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I’m trying to look as if I’m suffering. I have this anguished expression on my face but it’s wasted since I’m wearing a surgical mask and anyway the focus here is really on my wife and the doctor is right there between her legs and he’s shouting Push, and my wife is doing this astounding thing, she’s pushing yet another human being into the world, a world that so far seems to be pushing back,
and the baby’s heartbeat is down to 90 so the doc says, I think maybe one more try, then we do the Caesarean, so things in the room really are a bit tense, it’s definitely a moment that demands a lot of attention, and my wife is gathering whatever shreds of strength remain in the shaking exhausted sleeve of flesh her body has become, the blood and sweat and fluids everywhere, and this is It!—when I hear the attending nurse standing just behind me saying to this guy in scrubs standing next to her, I think he’s the anesthesiologist’s assistant,
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.
Featured art: Abstraction, 1906 by Abraham Walkowitz
I am floating in the public pool, an older guy who has achieved much, including a mortgage, a child, and health insurance including dental.
I have a Premier Rewards Gold Card from American Express, and my car is quite large. I have traveled to Finland. In addition, I once met Toni Morrison at an awards banquet and made some remarks she found “extremely interesting.” And last month I was the subject of a local news story called “Recyclers: Neighbors Who Care.” In short, I am not someone you would take lightly.
But when I begin to playfully splash my wife, the teenaged lifeguard raises her megaphone and calls down from her throne, “No horseplay in the pool,” and suddenly I am twelve again, a pale worm at the feet of a blonde and suntanned goddess, and I just wish my mom would come pick me up.
Featured art: ‘Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate)’ by Vincent Van Gogh
I’m walking home late after work along Meadowbrook Road when I realize the guy half a block ahead of me is Bill, from Religious Studies. I recognize his bald spot, like a pale moon in the dusk, and his kind of shuffling, inward-gazing gait. Bill walks like a pilgrim, measuring his stride for the long journey, for the next step in the hard progression of steps.
Someone thinks I’m beautiful again & likes posts of my day, comments. I stifle smiles & feel uncontainable— bungeed off ether & the interplay. Punch-drunk in this blue-sky space, a rush of the past, the in-between, whole chapters, I open annuals & albums from storage. His change in status: single. Papers in hand, this backlit man heaves toward the kite’s trailing end: What if?— that butterfly. My youngest lights onto my lap. Who’s that?— as a key turns the lock, I log off.
Of the way you spend Saturday morning in your room, instead of helping Papaw with the lawn work. You watch him on the riding mower, in customary slacks and suspenders, coasting back and forth beneath your window as if the ragged scream of the machine will summon you like a siren to your manly duty. You raise the binoculars Papaw used when he was stationed in West Africa during WWII, long before his shoulders bowed and his skin darkened with liver spots. They are clunky, large in your hands even though you’ve had a growth spurt and you’re well on your way to catching up to Peter, who’s a whole six feet and had college basketball scouts watching him at every game last season. It was Peter’s senior year of high school, your freshman year. The fall had been glorious, riding the cloud of popularity as Peter Thompson’s younger brother. The other kids, the teachers and coaches, cafeteria ladies, librarians, all looking at you with an expectation that was not yet a burden. You joined the Fellowship of Christian Students, which Peter was president of, and took the Advanced Placement classes he’d taken. You had more friends than you’d ever had before. Through the lens, Papaw’s face jumps up at you. You’re intimately aware of every wrinkle, every nose hair. He guides the mower in long, straight lines, first in front of your window at the corner of the house, on the second floor, and then away toward the county road. The motor’s howl falls to a low growl, builds back up as he returns exactly two feet to the left, is eventually reduced to a low grumble at the back of the house.
I drive past motel signs advertising free cable for bikers, truckers numbed by cracked asphalt. A looseness, as if everything is slipping away, and the sky shaved thin as mica.
Stretch of dusty storefronts hung with local art—warriors astride painted horses, mesas. The Rio Grande cuts in and out, shape-shifting between cottonwoods. In the café, regulars remove their hats, sit alone.
Featured art: ‘Avocado’ (1916) by Amada Almira Newton
Your right leg is shorter than your left. There’s something funny happening in your left shoulder. You should change your detergent and go fragrance-free. Is this too much pressure?
You once had a girlfriend who threw bottles at your head. You haven’t slept well in decades. You store all the grief for your dead mother in your solar plexus. Breathe.
Featured art: [Villa d’un Chiffonier (Ragpicker’s Shack)], 1920by Eugène Atget
I saw you, daughter, sneaking a garbage bag of my treasures into your car. Those heaps of eyeglasses are art.
Never mind the cracked lenses and broken hinges, the bent frames. Some day I’ll make a sculpture or hanging lamp. I’ll make a mobile.
The broken picture frames and dried-out pens. Even the bottle caps beg to be known. And how patient those stacks of hotel soap. Waiting. Just in case.
Yes newspapers haystack the walls. But it’s all there: knowledge at my fingertips. The postman will bring more.
There is an ocean liner inside my heart that waits to set sail. The crowds wave at the dock. My shades are drawn. Bring me, daughter. Don’t take. Bring me a basket brimming with words.
Featured art: “Beach of Bass Rocks, Gloucester, Massachusetts”by Frank Knox Morton Rehn
Everything made my mother nervous: the baby crying, sand on the floor, the flies. So we went out to the beach. I took my bucket and shovel. My mother sat my little brother up on her shoulders and carried the towels and a canvas chair for my father, who was too weak to carry anything. He wore his cabaña suit, light green with white palm trees, his legs, pale like the sheets in the hotel room. He hadn’t shaved.
A late afternoon after work, Rosa puts the flame down under the rice and beans and sits with her feet up in Laureano’s recliner. The knock on the front door Rosa thinks must be Mondo’s social worker, the only person she knows who doesn’t just walk in the back door. Mondo is in detention again for defacing a wall, or an overpass, something.
But it isn’t the social worker, it’s little Esmeralda, daughter of the Mexican grocer on Moody Street, who comes in politely, sits opposite her with a notebook, and asks Rosa can she ask her some questions. Hah, like the social worker, Rosa thinks, then corrects herself. This is a child she used to see sitting on the floor of her father’s abasto sorting red beans. The girl tells Rosa she needs to write a biography of an older person for her fifth grade class.
Ah, Rosa, with her aching feet, feels old.
Not old, old; just older than me, says the child. She used to be in Rosa’s catechism class at St. Justin’s and was notably better behaved and brighter than any of the others.
Hokay, says Rosa, not yet realizing what will happen to her.
It was dark, sure, but the city’s halo whitewashed the stars. We drank good bourbon from Dixie cups to mock our sophistication. Two black men and a white one who needed a brother. We drank to Ghana advancing, not so naïve to believe they had a chance against England. We toasted our wives of many colors and our barefoot children chasing fireflies like the first night in Eden. But it was Oakland. So when the boy climbed the porch steps cupping a winged and glowing offering, I called him by the wrong name, as if I did not know him, as if his father was not my friend. The brothers exchanged their look, too polite to call me out on a summer night in paradise. And we all pretended not to notice the bats that let go their roosts to flap old patterns in our chests.
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.
There are two, as if some ark came to rest on the high school football field and Noah flung them through an open window to test whether this cement-skinned town can sustain life. See them there, trimming lava-dipped wings in the sky above Costco, bills curved like question marks. And what do they ask, out of earshot of the man with sunflower seeds? Do you know what it means to circle, to draw and redraw the tightening circumference of your life above the grid of 50-year roofs, in steak smoke risen from backyard barbecues? The parrots’ owner is no prophet. Summer evenings, he wrenches on a ’67 Mustang that drips its innards onto his Avenue L driveway. And at dusk, he makes his arm a perch, takes the two from their cage, feeds them from his lips, knowing if they love him he need not maim their wings.
“Hypergraphia is a behavioral condition characterized by the intense desire to write . . . ” “It is a symptom associated with temporal lobe epilepsy.”
It’s as if . . . , he says, It’s like . . . , or, It’s ABOUT things being simply THERE, molecular, blue, strewn, flattened, aflame. He pulls up the shade and looks out. There’s this kind of accounting he does: sidewalk, hedgerow, phone pole. He lists the round and the ready-made. He notes the hand-carved and the curved. He sorts by color and shape. He lists by size and by brightness. He notes the nautical, normal and nameless. It’s Wednesday and he’s moved from columns to rows: alphabetic, magnetic, majestic . . .
Pull up any rug, there’s a hole. An easy chair sits on a trap door, which leads to a slide. I am still surprised, after all these years, how many tunnels are in my house.
In the basement, which is under the place you would consider the basement, is what I call “the secret room.” But all my rooms are really secret rooms. It has a large colored map on the wall, a folding table under a fluorescent light, a red couch.
I wanted to smell less like a restaurant and more like a woman. I tried my best. All the women I know could have sex with famous men like J Hamm or Leo D or BJ. All the women I know smell like French Vanilla perfume and fresh cigarettes. They smell like thin people. When I describe them I say, she is thin like a rich person. I say, she eats paper and melts diamonds, to stay thin— she huffs paint thinner. I say, she has never touched another person’s ranch dressing or brushed it onto her thigh where it looked like the seed of a famous man or anyone really.
Though they’re meant to be our protagonists, we detest these teenagers who fall for the same tricks and traps in every film and because they keep coming back dumber and hotter decade after decade with their perky breasts and discernible abs and the way they throw themselves mercilessly against one another in backseats and on twin beds and because they smoke cigarettes and slug soda and beer and because dialysis and diabetes will never creep like Freddy into their dreams. Because they’re always in love and loneliness is as unimaginable as feigning sleep so the person next to you will stop kissing your neck though you still care for her and he’s still beautiful or maybe you don’t and maybe he’s not or maybe the workday has emptied you of desire for anything but seven hours of silence and maybe these are the words you say that can’t be forgiven. Curse the children
10 my dog, climbing trees, apples, my sister On two separate car journeys, one with my mother, one with my father, I ask each of them to choose the last thing they’d give up. At ten, my questions take this form with some regularity: exaggerated parameters, carefully explained rules. “It can be food or water or something solid, but it doesn’t have to be. You only have twenty-four hours to live.” Both ask if they can think about it. Both remember to answer by the end of the journey (a hastily added rule).
My father: “the capacity to love.” My mother: “to know I am loved.”
11 anywhere outside the classroom; mud, cold, leaves, not sports, lists I start smoking in ditches. I ask my father if he’d still love me if I went to prison. “Of course.” He doesn’t hesitate or ask what crime I will have committed. I think about this and watch the back of him digging. I don’t doubt his words but I am curious. “What if I joined the IRA?” There is a long pause and he straightens out for it. The Irish Republican Army is in the news a lot. They drive fear into every school child, make public transport and Saturdays anxious. There are no longer bins on the streets, litter blows frightened of b-o-m-b-s. “There will always be things you could do to make loving you harder. That’s not the same as not loving you. Difficult doesn’t mean no.”
Don’t ever make him a take-me-back mix CD. But if you do, open with Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home To Me.” If Kim from high school wants to wait in the really long line for the panda at the zoo, don’t complain. That panda is going to be so cuddly cupping its paw around the bamboo, your heart will do a somersault. Besides, you’ll miss Kim when you’re away trying to tell her updates before the metro goes underground. “I’m going on a date and wearing eyeliner.” “You’re going on a date with a minor? ”