Tag: Friendship

Miraculous

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Pam Baggett

Featured Art by Eliza Scott

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.

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The Nigels

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Linda Bamber

I used to have no name-mates
but I never took my birth name back and now
two other Linda Bambers
sometimes get my mail. Texas and Kansas, I call them

to tell them apart. One is the author of a perennially best-selling textbook
on accounting; the other
wears crossed pink ribbons
in images online. I trust them both and plan
to be in touch.

If all 8 billion of us had one name
would no one ever start another war?

Nigel Smith, a pub owner in Worcestershire, England
once threw a ‘Nigel night’
expecting maybe half a dozen name-mates.
Four hundred thirty four showed up, he exulted,
              including one from Colorado
crowd-sourced for the trip.

Ni GEL, Ni GEL, Ni GEL
they all shouted
when they’d had enough beer.

All these Nigels, crowed the host,
were really keen to talk and share their lives
and come together in a kind of Nigel community.

I’m saying . . .
could you scale that up?

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The Arachnologist

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Benjamin Gucciardi

Featured Art: Untitled (Hourglass) by Mary Vaux Walcott

When he told me his teeth felt too heavy
to study history, I excused him.
I knew he was headed for the aqueduct,

or the boarded-up houses choked
by trumpet vine where he found them.
Martel collected spiders with the discipline of a surgeon.

He kept them in empty soda bottles
under his bed. On his way into sixth period,
he touched my fist with his fist,

announced the genus of his catch,
Latrodectus, and his total, that’s nine this week!
Through this tally of arachnids captured

in sugary plastic, we learned to trust each other
the way men on tankers far out at sea
confide reluctantly in gray rippling water.

When his best friend broke the news,
they found Martel last night, her voice quavering,
stray bullet off International,

I went to his house to adopt a spider.
I imagined the red hourglass
on the female’s abdomen emptying itself

slowly, her segmented body imprisoned
in the glow of the green-tinted bottle,
but no one was home. Now when I hear

the old women gathering cans at dawn,
half-swallowed by blue waste bins,
I think of Martel finding containers

to bring to the canyon, Martel
inspecting stones, placing his fingers
delicately around the thorax,

the eight legs angry at the morning
as he lifts the arrowhead orb weaver
toward the sun, offering

what he loved to the old, hungry light.

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Dialing The Dead

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mark Kraushaar

I’d never call.
First of all, I’d be intruding, and besides
I can see my dead friend with all his dead friends
even now, translucent, weightless, winging
through a cloud or sitting in a circle
on some creaky, folding chairs—
Hello, my name is Peter and I’ve
been dead ten years, car wreck.
Hello my name is Edith and I’ve
been dead a week, pneumonia.
Hello, my name is Frank and I’ve been . . . .

Oh, I know they’d all be friendly but even
dialing later when I guess he’d be alone
I’d have too many questions:
If you’re nowhere now and nothing
is this the same as everywhere and everything?
And, Peter, do you sleep in heaven?
Do you eat up there?
What’s the weather anyway?
And that tenderness of heart we try so hard
to keep a secret: in heaven we’re
wide open, aren’t we?
Stay in touch.
No, don’t.

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A Discreet Charm

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Stephen Dunn

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.

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At the Dinner Party

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Stephen Dunn

Featured Art: A Family Meal by Evert Pieters

As usual, we were trying to please each other,

so Ryan told a story about a water buffalo,

a lion, and a crocodile, which reminded

Julie about a coyote and a groundhog, and

I could not help but offer my favorite of

this kind—involving the tarantula

and its natural enemy the digger wasp. The

problem was that each story was true,

therefore that much more difficult to tell,

and each had in it an element of the fabulous,

and therefore the promise of a moral.

Linda, the contrarian, asked us if we had heard

the one about the priest and the rabbi,

but was booed, and kept quiet for a while.

In each story an animal was in danger, one

always slightly more sympathetic

than another. The water buffalo rescued

her injured calf from first the crocodile

then the lion, the coyote got bored

with the groundhog and returned to the woods,

and the tarantula just stood there, frozen,  while

the digger wasp dug its grave.

Ryan and Julie selected their details well,

paced and arranged them, as I hope I did,

and it wasn’t that our intent was to avoid

a moral, but that there was none to be had,

this being nature we were talking about

with its choiceless whims and atrocities.

Linda, of course, said she forgave none of it.

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