary glory, the larger world asserting itself in the form of llamas on the loose, llamas spreading through a whitened February field and no one around who can stop them. I should mention, I had been crying.
Starting for the door of the farmhouse, I hear someone coming out. Fucking cocksuckers, he drawls, this older man we can’t see, as if the llamas plotted this breakout on a regular basis. Jesus Christ Almighty— adding a new dimension to my image of the cluttered farmyard, hushed and exotic, too much to take in though I always slow down, riveted as I am now, but I drive away and leave him to it, lifted.
In Denver all days end standing up packed like dried fish dry-humping each other on the H Line. Some passengers in their drunken wobble or even in their haze of sobriety pull down hard on the rubber handles, the ones meant for standing, the ones that swing dumbly above our heads. They think this action stops the locomotive but the train is automated, stopping itself at Broadway then Osage, Lincoln Blvd. Since the train, as it always does, stops— the travelers learn to keep tugging & I can’t help but think this is how prayer works. Like when I prayed to a god I don’t believe in that your morphine drip might soothe the wounds that chemotherapy would not & how I swear it worked sometimes but didn’t others & yet in my drunken sobriety I believe that it was me who eased your pain, that it was my failed pleas that bleached your blood.
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.
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: A small portion of the Fanny Bennett Hemlock Grove on one side of Spruce Knob, West Virginia. Old Mammoth Road by Carol M. Highsmith
Angels visit sometimes, close to dawn. They cluster by the door, seem to scan the cars as they turn in, as if waiting for something— what, she doesn’t have a clue.
She’s forty-three, a bad cough (first cigarette at fourteen), two divorces, a dragonfly tattoo on her left shoulder blade. Tumble of chestnut curls—not a gray hair yet— imprisoned in a net, magnificent when released. Terrible feet. She hasn’t told a soul about the angels, not even her sister, who knows everything else worth telling.
They aren’t as glorious as she’d imagined. Their wings, in particular—tight-folded against their backs—surprise her by their drabness, dusty-brown as the sparrows that hop around the parking lot and gorge on stale biscuits she crumbles on her break. The angels’ eyes— washed-out blues and greens with strange, cat-like pupil-slits—track her as she winds through tables, a pot of coffee in each hand, or delivers platters heaped with pancakes, sausages, fries. Why me? she wonders, her back tickling under their eerie gaze, but can’t imagine. Until the night the boy— he can’t be more than boy yet—plunges through the door, white as biscuit dough except two spots, fever-red, high on either cheek. The pistol he grips trembling with every shuddering breath.
The cook’s whistling an old Alabama tune she almost recognizes. The trucker in the back booth drops his toast, lunges to his feet. The pistol wavers toward him, and then the angel by the door lifts its hand to beckon her. She feels her lips curl into the smile she offers worn-out mothers, fractious teens, men who look as though they can’t endure another night alone. Yanks off the net. Shakes down her waterfall of hair. Takes the first step toward whatever’s come to her.
Although it’s abandoned at two in the morning, an empty white carton of buzzing fluorescence, there’s always the feeling that someone was there until only a moment before you walked in, someone who reached up and popped a soap bubble of fragrance, the last shimmer of color afloat in this otherwise colorless storefront, then strolled past the choir of top-loaders and opened their lids, leaving them open, each of them holding its breath before singing, two dollars in quarters per song.
Someone has to identify the body. The funeral facilitator, Jeanne, gestures me into the room and clicks the door shut behind me.
You finally got your wish, I say to my mother. She’s wearing a shade of lipstick that unbecomes her, a subtle peach she would have hated. Her face is her face and of course is not, her hair parted in the middle, a new look. Her hands, composed across her sternum, are the color of parchment, skin thin as vellum.
I don’t stroke her arm. I don’t kiss her forehead, as I thought I would. Instead, I wonder, oddly, if the funeral people use the same gorgeous quilt that covers my mother now, with its sunbursts and bluebirds, for everybody.
When I think I have stayed long enough, Brahms trailing off in the corners, Jeanne is sitting outside the door, her long fingers forming a steeple. I want to say to her I have no idea who that is, I’m sorry, but levity isn’t encouraged here. Although I would only be speaking the truth: Alzheimer’s riddled her brain and sucked the marrow from her spirit; she became a stranger and a stranger to herself. What else was there to do but believe along with her that Hoss and his Bonanza brothers were indeed aliens from another planet, that Pat Sajak was “in on it,” along with everyone else who came and went in Mom’s room, stealing her clothes, her makeup, the nursing home grand conspiracy . . .
I’m sorry it’s taking me so long, Mom said in a rare lucid moment last week, and I had nothing to say, and I tugged the blanket snugly under her chin, and I handed her the plastic cup full of water which she waved away.
We’re in the Taqueria Uptown. People are eating, or gazing out of windows, or talking to each other. The food is delicious and the coffee hot and fresh. A man walks in with a cheap guitar and pleads for our attention, then fumbles through three mangled songs.
You can hear the pain in his voice. If he were drowning in Lake Michigan, he would flail and grab the lifeguard in a bear hug.
How much do we owe this guy, who’s interrupted us at dinner? What is it we owe each other? Nothing at all?
Bless you all, I hope I’ve brought some sunshine to our lives. He looks around. All that playing has made me hungry for a nice steak taco.
Everyone tenses and ignores him.
It’s my dream to be a paid musician.
A jornalero says something in Spanish. The waitress shrugs and writes the order.
Could I have a side of sour cream with that? he asks her. You see, the peppers burn my mouth. He looks over to the jornalero. My mouth is very soft and sensitive.
The jornalero ducks his head, embarrassed and a little pissed. He nods okay.
It’s terrible to be so lonely, he says to no one in particular.
The waitress has laugh lines around her eyes, she likes to laugh. But her face is neutral now. She brings him the sour cream in a saucer with a plastic spoon, and the taco.
Everyone is hoping that nothing more is going to happen next.
The attendant hands him a soda and turns her back, thinking of straws—how she’s running low, and their candy-red stripes, and the way everything here comes wrapped up in paper, and
then a 3½-foot alligator is clawing the air. As if she pressed the wrong button on the register. Or maybe, during lunch rush, she’d ignored an oncoming hurricane tossing them about.
In any case, she shrieks, finding for this alligator non sequitur no earthly explanation. Back when the heavens functioned with less subtlety, she might have turned to the logic of myth.
The god of rapacity took the shape of a lizard to penetrate the food hall’s oil-glossed aperture.
Perhaps the oracle of Jupiter, FL on his faux-leather throne delivers this cold-blooded message to confront corporate greed teeth to teeth. Not that the police have succeeded
in extracting a motive. The culprit’s Frosty-smeared lips are sealed. His charge: assault with a deadly weapon. Yet it rings untrue. For Florida Man, we need a more particular punishment:
accused of wielding a projectile reptile, the defendant shall be flung naked into the Loxahatchee Slough.
If indeed he is a criminal, there will be no proper dunking. If he is a hero, he will don no duckweed laurel as he rises from the mud. But the surveillance camera remembers:
it’s not so wide, the gap between the actual and the possible. About the space from Nissan Frontier to take-out window where an alligator, bewildered, sees the kitchen’s steam
like fog over a marsh in red bloom, smells the billows of meaty fragrance, hears the gatekeeper’s yodel of welcome, and for a moment flies.
By George Bilgere Featured Art: Long Exposure Coupleby Jr Korpa
I walk past Erin’s house at dusk and there she is at her kitchen table, working on her book about the Reformation.
She needs to finish it if she wants to get tenure, but it’s slow going because being a single mom is very difficult what with child care and cooking dinner and going in to teach her courses on the Reformation, which I can see her writing about right now, her face attractive yet harried in the glow of her laptop as she searches for le mot juste.
Meanwhile Andrew, her nine-year-old son, shoots forlorn baskets in the driveway under the fatherless hoop bolted to the garage by the father now remarried and living in Dayton, as Andrew makes a move, a crossover dribble, against the ghost father guarding him, just as I did when I was nine, my daddy so immensely dead, my mother inside looking harried and scared, studying thick frightening books for her realtor’s exam.
And although I hardly know Erin, I feel I should walk up, knock on her door, and when she opens it (looking harried, apologizing for the mess) ask her to marry me. And she will smile with relief and say yes, of course, what took you so long, and she’ll finish her chapter on the Reformation and start frying up some pork chops for us
as I walk out to the driveway and exorcise the ghost father with my amazing Larry Bird jump shot, and tomorrow I’ll mow the lawn and maybe build a birdhouse with the power tools slumbering on the basement workbench where the ghost father left them on his way to Dayton.
I will fill the void, having left voids of my own, except that my own wife and son are waiting down the street for me to come home for dinner, and so I just walk on by, leaving the void unfilled, as Erin brushes her hair from her face and types out a further contribution to the body of scholarship concerning the Reformation, and Andrew sinks a long beautiful jumper in the gloom.
Somehow it’s good to know the wildfires have not touched the face of our local TV anchor delivering her lines with a touch of sadness that never approaches despair, even as her bangs cascade onto her forehead like evening clouds descending the Coast Range. I think of her in her dressing room before she offers her face to us— the one that will help us fall asleep— while a line of flames somewhere far away descends the ridge and licks into a kitchen, melting the refrigerator magnets, popping cans of spray oil, and setting the dog out back to howling, jerking against its chain. I see her in front of the mirror, surrendering to the ministrations of tiny brushes— a makeup artist leaning in like a lover. Foundation first, an A-side attack on brow furrows and laugh lines. Then concealer to suppress the advance of crow’s feet into the Botox buffer zone. Within a half-hour, the spread of creases and fissures 95% contained. The brushes flit across her face like prayer flags, and I can almost smell the warm breath of the girl who sticks out the tip of her tongue, leaning close to line the boundary where the fullness of a lower lip begins its concave plunge into smooth white chin. Our TV anchor practicing her lines, mastering her face. We need to love her for this. For the way she shows us how to keep a chin from trembling, an eye from twitching even while the chained dog curls in on itself in the burning.
I ran into the boxer Leon Spinks in 1992. Spinks had won the heavyweight belt 14 years before from Muhammad Ali. He had also won bronze in the Olympics and gone to the penitentiary for possession. By the time he got to me he was all done with fame and fortune. But he still scrapped with life, just trying to be. At that time, I was staying with my brother in Springfield, Missouri. He ran a pool hall and kept an apartment in back of the place. I snuck into the kitchen late one night for a slice of that industrial orange cheese that I was addicted to. I flipped on a light and there was a large man sleeping on a cot in the middle of the white-tiled room. But I went ahead and opened the fridge because when you are visiting someone, nothing is unusual. It should all be that way, every day, everything new, but it rarely is. I reached in and lifted out a long orange sleeve. That’s when the sleeping man said, “Leon hungry,” and instantly I remembered my brother telling me that Spinks had started coming into the bar, but I did not believe him. It had been so matter-of-fact that I barely retained the anchor to the info. I made sloppy towers of tomato and cheese sandwiches for Spinks and me and we ate them in silence except for all the tooth-sucking that bread and cheese promoted, especially for Spinks who had more than a few teeth missing. I cleaned up and Spinks lay back down. There was nothing really to say. But when I turned off the light, as if still a boy, Spinks said, Nigh-night. They call it American cheese because it is processed from nothing much. In 1978, Ali taunted him and Leon beat his ass in one of the biggest upsets ever. I met a ton of people back then who ceased to matter. But that did not stop them and they persisted.
The History Channel’s playing “The Gold Rush” again. All those bearded men looking at reflections of themselves on the surfaces of creeks and rivers and lakes. They’re so beautiful coming out of ramshackle cabins, thumbs tucked into suspenders, wading into streams the color of cheap whiskey. That golden light on their shoulders, in their beards, dripping from the brims of their hats, high on “howdy” and “rough and ready,” around every bend in the river, expecting life to begin. The flash of light in a silver pan full and overflowing. All that hope. Out of the river, there’s always more earth. There’s always the scooping and sifting and throwing away. Everything left behind—out of frame: The women in their calico, waving goodbye. The steaming cows in their barns. Now just the sloshing desire of this moment and the next. Sure, you have to be willing to kill a few Indians. But as long as you’ve got a pan and a river to dip it in, you can forget the rest. At least that’s what I tell myself before the first commercial break. Before those attractive late-middle-aged people clutch each other in honey light and the baritone voice-over tells me to go to the emergency room if I experience an erection that lasts more than four hours. I wonder if anyone ever panned for gold in terrycloth— my fabric of choice for watching “The Gold Rush” in bed at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday. I wonder if any of those bearded men had a bottle of Prozac back in the cabin next to the straight-blade razor underneath the cracked mirror—something to take the edge off all that failure, something to dull the regret of walking out on their women and cows. Of course they’d have another name for Prozac, like maybe “nerve pills,” as in: “Durn near forgot to take my nerve pills this morning, Jake. Christing Jesus, sure don’t want to start sawing at my wrists again, now do I?” I love the way there’s no word for shame in the language of gold miners. All that hope is contagious. In fact, I believe if I really tried, I could get up and shuffle to the bathroom and brush my teeth during the next commercial break. I love the History Channel! It’s so inspirational. Right now, the sad banjo music is playing— the plinking of catgut string over doe-skin, a sound so Californian it makes you weep for the all-night diner in Auburn where it’s 6 a.m. and the sun is lighting up the foothills and the American River is still frothing to get wherever it’s been trying to go all night long. All the gold’s dug out of the hills but the waitress is calling you “love” as she puts down a cup of awful coffee and sits in your booth— night shift done. It’s as if she knows you. As if she’s made the same mistakes and she’s telling you it’s okay. Now she’s taking out a bobby pin. Now she’s letting down all that golden hair.
When I tell my mother that a man I know pickets the local hospital about what his wife calls “his topic” that is, circumcision and its evils, she tells me this was my grandmother’s specialty as a nurse, and I say, “You’re kidding.” “No. The doctor she worked for couldn’t stand it, so she did all his circumcisions. She loved it!” Loved it? I think—cutting the tips off boys’ penises? Loved what? The precision? The power? The cries? I remember sitting with my mother and grandmother when I was seven or eight, pretending to play, so I could listen to them talk in front of my grandparents’ house in Washington, 328 Maryland Avenue, and down the tree-lined street you could see the Capitol dome looming. A couple were walking on the sidewalk, and they waved at my grandmother, who smiled and waved back. “Are they married?” my mother asked when they passed. “No,” my grandmother answered, “they’re just shacked up.” The cups of my ears gathered around those words like ravenous Venus Fly Traps, because this was just what I had been waiting for, though I had no idea what it meant, and I knew I couldn’t ask or my doll dressing and tuneless singing would be exposed for the subterfuge they were, and I’d be exiled into the house, and this was before my grandfather died, who didn’t think a woman should drive, but my grandmother taught herself, her two little girls in the back seat screaming as the car jerked over the dirt road behind their house in Kentucky, and then after he died, she went to school and became a nurse, but fifty years later I’m chatting with a man on a plane, who’s returning home after spending the day in New York because he is a mohel and has made this long trip to snip the tip off some little boy’s penis, and I think of Mantegna’s painting of the circumcision of Christ at the Uffizi and kosher laws which forbid eating crustaceans, which would mean a sacrifice of gumbo, boullabaisse, cioppino and fish soups the world over, and it was the fried Apalachicola shrimps that broke the back of my vegetarianism, what in Louisiana they call “sramps,” and I’ve heard them called “pinks,” “prawns,” and sometimes when I’m standing over the stove making a roux my life seems to be a kind of gumbo, and if you don’t burn the water-and-flour paste, then it doesn’t much matter what else you throw in, but okra is a must and a couple dozen oysters, andouille sausage, all your dark mistakes mixed in with the brilliant medals and diamond tiaras, and my grandmother told me she went to her wedding in a horse and buggy, a seventeen-year-old girl, probably a virgin, and little did she know where that road would lead her, from canning tomatoes and corn to snipping the tips off thousands of penises to the nursing home where she died, shacked up with all her selves, that particular gumbo stewing in a body withered by 93 years, not knowing anything but that she’d rather be eating ice cream, driving to Memphis, frying chicken, mashing potatoes, baking a cake with blackberries her daughters picked that morning before walking to school.
Feature image: Odilon Redon. The Beacon, 1883, reworked c. 1893. The Art Institute of Chicago.
So this young couple, overweight and seriously tattooed, comes into the café, and each of them is actually wearing a baby in one of those tummy-papoose things, and they have two enormous dogs designed to kill elk and wolves, not sit under the table at a coffee shop, and as I watch them smile at their babies which are now screaming bloody murder while the great slobbering mastiffs begin earnestly licking their own privates, something terrible happens to me: it’s like The Manchurian Candidate, when Lawrence Harvey suddenly realizes the reason he’s been acting so strangely is because he’s been brainwashed by Soviet agents:
Featured Art: Luncheon Still Life by John F. Francis
Our good friends are with us, Jack and Jen, old lefties with whom we now and then share what we don’t call our wealth. We clink our wine glasses, and I say, Let’s drink to privilege . . .
the privilege of evenings like this. All our words have a radical past, and Jack is famous for wanting the cog to fit the wheel, and for the wheel to go straight
down some good-cause road. But he says No, let’s drink to an evening as solemn as Eugene Debs demanding fair wages— his smile the bent arrow only the best men
can point at themselves. I serve the salad Barbara has made with pine nuts, fennel, and fine, stinky cheese. It’s too beautiful to eat, Jen says, but means it only as a compliment.
Featured Art: Café Concert (The Spectators) by Edgar Degas
When Peter Byrne of the 80s synthpop duo, Naked Eyes, played for me his acoustic cover of k.d. lang’s “Constant Craving” in his studio over-looking Los Angeles, the peacock—not the NBC peacock but a real peacock among the many on the grounds—opened his fan as if the music were a potential mate. He strutted and shirred. He shimmied his many eyes. He’d been drawn to the music, then spotted himself in the sliding glass doors. He leaned in and turned for us like a Vegas show girl. He brought tears to my eyes. When the song was over I could barely muster, “What a tender version, Peter,” though tender wasn’t the word for the primitive if aimless seduction on the lawn.
By Peter Stokes Featured Image: The Kiss IV by Edvard Munch
This is a whole new world to us, and We drove up to some rooftop parking garage To look out on the Western night There up above the Terminal Bar & Grill And later moving on down darkened East Colfax Past all the whores with their narrow old asses And bars wide open with their doors bent back I thought I saw Bo Diddley At the wheel of a cream-colored Cadillac Like out of some wet dream from my Visions of Kerouac And I knew that at last we had arrived.
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