Green Basilisk / Basiliscus plumifrons / Jesus lizard

Photo by spencer77 Spencer Wright via flickr

My roommate Frank finds the basilisk on one of his worksites and brings it home. He puts it in the snake tank, which he leaves on the patio, and tucks some plants in it to make it homey. Sheena puts a towel over one side of the glass so the lizard has shade.

The lizard is a bright, acid green–the kind of green that could only be found in a reptile. It has a crest on top of its head that fans out when it is alert and deflates when it is at ease. Its face is intelligent, though also inanimate in a very un-humanlike way, and it has a long, thin tail–so long as to seem gratuitous. Frank holds it with one hand, its tail protruding pornographically from between his fingers. I wonder if its heart is pounding. If it is, the lizard shows no sign of it. All those years of evolution and it is holding still in a hand that could crush it. I wonder: how does the lizard know when to stay still and when to run? How does it negotiate the balance between coming and going? Between stasis and instinct?

“Come see this,” Frank says, still clutching it.

We all go out to the cul-de-sac in front of the house. Frank kneels down on the cement, lowers his hands, and opens them. Then the lizard is a moving green flash, a blip in our vision. It is running by us upright, on its two hind legs, bipedal, as if it has been hiding this fact from us all along. The thighs of its two legs are comically out of proportion to the rest of its body. They churn the lower legs like crankshafts on propellers. The lizard looks like The Road Runner, its upper body strangely stiff, even as its legs whirl and it is a blur of light. Its sphinx-like expression remains even as it is making a run for it.

“Runs like that over water,” Frank says, then fishes the lizard out from under the rim of a tire.

“No way,” I say. But later, I look it up and find it’s true. In videos Jesus lizards fly across the surfaces of streams, the thin webs between their talons preventing them from plunging in more than an inch at full-speed.

Frank returns the lizard to the tank and it eats a worm, some grasshoppers, a hibiscus flower. I keep thinking about how different it is from mammals. One day, while Frank has it resting on his shoulder, it darts off and one of the cats claws it.

“Didn’t think so much blood could come out of a lizard,” Frank says. I go to see and the floor is indeed filled with small pools of red. I am startled. Somehow, I was not expecting red. In some part of my mind, I was expecting the lizard to bleed blue or green, like toxic waste, or futuristic battery acid. Somehow, I imagined that the lizard–with its scaled skin and speed and stoicism–was untouchable, god-like.

Florida Blue Jay / Cyanocitta cristata semplei

The twin blue jays (are they a couple?) make an appearance on the patio almost every morning. They are haughtier and more aristocratic-looking than their scruffy, conventional blackbird competitors. It is hard not to stare at the blue jays. They are all hard lines and beautiful geometry: the feathered ridge on the head like a mohawk, the shifting shades of cerulean against the snowy white plumage, cordoned off by the necklace of black. The thick triangle of the beak a perfect contrast to the slope of the bird’s head, to the horizontal ridge. And, of course, the eyes like two black beads.

Frank doesn’t like them because they shit on the patio and because they can’t be chased off easily. But I am mesmerized by them. How they are arrogant together, in their coupledom.

Lovebug / Plecia nearctica

On the drive down to Florida the air filled with the long bodies of black flies the size of almond slivers. They had red thoraxes, as though they were wearing tiny red capes, and kamikazed themselves into the front of the car as we drove down 95 South. Some of them, I noticed, were attached at the end. There was something about this that made me feel bad for them. How cruel to have to be glued together in order to mate. To be Siamese-twinned against a car going 65 miles an hour.

By the time we were outside of Orlando the grille of the car was positively slicked with lovebug paste. They covered the walkways and doors like black snow, and we couldn’t help but scratch and slap ourselves, imagining that they were brushing up against our skin. We were told that they only come out a few weeks a year, and that they infested this part of the state because the University of Florida accidentally released them during a science experiment.

“It’s true,” a cashier at a gas station tells me. “I had a friend who was working in the lab at the time. He was there.” He says this with a conspiratorial nod.

The lovebugs are Romeo and Juliet, brought together by fate, mated for one tragic night, and then obliterated until their next reincarnation. I have never experienced such in-the-blood necessity. I still try to feel out the boundaries of my commitments, like a person in the dark. If I press tenderly, how far will they give? Will they stretch all the way to Florida?

And not only this, but the corpses of P. nearcita become acidic after a day or so and begin to eat at the car paint. How strange, I think. Driving into Florida during a downpour of suicidal, paint-eating lovebugs. It makes me nervous, as though they were the plague God forgot to send down. As though they were a silent warning to my need for motion, the reason why I am here.

Giant Toad / Bufo marinus 

Every now and then we see the toad on the patio. He (or she? I always assume, unfairly, that reptiles and amphibians are males) is like a temperamental lover, only calling when the leftover cat food is still out.

If the toad was a person, it would be thought of as ugly. It has fish-like, wide-set eyes and skin the color and texture of swamp mud. Its heavy mouth sags. With all that skin, and being as big as a dinner plate, it is also corpulent. Bulbous but compact. There is something sensual about the toad. All that rutted, muck-brown skin, the face that is all body. The cats mewl at it with longing, thwacking themselves into the patio door for it.

“I want to let the cats out, but I’m worried it’s poisonous,” Sheena says.

I research. According to the University of Florida’s Wildlife Extension site, Bufo marinus secretes a milky-white toxin from its parotoid glands. The poison will burn eyes, make cats and dogs foam at the mouth, cause convulsions. “Good thing we didn’t let the cats out,” I tell Sheena.

It turns out that, like so many other species here, B. marinus isn’t indigenous. They established themselves in south Florida, the article says, after “about 100” of them escaped from a dealer at the Miami airport in the 1950s. When I first read this, I thought the article meant not a hundred toads but a hundred exotic animals had escaped. I pictured a burst of zebras, elephants, and giraffes surging forth from a cage, the exodus from Noah’s ark, ready to thrive in Florida’s warmth, the helpless pet dealer watching from the side. And then I checked and realized no, it was just the toads. I had to remind myself that, though Florida is known for its invasive species, not everything is trying to come here. Not everything is always looking for a new beginning.

And then, as I read on, I find out that, suspiciously, the giant toads were released again in the 1960s, apparently to assist with pest control.

B. marinus looks almost exactly like its southern cousin, Bufo terrestris. The only way to know the difference is to check for ridges on the head and for the parotoid glands that angle over the shoulders. B. marinus is ridge-less and has little hillocks of poison above its arms.

Both B. marinus and I are transplants to Florida. Me, for the summer, B. marinus for good. I want to lift it up from the tiled patio by its underarms, to see its limbs hang down. I want to hug it, to feel its amphibian, too-big warmth on my chest and the ridged, abraded skin, slick and foreign against my neck. Both B. marinus and I have been embraced by this strange land, our beauty and ugliness both finding their uses.

Northern Curly-tailed Lizard / Leiocephalus carinatus

The curly-tails are dune-colored, and when they bask in the sun they lean horizontally, as if their joints are stiff. Their tails raise and tense into a nautilus before they dart off. Whenever I am leaving or coming back to the house they scatter through the bushes or across my line of sight. Anytime there is a bit of movement without clear cause, I know what’s behind it.

Tropical Orbweaver Spider / Eriophora ravilla

Walking up the driveway one night, I feel the unmistakable silk of a spider’s web tangle across my shoulder and I cry out in terror. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the spider’s body glimmer in the dark, the color of moonlight. I run inside and find a flashlight. When I shine it, the orbweaver contracts inwards. Thin-legged and skull-bodied, it is the size a lychee. Its web is a wonder, a tapestry of gossamer concentric rings. In the dark the web is barely visible, so that the spider looks suspended, unearthly. I text Sheena and Frank to watch out for it when they get home. Night after night, we return to the driveway to awe at it. Its exoskeleton is perfectly pieced together, like the parts of a jigsaw puzzle. Its legs hook gracefully, are bent like talons. Never will I recover from the surprises Florida has to offer. Never will it stop giving me something else to wonder at, as though, once I feel I know everything the world has to show, it will say no, look, hear, see.

Ball Python / Python regius

Frank’s snakes live in the closet, coiled up among the button-downs and jeans. They are ball pythons.

“But what if they get hungry?” I want to know.

“They don’t come out,” Sheena tells me. They ingest a rat once a month. When they aren’t in the closet they are in the tank, but the lizard lives there now, so the snakes occupy the closet full-time.

There is something unsettling about the snakes, though I like them, and have probably suffered more at the hands of the cats than I will ever from them. Perhaps it is some remnant instinct that reminds me that they are capable of killing humans. And they are so different from legged creatures, which is what I am used to. I like the long arm of their body, all muscle, corseted by the paper-smooth gold and brown skin. The clench of them wrapped around a limb–like an arm, or a shoulder–is so much stronger than I could have predicted. A little neighbor girl comes over to see them and her mother requests that they be put on her lap, apparently to make her overcome her fear of them. They sit on the couch together and Frank drapes one of the snakes over their legs and then promptly wanders off, leaving me to deal with the girl’s screams to take it away. I grasp the snake a few inches from its head, where my hand can encircle its circumference. I pull it towards me, but it’s like trying to grip the current, or the tide. The snake seems to bend in dimensions I didn’t know existed, nearly thwarting me, though I am pulling it towards me with all my strength. I am humbled by the power of its body. I now understand viscerally that the snake could strangle me if it wanted to, all coil and squeeze–the world’s worst tie, necklace, choker.

American alligator / Alligator mississippiensis

But I cannot write about Florida, cannot catalog its fauna without writing about the alligator. I saw them in an Everglades park. A keeper gave a talk on them in their enclosure, where two of them were basking by a palm. Using a stick, the keeper prodded at them, making them flee into the murky brown pool nearby. From utter rock-stillness they became pure movement, pure slippage in the water. The keeper tucked the stick into the largest one’s mouth so we could see how wide the jaws open. The keeper was, in my opinion, a little cavalier.

The horny exterior of the alligator and its stillness allude to the prehistoric. They seem to know something we don’t. Perhaps, it’s eat or be eaten. Or that time extends in unimaginable stretches. The studded belt of their tails looks like armor against all tragedies.

I associate the alligator with Florida’s strangeness, which I find alluring and beautiful. Forget the beach, the turquoise waters, white sands, tropical fruit. Give me the swamps. Give me the alligators. In Florida quirk is an aesthetic. Unlike the north, here disruption is desired, needed. Here, creatures as old as history lurk in water the color of soil, their eyes comically peeping out like the periscope of a submarine. Here, people get drunk and get mauled by them. Yes, give me Florida any day.

Banyan / Ficus aurea / Florida strangler fig

            The multi-veined banyan trees appear, rope-like, throughout the south, though they are not as common as the palms. Their trunks are webbed in by roots, so that they appear to be all root, and no trunk. They are the color of wet paper, a charcoal, ash-gray. I want to crawl into the nest of those roots, exposed, tender, and fall asleep.

I have fallen in love with the banyan trees, just as I have fallen in love with Florida. How to tell you of the things I saw? How they took care of me, in their own way? How to catalog all the wonders of the world?

 Lia Skalkos received a BA in English from the University of Chicago in 2009. She is a graduate student at Rutgers University.

Photo by kretyen, Ken Bosma, via flickr

There is a jasmine vine on the corner of 9^th Ave. and 5^th St. It weaves across a fence around a 1938 house that holds the vault of a former bank robber. You will find its combination scratched into the garage wall. The bathroom vault was locked, but empty. This is not that story.

The house used to be plain white, nothing to stop for, with big sliding windows and a narrow curving yard. Inside is a woman who as a child lay on her driveway waiting, believing or mostly hoping that there was other life in the skies, and wishing that whatever form enclosed it would claim her and take her where she might be remembered. The jasmine flowers are also white and some sensitive type or some fool lover born all over again will pick them while walking by. When overgrown the vine’s tentacles thwart pedestrians and skateboarders on the sidewalk; through the windows you can see the slack arches bouncing in the breeze, or in response to being slapped away. The woman says it is time…that people will soon go missing.

In the bottom of my closet is a tee shirt with stains like raised blisters. This is the vine shirt, used strictly for tackling its winding, recalcitrant growth. The vine’s sticky milk seized the blade of the electric cutter, so I switched to a hand clipper. No amount of washing can unstain the shirt, but no stain can stop you from wearing one. When I’m out there grabbing and pulling, snipping and sweating, I see the Mexican guys in the house across the avenue. They fix cars in their front yard and play what sounds like Tejano music; and odd nights on their porch there’s a good time you can hear, if your windows are open.  They look over at the sight of me cutting–or maybe really at me–and from time to time a couple younger ones will ride by on a single bike, circle near my car as I’m uprooting a monster weed and return grinning to their house. They’d grin some more if they knew what was lazing in my freezer:  my garden day Margarita or a Tequila spiked Tequiza. No one cuts a jasmine vine just to cut it.

You know the smell of jasmine when you smell it. It is feeble to call it fragrant. It is feeble to call it sweet. The prattling finches who inhabit the vine, whose song is syrup seeping into the ears, solicit a man from his running car to pace forth and back before the vine and back and forth some more. I go out to him in that melting asphalt heat and his spectacles’ rims, they outshine his squint, and what he wants to know is if we are rearing finches. I say, dropping him from wherever their song has hoisted him, that they simply live in the vine. He says nothing, walks away, puts his body back into his car.

A guy we call The Professor lives on the 5^th St. side. He is droll and awkward, sort of contorted and plenty retiring. Whenever I see him, he is with a book and coffee cup, in a dark shirt and khaki pants that fail to fit proportionately. I do not know what he does because, being an unpublished writer, it is my habit to never ask, “So…what do you do?”  Instead, we smile-hey or wave or trade a half gesture for a facial whatever. The Professor shares the seniours’ apartment complex with among others, The Swinger– who is no seniour—who pilfers the parking space alongside our house despite having two of her own, only to shut her car door and start her key ring swinging, round and round, like she’s showing that she’s packing in some old Western. That said, she did rescue a ravaged squirrel that still lives with her, so I figured her soul might scrape by. That was until the afternoon she hollered out, “Peek up your sheet or I will call the police.” The dog and I both startled, I managed a “Sorry???” before being set straight: “The dog sheet. I will call the police.”  A rare time I am delinquent about the baggie and…right…okay, she is going to call in a pile. And it all adds up later when I see her jeep’s Venezuela bumper sticker. I am from Trinidad and…Venezuela and Trinidad are oil and water, and in close proximity to each other. We both have oil and we both have water– water we fight over, as in: you’re fishing in my water so my Coast Guard is going to arrest your culo and throw it in jail. Now the Venezuelan jails have more Trini culos than the Trini jails have Venezuelan, but this is not a conversation The Swinger and I will ever have. I reckon this territorial jostling is a cosmic thing—nothing to do with either of us, really, all the way over here in over-Grouper-fishing Florida.

Late one Sunday morning a more than heavy woman is rocking like a dry anchor, this way, then that, out with a right step, out with a left, stop and heave…and heave; brown skinned in a bronze sequined mini dress, with bleached hair and a cane, and a kind of tolerance–but no complaint–in her smile. She, too, passes the vine. As do two men who have lived much life in the next corner house, who like so many can no longer afford their mortgage; both technically men, but only one living according to the diagrams our binary species is diminished to—as if anatomy could pass for identity. The first, a handyman who wrecked the woman’s double doors, who has a parrot at his ear that I would name Avocado; the other ailing and moving more slowly, thin in her shorts and blouse, but quick to call the cops for those sketchy types sketchy landlords rent to…Those cramped houses where the party does not end, or the types who visit vacant houses, or too often glance over their shoulders on their bicycles, or who board the bus in a rush that exhales,” I was never here.”

Still, it isn’t nearly as dangerous as it used to be. When the woman first moved in the panorama those wide windows presented did not go unheeded by the cops. They requested her house as a lookout to gauge the drug activity. In those days many a march passed up and down the streets; determined neighbours drawing strength from each other, and from whatever well of alcohol was in that night’s sippy cups, the woman in her leopard print coat, the crew of them stamping and chanting, “I don’t know but I’ve heard rumours, all drug dealers wear pink bloomers.”

The woman painted the white house in colours you could not name—unless you were an artist with a vast spread of tubes or an employee at the paint company or an inbred descendent of Aldous Huxley. Chimerical colours someone must have reverted to invent, for they could not have been contrived; or inscrutable shades found so nearby they cast one back into a stumble. A taffy-dew green; the coral of candy corns—not that my names capture the colours. But before the colours that cannot be truly named, and before she could wash the white house in them, the woman would drive there after work to sit on the doorstep and eat dinner from a bag or a box, resolute that this was her house. Call it a vigil that would continue until the shifting had shifted and the click clicked, and the held key turning quite unlike the clock, hinted, “I am here.”

Some people call pigeons the rats of the sky. Not I. I am the pigeon junkie who throws seeds to the garden floor, spirals them on the glass-top table, lets ’em drizzle in the frog feeder by the gate with the tricky hinge beneath the arbour. I see their shadows strutting across the vine, dark forms unlike themselves, because the vine is ropey instead of flat and the sunlight scatters in the weave. I look up and they are on the roof and I know they are waiting, some still, some bobbing, but each one with a pigeon’s iridescence– blue, pink, purple, green—tinges of makeup, of metal, of Moonstone; and their descent is soft slapping sound and skin-brushing breeze; and if I am lucky, in the midst of all that gray glitter the all-white one will surprise me, who is surely a lady; and her name is Bella.

Found in the vine: one man’s leather wallet. Turns out he is the pastry chef at the Italian market who was pick-pocketed downtown the night before. The woman returns his wallet and then returns with a tray of desserts. Karma…for us children of the microwave. The dog lives to crouch behind the vine and then launch like a barking rocket at this old biddy who is as crabby and who looks remarkably like the one on those greeting cards. She wears a visor and you can tell that she is angry at the sidewalk and the weeds and the walking stick she jabs accusingly with. Then the dog gets to pranking and out comes this screak, like something from the floorboards or one of Hitchcock’s doors, her head fighting its way up, a smoker exhaling, part phlegm, part flight: “Shhhhhhuuuuuuuuuutttt up.” As for the finches…I see them spraying out the vine, entrails of a piñata struck by a kid too big for his age.  And underneath? The culprit’s vigorous hips, his hooking tail, and a proud pair that survives there for he is not yet heartworm free. But sometimes the finches flurry because the hawk is here hunting. Today I see it atop the light post tearing at a fish under its foot. I am grateful it isn’t one of my pigeons. You see I throw things at the hawk’s branch when it rests in our tree; but it merely looks at me with a composure, a self possession in its eyes and in their version, that reduces as it reasons, “Collect yourself. I am a hawk.”

The dog stares over the vine, past the paper box and down the avenue. You will see his head tracing U shapes in the window as he studies both sides of the road. But the dog will lose all equilibrium if the bearded man bound to be a ‘Nam Veteran comes whizzing down in his wheelchair, whose flag whip-wags at the wind. On the fourth of July and from a corner in the yard, we watch the fireworks vanish and climax in the distance above the water. We also watch Neigbourhood Man and his friends directly over the avenue. They are setting some off outside his house. Neighbourhood Man is always involved and always informed, and his way of standing suggests that he is donning The Emperor’s New Cape.

But it was in that same corner of the yard where the vine had never reached that I found myself pushed. This was after the woman had heard the dog and caught sight of a possum. Foolishly, I let her push me like some battle ram while she huddled behind professing, and professing,  to be gathering stones so she could throw them. The plan was to grab the dog’s collar, and thank God for vodka, because the dog was almost touching the cornered possum–picture a dinosaur’s very open jaw–it was all very Jurassic, and I was not the one curious about dinosaurs as a child; just long rows of long teeth, I could see nothing else, and there is her hand still pushing, and hearing a few faint thuds (the stones?) I get my hand under the collar and we three hustle back to the house.

When I begin to live in the house the body count is four. The woman has an old Tuxedo cat that likes and despises me, is irritated and drawn by me. And while I concede it could be confusing to be formally attired for no real reason, the cat’s opinion vacillates like a laser toy would if a cat got hold of it. This dithering is also directed at the dog; hence, we both fall prey to his hook and nip, a technique he dispenses with the speed of the ninja…so inseparable from the grace. Well, one good morning comes around and Feel Good’s (my name for him) purring is ignored. Time runs and I will myself out of bed. I mean to let the light in the front door when something swooshes past my leg that is black but splashed by white. “The cat isn’t allowed in the yard. Don’t let the cat out that door.” Not to worry, the cat is hungry. He was hungry an hour ago; he’s even hungrier now. So I take the Lactaid carton out the fridge and start summoning the cat through the open door. Nothing. So I take the carton to the doorway and see Feel Good sunning beside the vine, posturing, requiring, like the cat that he is. I beckon some more, getting really animated with my carton shaking, waving the thing like a golden calf; but the cat only glances then arcs his neck, which with his head form a parenthesis, and I see that I am out of range…and out of luck.

It is deep evening when a figure blurs that bend from street to avenue and rouses me from black leather, away from the red-dropping wall. I curve with the sidewalk, which curves with the vine, to find a large dog, mostly white and wandering, then standing there while its nose considers the avenue. I am unsure that this is happening as I do what you do not do–place my hands and hold its hindquarters—and its eyes back-slant but it makes no sound as it turns from the avenue and takes a side street. I follow. It continues, wide-aware and wary of my presence; and some kids come bustling our way, looking to score something, to feel something; and I believe their facades and I believe their bodies, and on the left is a low house whose windows wish Happy Birthday Mom or Happy Mother’s Day with red paint; and the kids pass that house, or maybe they go in; and I wonder if they know who forced our paper box on its back, and if it was for what either held or either lacked; and the dog loses me. I lose the dog.

I am wearing the tee shirt with the welts. It is time. The woman does not need to say it. The milk spurts because I am cutting what is still living; and I cannot say where the vine starts or that it ends, or how many plants first took root when this was just a fence. If I try to pursue a dogged line it so mingles with the others that I forget where I started…which is to say, I forget myself.  The woman calls through the window, “Don’t cut what’s flowering.”  But the vine dares: however you cut me, you cut me here. And I defer, because when I say that is how I want you to touch me, I mean there. “And don’t scalp it like the last time.” (Something better be in the freezer.) And there goes old Gandhi, in skin that rolls along his chest heaping lightly, like a wave thinning out on the shore. He walks 9^th Ave. with his shirt in his hand, on flat-soled shoes, too steady to hurry…sometimes with a bag from the grocery; today, with no bag at all.

Kathryn Martins studied writing at the University of Tampa and, after a ten-year absence, has returned to her homeland of Trinidad. She lives in a valley where she sits with and stares at the hills. Not much happens, but there are hummingbirds and the weather and the neighbour’s feral children. You can read more at http://kathrynmartins1.wordpress.com/

How many have handed over their religions?
Come empty fences come power-lines,
TVs all promising the fall-out won’t make landfall.

I’ve been in rooms full of people while they haunt themselves
with the forest-fire sunsets of Arizona.
And we share the same disease, sincerely,
they’ve never slept very well.
By which I mean their elegance was in dying artfully,
all blossoms on the stem, all violet and mercury.

You see these apparitions?
Fuck, look at it, the hanging of innocent men on the coast
suspended in marble in the light from outside.

In the event of nuclear war we must understand
the most beautiful word is existence
and believe then that our sailors will return from the sea
like astronauts
younger and without a god.

Jaime Garcia is a 23-year-old Californian.

The crook of my neck: the hairline
once made a perfect cursive M:

you wept over the dishwater
in the same sink

you had once washed my infant body
(the soft machinery):

you the mother within my mother
who will not know

what I won’t want you to know
is why I am:

Kevin McLellan is the author of the chapbook Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010), a collaborative series of poems with numerous women poets. Kevin lives in Cambridge MA with Frankie (a canary), and sometimes teaches poetry workshops at the University of Rhode Island in Providence.

by notsogoodphotography via flickr

I am sitting in the attic closet with the cobwebs and mothballs, holding my baby, her hiccups ceaseless as the paint can smashes through the window below and the diaper rash is getting worse and cradling the freshly coated doorframe, they climb the pull-down ladder. They are dressed as clowns but they are my ex-wife’s attorneys. They do their own dirty work. Do not care that nasal cavity cancer traps me in a cell every minute. I can smell them through the paint raising the dust with their humongous shoes. They reek of whisky, cigarettes, and bar pussy.

I am seeing shadows shaped like wrinkled and bloated imaginary friends who have not shown up in decades; pull me from the moment. What the hell happened to them? How did they get so damn old and ugly? One is too chubby to fit snugly between the shelves and the shoeboxes filled with baseball cards.

I stick my eyelashes into the wet slants. Her attorneys are young and strong, they feast off the papers and ink which forbid me from seeing our treasure. Her nails are on my prison tattoo. I am a poor man and bad drunk, reckless driver, couple counts of involuntary manslaughter…but a decent father.

Pleading with the hiccups, all reason is the weight within my arms. I can see their knees through the slants. Hear them breathing as they crouch beneath the ratty furniture, the sofa where the boxes of baby toys lie unopened. The packages are still wrapped in reindeers, Santa, and elves. Cobwebs and rat feces have collected upon the ribbons and bows and my cards in their colorful envelopes ignored by the bottles and extra nipples and dragon toys neglected.

Four chubby fingers on the paint, the shutters spreading and a litigator with soiled makeup smiles down at my daughter lying in the shadows of her great-grandfather’s sweaters. Drips of perspiration trickle from stale armpits as they lift the gift of God, prying the imaginary degenerates from my shoulders.

I am cooking the cancer beneath the heater of their clown car as we pull away from the house. The baby is crying and we are driving so fast that their briefcases are bouncing in the backseat. Her hiccups more frequent and louder as the steering wheel blisters my palms and for one glorious embrace in the ether, eye-to-eye, diaper rash the least of our problems. Falling asleep has never been so easy.

Matthew Dexter lives in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Like nomadic Pericú, he survives on a hunter-gatherer subsistence diet.

Photo by wshup001 via flickr.

They sent me to London for a summit on Global Water Leakage. I lasted no time at all because feeling like a lame duck I soon began to sweat. We were in a convention centre, some stuffy four star hotel near Marble Arch. Waiters deposited jugs of water. Buzzards fiddled with microphones, wearing expressions that announced rancorous minds behind jaded eyes and stilted imaginations. The stale air made me dizzy. People I could not focus on hovered around in the twilight when on a sudden as if definitive wave of energy I jumped up and made my way without hesitation towards the light. I stood on the steps of the hotel pulling my coat on. From a conversation with a barman the previous evening, I knew that a train would take me from Liverpool Street Station to Ipswich, Suffolk, where I had a vague notion of its significance to the lives of two noble men, no longer in the world. I would make a frantic dash like a seagull suffering from amnesia, a distorted map of the geographical dimensions in my head, along with the idea of finding something of them out there. I turned my back on the great white facade of the hotel and the conference; every gesture, word, sigh, flicker of eyelid, yawn, every boring old buzzard’s drone. The exhilaration of feeling like a truant drove me forwards as the chapters of some obscure saga spun through my head, an un-edited monster of a book with a haphazard conglomeration of images. I asked the doorman for directions to Liverpool St. Station where I said I had to catch the 10.20 to Ipswich. He looked at the traffic and looked at his watch, suggesting that I’d be best served by The Underground in which direction he pointed me, explaining what line I should take. I began to move at such a breakneck pace that I was soon lost and could see no sign of a tube station. I thought about hopping on a bus but the red buses of London were crawling along at a pace that was terrifying when placed in ratio with the urgency that now possessed me. I asked a bus inspector for directions and he spoke rapidly in a cockney accent that had the effect of disorientating me further. I paused for a moment and considered jumping into a black taxi but the traffic was so congested as to make a gridlock that would have been insupportable to sit in. I paused for another moment, this time to consider throwing in the towel. Why not just step into the nearest bar and over a drink find the calm to make an easy day of it, visit an art gallery or a museum or indulge in a literary trail that was much more accessible than the mad dash into Suffolk? I would take out a notebook and write; Whatever happens I am not going back to the conference to moulder among the delegates, stifled by the putrid air. My existence floundered on the edge of the erratic, even errant and perverse. I struggled to find a reason for going on. I was on the bridge of a sinking ship with little chance of leading a normal life, whatever that is, harbouring a repulsion for social events and special occasions. I recalled the previous evening in an Italian restaurant in Piccadilly Circus; Bobo Gogo, or Gaga Baba or some such nonsensical name. The ridiculous drinking and shouting and bizarre egotistical mind games resembled some kind of weird chess match while the world sailed towards the void.

There was little movement in the traffic; grey, the colour; glass, metal, rubber, petrol, the media; voices and music of f.m. radio from gridlocked vehicles. The drones stared ahead, lost in a twilight world. The compulsion to make my destination reached fever pitch. In Ipswich, Suffolk I would encounter the essence of a hero, a composite of two men, whose lives if sad were noble and therefore to be, to be what? I didn’t know. I just wanted to walk away from where I was, to defect from reality as it were, to fuse into a fantasy of utopian dimensions. I wanted to slip away from the grasp of my commissions and colleagues with the ease of vapour, drift off like a puff of tobacco smoke over a balcony. The man I wanted to emulate, Max or Ivan, held the cigarette at a slight distance from his face as he wandered through the rooms of his house where he kept a cyanide tablet, his heft of hemlock, he called it, in the drawer of his writing desk, never far away as he didn’t go out anymore.

I challenged spatial and temporal reality in the mad dash to Liverpool Street to catch the train. The seconds ticked by as I rolled along on the crowded Tube, a charged network of blood and genomes. What a mix of clothes and hairstyles, what novels, diaries, and i-pods, what histories of unknown emotions; this human form bound for extinction. I made it to the train station with ten minutes to spare. I stepped into a cafe and ordered a drink. Young men stood over a juke box, music very loud. My head spun with the confusion. People around me made no sense, anyway paid no attention to me except for a child in a football jersey who approached and said was I from here? And I said yes, I was. So he asked me who did I think was going to win the big match? And I told him who I thought would win which pleased him as he trotted off and conveyed the good news to his dad.

The English countryside flashed by. Roadways criss-crossed under a patchy sky. We ran beside gardens, taverns, village chapels, and driveways to country manors. There was a hawk over a copse, then fallow ploughland, pasture and hillock, sheds and warehouses. There was The King’s Head and The Red Lion, good food served all day, Braintree and Colchester, hurtling eastward, the coast out there, Lowestoft and Felixstowe, a lone seagull above the marshes and mudflats. By the time I reached Ipswich Rail Station my energy was sapped. I went into the station bar, ordered beef in tomato sauce with dumplings. A calm descended. For all I knew my hero or heroes had sat here waiting. All of a sudden it didn’t matter. I thought of the conference centre and my colleagues grinding through the afternoon as I stood at the counter of the bar of Ipswich Rail, gripped by inertia now in direct contrast to the frenzy that had driven me here, gazing up at the daylight through a glass dome and felt like just one more creature, in the words of my master, driven and derided by vanity.

Edward Mc Whinney lives in Cork, Ireland and contributes regularly to Contrary. Read his many stories and excerpts here.

The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years
by Greil Marcus
PublicAffairs
2011

In the twenty-five minutes it takes to drive from Berkeley to San Francisco—in the spring of 2010—Greil Marcus made a curious discovery. Flipping through radio stations in search of a good song, he was surprised to notice that The Doors, whose reign lasted only from 1966 to ’71, were still getting plenty of airtime. You know the songs: “Light My Fire,” “L.A. Woman,” “People Are Strange,” “Love Her Madly,” “Riders on the Storm,” “Break on Through,” “Roadhouse Blues,” “The End.”

In his new book on The Doors, Marcus wonders, “What were all these songs doing there? And why did most of them sound so good?”

The result of Marcus’s ruminations now makes for an exciting and detailed exploration of The Doors’ place in American culture. Like his previous books—Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music; Dead Elvis; Lipstick Traces; The Old, Weird America, which chronicle the life and times of Robert Johnson, Sly Stone, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, The Band, The Sex Pistols and other performers—The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years is more than just a gloss of a band’s music.

In The Doors Marcus contrasts the popular perception of the 1960s (“the so-called sixties,” populated by self-sacrificing activists) with the real ’60s, which, according to Marcus, were—for the most part—a time when “people who could have acted, and even those who did, or believed they did, formed themselves into an audience that most of all wanted to watch.”

The book is divided into two long critical essays and seventeen compact explorations of the band’s songs. The first essay (mentioned above) discusses The Doors in the ’60s. The other examines The Doors’ song “Twentieth Century Fox” as Pop Art. These essays are far more conceptual, ambitious, and slippery than Marcus’s shorter discussions of the songs. But it is here, in the soaring and intrepid descriptions of The Doors’ songs, where some of the sweetest pleasures of this book reside.

In “L.A. Woman,” Marcus writes, Morrison’s voice is

full of cracks and burrs, and an inspiring, crazy exuberance, a delight in being on the streets, in the sun, at night under neon, Blade Runner starring Charles Bukowski instead of Harrison Ford.

And in “The End,” a 12-minute mad séance that wraps up The Doors’ debut album, Marcus celebrates the moments

when the performance feels as if it’s about to tear itself to pieces. … No element in the music seems to anticipate any other, to call any other fourth; the performance is a dance around a fire, with the pace determined by the flickers, which can’t be anticipated.

On page after page Marcus’s beat-by-beat descriptions lead us to a new understanding of The Doors’ music and the emotion and intent behind it. While listening to “People Are Strange,” he writes,

It isn’t hard to believe the singer knows what he’s talking about. Robby Krieger’s guitar smoothly, confidently, walks Morrison into the tune, and some of that confidence stays with him, until the last word of the first verse. ‘Faces look ugly, when you’re alone’ slips by, sung so lightly it’s like a firefly, but that lightness is gone two lines later.

Although Marcus generally examines Jim Morrison’s lyrics together with The Doors’ music—delving into the effect they create as one entity—he sometimes zooms in on just the words. About “Soul Kitchen”—a song on which Morrison sings, “Let me sleep all night in your soul kitchen”—Marcus writes:

It’s an image, as quietly dramatic a sexual image as any could be. For all of Jim Morrison’s unbearable poetic extravaganzas on Doors albums, those two words are poetry, translating something almost beyond words into ordinary language … ‘soul kitchen’ is too unlikely, too immediately right.

At times, Marcus’s writing gathers so much momentum you have to remind yourself to slow down, to take it all in—an effect produced by Marcus’s ability to shift seamlessly from an analytical approach to an impressionistic one, from descriptions of how the music sounds to how it feels.

Yet with the same confident elegance with which he lifts them up—bringing The Doors to new heights—Marcus beats them down. Precisely because he takes the band so seriously, Marcus is compelled to point out what he considers to be weak or sloppy. With one hit he smashes half of The Doors’ entire studio output by declaring that the albums Waiting for the Sun (1968) and The Soft Parade (1969) were “terrible jokes” and that Morrison Hotel (1970) was a “bland, vague roundelay to nowhere”—except for the opening track, “Roadhouse Blues.”

The music is all slices, knives cutting into the song, each penetration leaving it stronger, bigger, more a thing in itself, impervious to any error.

In other words, it’s perfect.

Dmitry Kiper is a New York City writer working on short stories, photos, poems, songs, and other curiosities. He is currently a fellow at the Writers’ Institute at the City University of New York.

The Greatest Show
 by Michael Downs
Louisiana State University Press
2012

Michael Downs is the son of a man who­–as a three-year-old boy–did not attend the infamous Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus in Hartford, Connecticut on July 6, 1944, thereby escaping one of the greatest fire disasters in history. Instead, a family quarrel resulted in a decision to keep the boy home. The impact of his father’s near miss did not escape the author.

The Greatest Show is a collection of ten linked stories about a three-year-old boy who does attend the circus that day. But the stories are not about the drama of smoke and flame. They’re about the aftermath, the internal and external scars of those affected.

In the first story “Ania,” Teddy’s mother, a Polish immigrant, illegitimately secures circus tickets she cannot afford on her housekeeper’s pittance. She prays to the Black Madonna:

 Ania tried to explain why she took the tickets, how she so wanted Teddy to spend a day laughing, his eyes opened to a place beyond his imaginings in the way her eyes had been opened the day she and Charlie [her husband] arrived in America.

“For the sake of the boy,” she prayed, “bless my sin.”

Her action ignites a series of stories that span over fifty years and a legion of characters connected to one another by the events of that day. Seven of the ten stories center on Teddy, though five of those seven are not told from his point of view.

In “Ellen at the End of the Summer,” Teddy is “at the age for starting school.” Ellen, the childless woman who pays Ania to clean her house, takes Teddy on a picnic.

[Ellen] worried that he would tear his shirt, or his trousers would ride up the leg in some rough boys’ game, and the others would see his scars…That he was having fun did not lessen her concern. Still, she was glad to feel it, because it seemed akin to Ania’s concern, to a mother’s concern.

Ellen’s grief over her childless state and her fixation on Teddy are fueled by the fact that it was from her desk that the tickets were stolen, that somehow she could have prevented the scars on his body. Downs skillfully associates the guilt and sorrow of one woman with the guilt and sorrow of another, Teddy’s mother.

“Mrs Liszak,” one of the stories not central to Teddy, is the story of Suzanne, a motherless teenager obsessed by the burn lines on Ania’s face, which echo the scars on the painting of the Black Madonna, reminding the reader of Ania’s prayer. The motherless child theme here is the reverse of the childless mother theme in Ellen’s story. Where the character Teddy does not serve as a direct link, theme acts as the unifier.

In “At the Beach,” forty-two year old Teddy meets Rosa. Though it’s his body that is rife with scars, Rosa’s awareness of her own insecurities becomes a turning point in their relationship.

His kind manner helped her past her embarrassment…. Maybe he’d learned that, how to put people at ease by living with his scars. Such a skill could fend off staring, help him fit in…. Sometimes love came because you could fit in, because you helped people feel at ease with your strangeness.

And, in the story “Elephant,” Teddy, now with a family of his own, is finally able to understand the full impact of the fire. He recalls his father’s version of the aftermath, how his father visited the charred tents and the neglected animals, how his father couldn’t bring himself to visit Teddy and Ania, “alone in hospital beds, their skin peeled.”

The title story advances the calendar to the day the circus in Hartford cancels in deference to the 9/11 tragedy. The performers describe how Teddy and Rosa visit the big tent despite the sign No Circus Today. When they learn of Teddy’s past, they rally to put on a show.

Even that day when events had shoved in our faces that circus work was trivial and measly and low, Ted and Rosa’s applause helped us embrace the optimism of our craft.

Though never far from our minds, Teddy is not the one true protagonist. Instead, throughout the collection, the author accomplishes a “we” protagonist, weaving characters in and out of each other’s lives, creating a whole from the sum of its parts.

Jodi Paloni earned an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is currently working on her own collection of linked stories.

Draw a Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young
 by Jeremy Grimshaw
Oxford University Press
2012

Minimalism. Art’s 50-year-old movement. A force of stasis. Of repetition. Of the barest materials. In writing. Ray Carver. Language eviscerated of ornament. The impact: disturbingly hollow. In painting. Frank Stella. Primary colors, perfect shapes. The response: purely dispassionate.

In music. There is the bell-like wistfulness of Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies.” There is the repetitious ecstasy of Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians.” And there are the sound environments of La Monte Young—the conceptual pieces (“One or more butterflies is let loose in the performance space”) and the long-tone drones (“Chronos Kristalla”).

Jeremy Grimshaw’s critical biography of Young, the sonic frontiersman of minimalism, is a well-intended yet undisciplined stab at describing this iconoclast—the cultish, self-deifying composer John Cage found irresistible. Bad-boy twins, Cage and Young abandoned the harmonic logic of Western music for a new soundscape ruled by unrepeatable happenings, composed accidents, and artful noise.

Young is different from all composers, even his fellow minimalists who radically simplify music: Philip Glass, repeating arpeggiated structures that phase-shift are repeated, added to, and cycle through an ensemble, or Morton Feldman, letting the space around slowly transformed chords resonate with their fading away.

No such narrative unfolds in Young’s compositions. In collaboration with the light sculptures of his wife, Marian Zazeela, Young shapes his pieces for ritual performance and spatial installation. He crafts sounds—raga-singing or drone-playing—into physical objects whose body we enter in space, lose track of in time, and are absorbed by in semi-conscious elsewheres.

Grimshaw calls Young’s creations archetypal—“instantiated anew with each successive presentation.” Young “saw himself initiating, by musical fiat, as it were, a new but complete tradition, springing fully formed from his own head like Minerva from Zeus’s.” It is a music “that could interface directly with the mind and spirit through psychoacoustics and psychophysiology.”

Young, born in an Idaho log cabin, spent his earliest years near an electric power station. The buzzing landscape stayed with him, becoming a model for his first major work: The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer. The piece is performed by eight musicians who sit in a meadow and bow string instruments, blow saxophones, intone the notes C-F-F#-G, and assemble a long sound via frequency ratios in just intonation. The notes absorb one another and reach intense microtonal vibrancy—like sonic wind or what Young calls “dream chords.” Hearing such “sustained friction” is not unpleasant.

Young’s heyday was the sixties. One ensemble, the Theater of Eternal Music, featured John Cale, later of Velvet Underground. At these concerts, audience members, among them Andy Warhol and Yoko Ono, crawled around the magenta-lit coven of the concert space that hummed like an atonal womb.

Largely unrecorded, Young guards his work from the collective ear. (Lawsuits over authorship continue, though a few YouTube clips exist.) From their Lower East Side, Church Street loft, he and Zareela produce the occasional show. One aleatoric piece, The Well-Tuned Piano, has had performances lasting as short as five seconds and as long as fifty hours. In many respects only those in the performance space get it.

The composer Terry Riley (“In C”) famously noted that Young taught the avant-garde minimalism’s purpose: composers, Riley said, “need not press ahead to create interest.” Music doesn’t have to motor toward a dramatic end via harmonic transformation to have aesthetic or emotional value.

Grimshaw tosses knives at Young’s fleeting target, writing that the drone pieces are “like sonic claustrophobia” or “a kind of transparent and viscous glycerin volume.” In addition, there’s a dismaying exclusivity about Young that his biographer skirts. Young’s soundscapes are, as one critic put it, anchored in a “hermetically sealed aesthetic world.” As a result, his spatial drones are often redoubts of ennui: his oeuvre in sounding so totally different from other music ends up sounding totally the same.

Grimshaw struggles to define Young’s mysticism. Without adherents testifying to a common experience, the spiritual element lacks substance. Worse, Young pugnaciously defends his aural kingdom. He lectures listeners that his music will not entertain them. He loses collaborators by insisting that he owns everything he participates in. He stages concerts of such siren-like noise that once his parents (invited guests) left the venue in tears, wounded by their son’s hauteur.

Post-publication, Young launched a website where he claims: Draw a Straight Line and Follow It is rife with factual errors. He believes Grimshaw misunderstood his work and that the book should have been axed. After giving extensive interviews, Young thought he would be allowed to proofread the book. Apparently he wasn’t, and the two, subject and author, parted ways. For his part, Grimshaw disputes Young’s claims at an Oxford University Press blog. The biographer also writes, in an email, that “Young’s finds in the book have to do not with grave mistakes of historicity, but with its not being adulatory and hagiographic for his tastes.” It’s hard to see who’s right in this battle. Since it all feels tainted by hurt feelings. It’s a painful reception. For Grimshaw’s first critical work. Which, nevertheless, still reads as a fawningly sympathetic treatise.

Thomas Larson is the author of The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” and The Memoir and the Memoirist.

Wild in the Plaza of Memory
 by Pamela Uschuk
Wings Press
2012

Nature looms large in Pamela Uschuk’s Wild in the Plaza of Memory. In one poem alone, “In Dharamsala Among Tibetan Exiles,” “Light slides like a silk sleeve / over the water buffalo shoulders of rocks,” “the flame-tinted lily tilts its six tongues / to a shifting sky,” and mountain ridges “razor blue air.” Yet these images gain even more power when contrasted with the political realities Uschuk delivers in blunt, unflinching language. In “Focus of the Mind’s Labyrinth,” dedicated to Ama Adhe, Uschuk describes Adhe’s twenty-seven years in a Chinese prison:

With three hundred women, Ama
was imprisoned, in four years,
two hundred ninety-six starved to death, numbers
too vast for our hearts ripped
open, bereft of calculation.
Raped by cattle prods
interrogators shoved into their birth canals,
into their mouths, beaten
and beaten again, these women
refused to renounce love or their minds
to the butchers
who simply stopped feeding them.

As guards watched, the women ripped their shoes
into finger-sized pieces to share,
chewed strips of flesh men prisoners
sliced from the backs of their own arms
and thighs. The women died anyway
and the men, souls wrapped
in prayer shawls of winter winds
winding from the snows of Annapurna,
from the endurance of sister peaks.

What Uschuk understands, and this becomes especially clear in the Buddhist-influenced middle section of her book, is that beauty is our reward for surviving. After leaving “the stunned room” where she heard Adhe speak, she “inhale[s] the sweet alms of finch song,” and in the next section of the poem, while she waits to meet the Dalai Lama, she is seated across from a baby:

his face, a laughing moon, round and clean as Buddha’s,
black lashes luxurious as wet feathers.
Like the crows, he can’t stop giggling.
In any language, babies laugh the same.

Yet even this reward is fleeting, because, as Uschuk continues in the same section of the poem, “Sometimes love can / detonate faster than a grenade.”

Uschuk asks in the penultimate section of this long poem, “How can I bring this learning home, back / to the slurry and burn of the everyday? / Back to the greedy chop of political gain.” This quote seems to sum up the impetus for her collection. Uschuk is poet-as-messenger. She “bring[s] this learning home” in her well-crafted verse, and it is unfortunate that more who live in the “slurry and burn of the everyday” won’t find it accessible.

If there is a weakness to Wild in the Plaza of Memory, that’s it—that it is a book probably best appreciated by academics or readers with stamina. The imagery is breathtaking and could be enjoyed by everyone, but the majority of the poems are long (by modern standards of poetry) and dense, making the collection intimidating. I picked up Wild in the Plaza of Memory at a writers’ conference along with, perhaps, a dozen other books. One poetry collection, I finished during a few train rides. Not Uschuk’s.

The beginning of one poem, “In Synch,” is, “Sun stabs the horizon of my dog’s intention / as she leaps at the front door. After she’s / taken a leak, she jumps six feet.” The poem recovers:

…black
lips neat as moist velvet
trolling for Milk Bones and hoping
that I won’t go to work this Monday. Like
any god, I must disappoint her…

But perhaps the high-brow “Sun stabs the horizon of my dog’s intention” is to balance the low-brow—the dog taking a leak.

If Uschuk truly wants to reach the burn of the everyday, she would do well to look for opportunities to dip into language less dense and to consider shaping the collection so that there are more “breaks” of short poems between long poems. Although there’s nothing wrong with intimidating material, few will be able to read the collection straight through. One of my Introduction to Poetry Writing students said of another writer, “His work is amazing, but it makes my head hurt.” As writers, most of us would like to be read, so accessibility is an issue we need to keep in mind.

Uschuk is a recipient of an American Book Award for poetry, and deservedly so, but at ninety-seven pages, Wild in the Plaza of Memory is a long poetry collection, and the poems within are heady stuff. I will reread the book and treasure the poems a few at a time. I hope I can convince other readers to do the same.

Shaindel Beers is Contrary’s Poetry Editor.

The Map and the Territory
 by Michel Houellebecq
Translated by Gavin Bowd
Alfred A. Knopf
2011

I’m not going to write about Michel Houellebecq’s shocking public fight with his mother, nor his penchant for sex clubs, nor his charm and wit and reputed sexual prowess. I’m not going to tell you how much he drinks, nor what drugs he uses, nor speculate as to the cause of his disappearance earlier this year. I’m not going to write about the album Iggy Pop recorded based on Houellebecq’s fourth novel, The Possibility of an Island, nor his public defamation of Islam, nor his interest in H.P. Lovecraft. I’m not going to talk about his epistolary war with frenemy Bernard Henri-Levy, nor am I going to discuss his tax problems. Googling “Houellebecq” leads one into a hall of mirrors, a confusing maze of gossip and confession. But I am not writing about Houellebecq. I’m writing about his book. This is a more difficult task than it seems, for Houellebecq appears in the novel as noted author, Michel Houellebecq.

Through his work, the protagonist Jed befriends Houellebecq, and, since Jed is a pastiche of Houellebecq, and Houellebecq is the author Michel Houellebecq, their scenes together are in danger of reading like a schizophrenic talking to himself. Instead they are lively and playful. A naked need for friendship beats between Jed and Michel, and that friendship gives the novel a layer of tenderness not often found in Houellebecq’s novels.

The Map and the Territory contains Houellebecq’s usual provocations. Jed’s father encapsulates Houellebecq’s view of artistic success:

I’ve known several guys in my life who wanted to become artists, and were supported by their parents; not one of them managed to break through. It’s curious you might think that the need to express yourself, to leave a trace in the world, is a powerful force, yet in general that’s not enough. What works best is money, what pushes people most violently to surpass themselves, is still the pure and simple need for money.

For all of Houellebecq’s celebrations of crass commercialism and its sidesteps into objectification, The Map and the Territory is a kind, witty, and charming novel. Houellebecq describes the artistic developments of protagonist Jed Martin’s lifelong career as a painter with compelling earnestness and clarity. The novel is touching in its exploration of the contrast between Jed’s success and ascendancy as an artist, and his father’s aging in the wake of his career as an architect:

On entering the nursing home, the former head of the family—now, irrefutably, an old man—becomes a bit like a child at boarding school. Sometimes, he receives visits: then it’s happiness, he can discover the world, eat at Pepitos and meet Ronald McDonald. But more often, he doesn’t receive any; he wanders around sadly, between the handball goalposts, on the bituminous ground of the deserted boarding school. He waits for liberation, an escape from all of it.

I’ve read and liked much of Houellbecq’s work, even when he seems to detour into provocation for it’s own sake. But it wasn’t until I read The Map and the Territory that I fully realized how he rescues his novels from being thrown across the room during those “lower” moments. It is difficult to say whether this epiphany of mine is an actual construct of his, or pure philosophical kismet, but here goes: Houellebecq (the author, not the character, though him, too) always draws a lot of fire for being shocking. The labels strapped to him are many and partly accurate, but the beauty of being callow is in the redemption. Yes, he may hammer out many shallow observations and revel in his own seemingly reactionary perspective—his hatred of post-1960s liberalism, his disdain for the “progressive” politics. But there are moments in The Map and the Territory that are so clear, so beautiful, so poignant, that the contrast with the more confounding sections is stunning. Here’s one of my favorite of these moments:

Olga was nice, she was nice and loving, Olga loved him, he repeated to himself with a growing sadness as he also realized that nothing would ever happen between them again; life sometimes offers you a chance, he thought, but when you are too cowardly or too indecisive to seize it life takes the cards away; there is a moment for doing things and entering a possible happiness, and this moment lasts a few days, sometimes a few weeks or even a few months, but it happens once and one time only, and if you want to return to it later it’s quite simply impossible. There’s no more place for enthusiasm, belief, and faith, and there remains just gentle resignation, a sad and reciprocal pity, the useless but correct sensation that something could have happened, that you just simply showed yourself unworthy of this gift you had been offered.

And it is here, in this strange territory between the shallow and reductive and the expansive and brilliant, that Houellebecq leads us. And it’s a beautiful place, well worth the bumps in the journey.

Frances Badgett is Contrary’ s fiction editor.

At Contrary Blog, former Guardian columnist Crista Cloutier is reviewing worship services and settings. Read about the Society of Friends, the London Spiritualist Mission, the Guild of Vergers, the chapel at Arizona’s Turf Paradise Race Track, and more.

In this issue, Contrary features reviews of books by Michel Houellebecq, Greil Marcus, Pamela Uschuk, Jeremy Grimshaw, and Michael Downs. Visit Contrary’s Index of Reviews or the individual links to the right.

Deception, Misread

I pull gumdrop from gunpowder, catch
Nazi in a list of thirty warning signs
of menopause. I skim the pages of a journal

take bisexual from bilingual, intersection
from Czech and Mexican immigrants.
Too often I strike God

on the keyboard when I mean good,
sold, when all I wanted was soul.
A woman from Devon, a feather her fate,

was tricked by wind. Wingless
she wrecked to beach below.
Her epic noted, the papers advise us

Read the signs!  but she is already
a hanged sister; hindsight has hid things
in the once tepid, tonic deep.

Some discern death in a martini, sex
on a Ritz. Maybe it’s simply a nimbus ill,
subliminal conspiracy embedded while we sleep,

learning our misread dream is
merely a mad rise, a poetic end.

.

What Story of Loss
—for Dwight Clark

.

Need Somebody to Love

I’ve picked each fruit under strawberry leaves
planted my Queen of the Night
and now this sliver of bark won’t budge

for love, nor money, nor squeeze
of tweezers, like the stinger left

after the death of the bee. The Chablis’
gone to my head, and Mercury
dead these nineteen years. I was

so sorry to see him leave,
wanted Jackson back, too,

though he dangled his son high
above the maddening fans. Tomorrow
it may rain. Some things arrive

with faith. Its black cap
aflame, the tulip carries its secret

sex in its mouth. Many times
I’ve visited this arena, have sat
at the right hand side. Tonight

I need somebody to raise
Freddie from his grave, give him back

his microphone, his white skin-tight
body suit, his love. These berries
in my bowl are cold, hold their juice

only so long. Oh thorn in my flesh, pollen
on the stamens, my wine-heavy mind.
Ronda Broatch is the author of Shedding Our Skins (Finishing Line Press, 2008), and Some Other Eden (2005). Ronda is the recipient of a 2007 Artist Trust GAP Grant, and is poetry editor for Crab Creek Review.

Ringing phones start too many stories.

Take this one for example. When it rings right at the mouth, we are forced to consider others that open this way – those crime novels, that translation, some classic, a romance, the paperback. And we wonder how to react to it happening again, here. Ring, ring. Are we angry? Bored? Do we write it off as cliché, played out, done? Or do we forge ahead, like a cocksure gymnast swinging from one ring to the next, remembering similar openings as generally worthwhile?

Or, hanging on the sound, do we pause to consider why it’s such a common technique? Is it the sense of mystery? The call to action? Laziness? High probability? Phones are ringing everywhere, from bedrooms to submarines – why not at the beginning of a story? Is this cynicism?

Or is it, like bells, an affirmation? Of hidden things, like funerals or weddings or Sundays? Of a place that’s only real between the time when the ringing starts and when it’s answered? An imaginary place where everything is possible at once, vibrating phono, sounds waving in and out and from one thing to another?

But isn’t sound, like a spooked herd of gazelle, a thing that spreads outward from a point of conflict, in all directions? Yet this only further illustrates multiplicity, the array of options opening up to us – it could be anyone and anywhere – rushing away from danger, suddenly.

That sounds nice!

But a ring is also singular, an object placed around a finger — a promise, which is an engagement, which is a constriction. The phone keeps ringing, and it grabs us, encircles us, tightens around us with a kind of caged hope, an optimism drafted in the belief that, with so focused a direction, something good has got to happen, finally, so don’t let go.  Follow the karats, jump through the hoop.

And we answer it, both the story and the phone and everything else, not because we are actually hopeful, but to find out – in the spirit of all too many engagements – whether or not we are wrong.  About what? Doesn’t matter, we are always wrong – though often in ways we haven’t thought of yet, which is a poor reprieve. “Hello?” we say.

At first there is only static, a muffled shuffling, like a pillow smothering a sock. “Hello?” we say again. We bristle excitedly. Anything could happen. And then there’s nothing. Not even a click, just nothing.  The ring is empty.

The number, too, is unfamiliar.

+

Oh well, you think, forget the call, time to go over finances.

You place your tax returns on the desk (pressboard) and retrieve the bills collected in the kitchen (linoleum tiled). You chew the relationship between the two (dreadful), and then compare this against a list of available funds (liquid and solid). You feel a mix of shame and anger at these digits (0 – 9) because it is only when dealing with numbers, infinite though they are, that the finite world flops back down, like meat onto a counter.  God, remember when the phone was ringing and everything was possible? That was great. And now these numbers. There is no way to compete with numeracy, only the means to applaud it, meekly. It is a spectator sport, and wins races and runs companies.  Galileo turned Dante into astrology with maths, tossing the rings of hell into orbit; what have you ever done? Narrowly avoided bankruptcy?

Bravo.

It’s at this point, as always (if you double check, you’ll see that this is true), that you become uncomfortable being the subject of the story. How did it happen anyway? Wasn’t this about all of us before, or at least everyone else? Now it’s just you? Get out of here. It’s all too specific and a bit trivial, even snide. And barely accurate. Yet, whether it’s mundane, dishonest, or even mildly antagonistic, you admit it doesn’t seem to be changing. Now, open the bank statement.

Thank god, the phone is ringing again.

Oooooh! You answer it too quickly, forgetting to savor the brief precipice of possibility, and fall straight into the familiar canyon of a loved one’s voice, asking you if you want Mexican or Thai tonight.

Ugh. The riddle is solved, the mystery over. The lens has focused, the image cleared. Fuck: no more ethereal hope bells. No more possibilities. Only regional differences.

You feel a pang of disappointment. Then guilt. Why opine the absence of an imagined stranger upon the arrival of an actual loved one?  Is the unknown more appealing to you? Pig! Just start talking. There’s not much to say, but say it anyway.

Now: Mexican or Thai? For some reason, you hedge around these two, trying stupidly to dredge up what little uncertainty lies between Mexico and Thailand. “Um,” you say, considering the Pacific, “well…”

Then – yes! You can hardly believe it — you’re getting another call, the other line. Fidgeting, you admit to being curious, but not thankful, though to whom you’re admitting this you can’t be sure. You’ll admit it to whoever’s on the other line if they’ll forgive you for secretly relying on them, or if they’ll carry you across a chasm you don’t understand and which in fact doesn’t exist. Wait, the Pacific? “Hello?” you say, clicking over.

And then, talking to you, almost too quickly to comprehend, is someone offering both forgiveness and a ride across unknowable and nonexistent chasms, in as much as thinly veiled real estate scams amount to all that, which they usually do, and for a competitive price to boot.

There are condos at Rates You Would Not Believe.

There are People Just Like You changing their lives As We Speak.

Great! What are you waiting for?

You politely ask this person, who you now notice has a kind of sexy musk-laden voice, to add you to the do-not-call list – despite the endless coastlines, European architecture and astounding APR. “And your number is?”  they ask, which is strange, considering they called you. But you give it to them anyway, if only to hear it repeated back in damp, dulcet tones.

And then, clicking over, you’re answering “Mexican,” while secretly weighing supernatural realty equities against your impotent check book and imagining that sultry voice materializing in your living room as a blooming genital spilling over with peppers and ground beef and desire and boundless wealth. “No, wait, Thai,” you say.

And, like a gauntlet, the conversation turns suddenly to when and where. Christ, the certainties are really adding up now.  Time. Space. Distance. Speed. Volume.

Jesus, Surface area.

“Seven PM,” you barely manage to shoot out. Whew.

Relief doesn’t last long, however, because your loved one throws all caution to the wind, saying “How about eight? I have some errands to run.”  Errands? Eight? You can barely process this. You just want the phone to be ringing again, to be about to answer it.

Then, like a guardian angel, that blessed beep – another call, this time somehow answering you. Is it the musky service-rep calling back to say your voice is sticky too, to drag you through the ear piece? Oh, you can only hope.

Clicking over, however, there’s not a trace of musk, only dull rhythmic thumping which increases in decibel and rate. And underneath all of that, something else – a genderless and desperate scream, over and over again, knifelike and real. It too is getting louder and more hopeless, like a dog that learns language but gives it up after judging speech too inadequate to express suffering. There are not enough buried bones to embody it; a whole new realm of terrible possibilities is blooming out there. You don’t even say hello, merely click back over to space-time and love.

“Eight sounds good,” you say, shaking.

_

And now, poof, a date, 8:30 pm. The clatter of plates, silverware. A surprise change of heart: Italian. Wooden boardwalk as marimba. Inaudible chatter.  Sea breeze. Clams. Jazz. Laughter. Lights, couples, gulls, and hair blown gently from faces. A tide coming in. The service here is poor, but no one is screaming. The wine is provincial, but no one is in pain. Or at least they’re not flaunting it like new scarves or fancy hats.

Which is only polite. What kind of person dials a stranger and dumps their anguish on them out of the blue? It’s terribly inconsiderate. There are prescribed numbers for everything. When hungry, call Pizza Hut. When sued, call a lawyer. When troubled, call a department: police, fire, technical support. Do not put it on a stranger. And it follows that if someone hasn’t called those numbers, then they aren’t actually in trouble. It’s as if that call didn’t even happen. A comforting thought! Yes, it happened to someone else.

It’s almost too easy, he smiles, grabbing a hand from across the table, thinking of someone else.

Who? Musky Meat-mouth? Maybe. Admittedly, he cannot block out entirely the memory of that call, nor the inhuman howling. His mind circles back to it at inopportune times: dessert, the mention of a sick relative, a compliment. When his date steps out to the bathroom, he checks his phone, stupidly. What was the number of that call? Staring at the screen, he imagines a movie plot wherein he dials that last number only to hear an ominous ring from the purse across the table. How maudlin. Then, in reality, he registers a peculiar fact.

All the numbers were the same. Something sticks in his throat.

Three calls. Muffle. Pitch. Scream: each originated in the same place.

The weight of this fact barely registers by the time she returns, smiling.

He eats distractedly and talks coolly, but only at first; soon he’s drawn into routine. Not forgetting, just floating, as if the evening were a mid-afternoon drive to nowhere, with him in a passenger seat, the third person, while a potentially sinister world simply sails safely by, out the window.

It’s while they’re fucking later that the phone rings.

And it’s her phone this time, a 30 second pop tone looping through the room. Had she purposefully placed it on the bedside chair? He doesn’t know, but can just about make out the LED display, glowing over the socks and old magazines. Unfortunately, the number is obscured. He doesn’t answer it, of course, but keeps thrusting the two of them along the sheets, closer and closer, inch by inch, trying to get a better look.

658, okay – and, is that a 4? Or a 7?

The numbers blend together as if working to other purposes, as if adding up whatever it is that accumulates each time people sleep together. How much do I have, he thinks, and what is it? 9? 718? The ringing fills the room, jarring and arrhythmic. People, too, are rings, he muses like a fool, but he hasn’t the slightest idea how to answer one, so he keeps going, sliding slowly toward a revelation. It looks like it could be the same number, maybe. Just a little closer. But before any kind of arrival or epiphany, the ringing stops, the glow fades, and the room is left darkened and silent, save for the sound of a nameless thing pointlessly accruing.

×

Then factors multiply. That is, things change. For one, I can’t fucking take it anymore and go to the police. I’m surprised to find myself at the center of whatever this is, and I don’t know how to proceed, or even how I got here, really. The buoyant and attractive officer registers my anxiety with a wry smile, though I can’t be sure this is in my favor, or in his, or someone else’s altogether.

“So, let me get this straight,” the officer says, “You got a call from a number, but it didn’t connect.” I nod. “And then, you got another call, from what you now know to be the same number.” I concur. “And it’s some kind of real estate offer?”A scam, I say. One of those pyramid schemes. Like spam. “Isn’t spam on the computer? Anyway, then you ask them not to call again, right?”And I give them my phone number, I say, that’s important. “Is it? They clearly already have your number.” Exactly! “Hmm, and then, you get another call, again from the same number, with a lot of noise and something that could be a scream, like a dog but a person?” Right, and then it got louder. “Okay, and afterward you went on a date? And your girlfriend got a phone call? And maybe it was the same number?” Yes. “But you don’t know for sure?” Before I could check, she caught me going through her things, trying to guess her cellphone password, and broke it off with me. “I’m sorry to hear that, sir.” It’s okay, but now what? “Oh, well I’d try a dating site I guess.” No, about the number. And my credit card, like I said, which has been cleared out. “Oh, that. Take it up with your bank. And otherwise there’s not much to go on here. I can call if you want, but that’s about it. Neat story, though.”

The police are useless, and my cancelled card is tangled up in litigation and red tape. But when the system fails, it’s time for good old fashioned American ingenuity. Grab the boot straps and fly. For wings, I’ve invented a story that keeps me going, pulls me along, a fiction wherein the musky sales-rep is borne into a secret, shattering Condo bondage, all for merely letting one too many contacts slip into the dark crack of the do-not-call list, and that, through some deranged logic, she thinks of me, of all people, for help – not only because I was the catalyst for her incarceration, no, but also because we shared some undeniable intimacy, rare in this world, unforgettable even in the red-glossed throes of a bloody and sadistic pummeling.

This is my bootstrap.

The story is a bit flimsy, and in fact completely false, but something rings true enough to keep me going, so I do a little research on the internet, dig up some dirt. The numbers lead me from old leases to private holdings, distant bank accounts to poor credit scores, nebulous websites to unregistered phone numbers, from angry forums to storied comments sections, and finally from deeply buried “About tabs” to one Annulus Equity Marketing and Management, a small company located in rural Dry Prong, Louisiana, a town, or village really, founded two hundred years prior, around a water mill whose principal river source dried up each summer, leaving the town financially unbalanced and clawing desperately for stability in an unforgiving and alien landscape, a legacy that may or may not have left its people innately prepared to take on just about any scheme, Ponzi or otherwise.

I hate these people from afar, imaging a kind of hillbilly methlab that conjures money from trace elements, like modern alchemists, warlock financiers.

I have my reasons, too: the current enterprise stinks more than I previously suspected.  There’s nothing concrete, but I sniff out ambiguous turd after unspecified plop, all stinky and congealed. Annulus, for example, crops up in more than one missing money case, not to mention numerous allegations of identity theft and fraud. They’re tied, if only tangentially, to a ring of misleading business ventures meant, it seems exclusively and almost blatantly, to take advantage of people, their ambitions, and finally and most importantly their money and property. A few of its primary figures are currently serving upwards of twenty five years in federal prison, though stamping them as officially part of anything would be a legal mess not worth attempting because all of these incriminations amount only to patchwork threads sewn together through blind guesswork, vague news reports, old court filings, peripheral public tax indexes and side-line property records. But the tone is there, a disembodied voice screaming over miles of unlabeled telephone wire for my help. The bottom line?  I’ve got to get to Dry Prong.

Musky meat-voice, I will answer your call. I am A Person Just Like Me and I am changing my life As I Speak.

÷

Driving across the Mason-Dixon Line is like diving into America’s underwear. It’s sweaty and thick with growth, and ever more so deeper into its counties. The south has an impersonal and detached way of being itself, despite the reputation for friendliness. Hospitality may be true of its people, in a greater degree than can be expressed through anecdotes and travel journals, but the landscape itself is different – or, more accurately, indifferent, even arrogant, with its green swaths and endless vines taking over everything in its path, like it owns the place, which perhaps it does.

Dry Prong, the village, is no exception. It is surrounded on all sides by a latter day American jungle, a billowing green mesh of trees and swampland and thickly knotted bushwork, cut through by hair-like waterways, streams, springs and creeks, some sullied by distant industry, lone factories and shipping/receiving centers, while others remain mysteriously pristine. Yet, time worn or resilient, all call out in unison: sorry, don’t care, busy.

So, when a driver from up north comes snooping into town, as if to save the Princess from certain danger, Dry Prong takes little interest. Dry Prong lets the man walk about peeking in windows and loitering because Dry Prong has better things to do. Like what? Like sitting, resting, aging, warming, cooling, raining , drying, counting, tilling, and growing and dying.

Who else but Dry Prong is going to hold that house in place? Who else will push the wind across the concrete blocks of that abandoned apartment building? Who else is going to admire the useless mill as it nobly gathers dust and families of rodents? And who else will take on the tedious work of sitting quietly in the town center, as if referee to a boxing match between long-closed shops?

No one. The answer is no one.

It is only out of the goodness of its heart that Dry Prong shows the sneaky man an empty model home and an old office. And Dry Prong doesn’t mind when the man crawls into the forgotten Condominium Complex, “A Private Community” — because what will he find there beside the Annulus Realty sign, graffitied with obscure obscenities? Nothing else but foliage and emptiness. A few muddied toys, sure, but no stories of how they arrived here or why they need privacy. There are no stories in Dry Prong, only blank pages, defiantly filled with grammatical errors and scattered in the street.

But when the stranger oversteps his bounds by breaking and entering, kicking a door in, Dry Prong goes from indifferent to wrathful.  First Dry Prong takes out the man’s car, with a flat tire, via broken glass, and then Dry Prong sucks the man’s wallet dry, at the mechanic and the motel, and then Dry Prong takes his dignity when it attacks and beats him outside of a bar, though it doesn’t require much to do so, just a few kicks to the ribs and face, a few broken bones and maybe a concussion, very little effort for a town whose weight trumps that of its inhabitants a million fold, amounting to a lopsided boxing match held in a ring that is Dry Prong itself.

So it all too easily leaves the man adrift, far from home, broke, hospitalized, fee-laden and without a soul to care for him, in a place where the water has run thin along with its population and opportunities, and it doesn’t care that the man pleads he’s “only trying to help someone in need,” nor that the man has made nearly no progress at all in doing so, save for being in the general proximity of the fiction he aspires to. Ha! But Dry Prong, though vengeful, is not wholly uncaring. It prefers an even hand, so Dry Prong kindly offers the man an olive branch, the only way it can – in the form of a job.  At Annulus Equity Management. As a telemarketer.

They assemble.

Together, they march into the second floor office. They wear hair-curlers and cargo shorts.  They gossip about soap operas and child rearing. They’re here for the money. They are here because the bowling alley closed. Because their grandmothers are sick, because their dog has diabetes, because a television program is cancelled, because time is running out, because it’s raining, because someone lost a leg, because the opportunity presented itself too many times, because it’s fun, because of snacks.

All too often, it’s the snacks.

And they are divided into sets. They‘re rushed toward the forums section, where they are instructed to friend-request at least fifty people per hour, and to consistently upload nearly-nude profile pictures, not of themselves but of anonymous women, women surmised to be Russian or Uzbekistani or Korean, not specifically but generally, if that is possible, and as if this were some kind of an apology for everything, though in the end, the women are just as apt to be American, and no one is sorry. They operate under the belief that “there are plenty of hornies out there” and everyone wants free porn. No apologies are made — and to who these apologies might even be directed remains a mystery. To their mothers? Themselves? Who cares, they say, just add me, add me.

Or they are cordoned in the ROMS and emulators barracks, a makeshift office in what used to be the supply closet, where they aggregate the digital images of every video game known to man, crossbreed them with feigned news reports about the health benefits of acai berries, and make them available for download in the hopes of driving traffic through briefly-lived sites crowded over with ads about abdomens and legs, like insects — themselves often created by other departments. Also, more porn here, indefatigably.

Or they are shuttled to the email department, a huge hive of activity, where they’ll write free-form poetry and heartfelt letters from fictional Nigerians, to better strut through the gates of email filters and ultimately net more personal information, zip codes and social securities and drivers licenses, as if information were the direct product of probability, which perhaps it is, or they will sit in rooms where videos are uploaded, graphs rendered, Powerpoints structured, codes written, and they will contact other agents in an expanding ring of entrepreneurs, amongst whom they will, at higher levels, herd finances and financers toward shaky land markets, both in the states and abroad,  through gentle nudges and tough prodding, promising booms and busts, braying as if the transcontinental railroad were about to be rebuilt across once useless towns and counties and sections of the internet, each now destined for an unprecedented future prominence in a World Beyond Belief Where Not Everyone Can Win But Why Not You?

They try to find the melting point of every object and hyperlink, like monetary alchemists squeezing rocks and html until gold and paper pop out. They do so without meaningful regard for profit, casually allowing others to use their methods, letting money funnel gradually off into anonymous accounts, perhaps out of carelessness or stupidity or apathy or, though unlikely, a rare camaraderie and sense of empathy. In large measure, too, they are often calling on themselves, swindling different portions of their enterprise one day, another the next. They not only offer Inventors Tool Kits, As Seen On TV, but they buy them too, wholesale. They acquire their debt. They redouble their interest. They catch their tails.

They are unaware, however, that they have been infiltrated.  They do not notice themselves, at least in very small part, traipsing through the hallways, looking. They do not feel themselves spying around corners and through doors left ajar. They remain unaware that the smallest contingent of them, namely one, persists only out of an inexhaustible determination to rescue a fictional woman that, despite (or due to?) being only a figure of their meek imagination, remains frustratingly elusive. They do not know that they are still trying to win, because, well…win what?

It’s only when we pick up the phone to make our first unsolicited call that we realize we’ve come full circle.

^2

We’ve been gone for a while and need to take stock. We hear the ring we’ve made, but no one answers. We can’t help but feel the same way we did after our first call – empty, hollow.

Why? We spit Ouroboros’ tail from our mouth.

Despite all the voices we’ve heard, she is still missing.

She’s isn’t in any of the utility closets. She isn’t in the unused gymnasium or the boiler room. And then, when we find her, we  admit: well, not really, no we haven’t, because she isn’t real. We have not unlocked a conspiracy any larger than a few idiots skimming bucks off the top. We have not untangled a dangerous web of illicit activity in which women are shepherded into dire sexual misadventures. We give up.

But then, unforeseen, she is sitting next to us. Great!

She is huge and sudden. She rolls out from her own body like flour from a ripped bag. Really, she doesn’t sound at all like the woman with the musky-voice, or the screamer. In fact, she is neither of these women, nor even the one we imagined them to be. She is someone else entirely. But as with so many before her, we let her stand in for what we want. A place-holder occupying a pronoun and a body. She works here, too, has for much longer than us. She has gotten used to it — in the same way that we begin to think she’s what we’ve been looking for anyway, that we were wrong before, that she is it. She takes us home. When she has sex, she splays out across the bed like a half-melted chocolate. She smells of uncooked chicken, neither appealing nor offensive, but overwhelming and occupying. Afterwards she discusses what she knows about Annulus as if reciting bad poetry or deciphering a poorly crafted horoscope. She’s been in almost every Annulus department, and she imagines that things are more organized than they at first appear. She views Annulus not as cynical but as an absurd affirmation of something that remains unseen. She says that they are not con-artists but patriots, not thieves but heroes. She is delusional. She says that it’s all like an equation, the economy and our lives. She smokes inordinate amounts of cigarettes. She keeps saying the word equation as if to multiply it, or divide it, and she says there must be balance. She does not mean this in terms of moderation and restraint, but literally with regard to equal sides, as in the case of scales, as in how much gold is equivalent to six hundred thousand dollar stores, as in how can we tip the weight against trillion-fold stimuli, as in a train leaves Dallas going sixty miles an hour and to what degree does this obfuscate our dreams? She says we keep growing and moving outward, that we have to, it’s natural, but that, since it is an equation, something has to be added to the other side to keep everything from being flushed out through the equal sign, like so much shit and paper and hair, though she does not clarify where any of the sides are located, nor where things might be flushed to or how. She says that in math the equal sign is an anus. She says this again and again. She is excited by it and usually wants to have sex again after she thinks about it. She says we have to turn everything into money and credit as a kind of colonic blockage system, to render a lasting stillness in America. She says spam and scams are a kind of financial peristalsis liturgy to be spoken by a chosen few. She watches too much television and has as much to say about American Idol. She does not understand my incredulity.  She gets angry when I make my own metaphors. She says it is not a metaphor. She says there is an enormous hole through which real value can actually be lost. I ask her to show it to me.

She does.

=

First off, it can talk.

“Have a bloody-mary,” it says, gesturing with a twitch of its muscles toward a makeshift bar. It’s in the water mill, where it somberly gurgles. It is round and pink and fleshy. It is a hole yes, but it is crowded, and it brings to mind uncooked hotdogs and raw sausage, bisected like oversized pepperoni. But it’s not dry. Rather, it appears buoyed as if by a brine, floating in the center of the room, like a meaty donut hung by strings from the rotting rafters, and it is wet and leaking. Every now and then, the dark hole at its center is revealed by the parting of its veiny membranes.

You can sense it defiantly smiling.

You want to talk about what she told you, about the equations, about scale, but don’t know where to begin. You want at least to ask about the musky-voiced woman and where she went, or if she’s even gone.

It talks instead about bacteria and how cute they are.

It talks about the ones living in the Mississippi River, that they average 8,000 microbes per cubic centimeter. It says that it would like to see a new Huckleberry Finn, starring effluent water and Vullisneriu Americana, common hydrophytes. Gut flora especially are its favorites, and it imagines Twain’s new narrative exploring rivers within Huck’s pubescent body, his esophagus, stomach, large and small intestines, colon. Bacteria are too often maligned, it says, with anti-bacterial soaps and antibiotic pills, yet the entire body would collapse without them, the forgotten organ.

Eventually, it asks us how we feel about the story ending this way.  After starting with a mundane ring, it wants to know, is there balance in a non-existent and floating math hole?  Or does the narrative need more grounding, more reduction?

We aren’t sure how we feel yet, but reduction is good. Give it more time.

But what, it asks, could be more reduced than math?

No, we disagree, math is 100% abstraction.

That’s not fair, it says.

To be honest, shouldn’t we be talking about people, not numbers? About home owners, not functions? About retirees, not equations? About shareholders, not dividends? Or, at least, about sex, not sums?

People aren’t constants, it says, they’re variables.

That’s a little hard to digest, we say, and you’re a real jerk. Stop doing math.

It begins to pucker itself in retort, but moves instead as if angered, then hurt. It begins fluttering, shaking what might best be described as its lips. “Fine!” it manages to mumble obnoxiously just as it’s overcome with a heaving thunder. From underneath the thumping and gyration spills a familiar scream, real and hopeless. And then, as if to affirm the fact that speech is an inadequate release, there’s the smell.

Oh, it says meekly, Pardon me.

And you do — with a kiss.

Dolan Morgan is currently cataloging every airplane hijacking in history, a portion of which will be serialized in Fortnight Journal this winter. He co-curated an experimental art installation of a “pirate internet” on the L train in NYC, and he is a member of the writers collective, 1441. Find him at dolanmorgan.com.

"Rope" by Verte Adélie via Fotopedia.

It was me screaming in the reflection of Dr. Maxwell’s sunglasses saying “the kids! the knot! the rope!” and pulling on his sleeve trying to explain what he already knew- that there was an extra knot- that the ropes the organizers gave us were marked with them… the knots I mean, a foot apart- I held up my hands ‘like this’- one for each kid coming to bible school, because the teachers, we needed to glance and see them, they’re so small and fidgety, we had to know we had the right number, “all of them” I said reaching over and yanking him again harder, faster down the hall between the Elmer’s glue scented rooms where I had helped them cut out breastplates of righteousness reading “Jesus Loves Jenny” or James or Joe, where I had promised them they would go to heaven and the angels, even Gabriel- because he was their favorite- would blow their trumpets and to please line up and grab a knot and John stay out of the candy and all of you to please follow me to the puppet show and they did, “but not all of them” I said and I felt wet on my face, but we made it- finally made it to the door where there was nothing clearly awry but Jelly Belly’s spilt from the desk to the floor, a fr agmented sugar rainbow that must have been the reason for Dr. Maxwell relaxing beside me and putting a hand on my shoulder as if it had all been too much, as if I had been mistaken and John wasn’t hiding within the folded up room divider with an airway full of masticated plunder– he must have thought, before we heard the knock of the extra knot, I was the one choking.

Holli Downs is a n ative of North Texas, earning an MFA in Fiction at Emerson College.

I

Nothing happened— not my entire life.

The punitive pale clay of the body enacted

the hours the way the marrow of a bone

sleeps inside its chamber. There were Novocain hills

beyond the railroad tracks, sodden cigarette butts

in the ashtray, choleric crows complaining

from the open field. Do you hear what the sky

is asking, how the spinnakers of decades

carry us forward, as distant from ourselves

as something expelled from the tongue,

a language of forgetfulness, this solemn

ventriloquist we carry in our chests? We build

these decades from an artifact of longing,

inscribe each breath inside our lungs.

II

And if we are sinking, if we are unsocketed by grief,

shriveling the way winter leaves curl

then wither in the woods, like a small basswood

that falls into the arms of a larger hickory,

is held there as primitive as sorrow, then this is the silenced

tongue inside the mouth. The crows smudge

loose of their black bodies. As though what is lost

might undream the final hours, name them as ash.

And later the night-clouds will pass overhead

with human weight, slow-trumpeted. A glossary

of years. Waiting for the wind to blow

through the trees and drown the earth in sound,

so that when we speak it is in the language of two crows

circling and circling back, the language of devouring.

III

Then here is our voodoo queen, pricking her finger,

watching three red drops slip into her coffee.

She is imagining the body of her lover

congealing over decades into hardened mud.

She loves him the way a straight razor

loves the beard it scrapes, the way sunlight

suffuses the swamp mist come morning.

And placing a coffee cup before him,

she fingers the amulet she wears

around her neck: a body

is a body is a spirit. Before they met,

she constructed him from the black

moon on a black night, dreamed him

from three drops of longing.

IV

Which is why she sings of the bodies

in the field springing from the tongue—

pale green shoots and scents of sex.

Lovers rising from the mud of the earth,

believing they are crows. I reach for you

in sleep and the moon burns my fingers. Even tall

grass dreams. Or say the lovers forsake each other

for clouds drifting past, forget each other for stars,

pale as mushrooms in a dark woods.

Or maybe there is the hush of early morning,

the brief shower of rain that breathes

then stops. For here is nakedness,

the white skirt of fog on bare legs.

This dream of a mouth pressing down.

V

Then after he devotes himself to her, after it is done,

the voodoo queen dreams only of St. Peter,

smelling of fish, lifting a coffin lid to inky darkness.

The dead awaken from bodily liquefaction,

gothic eyelashes fluttering, releasing

the floodtides: crows opening the sky’s door

at first light above the creek, rat snakes

muscling on their bellies to burrow into loam.

And always the drowsing grass, speechless

in spirit, as human and self-effacing

as a severed tongue—bright as a dog’s penis—

in a pickle jar. Or now the translucent

eye of a dead horse decaying by the fence,

calling forth its frenzy of flies.

Doug Ramspeck‘s poetry collection, Mechanical Fireflies (2011), was selected for the 2010 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize. His first book, Black Tupelo Country (2008), received the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry. He directs the Writing Center and teaches creative writing at The Ohio State University at Lima.

The cat had been sleeping in the doghouse. The day was like a cave after a lightning. Birth and death played on a see- saw and sight and night played hide and seek. Time had left no tracks. The ground always seemed to be a step ahead. The very air turned nocturne.

Trees dreamed of fires at the bottom of a drowned sea, where echoes still repeated a wave’s last yelp for help: the sunken sea the sun can see.

A moth had died between two panes of glass, dreaming of being still and light aflutter round it. And the panes dreamed of being landscape and living room at once. Alas.

The sun persisted amid stars. But the light was narrow as an arrowslit. The sun was not eclipsed – the day itself felt faint. Brightness graded into dark.

The sun and I stared at each other, but seeing felt like blindness.

Vyatcheslav Bart was born on December 2, 1983, in Kokshetau, Kazakhstan. In 1994 he immigrated to Israel. He is studying for an MA in English Literature at Tel Aviv University.

Photo by Larry Johnson via Fotopedia

When they entered they were not sure it was the right alley. They looked up to see scraps of sky between old dark beams like the ribs of a boat. Maybe it was covered once.

“Do you think this is it?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I’m completely turned around.”

They walked a few hesitant meters, past cheap textiles and rugs wrapped in plastic, past women in those same red colors, smiling to themselves in conversation. The walls were tall and gray and the alley looked like a long room.

“Do you think people just sleep out here in the alley?” He shrugged, and wondered if it always looked like twilight here.

Then they saw the tarbouche-maker further on the right. His shop was half inside and half out, like everything else here. He was returning from getting lunch, with a small plastic bag of tam’iyya. The glass store front was filled with shelves of the hats, and a placard that said “In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.” He smiled a small smile at them. A litter of reeds from somewhere in the Delta, a stack of woven frames, and a chair stood in front of the glass windows. The machine itself looked like an enormous oven, a blackened brass winking dim in the steady light.

Above, the chuckling of doves, like a quiet liquid on their ears. A cat crouched on a step, in front of a door that may not have opened for centuries. A subtle black soot painted the edges and corners of everything.

They said hello as well as they could with a few words of Arabic, their hands working to explain what they wanted. A gift for his brother. The tarbouche maker was proud and patient, and did not smile but seemed friendly in his patience and his soft voice, surrounded by his life’s work in the ancient alley, the wine-colored felt, the reeds, the heavy machine. T hey motioned to take pictures, and he assented. She in the hat, he in the hat, each with him. He lit the machine’s gas fire, showed them the heavy brass forms, how he shaped the felt. They took more pictures. Finally they bought a hat. He put the hat in a box, took their money, shook their hands, and sat down to eat his lunch. They smiled and turned back toward the alley.

Athaan began like siren from everywhere. A man in a worn blue galabiya walked over to a microphone hanging from a cord that slid down from the top of the wall like a vine. He looked at them for a second with a smile whose meaning they could not tell, then turned to face the wall and began calling into the microphone, adding his voice to the din. A few men knelt on the rugs in the alley and touched their heads to the blood-red wool. Mecca was there, somewhere behind the wall, across the Red Sea.

The cat was still on the step. Someone had put some bread on wax paper for it. It turned at some sound that punctured the low rolling calls from the minarets, and they saw a flap of skin like meat hanging from the side of its face. It seemed not to notice, and bit and bit at the bread until it was gone.

They squinted at the cat for a second and headed down the alley with their gift, to where there was afternoon, and the domes were like sculpted dust, sandy against the cloudless sky.

Michael A. Telafici has been an English lecturer at Texas A & M University at Qatar for the past several years.

Old House by Cello Calcagno

She opens her eyes.

She’d squeezed them closed, waiting for the voices to pass her by. As if closing them might allow her to disappear. It was a ritual she’d believed in when she was younger, but now she’s nearly eleven and has lost her faith.

She’s wedged between the chest freezer and the cinder block wall of the basement in her own house. The block cool at her back. The freezer’s compressor oozing a syrupy warmth into her face. It clicks on and off at irregular intervals, the motor rattling to life. Startling her each time.

There’ s barely room to breathe. Her knees pressed to the rear of the machine, chest pressed to her knees, back to the wall. Grime and furred dust coats the floor beneath her, sticky on the skin. Clumping to her hands as she pushes further into the corner. Her heartbeat skitters along her damp and gritty palms. She tilts her head upward toward the open air. She can’t hear anyone moving now.

But she doesn’t trust the silence. She decides, even with her heart shuddering, to wait.

And in a moment, footsteps, attempting quiet. They pad to the front of the freezer, stop, then move further into the depths of the basement. They shift boxes along a near wall, scudding them out along the floor. There are whispers.

The cardboard scrapes roughly over the cement, first in one direction then the other. The footsteps move to a far wall. She hears murmuring, someone calling. It might be her name. She curls her toes in her sneakers, tenses her palms into the block at her back.

She had learned to cope with fear. When she was younger and she lay in her bed. Her father had allowed her to sleep with the light on for quite a while but, finally one night, he’d turned the light off and lay in the bed beside her.

He’d spoken softly, guiding her to trace her breathing until it slowed. To feel the blanket warm upon her skin, the bed solid beneath her, the doll soft in her hand. To find a center. At first, it had been impossible to follow his voice but then, something in the timbre and constancy of it allowed her shoulders to ease and then her mind to follow his suggestions without the delay of thinking. Until she’d fallen asleep.

He’d done this for three successive nights. Lying on the bed beside her, most of his body overhanging the narrow mattress. His lips near her ear, his arm at her side. Close, but not touching. He’d led her away from her fear and into her body.

On the fourth night, after he’d said goodnight, he switched off the light and shut the door. She’d pressed her eyes closed and felt calmed. But the fear was familiar. It had a taste she could roll on her tongue there in the dark. Testing it, savoring it.

The fear was erratic. Abandoning her for days or weeks then returning in an instant. It was familiar enough that at times she longed for it. At times she smiled in the moments of its first touch, before its full terror overtook her.

As soon as she’d been old enough to recognize it, she’d lain rigid in horror. Or screamed. And her father would come, turn on the light and comfort her back to sleep. After a while, he allowed her to sleep with the light on.

What happened when she opened her eyes, then and now on the fourth night, was this. The walls of her room began to waver, first in the corners and just on the edge of her vision. She saw them as something liquid. As she watched, the walls lost their shape around her. Then she began to see through them. Not into the hallway or the room bordering her own. Into another place. She peered through one life and into the fine structures of another.

And then she would scream. And her father would come. But not on the fourth night. On the fourth night, she floated upon her leveling breath. The well of the bed beneath her. The lingering scent of her Dad.

The walls began to s himm er. She watched the room around her shift, growing larger, more spacious. The veil of the world slipped. She felt she could begin to see all of the shadow forces and they weren’t there to harm her. She was still frightened. But she could watch without screaming.

The space behind the freezer grows tighter. She waits, whispering softly to herself to keep from moving, to keep from pushing herself toward the opening or crying out. She scrapes the back of her hand along the block for the pain of it, the jagged sensation rising into her arm.

Maybe twenty feet away: the thunder of running and shouts. She turns her head toward the opening and peers into the darkened slit of the room. They’d found Abigail. She hears the screams, off to the left near the basement stairs. She hears them struggle.

A fine thread of fear spins into her stomach. Angular and icy. Tingling to the tips of her fingers. Calming her somehow. Exciting her.

She closes her eyes. She is no longer folded within the space behind the freezer. It might as well have vanished. She’s imagining, now, the chalk circle in the center of the basement floor which is home. She can’t see it. She feels it in her chest and her stomach, a new warmth within the thrill and terror.

Abigail is laughing now. And Alex and Ben. They’d already caught Lucy and Bill. And Sandy. Mariel is the last one.

She opens her eyes. I know she opens her eyes. The wall presses against my body, the damp-earth scent of the basement fills my nostrils.

The sky is gray outside the window and I’m nearly naked in the cold. Flushed and damp. I can feel the wind whipping up through the rough floor of the meditation hut  to catch at my skin. I can feel the wind, I can see the window. But I’m crouched behind the freezer, the block cool at my scraped knuckles. That’s where I’m present. Picturing the chalk boundary etched upon the basement floor.

I scrape my knuckles against the block until the skin curls off in fine strands. I squint toward the narrow opening between freezer and block into the darkness of the basement.

“Are you cold, Mariel?” Will asks me from the floor. His fingers stroke the top of my hand, flat upon the boards. My elbow holding me upright and close to the window. His skin is warm against mine and I feel the weight of his body behind the caress. “A little,” I tell him.

“Why don’t you come down here.”

“I’m fine. I like the window right now.”

“Sometimes,” he confesses, not for the first time, “you really confuse me.”

I turn to him, away from the window of the hut, away from the block wall and the basement. He’s lying askew upon the rough floor. His shirt unbuttoned and twisted around him, his pants at his ankles. His eyes are blue and clear and he’s watching me because it’s something he likes to do.

“Do you want a world without mystery?” I ask him. And he laughs.

His laugh changes the space around me for a moment. I feel it close and taut along my skin. And for just a moment I consider that I could stay and the entire world might focus into a single shape and he would hold me.

His laugh changes the way I think for a moment. I consider arranging my furniture around it into the shape of a nice warm room at the center of an inviting house. I could choose the wallpaper and the curtains to match the texture of his laugh. I could find the colors to mimic the quality of his caress.

His laugh is a different place to settle. Like a stone at the bottom of a fast moving stream. A location I might share, resting until the final closing of my eyes. His laugh is a surprise, a door bursting open in a gust of wind.

Or the flush of my first meeting with Antonia Beck. It had been here in the meditation hut, but it had been spring then, two years ago, and the air was heavy and green. My decision to move to a spiritual community, to Monmouth in particular, had been a strategy for upending my life, for completing a first draft and beginning the second with a flourish. I expected it to draw me further into myself in a complex series of exchanges with invisible beings, but the apocalypse, when it comes, is always simple. And quiet.

It’s a shift in the light. Nothing more.

I’d read Antonia Beck’s books; I was sincerely drawn to her teaching and the idea of devoting myself to a spiritual practice. I imagined it to be an anonymous and unassuming enterprise, so I was nervous when I met her. I was sent, like every Prospective, down a winding path through the trees to arrive at the small raised hut in the center of a wide circular wall of stacked stones. I was reminded of Hansel and Gretel.

But, once in side the meditation hut, there was no hungry witch, only Antonia, seated on a cushion near a window, waiting for me. I babbled and she was quiet. She must have spoken that day but I can’t remember a word. I remember her stillness. Her patience. Her eyes. It wasn’t what I expected.

I expected to work in the gardens, with the animals. I expected to hum God’s frequency. I imagined myself melting away. I counted on a form of silence and hoped for a revelation which might order the whole of the cosmos around me. I was merely following my frontier strategy of devising safe locations within the light, then moving away again, into a deeper darkness. Focusing my center down to a dense, golden star.

I never imagined Antonia and I would simply become friends, not teacher and supplicating student, but friends who talked about movies and language and the embarrassments of our own humanity. I never imagined we would take up residence within each other, readily, hungrily.

When Antonia abandoned Monmouth nine months later without a word to anyone, I understood. I found her note pinned to my screen door early that morning. The rest is up to you, it said. And that’s all it said.

I’d initiated this relationship with Will from the vacant ache of Antonia’s absence. From an urgency which spasmed through my lower body, rising then into my face in a heavy steam. I’d wanted a lever to wrench me from my stable orbit at Monmouth and hurtle me outward into the void. This need had drawn me toward him, pushed me to speak, and laid me open all at once.

But I had nothing to talk to him about. Nothing to tell him.

I watch him sometimes, when he’s working with the animals or reading in his room. He seems easy with his secrets. Delicate and watchful. He moves as if he has nothing to hide. I watch him now, sprawled on the floor around me, his eyes on my face, my breast, my hand. He touches me as if he knows me, but he doesn’t.

Antonia knows me. She simply saw me. Fully. And the reflection was enough to burn the image deep into bone.

I blink and I can see us, sitting in the back yard of her house. Barefoot in the damp grass even in the rain. The dark bowl of the sky above us. We sat in old lawn chairs, twirling bottles of Rolling Rock between our fingers by the neck. We talked, over the course of a summer and a fall. About everything. As if we were inventing and naming a world.

It wasn’t a string of revelations between us. It was a silence and an occasional glance. It was in the way we watched the night around us, noticing every rustle in the grass and balancing star. Never pointing these things out. Assuming the other was listening, watching, just as intently.

It was a way of talking which built worlds and thoughts and feelings while the grass cooled and dampened between our toes. It was something we made together which burned above us, just outside our reach.

The field before us would be wide and dark, the oaks and locusts rising as shadows acres away. There were no houses close by and the nearest city was sixty miles away. In the summer, the staccato rhythms of the fireflies. In the fall, the low rumble and crash of the cows and the quickening rattle of the leaves. Antonia would sometimes sit with her head thrown back along the aluminum rim of her lawn chair. One hand open on the plastic armrest, the other dangling her bottle above the grass.

I betrayed the rest of the world with Antonia Beck. Betrayed everything we agree the world to be. Every rule of logic and physics, every shared ethic.

I betrayed my past. I surrendered fragments of a future. I could see myself doing it; I turned each one between my fingers then let them go. I gave up a certain vision of myself. I gave it all over to a crystalline loneliness.

On those nights, we re-imagined each other. Simply by talking far into ourselves. It was a tacit agreement, never spoken. We touched only occasionally, accidentally. We shaped our world. On those nights I visited places I couldn’t easily return from. On those nights, Antonia released me into doubt and I freed her, somehow, from Monmouth.

And in the morning, in the light and shuffle of the day, we held our secrets close, tender against our skin. As if we were sheltering a fragile creature, a wet butterfly, a frightened bird. In the mornings, we smiled our secrets between us; each with our own work, each in our own world.

There’s so much I can’t tell Will, so much I don’t talk about. There is one thing I could say but I don’t. I could say: I know the imprint of touch, I know the mark it leaves.

The window is still there. The window has not changed. Nor has the gray screen of the low sky. Will strokes my hand and I let him, my eyes on the distance, goose bumps rising along my arms.

He draws me down toward him. My cool breasts resting upon his cool chest until a warmth begins to form again between us. I kiss him. We make love again. My body gasps in the motion and joy of it. I’m happy to be with him. Happy to be making love, to be warm where our skins meet and cool where the winter air brushes me.

Later, we dress. Standing up, tugging our limbs into our clothes. Facing each other. Shuddering in the cold, now that our bodies have separated. Staring at each other until we laugh.

Seated outside on the wooden steps, I pull on my sneakers. It’s deep fall and the leaves have filled the raked space around the hut. The low surrounding rock wall holds them in rattling pools. The cows have already passed. Entering their winter lethargy early, they’ve meandered toward the far side of the property, one following the other.

Will is straightening cushions inside. I can hear him through the open door at my back. He pulls the door closed and stands on the top step behind me. The wind begins to pick up as the light fails, the cold seeps up from the earth. He descends the stairs past me. He stands at the bottom, looking up.

I scrape the back of my hand along the rough step beneath me, the grain of the wood rasping into my fingers and arm. She scrapes her hand along the coarse block beside her. She is turned now in the opening between the freezer and the wall. Turned into the open darkness of the basement.

He draws me toward him to stand. He straightens my bomber jacket around me and zips it up. He takes my reddened hand and kisses the knuckles. He doesn’t let my hand go.

We walk away from the hut, our secrets tender and untold between us. An alternate history we do not address. We hold hands until we reach the wall. Like teenagers in the parking lot of the spring dance, unsure whether to be proud or embarrassed.

On the fourth night, Mariel had lain in her bed and the walls had dissolved and the bed had floated free and her body had burned off and the world had spun a whirlwind around her. Before, she had always screamed for her Dad.

Now she could find his voice within her, winding its way around a tiny pinprick of light. A light which did not move, but shimmered and burned bright. She felt him close. Closer even than he had been, lying upon the bed beside her.

The frame of the room fell away into the darkness and she did not scream, though her breath caught in her throat and her pulse doubled. Before, this change had always terrified her but now it seemed beautiful. Solid and true. Not a nightmare at all.

They’re all looking for her. Stationed throughout the clutter of the basement. They’re all calling her name from different locations. But she only has to avoid Alex and Ben.

She would scramble from behind the freezer, make the six feet to the corner wall, then turn left. The chalk circle would be twenty feet straight ahead. The basement was crowded with boxes and junk. She’d have to ease past the garden equipment and appliances. Once she made the turn, she’d have to watch the stairs. They were dangerously close to the circle and Alex or Ben might be hiding there.

Her hands cupped upon the concrete floor, she draws herself to her knees behind the freezer. Her limbs unfold into the open darkness. Her knees are stiff from the cramped space and tremble as she stands. She grasps the edge of the freezer to steady herself.

Sandy is calling her name close and to the right, laughing as she calls. Mariel slides toward the corner wall, more stable now. Her eyes flicker over the room in the near dark, articulating shadows.

She eases past an old lawnmower, close to the wall, without falling over it. Tennis rackets hang from the ceiling. A garden hose is coiled high at her side. Sandy is coming up close to her right, her voice growing nearer. Mariel peers toward Sandy’s voice, hoping to judge the distance.

Alex rounds the corner, five feet away, Sandy at his side. He stares blankly at Mariel for an instant. Their eyes meet and his face lights into a grin.

She bursts from the corner and into the long stretch toward the circle. The area is open, appliances and bicycles lining the walls. She can see Abigail standing near the circle, her back turned, watching the stairs to the right.

“She’s here!” Alex shouts, at her heels, “I’ve got her!”

Abigail turns, her hands coming up before her in surprise. When she sees Mariel, she leaps into the air. Laughing, clapping her hands, cheering her forward.

Her body arches in a surge, her legs bearing her forward and up. Her breath is hot and hard against her teeth. Her legs extend to their full length. The basement, the house, vanishes. She can hear the voices rising around her. The rustle and pant of Alex at her back. There’s only the distance between her and the circle.

She laughs in the exhilaration, the release. Her body taking a new shape. Her breath emptying her lungs and thrusting her forward. Alex galloping behind, his arm extended to tag her. Abigail clapping near the stairs. Ben descending the steps in a panic, knowing he’s too late.

The leaves crunch and scatter beneath our feet and we don’t say a word, even when we reach the stone wall. Reflexively, Will’s hand slides from mine as he steps over. For some reason, I stop.

I hear Will turn back to me from the other side of the wall. I hadn’t realized my eyes were closed until the sound of him. I open my eyes. I raise them to him. Then he knows I’m leaving. And I know he’s staying.

She tears through the basement. The old toys and broken bicycles, the washer and dryer, blurring past. The other kids are all laughing now, cheering dramatically. It’s come down to just her and Alex.

Her lungs are bursting, her legs ache. Alex’s breath is close at her back. She can sense his hand near. He grabs her shirt, spinning her around. Sweating, laughing. Running past her, unable to stop. But she’s already inside the circle.

I step over the wall into the border of trees, blinking into the light between branches. I step away from a place I knew as a child. A place my father helped me to discover. A place I lose and find. Again and again.

A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers
by Michael Holroyd
2011
Farrar, Straus & Giroux

English biographer Sir Michael Holroyd has been bit bad by the Bloomsbury bug—that clique of authors who spawned literary modernism in England during and after the Edwardian Age and whose high priesthood included Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry. Holroyd is obsessed with this group as his two continent-sized biographies, Lytton Strachey and the multi-volume Bernard Shaw, attest. Since Bloomsbury history is evidentially fat with letters, novels, diaries, and memoirs, such a record lures sleuths like Holroyd to remix the group’s labyrinth of motives. It’s the hunt he loves, chasing down their unrequited affairs, their aristocratic snuggling, and their benighted books to tell again their scandalous loves and psychological woes.

Thus, in A Book of Secrets Holroyd clothes lines a half-dozen women, who, spanning a century, stretch out from the nefarious blueblood Ernest Beckett, a.k.a. the second Lord Grimthorpe, who, as the era’s “greatest lover,” marries the 19-year-old American Lucy Lee, juggles her with his first mistress, Josephine (José) Brink, which is followed by (and unconnected to) Lucy’s death at 26, allowing Beckett to dump José and become engaged to Eve Fairfax, the muse of the sculptor Auguste Rodin, whom Beckett soon abandons once his roving eye espies Alice Keppel, who will be the bed-warmer of the Prince of Wales, Edward VII, of the Edwardian Age, but not before Ernest and Alice have a daughter, Violet Keppel, (nee Trefusis), who grows up to be the lover of Vita Sackville-West, herself the paramour of Virginia Woolf and—stay with me —whose sister’s granddaughter, Camilla Parker Bowles, a.k.a. the “Rottweiler,” fulfills this carnal lineage by splitting up Princess Diana and Prince Charles to install herself as the next King of England’s wife.

Any writer would be a fool not to be smitten by such a sordid history.

The surprising drama is that these dalliances were not kept secret. They were encouraged, in part, because aristocrats accepted the contractual nature of unions as the class-based transfer of wealth and genes. As a result, infidelity was thought good for the marriage. Violet and Vita’s three-year assignation is said to have made Vita’s fifty-year marriage to the bisexual diplomat Harold Nicolson secure.

And yet only in the book’s second half, with Violet and Vita’s affair—this, thanks to their letters and to Holroyd’s analysis of Violet’s fiction (all of it, roman-á-clef)—do we arrive at some meaning or purpose to his effort.

But how could Vita pursue a love affair with Violet at the same time as planning a marriage to Harold Nicolson? Violet seemed to float in an illusory world of romantic ecstasy; Harold belonged to the solid world of facts. And Vita needed both fantasy and fact in her life.

Or this smart insight about the aging Violet’s meanness:

The writer [Violet] who worked alone for two or three hours each morning went about her business ruthlessly dissecting the woman [again Violet] who would occupy the rest of the day so emptily in smart society “not caring a damn for anyone.”

It is the ravages of these affairs that Holroyd appears to be after. And yet his endless overturning of the unfaithfulness story belies that tack.

After a time, even Holroyd seems bored. So he inserts himself into the story. His grand entrance comes while visiting Beckett’s sunny Italian villa where some of these liaisons got steamy. But, alas, we get no equivalent heat, just shadow narrative: driving to Gatwick; the flight to Italy with Beckett’s granddaughter; arriving at and touring the villa; his sparsely-attended lecture; and a fluttering over a young translator of Violet’s novels who fondles what she believes is the spirit of Violet rising in Holroyd.

There’s no attempt to dig out any emotional or intellectual doubt Holroyd may harbor about his obsession, which remains unquestioned and worse, unfelt. Why bring up his to-ing and fro-ing if nothing consequential happens? I wondered. The opera is much tidier in the biographer’s tableaux.

Clearly these icons of Romance and Literature quicken his blood. But Holroyd shies away from the alleyways of the self writers discover in pursuit of their most cherished subjects—writers, that is, who tempt themselves with memoir in biography. Instead, he hound-doggedly follows the research trail. And here it’s only so interesting, at best, a literary mirror of the Merchant-Ivory film.

Thomas Larson is the author of The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” and The Memoir and the Memoirist.

From a Terrace in Prague: A Prague Poetry Anthology
Edited by Stephan Delbos
Litteraria Pragensia Books
2011

From a Terrace in Prague is an ambitious literary undertaking. Stephan Delbos, Culture Editor for The Prague Post, gathered 120 poems from 16 languages written between 1888 and 2010 that focus on Prague or events that took place there. The result is a poetic guidebook to one of the world’s most beautiful and culturally rich cities, complete with a thorough introduction on the history of Prague poetry, author photographs and biographies, extensive notes on each poem (many of which include photographs of landmarks), translator biographies, and a detailed map showing every landmark mentioned in the book.

The book is organized sequentially, and divided into the following sections: Local Voices (1888-1911), From “Zone” to War Zone (1912-1939), Intruders & Exiles (1940-1959), The Frozen Thaw (1960-1969), Enforced Normal (1970-1989), and Iron Curtain, Velvet Rope (1990-2010). The chronological arrangement provides a complete historical narrative, the likes of which one wouldn’t expect from a poetry anthology. The pre-World War I poems are idyllic, such as Karel Hlavácek’s “Evening at Liben Cemetery” which begins with a pastoral scene:

A wedge of sunlight tipped on a bouquet,
every grave drowned in the brilliance,
a dark shadow cast by a row of crosses
climbed the low wall to a field of wheat.

and ends just as beautifully:

Stars above the earth now emanating peace,
the wheatfield breathing in its sleep;
just flashes from a vortex of clouds in the distance
—heat lightning—out of the silence …

The second section, “From ‘Zone’ to War Zone” is dominated by Marina Tsvetaeva’s twenty-one page long, “Poem of the End,” which chronicles the poet’s last walk with her lover before their forced break-up by the poet’s husband. The walk begins near the National Theater and Café Slavia, and continues south along the Vltava River. When the couple reaches a railway bridge, the bridge becomes a part of the poem:

A bridge.
Ha—ppy destination
Of lovers without hope:
Bridge—you are passion:
A convention: an unbroken between.

From this point on, the bridge appears as a dash in the middle of words, “ca—rrying,” “li—ke,” “do—wn,” showing that the break-up has caused the speaker to feel broken and to long for some bridge between her and her lover.

As they continue their walk, the city is described to the reader through the lens of their break-up:

…—Our café!
Our island, our chapel,
Where in the mornings we—

Lowlives! Transitory couple!—
Celebrated out matins.

Because of the detailed map and poem notes, readers can trace the exact route of Tsvetaeva and Rodzevich’s final walk. Although I’ll admit this may not be an activity that would occur to most travelers, tracing the routes and visiting the landmarks of many of these poems makes the connection between the present poet-traveler and the original poet as tangible as possible. I’ll admit when I’ve visited places where great poets lived and wrote, it was a thrill to know I was walking where my poetic idols walked—including, I’ll admit, geeky freak-outs in front of the homes of several Romantic and Victorian writers during my visits to the British Isles.

The next section, “Intruders & Exiles” is incredibly diverse, containing poems from Scottish poet, Edwin Muir; Mongolian poet, Byambin Rinchen; Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda; and Turkish poet, Nazim Hikmet, as well as others.

The remaining sections of the book make up for an impressive overview of the tumultuous Czech history, including events such as the 1945 accidental bombing of Prague by American Air Force planes intending to bomb Dresden and the 1968 suicides of students Jan Palach and Jan Zajíc who self-immolated in protest of the Soviet invasion, as well as the more recent and differently tragic death of a rhinoceros at the Prague Zoo during the 2002 flood.

The book concludes with the sense of a city still in the process of defining itself. The poems in the final section struggle with such questions as, What is the difference between tourists and ex-patriots? and W here does Prague go from here?

The final poem in the collection, “The Love-Life of Objects,” by Marcela Sulak explores Prague through the works of Czech photographer, Josef Sudek, and summarizes the book’s intent in a fitting way:

These are the objects light has groomed
in Josef Sudek’s famously photographed studio:
a rain that wipes its fingerprints from the windowpane,
a tree that twists from earth to sky, unable to decide,
a plate of peaches freighted with the taste that never leaves
his mouth. Like other Czechs before him, he has confessed
to loving the secret life of objects.
Prague is full of them.
That’s why the streets are bent and small,
their ascent so steep. . .

The great strength of this anthology is its single focus of opening up Prague and the poetry of Prague to the reader. Delbos makes brave editorial choices to that end, not shying away from long poems such as the aforementioned Tsvetaeva poem or Roque Dalton’s masterpiece “Tavern,” whose five narrators relate to the reader the “barroom talk” of the pub U Fleku for seventeen pages. He also doesn’t eschew poems written by collaborators or visual poems, such as those by Jirí Kolár, which are collages made from Czech newspapers and texts.

From a Terrace in Prague is an indispensable gift for anyone traveling to Central Europe or to any lover of Central European history or literature. Many writers dream of taking part in the Prague Summer Program, and delving into Delbos’s anthology is the perfect first step.

Shaindel Beers is Contrary’s Poetry Editor.

Tales of the New World
Sabina Murray
Black Cat
2011

On the face of it, Sabina Murray’s latest collection of tales appears to take up where her PEN/Faulkner Award-winning collection, The Caprices, left off.  Those were tough-edged, yet humane, stories embedded in the Pacific conflicts of World War II.  The final story in that book featured Ferdinand Magellan’s discovery of Saipan, and this new one revisits him as a character in the story “Translation.” Magellan recruits the translator Pigafetta to be his chronicler because even famous explorers need some good PR. History may be ‘written by the victor’ but discoveries are defined by their scribes rather than by the victorious explorers themselves.

Tales of the New World is about voyaging far afield, and yet it begins with the story “Fish” in the utter closeness of “still, dark air” within a basement where Mary Kingsley has been bricked away from the world by her mother’s ill-health.  Thus, from the outset and from confinement, Murray creates a new world for the reader. Escaping from this stultifying, closeted existence with “a magpie’s education from The College of Whatever Happened to be On Father’s Bookshelf,” Mary develops an extraordinary ambition for a woman in the late nineteenth century, to “explore the interior” of Africa. “This comes to her in an inspired moment, while doing her accounting.” Mary’s real adventure, of course, was to travel so far beyond the confines of her sex. Murray’s story encouraged me to seek out writing by the real Mary Kingsley, who was niece of the author Charles Kingsley and who took the wise precaution of chronicling her own explorations for posterity, although that didn’t prevent Murray from reinventing her again in fictional form.

With any historically based fiction a key factor in its appreciation is often what lies outside the story and how that impacts upon what is depicted within it. For example, imagine reading Don DeLillo’s Falling Man in a few centuries time without any preconceptions about what happened in New York on September 11, 2001. Similarly, I have no prior knowledge of the events or explorers depicted in most of Murray’s stories. One of the few exceptions to this is “Paradise,” which is concerned with the events of the Jonestown massacre in Guyana in 1978. Since I have an awareness of the skeleton of ‘the plot’ of this iconic event, I don’t personally mind that it is not supplied to me within the story. But its omission does leave me wondering what someone coming to the story cold would make of it. Not only does “Paradise” fail to sketch in events fully, the narrative makes a virtue of repeating facts and opinions and frequently contradicting itself. Indeed, it is one of those pieces of writing that causes the reader to consider the nature of story itself. The effect is somewhat indoctrinating, but also hypnotically poetic.

Tragedy is waste. Tragedy is the reminder of human helplessness. Tragedy invents God everywhere it chooses to appear. Tragedy destroys God everywhere it chooses to appear. Tragedy has its super stars. Tragedy has its victims. Tragedy forces people to take stock of their lives [as if lives were pantries or mutual funds] and find meaning in it. Tragedy is what forces people to take stock of their lives [as if lives were pantries or mutual funds] and find all essentially meaningless.

For me, this was the stand-out story of the collection, the one I will return to and marvel at for its technique and effect.

Not all of the stories in this collection succeeded in firing my imagination to quite the same extent, but all are powerful and tautly written with more packed away for subsequent readings.  A number of stories continue to play with the notion of who is the storyteller of a discovery or even a chronicler of the story itself. In “Full Circle Thrice,” William Dampier comes back to wrangle with the author and insist, “I am not a character, but a writer. A writer happy to be such, not desperate like you, who for a reason unknown to me has felt the need to put herself in her own story.” As if by way of revenge or reward for this interruption, Murray gives him a fictional exhumation from a London graveyard and reburies him on the Western coast of Australia. This sort of explicit negotiating with the parameters of fact and fiction is lightly done throughout the entirety of the writing. It worked as an accent point, rather than a distraction within the narratives.

Tales of the New World covers an impressive historical sweep. As in The Caprices we often find out what happened to characters many years after their heyday. Regrets, betrayals and misunderstandings frequently make bitter traveling companions through these new worlds, as can an explorer’s reading material. In “The Solace of Monsters,” Captain Coffin is reading Frankenstein. This story, and the collection as a whole, shows that there is no need to invent monsters. Here be dragons—plenty of them—but they are mostly of the human kind.

Pauline Masurel is a short fiction writer who lives in South West England and who will be traveling to New Zealand in 2012.  Her website is at www.unfurling.net.

Other Heartbreaks
Patricia Henley
Engine Books
2011

The stories in Other Heartbreaks by Patricia Henley will change you. Now the thin girl who passes you coming out of a gas station restroom—you’ll notice the gray smudges under her eyes. Your own secrets—the ones folded twice or three times inside you that crop up when you’re rinsing dish soap from your favorite tiny plate with the chipped edge, the plate you bought the day your divorce was final and that you’ve packed and carried from place to place—now you’ll notice sadness. You’ll feel a round in the dark to reach your bed at night rather than flick on the overhead light. You’ll want to say only the things that are the most honest to yourself and your daughters.

In “Rocky Gap,” June Peck tells the story of “the crazy family”—hers. She talks of fondness and missed opportunities, of everybody doing the best they can, considering, “They survived their parent’s excess, their imprudence, their disorganization, their inability to harness their darkest energy.” June pitches her tent at a campground where siblings and in-laws and nieces and nephews gather for a reunion/memorial service for the “phantom sib.” You will wish June lived down the road so she could stop by the mailbox to tell you a story. “Tanya’ s family is tidy and small. She has one sister: an attorney specializing in outer space law who still lives at home…They wouldn’t fart in a bathtub.” And, “Talking to a drunk about drinking is like talking to a stranger about slapping her children at the mall.” These gritty details leave an impression, like sleeping on gravel at a campsite.

Besides what they notice, Henley’s characters do strange things. In “Red Lily” they “daydream about the confessional,” sabotage other people’s jobs, and leave the Christmas tree lit all year round. They do normal things, too, like want “someone impossible.”

In “Sun Damage,” the characters find out that the things they thought were normal are strange.

Everyone had rules and Meg Ransom learned them quickly, rather than risk getting a slap or a switch. When she’d grown up and left the house on Bicycle Bridge Road, Meg thought her mother’s rules quite odd. But you don’t know that when you’re young; you imagine everyone lives as you do. Finding out they don’t is one of the best or worst discoveries of childhood. Hannah Ransom did not allow Meg to stare out the windows during lightning storms. She did not allow her to walk near people operating gasoline or electric lawn mowers. She did not allow her to watch television. And, she did not allow her to cross the railroad tracks into the lanes of Webber, a batch of leaning shotgun houses encircled by a muddy creek, the railroad tracks, and a sea of soy beans.

In some cases, hardship transpires before the story starts and leaves characters to grapple with the repercussions. Husbands walk out, men touch girls, and fathers “sit down on the limestone steps and die.” Whoever’s left behind, mainly wives and daughters, face the rest of their lives, lining up the broken pieces, memories like snapshots–this happened, and then this–trying to make sense. Sometimes what happened is only hinted at, leaving the reader to connect the dots. Other times, like in “Kaput,” you find out in the last line what the story is really about and that makes you want to read it again.

While the first six stories are linked by theme—women responding to loss through amalgamated reminiscences—a second section of the book entitled “Other Heartbreaks” is comprised of three stories linked by character and place, a family named March in Chicago. Each story tells a piece of family history from the point of view of one of the three family members. While the March stories are sectioned off from the others with their own title page, they share the main thrust of the other stories. Characters glean from their pasts to help sort out challenges they face in the present.

In all of the stories, one or more of the characters, unlike June Peck’s parents, harness the darkness, but not for the purpose of keeping it from running wild. Instead they rein it in to hold it close, to abide in the gloom and the comfort of its familiarity.

Jodi Paloni earned an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is currently working on a linked story collection in her tiny writing house in the woods.

Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters
Edited by Paul Maher, Jr.
Chicago Review Press
2011

Over Tom Waits’ long musical career, one thing has remained constant: “Vocabulary,” Waits once said, “is my main instrument.” That sentiment is just as true when Waits is off-stage giving an interview in a cheap diner, an old Chinese restaurant, or backstage somewhere. Tom Waits on Tom Waits—more than three decades worth of interviews, profiles, and the occasional excerpt and press release—makes that very clear. Although it’s not a biography, it does provide a kind of biographical portrait—a document of Waits’ evolution as a musician and performer, on the one hand, and as a person, on the other.

Talking about his voice at a time when he was promoting his industrial, gritty-gospel-blues album Bone Machine (1992), Waits said, “What I like to try and do with my voice is get kind of schizophrenic with it and see if I can scare myself…”

Keith Richards, starting with Rain Dogs (1985), has appeared on several Tom Waits albums, and the two share a certain aesthetic, which includes an aversion to over-relying on studio effects. “If I want a sound,” Waits said, “I usually feel better if I’ve chased it and killed it, skinned it and cooked it.”

On quitting smoking:

I’m like everybody else, quit a hundred times. It’s a companion and a friend … I would take a pack of cigarettes and dig a hole in the backyard and piss on them and bury ’em. Dig ’em up and an hour later, dry them in the oven and smoke. That’s how bad I had it.

But Tom Waits on Tom Waits is more than just a collection of gold nuggets embedded in long interviews. It’s a record of a man’s life.

I wanted to be an old man when I was a kid. Wore my granddaddy’s hat, used his cane, and lowered my voice. … My father left when I was about eleven—I think I looked up to older musicians like father figures. Louis Armstrong or Bing Crosby…

While touring for his second album, The Heart of a Saturday Night (1974), Waits was already aware—and perhaps somewhat weary—of the theatricality involved in a musical performance. He said that onstage he tries to “reach some level of spontaneity and just be as colorful and entertaining as I can … I want to avoid the unnaturalness of performing.”

Yet there were always questions about the difference between the person and the persona. “Sometimes it’s hard to separate the two identities,” he said at the time. “I may exaggerate a little onstage, but I’m not trying to be anyone else but me. I try not to be compromising or condescending. I talk about things I know about.” Exhausted from excessive touring, drinking, and lack of sleep, Waits sometimes reacted aggressively to such questions, emphatically telling one interviewer, “I’m not a drunk, I’m a regular guy.”  But that, of course, was hard to accept from a man who lived at the Tropicana, a notoriously seedy Los Angeles motel Waits described as being full of “four-speed automatic transvestites, unemployed firemen, dikes, hoods, hookers, sadists … reprieved murderers, ex-bebop singers and one-armed piano players.”

In 1980 Waits married Kathleen Brennan, who became, beginning with the critically acclaimed album Swordfishtrombones (1983), Waits’ song-writing partner and co-producer. “My wife’s like a cross between Eudora Welty and Joan Jett,” Waits said in 1999. “She’s got the four Bs: beauty, brightness, bravery, and brains. She rescued me.” And the strange thing is, even though Waits cleaned up his act—quit smoking, cut down on drinking, had three children, and eventually moved his family out to California’s Sonoma County—his music has remained wonderfully surprising and weird. And so have his interviews.

Dmitry Kiper is a New York City writer working on short stories, poems, songs, and other curiosities. He is currently a fellow at the Writers’ Institute at the City University of New York.

Greasewood Creek
by Pamela Steele
Counterpoint
2011

In her debut novel, Greasewood Creek, Pamela Steele draws heavily from the elements of poetry even as she weaves an emotionally complex story. The short chapters feel like stanzas. The phrases and descriptions linger with the reader, and invite repeated readings. The structure is spare and delicate: time wafts from the present to the past and back again in flashes of memories. Seemingly insignificant moments are distilled to show the normalcy of life, the pain around the edges of tragedy. And the tragedies—many of them spiraling outward from a single event, the death of the protagonist’s sister, Jean Ann—are told in cool, quiet detail without tumbling to sentimentality or melodrama. Steele writes in images, brushstrokes. Her sentences are careful and deft, and though she clearly sees language through the lens of poetry, she rescues the prose from becoming too obtuse or imagistic by allowing the language to reflect the heartbreaking events of the story and to mirror the difficulty with which the characters recall their collective past. It is a story told through the outstretched fingers of a shielding hand, a novel written from around the protective corner of a doorframe. “Tell it slant” Emily Dickinson once wrote.

The opening of Greasewood Creek is an example of Steele’s “slant” telling, carving the story out of negative space—telling a story by what isn’t there:

The air still holds the shape of the house. August light pushes through cottonwood limbs—no more than air themselves—shimmering off ghost windows. Weed-shot grass seeps from the empty pasture, scabs over the ground where the house once sat, surrounds a shard of foundation.

The elements of the novel are all in play: the weeds, shards, delicate limbs, and heartbreaking absence.

In some ways, Greasewood Creek resembles Southern literature, with its emphasis on language, family, and rural America, and perhaps, with the story’s genesis in West Virginia, that echo is intentional. But in many ways, this is a book of the West, of the hard life of rural Eastern Oregon, and the pain and redemption of life on the edges of a reservation. The protagonist, Avery, is gritty, smart, and resourceful despite the disappointments and tragedies of her childhood—the death of her sister, her father’s abandonment, her mother’s alcoholism, her own molestation, and the death of her own baby. The redemption in the novel comes from Avery’ s quiet unraveling of her painful pa st. In a particularly beautiful moment, Avery is heavy with her pregnancy, waiting for her baby to arrive, when a hummingbird enters the house. She remembers trying to c atch them as a child. “It can’t be done” her grandmother had told her. And yet, she succeeds.

She steps into the doorway and opens her hands. The bundle lifts a few feet, levitates flies around the side of the house. She looks at her palms, half expecting a spray of the luminous dust of butterflies and moths.

A quiet moment, and yet, the accomplishment of succeeding at “what can’t be done” and the flutter of the hummingbird, and the letting go are all a part of Avery’s life—her ability to rise above, and the sadness she endures.

Though Avery’s life is marked by pain, Greasewood Creek is also a love story—the steady, deep love of Avery and her childhood boyfriend, Davis. The pattern of their relationship in the novel rescues Avery—and the reader—from relentless bleakness. There are no small moments in Greasewood Creek, or, rather, it is a novel of small moments, of quiet poetic gestures and strange visitations.

Frances Badgett is Contrary’ s fiction editor.

The sunlight didn’t break, we are broken, the word ‘broken’ is broken.
~ Yehuda Amichai

Today, everything hurts, and I’m as close to god as I’ll ever come,
or want to be.  I try to forgive myself, fist knocking at the chest,

a door that forgot how to open.  The prayer book’s spine
against my palms, I sing loudly to drown out the dandruff

flaked on the suit in the next row, sing as if  I do believe,
as if  the fervor had not been rocked out of me by the Cantor

whose polioed leg rubbed into me as we sang together in front
of the high holiday congregation, as if I were still his student

and he could still grip my waist –   always his smell of yellow breath
and wear. That was when the old men said girls can never be

rabbis, girls can’t stand  before the torah. And now in the synagogue,
familiar as the couch leg that catches my pinky toe when I walk past it,

I think of the woman asleep in the window well on my block, blonde
wisping out of a hoodie, sneakers on the sidewalk like slippers by a bed.

No, she’d said, I’m not hungry.  I come to this sanctuary from that chill,
wonder if this is the night, the last time, I’ll try to  get that door open.

Janlori Goldman teaches in the Narrative Medic ine Program at Columbia University. She co-edited For the Crowns of Your Heads: Poems for Haiti, and hosts the Huge Shoes salon. www.hugeshoes.org.

I sail in my dreams,
I am dreaming of home.
~ Osama Abu Kabir, from Poem s from Guantanamo

For a Casio,
          for the way its back case can
                    come undone, expose

the mechanism
          that can be wired to a bomb.
                    For a Casio,

whose silver face glistened
          when he washed himself for prayers.
                    For a Casio

the U.S. manual
          labeled al Qaeda’s favored
                    detonation device.

For a Casio
          he’d glance at, spinning the wheel
                    hand over hand on

his way to drop off
           that one last water shipment.
                    Amman’s sun burning

off its hard scarred face.
          For a Casio he’d got
                     before he was to leave

for Afghanistan.
          Over tea the watch was eyed.
                    Digital readout

bathed the tent in green
          when he rose to step outside
                     and pee beneath stars.

For a Casio
          that set the Marines jabbering;
                    it was the first thing

confiscated, first
           reason suspicions were raised.
                    It remains, plastic wrapped,

labeled evidence,
          in a Guatanamo desk,
                    while Kabir hunkers

in detention’s night,
          time stopped, his wrist’s memory
                    of it turning black.

David Allen Sullivan’s first book of poetry—Strong-Armed Angels—was published by Hummingbird Press in 2008. His second book, a series of poems concerning the Iraq war, Every Seed of the Pomegranate, will be published in Spr ing, 2012.

Curtains by Waypoint-zero via Flickr

the alarm clocks were the first to turn. you reached with morning pulleys at your eyes in the bone-colored light to slap at the clock that wasnt singing. figured you set it wrong and went to work where eventually word got around because everyone shrugs in late and embarrassed and then, gathered in jessicas office and you sit on her desk playing with a picture frame (here you take out the picture to find what is underneath, it is a picture of a golden retriever in a santa costume he has a white beard). sam says it has to be electromagnetism some pulse in the sun. i mean why else would all our clocks fail. but you say no it isnt the clocks sam its the alarms. he scowls at you sam doesnt like to be wrong. you dont talk after that because you dont like to be scowled at and because you hate speaking, hate your new grinding metallic voice since the hospital (later this would hurt me), half the time you have to repeat yourself because no one can understand your new fake voice.

listen though here you leave the office. you walk to your desk and you sit down you pull out the drawer inside is a sharpie you uncap it you trace the lines of your knuckles, your palm. the next day the same thing, spinning crookedly out of sleep you are waking out of habit but now twenty minutes late. the media noticed (cameras microphones teleprompters) and there are words scrolling at the bottom of the screen you see SCIENTISTS BAFFLED ON THE MATTER OF WORLD-WIDE ALARM FAILURE. TRAFFIC ACCIDENTS ABOUND. STORES OPEN ING LATE IN ANDOVER WERE LOOTED THIS MORNING. trace the lines you drew on your left hand. okay now you realize and you realize long before the others did: the things we trained to outsmart us when we were barely the silhouette of ourselves, floating above our bodies half-awake and primal,  they outsmart us now. these alarms have grown smarter than our sleeping selves. and now you are almost afraid but mostly your neck gets hot and you are excited. but then that night back in your apartment, four in the morning billie holiday is singing spooky at your bedside, wakes you up for work, you are all the way to the shower (you keep the lights off, eyes mostly closed and dry-mouthed) with your hand on the knob before you realize the dark and silence, how it went off at the wrong time. you go back and stand before it naked and unplug it but still it sings, first you are confused, then angry and you curse at it without noise (moving your lips and teeth and tongue but nothing comes out since cancer took your voicebox), then you realize you are naked before it and grow embarrassed, you go back to bed but you dont sleep.

listen. here is the part where it changed for you: the next morning work is strange when you go in, quiet and people huddled. in jessicas office they sit around the television and watch. you cant stand riots because they make you think of people who are desparate and that makes you sad so you go to the kitchen, you try to work the goddamn complicated cappuccino machine but hot steam shoots at your hand. listen: here you realized something much greater than yourself was happening. you walked out of the kitchen (remember the linoleum squeaks before the doorjamb) and you walked past jessicas office with the picture of the santa dog and past the drawer and to your car and you drove home as fast as you could and you went into your bathroom, you locked it and threw the electric toothbrush out your window.

it went like this for a while see. a burn on your hand and you realized: the appliances were against us now (how strange but not entirely). and not for some long servitude, you would eventually learn, when the radio found out how to speak on its own, but for the same reason any person has ever rebelled since any person has ever taken up against another and that is very simply because they thought they could do it better.

so began the strangest war.  hundreds of people migrated but of course there are not many places to go and most wouldnt move at all because who runs from a toaster? nobody and certainly not an american. oh dear you thought behind the shower curtain oh dear. you called your mother on the telephone she asked you darling, are you alright. something so strange is happening. you said yes mom i will be alright how are you. she sounded confused she said that your father was trapped in the dryer and you couldnt help laughing you imagined it here:

your father is in the tumbler, legs bent strangely behind him, the hot metal sides turning his skin pink, eyes bugging, clawing at the window, then his own white underwear dives across his face and he is breathing through it! how could he even fit! how funny oh god oh god

but then you remember to be frightened and eventually you hang up and you decide no you cant spend your whole life in the bathroom (here you were distracted because you remembered the news story of one woman who lived in her bathroom for seventeen years after her sister died and eventually firefighters had to pry her out with axes) so you go to the neighbors, to chelseas, and it is there that you live for the next six weeks as you watch it all change. by tuesday you realized you had to get rid of them, and you and chelsea had a festival (it was like a tiny riot you thought) of throwing the appliances out the window aiming for the pavement so you would be sure to smash them: the blowdryer the microwave the blender the speakers the water heater the electric can opener eventually the air conditioner (see them here: they explode crystalline, red/blue/yellow viscera spilling and tangling, plastic stabbing in jagged peaks (they are tiny alps, you think)) and at the very end, only when it began to jerk suspiciously towards you both, did you get rid of the television. chelsea the graphic designer wouldnt get rid of her laptop so you both locked it outside like a pet that hadnt been house-trained, heard it throw itself at the door on the last days. comical at first then it grew eerie. and chelsea wanted to get rid of me but you told her that if you did there was no point in staying around at all.

here you remember: your brother, your mad brother, joined the other side, you saw him on tv one morning, your mouth opened and your fingertips shocked by static as you reached for his grainy figure, his face smeared with engine grease and on his shoulder a curling iron snapping at the cameras (how bizarre!). some kind of ally, didnt even know that was possible. you whispered but no words came out. watched for him for weeks but he didnt appear again. he howled and screamed but before you tipped the tv out the windowsill you saw scrolling WILD “MAN MECHANICA,” WHO HAD SIDED WITH THE ELECTRONIC TERRORISTS, KILLED BY VACUUM” and if things had been different you would have been weeping or laughing hysterically but instead here is what you saw:

you are very small and you are sitting on the beach and there is sand in your bathing suit it is wet and grainy and uncomfortable you are making a sandcastle with him, with mark. the beach is gray and there is wind and far away is a yellow umbrella with a picture of the sun on it but it is cloudy there so it is the only sun, the umbrella sun. he says how far does the ocean go, you say all the way to the other side, he says nothing and slaps more sand on top, a sand dollar is the window for the king. digging a moat around it and you are watching it erode, try to keep it safe but finally to your delight! the towers slopping and melting as you try to rebuild it and scream as it collapses, in the end you jump up and down and smash it with a pink plastic shovel handle and you leave clutching the sand dollar with sand under your nails. your brother holds onto your elbow.

after that you knew you had to leave so you went out into the street you stepped over all that shattered glass you began to walk you headed upstate. chelsea had stayed behind so it was only you. the street was empty and windows were broken in and somewhere far away you heard metal on metal, crashing, a minifridge skittered across the street.

you walk for hours and eventually you find a corner and you sit down.

you took me from where I rested against your tongue and put me down for the last time.

i saw you speak without sound, unable to voice anything at all, without me to translate to soundwaves, you formed these words in your empty throat:

“We had a good run, mankind. We came up with Fritos, and slippers, and global warming. But it is somebody else’s turn to try now.

“You only get one life and you don’t even get to keep it.”

then you leave.

i do not know where you went after that but i sat there with your voice on the sidewalk for a long time until i too learned to move.

so we took it, the whole thing. and eventually you all died off and now it is ours. it looks mostly the same though there are still subways and fairs but they have been empty for a while so sometimes we hear something collapse but it is such a grand noise! and it was more efficient first, our lovely and fragile and soft new world, but eventually we with our green and luminous eyes we began to relax because we knew everything. we loosened our numbers and the processes slowed. and after a long time, when even your soft bodies were gone, we began to get drunk and run late and stutter, we became vain or frightened, we noticed the ocean for the first time and somewhere a walkman drew its first sloppy family portrait.

how strange and comical, you would have said, but i will say it for you.

now we are marveling and small, like you were in the beginning.

and i still remember everything you ever told me to tell those around you.

i am writing it down because i have begun to forget things.

it is strange, and new, and wonderful.

Delaney Nolan is a recent graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, currently living in New Orleans. She welcomes correspondence at delanticnolan@gmail.com.

New York At Night by by Trodel via flickr

The Rabbi of Seventy-Second Street, a kabbalist, wore his hat inside out. He claimed this was not for mystical reasons, but simply so he could show himself to the world as he felt himself to be.

The Rabbi of Seventy-Second Street, when he left his home, which was not often, would stream through the crowds of Broadway as if he were the central float in a parade.

The Rabbi of Seventy-Second Street lived in a fifth floor apartment above a bagel store on the corner of West End Avenue. He claimed the seraphim were close to him there, and he could see the water. He had a river view, so he was certainly right about something.

The Rabbi of Seventy-Second Street, a tall thin man in his youth, had grown to be fat, portly and short. The sad part of it is, he would tell his students, he had hardly reached middle age.

The Rabbi of Seventy-Second Street had no pulpit, no yeshiva tucked away in a dim corner of West End Avenue. No, his students were the birds, the pigeons and the squirrels of Riverside Park. The most wonderful students in the world, he would often tell them.

The Rabbi of Seventy-Second Street lived al one, old before his time. He had lost his family in Europe, although he was not old and certainly had not lived through the Second World War. His spiritual family, he explained, to his students, the woodland creatures of the city. His people.

The Rabbi of Seventy-Second Street ate breakfast at the bagel store below his house each morning. It was not a kosher store, but the Rabbi ignored the patron’s warnings. These bagels are my morning prayers, he said, asking for a little extra cream cheese.

The Rabbi of Seventy-Second Street stared at the Hudson for hours each day. I wonder what it’s like to be a wave, he asked his students. His students wondered the same thing.

The Rabbi of Seventy-Second Street wandered down Broadway, leaving his native home and entering midtown. The people scared and thrilled him. An entire world, he thought, ripe to hear the voice of the Lord. He wrote himself a note, reminding him to tell his students.

The Rabbi of Seventy-Second Street felt alone, sometimes, but not because he was lonely. It was only that seraphim were quiet company.

The Rabbi of Seventy-Second Street wandered to Central Park. But the birds, the pigeons and the squirrels of Central Park were not his students. He had nothing to teach them.

The Rabbi of Seventy-Second Street liked to scream to the heavens, but only in the quiet of his dreams.

The Rabbi of Seventy-Second Street wandered the streets of his dreams. In his dreams, Broadway was a field, and Seventy-Second Street a canal. The City was in Venice, or it was Venice, and the Rabbi was a gondolier. He woke up, sweating, and wondered if the canals would be clean by morning.

The Rabbi of Seventy-Second Street knew no one he could not call his friend.

The Rabbi of Seventy-Second Street knew no one.

The Rabbi of Seventy-Second Street, on one of his strolls through Riverside Park, happened upon a stone. On this stone I build my church, he said, and kicked it away so it became lost among the trees.

The Rabbi of Seventy-Second Street, on one of his strolls through Riverside Park, happened upon a couple playing with their child. I allow happiness in this world, he said to them, but the child was a tree, and the couple were stones, and they ignored his blessing.

The Rabbi of Seventy-Second Street, on one of his strolls through Riverside Park, happened upon a sunset over the Hudson River. I allow beauty in this world, he said, and the sunset thanked him.

The Rabbi of Seventy-Second Street, a kabbalist, wondered on existence. He wrote an epistle, sent it to his people, the birds, the pigeons and the squirrels. And they gathered around the epistle, which was made of nuts and berries. And they ate the epistle, and they spread it to the far corners of the earth, and the Rabbi of Seventy-Second Street was happy.

Bezalel Stern lives in New York. Read more at bezalelstern.tumblr.com.

i

Look at them, slumped in the corner there.
Ears pounded and mouse-bitten,

ragged legs askew. Rubber lips kissing
cold cement. Even here, among the abandoned,

they are twice forsaken:
the coffee cup, chipped to a wobble,

is ever at hand; the faded sweater
desires shoulders, sure,

but a hanger anyway does the trick;
even that flattened football

fairly whistles with tossed potential.
What is it that goes out of dolls ?

They have never been more
than what they are ? How is it that now

they look less? Don’t look,
says the mother, left arm crooked

and loaded with a dozen pairs of slacks.
Honey, if they scare you, just look

the other way. Her little girl knows already
we’re only going the one way,

and so takes the measure of these
one-eyed, earless, hacked-bald dolls—

takes a step closer, her own rubber soles
kiss-kissing cold cement.

ii

On every one
she’s put a price tag. Oh, sure,
as old alphabet blocks go

they’re good—
this clown’s lips still strawberry,
each tree green and tall—

but why is S twenty cents ?
And why, Q, are you
a dime less demanding?

Or Mister Victory,
upright V, with your violet ink
and predictable violin,

why do you
deserve not just a dime
but a dozen cents? It doesn’t

make any sense. Though maybe
her first husband was a Leon
or a Larry—

and that’s why L
is had now for the linty nickel
at the bottom of my pocket.

iii

Wayne, it says, on the back of the upright mirror,
in blue crayon. The woman
at the shoebox till, hair crimped and bleached,
can’ t be more than twenty-four.
I don’t hear a thing from the house. And too,
there are the toys—
yellow dumptruck without a wheel,
box of just-worn baseballs. Those few pairs
of some small boy’ s patch-kneed jean s. Where,
oh where, can he be? God
of garage sales, of Jefferson Airplane 8-tracks,
of mismatched rose-patterned plates,
of shave-cream bottles shaped like rocket ships
and stilettos red as sour candy, of sixteen neon t-shirts
imploring one and all to Eat at Jake’s,
of just-a-dollar, three-for-one, you-won’t-find-another,
of all things culled from basement closet corners,
of all things wearing a decade’s furze of dust,
of all things justly and unjustly
junked—I pray now, here, in this stranger’s
strange garage, for this one, whose blue name
is Wayne.

iv

Iowans are easy, all smiles
and apologies, but the nicest set of drawers I’ve found,

of course, belongs to the Italian down the street—
all his eighty years

and ninety-eight pounds given to rage,
rage at whatever idiocy

the new day brings. Today,
I offer thirty. His old face fists,

his two fists like birds shot dead. You think
my things are not so nice? You think

I sell this good thing I bought in Omaha
with my own money? Bought when I was young too?

When I was man as you? That’s what you think?
Thirty-two fifty. You haul it out yourself.

v

It’s gotten darker than I hoped. And so,
after fingering for hours
the hidden, homely things of these—
my towns-men and -women—
I’m on my way back home. Before I left,
you said, Only what’s on the list.
And because I love you, I promised,
though right off I think you’ll understand
these LP’s—look here,
Little Feat’s Dixie Chicken—
couldn’t be passed up. The Jimmy Carter
coffee cup? That may be a stretch—
but it was only fifty cents. And for a buck
I got this charcoal grill shaped like a can of Pabst—
can you believe it? Just a buck! Yes,
I found a rocking chair, changing table, swing
and bouncing seat. Yes, now we’re ready. Yes,
I’m happy as can be. Yes, yes, life is made
of castoff things. God, yes—we need that yellow pail!
It’s for him. To carry things in. Whoever he is,
whatever he needs to carry.

Joe Wilkins is the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, and a collection of poems, Killing the Murnion Dogs. He lives with his wife, son, and daughter in north Iowa. You can find him online at joewilkins.org.

Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown
by David Yaffe
Yale University Press
2011

The day after John F. Kennedy’ s inauguration, fifty years ago, Robert Zimmerman, of Hibbing, Minnesota, who had rechristened himself Bob Dylan in honor of the Welsh poet, first arrived in New York City. He got off the bus, tramped over to Gerde’s Folk City, and started singing for his supper. Since then, Dylan’s Methuselah career has presented us with more inscrutability than we can grok—a fact Todd Haynes celebrates and enumerates in his cinematic masterpiece, I’m Not There. It’s fruitless to attach any one mask to Dylan. At 70, he’s had the time, the luck, and the swagger to wear them all: songwriter, poet, painter, filmmaker, film star (0f sorts), singer, and author.

Dylan is a shape-shifter, a premodern postmodernist. He’s legendary and real, the tightrope-walker still plying 100 concert dates a year. His long life lacks a singular narrative. Like Miles Davis, his genius has been to forge a new identity, frame it with a new sound, then abandon it for—or be called by—another turn.

“Every three years,” Yaffe writes, Dylan “turned into someone else, and every time he changed, his audience was nostalgic for three years earlier.” These “others” include Woody Guthrie imitator, protest singer, balladeer, existentialist, rocker, Christian, and Jew; the movie enigma Jack Fate; and the song-and-dance man doing a Christmas album for charity and “Angels in Venice” for Victoria’s Secret. With such a Juju-ability, it’s no wonder Dylan hated being classed a spokesman for the sixties.

Here’s an example of how the balletic Yaffe leaps across the vast Dylan stage:

‘When you think that you lost everything / You find out you can always lose a little more,’ he sang in 1997. The art of losing, says Elizabeth Bishop, isn’t hard to master. It’s not so easy to experience either, and listening to Dylan in the three decades that followed Saved [1980] is to witness, bit by bit, how he could still summon his greatest powers, not only while he was losing range in his voice but because of it.

Yaffe often lands on this transcendent point—that Dylan is the sum of his parts. Only via these linkages, in combining so many musical, literary, and filmic influences, do we have the critically reliable means to situate Dylan’s continental and time-bending essence. As a result, Yaffe’s synthesis of scholarship and analysis shines. Its rays never dim as he lights up the man’s hybridization. “Dylan has, in effect, come to embody the cultural pastiche he wove together so inimitably from ‘Desolation Row’ to ‘High Water Everywhere,’ [a 1927 Charley Patton tune] incongruous elements yoked together.” I would add that each album or period developed its own congruity, which, for Yaffe to piece the whole Bob into one grand quilt, requires a good deal of intelligent design.

Four contrastive weaves comprise the author’s patchwork: Dylan’s ironic, derisive voice; his mythic film image; his African-American sensibility; and his appropriation (some call it theft) of others’ material in the folk-music tradition. My favorite is the third of these. Dylan covered black artists, including Patton and Blind Willie McTell, and, according to Yaffe, married (and divorced) a black woman (they have one child) as well as blended musically with the Staples family; he wrote tunes about black citizens Hurricane Carter and Hattie Carroll, criminally framed by whites; he played the March on Washington in 1963 and the Apollo Theater in 2004 (backed by Wynton Marsalis’s band); and he endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 who later, at the White House, honored Dylan’ s contribution s to the civil rights movement.

Two quibbles.

I’m not sure, given Yaffe’s classifying élan, that Dylan is a complete unknown. (The reference is to “Like a Rolling Stone.”) It’s not Dylan who’s unknown. His music and his moods are familiar to us all. What’s unusual is that Dylan has embodied America’ s multicellular culture a s few artists have. Is there anyone as artistically diverse in expressive media as Bob? Leonard Bernstein comes to mind. It’s tough to think of others.

The second bother is too many Dylan-heads are enthralled solely by the language component. What Dylan has accomplished he has done in music and words and not in words alone. I wish Yaffe (and other “music critics”) would explore the sound of Dylan’s bands and how that sound, from the caustic rumble of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” to the soulful precision of The Band, in combination with the poetry, epitomizes a new orality, a new musical speech.

Thomas Larson is the author of The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” and The Memoir and the Memoirist.

The Call
by Yannick Murphy
Harper Perennial
2011

What I Read: The Call by Yannick Murphy

Favorite Quote: “Because light takes a while to travel, what we’re seeing is always in the past.”

How It Is Structured: The Call is written in diary-like entries told from the point of view of David Appleton, a veterinarian in rural New England. A log of his farm visits, moments with his family, and his stray musings while driving, The Call follows David from a peaceful life to one of pure torment. Murphy’s use of headings followed by passages is risky—too many of them too close together, and the novel would be peripatetic, breaking the narrative too much to give it substance, thereby drowning it in its own cleverness. Too few entries, and the point of the structure is lost, dragging the narrative along. But Murphy is a skilled writer, and her unconventional approach to the novel enhances the story’s pace, lends the story a tone and style, and underscores David’s engaging and unique perspective. Not only are his visits as a veterinarian lovely snapshots of the rural life surrounding David and his family—a sheep that attends church with her owner; a family so poor there’s nowhere for David to sit when he visits; a man who keeps his cows in his basement—that if this alone were the novel, it would be rich in detail and hold interest for the reader. But Murphy adds the surprising element of David’s imagination, which gives the novel surreal touches and dreamlike moments—a hovering spaceship, the voice of the wind, and the whisper of his house to him at night.

What the wind said at night: I can blow down all your trees. I can make the walls of your house fall in.

What the morning said: I kept the wind at bay.

Normally, this kind of intrusion into a novel with such an involving story would be irritating, but again, Murphy confounds expectations and imbues these little moments with great humor, poetry, insight, and even profundity. These repeated images also hold the novel together, preventing it from fracturing—another danger of a novel told in this structure.

Thoughts on the Tone: Even in its pastoral moments, Yannick Murphy imbues The Call with stark, shocking imagery. The opening is a perfect example of how Murphy weaves in the cruelty of the natural world with David’s calm, clear perspective.

Call: A cow with her dead calf half-born.

Action: Put on boots and pulled dead calf out while standing in a field full of mud.

Result: Hind legs tore off from dead calf while I pulled. Head, forelegs and torso are still inside the mother.

Thoughts on drive home while passing red and gold leaves on maple trees: Is there a nicer place to live?

David’s accounting of his days is stripped bare, more akin to poetry than prose. The predicaments of the various animals—the sick horses in need of shooting; the goat that has been sliced open from birthing a kid—are balanced with David’s matter-of-fact voice, the emotional distance of a vet who has been on many farms and tended to many animals in distress. This use of David’s distance is particularly effective when David’s son Sam is injured in a hunting accident and languishes in a coma. Most of the novel is a world of suspension and waiting while the family keeps vigil over him. David’s cool inner reserve begins to slip as he becomes preoccupied with finding the identity of the shooter. We see David go from calmly tending sheep and cattle, to obsessing about which of the The Calls is from the shooter. It’s an excellent example of how the protagonist’s obsession builds tension in a story that is mostly one of waiting: waiting for Sam to wake up; waiting for his “spaceship” to land; waiting for the shooter to reveal himself. Murphy crafts this story so well, she avoids both the dullness of the suspended action and the melodrama of sudden revelations.

What I Won’t Give Away: What happens next.

What the Sentences Say: The language loops and changes, and incorporates both terseness and lyricism, clarity and circumspection. The structure lends the story a kind of density of detail and imagery as each passage is no more than a few paragraphs. But within those confines, Murphy’s sentences are pitch-perfect, concise, and very moving. For example:

What I tell Sam that I’m trying to figure out: Gravity. I’m not sure it’s a constant. I think it changes. I’m reading books about it, but I’m not any closer to knowing. I think it’s like light. You don’t see light bend. What you’re seeing is space bending around light. I’d like to see gravity. I’d like to try, I said, and then I looked out the hospital window at the moon rising yellow over the mountains.

What I Recommend: This novel. It’s exquisite—moving, interesting, and deeply satisfying.

What I Will Read Next: Signed, Mata Hari and Here They Come by Yannick Murphy

Review of 852 Words: by Frances Badgett, Contrary’s fiction editor and a writer who lives in Bellingham, Washington with her husband and daughter.

Invisible Mink
by Jessie Janeshek
Iris Press
2010

Jessie Janeshek’s Invisible Mink is a collection worth devoting your time to and, in fact, one which can only be properly enjoyed as a project. Nearly all of the poems in Invisible Mink are based on movies from the 1930s and 1940s, and I fully intend to reread Janeshek’s collection while watching every movie she references so that I can understand all of the connections and immerse myself in the world she creates.

For instance, the first poem in the book, “The Appledoppeling Gang,” is based on the 1947 Bette Davis film A Stolen Life, in which one twin impersonates the other who died in an accident in order to be close to the man she feels her sister stole from her years earlier. In this opening poem, Janeshek explores the glamour of classic Hollywood films and our willingness to accept the preposterous plots of yesteryear, ending the poem with, “Not enough moon? Add some gloss.”

Throughout the collection, Janeshek’s sense of humor and self-consciousness at taking on the monumental project of creating a mash-up of poetry and classic film are at play. The second poem, “Jezebel, Jealous of Television,” which is based on Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? quips:

…Grey’s the only word

I spell pretentiously. No colour
no flavour, I’m not big on labour.

This poem will never
be a sestin a. Leisure’s
my inspiration…

While “leisure” in the form of cinema might be Janeshek’s source of inspiration, there are deeper forces at work. In nearly all of these movies, the heroine is forced to rely on her feminine wiles because she is utterly powerless in all other aspects of her life. This same theme plays throughout the collection. For example, in “Love Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry:”

Chanel heels sunk in mud.
I shrunk while I smooched him goodbye.

He disappeared with his chauffer.
I went to the river, whipping my wig off.

Time and again, the women in this volume struggle with the weight of being objects of desire and the even more dangerous possibility of not being desired. These classic feminist themes continue beyond the poems inspired by the over twenty classic movies.

In addition to film-based poems are poems inspired by art, such as Lord Frederic Leighton’s painting Flaming June, and Charlotte Brontë’s novel Villette, in which Lucy Snowe is a character. “Lucy in Wien, Looking at Brueghel’s Hunters in Snow” is a poem inspired by the intersection between painting and fiction and is especially interesting because it is not Janeshek joining male poets—notably Ashberry, Auden, and Williams—who have written about Brueghel’s paintings but Janeshek allowing Brontë’s character Lucy to stand in for the poet as the observer of a painting depicting the traditionally masculine subject of hunting.

The aspect of Invisible Mink that most thrills me as a reader (and reviewer) is the seamlessness with which Janeshek as a speaker is woven in with her movie heroines. “Jezebel Keeps the Appointment,” which draws on both Midnight Express and Diabolique, is a terrific example:

Last night, the cat pissed the bed.
I washed so many times
couldn’t get clean
dictated a letter to Lady Macbeth.

You’re not the weak one
your braids sopapillas.
You’re not the cute little ruin.

The train does not stop here.
What’s worse? It’s packed
with people from high school.

This is what Janeshek does at her best—interweaves everyday life, the glamour and tragedy of old Hollywood, and our innermost fears and neuroses, which she bravely points out in herself so that we can identify.

The only weakness of this collection isn’t one of the collection itself but one of practicality. I doubt many readers will take the time to watch over twenty classic films, read Villette, and perform a Google image search to see the paintings referred to in the book. I certainly hope to. And if I could finagle my way into it, I would teach a classic film course in conjunction with Invisible Mink. For now, I’ll update my Netflix and Hulu queues and look forward to watching all of the movies assigned in the Notes section by Professor Janeshek.

Shaindel Beers is Contrary’s Poetry Editor.

Volt
by Alan Heathcock
Graywolf Press
2011

Ain’t nothing but trouble for the fictional town of Krafton, Somewhere Prairie, USA. In fact, any one of the searing tragedie s or subtle terrors depicted in Alan Heathcock’s debut story collection would be enough to set folks in a small town reeling, except even taken together they don’t.

Instead, the law-abiding and the lawless, the God-fearing and the Godless, stroll the desolate streets, wander the barren fields, and course the weather-swept woods, shoulder to shoulder, as if gathering for a town meeting, until the reader questions all previously-held beliefs concerning justice. Strangely, everything about this town, the sinners, the law enforcement, and the unremitting trauma–manslaughter, torture, kidnapping, fire, and flood–seems acceptable.

Eight stories are linked by place and provocation, and something else, too: the prose. Minimalism sets the tone for violent acts, while lyricism implies softness in the underlying human vulnerability responsible for creating them. The unrelenting revelation of character dispels all risk of melodrama.

In “Fort Apache,” Walt Freely observes the aftermath of arson.

Smoldering lumber jutted from charred brick. Bowling lanes lay exposed to the night, and in the lane oil lapped tiny spectral flames like a riot of hummingbirds.

The first of the two sentences punches out pure description. The second contains insight into the character’s interiority. Oil on water becomes “spectral flames,” which compare to hummingbirds, reminiscent of loveliness and flight, yet the hummingbirds are grouped in a “riot,” hinting at Walt’s tumultuous sensibilities: his ghosted demons, his grasping for hope, how he wants to leave the horrors of this small town and his older brother Lonnie who does terrible things.

In the sign’s pale light, Walt studied his brother’s eyes, bright and blue and tracking the ash’s flight. Then they drew onto Walt.

“Small fires make big fires,” Lonnie said, with lilting reverence. “I surely hope so.”

Heathcock’s details work double-duty to enable images to mirror character.  In “The Staying Freight,” Winslow causes the accidental death of his young son, and then grieves by fleeing his wife and farm. He takes to the wild woods. Like Walt, Winslow seeks light but meets with darkness.

The land outside was bright…At the field’s base crouched the wall of the train, a lampblack silhouette, a driverless freight.

Sunlight bucked on the water. Though his body was still, his mind reeled in flashes: a child’s boot upright in a rut; a nurse cutting away Saddie’s bloody hair; a man’s crooked finger in his face.

A moth flitted about a light shielded in wire. Soon the light blurred, the moth became lambent confetti, and his heavy lids closed.

Small fires make big fires, while small deaths mimic the important ones.

“Smoke” opens when a youth is roused from a drunken sleep and drawn into the night forest to aid his recently injured father. In a later scene, Vernon discovers the extent of his father’s misdeed and realizes the part he is expected to play. The way Vernon interprets what he sees becomes the reader’s sole insight into his trepidation.

Vernon gazed nervously about the sunlight. Through all his adventures of hunting arrowheads in these woods he’ d never crosse d paths with another human. Still he glanced at the shadow-strewn crest of the rock, then at the slashes of tree trunks down in the hollow and into the canopy where the sun flashed off leaves as it might off a lawman’s spectacles or the buckle of a holster.

And later,

…he should stay and help his father. But, the ground passed quickly beneath him and he did not slow until wire patching his boot soles snagged the grass of the dense sedge prairie.

By the story’s end, we’re not sure how Vernon’s choices play out, but the nature of a l inked collection allows the reader a scope of character development beyond the events in one story, one narrow slice of time. In Volt, protagonists in one story age and become supporting characters later in the book. If we pay close attention, or treat ourselves to a second read, seemingly loose strings may be tied up.

But don’t expect a tidy package. Instead look for the hummingbirds, the empty freights, and the flashes of an imagined spectacle. The devil is in the details.

Jodi Paloni recently earned an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is currently working on a linked story collection.

Underdog
by Katrina Roberts
University of Washington Press
2011

While reading Katrina Roberts’s fourth book of poetry, Underdog, I felt as if I had travelled into the inner workings of the author’s mind – a big, loving, generous, voraciously inquisitive mind. In Underdog, it seems any moment can be caught and brought to light, and by the act of being caught, turned into something permanent. The book is filled with vivid imagery that appears culled from the author’s daily life as professor and mother of young children. Cutting across it are ruminations about mortality, familial love and heartache. Perhaps we will not understand all of the book’s private allusions and will even feel occasionally perplexed. But like dreams, these poems are filled with things that do not make apparent sense, and to read Underdog is to simply trust in not knowing.

Several of Underdog’s most prominent themes are explorations of race, social class, and the immigrant experience, and many of these poems touch on Chinese culture in particular, especially its languages and proverbs. Roberts also writes about words themselves. Above all, she explores the experience of motherhood (the author’s children become more familiar with each passing poem). For instance, the book begins with a fragment of her poem, Cave Canem, which is featured in full later in the book:

The word asp.
The word breath.
It’s always turning
into the next decade.

and several lines later:

come come
my quiet urgings to the children accompanying me in
my tasks . . .

These poems indeed evoke a feeling of following the author through her daily tasks, collecting verbal and emotional associations as the day unfolds. Meanwhile, Roberts moves gracefully between numerous poetic structures, ranging from couplet to triplet to thin, terse poems, and prose-like poems with long, wide stanzas.

In “From Po Tolo to Emma Ya,” the opening poem of the book, a rich, long poem, she writes:

Pitchers of sweet horchata. We’re walking out. Gracias, out into it. Xie-xie.
We’re walking. Spasibo, Shokran, We’re treading this earth’s skin,
leaving imprints, and afterimages however ephemeral for whomever
comes after. We’re on our way, my boy and I. And half-vast works for me.

It is sometimes challenging to decipher who is narrating a poem and when or where a poem is taking place, which evokes the sensation of dreaming, where any image can be a symbol of something else, and anything can occur. Roberts moves rapidly from broad strokes to sharp flourishes. She writes, in Dream Diptych:

We made our own reasons, wrote our own laws in a book
buried nobody knows where. Eating dirt.
Let the boat drift on black water. No oars. The way it seems

his father needs something antibacterial three days after drinking
from the think creek that slides through yellow wheat. Yes,
the color is simple.

Readers attracted to courageous, erudite poems with existential undercurrents will find a great deal in this volume to love. In Underdog, we must trust in the po wer of poetic inclusiveness, just as we would trust in the strength of a river that catches roots, branches, and soil as it moves across the earth.

Associate Editor Shevi Berlinger teaches English at the City University of New York and is at work on a book of poetry. She also runs a food conservation project, Egg in a Box.

She does everything you choose not to
and returns each night while you sleep,
ever loyal. When you are alone, buried
in thoughts like warm sand, then you
feel her there. Whatever you want to give
her, she will take, all of it. Her expertise
is in safe keeping. Her body is made up
of the energy you expend while forming
decisions. She is the sentence unsaid
that afternoon in the car, and the city
you did not visit. She is a runner, fierce,
fearless. Somehow, she learned things
you ignored, how to build molecules,
unscrewing and tightening the atoms,
as if twisting balloons into dogs, rabbits.
Where to clamp which wire when jumping
a dead battery. All the hours sleep has taken
from you have been fed to her. If she could
put her arm around you, she would,
so grateful is she for what you don’t do.

Hannah Stephenson is a poet and instructor based in Columbus, Ohio. For more of her work, visit her daily poetry site, The Storialist.

Contrary Blog Anchor David Alm is a journalist and a professor of journalism in New York. At Contrary Blog he h as been pursuing changes in education, media, reading, music, film and more as the human animal goes digital.

Tools

Hammer and hacksaw, vise and screwdriver have the hard gaze
and slow heartbeat of reptiles. I am visiting the hardware store

with my father. In a wooden drawer stained by dirty fingers
a sea of nails rolls back and forth. The bare light bulb

burning in the middle of the ceiling cuts deep shadows
in the men’s faces, silent men who smell of sawdust and kerosene,

boiled cabbage and cigarettes. When I furtively pick up a crested little tool
its claws bite my palm. The neighborhood’s only color TV glows neon

in the dark room behind the register. Cowboys are fighting at the bar,
chairs are crashing, the soundtrack builds ominously.

Carving

He comes to understand
the spirit abiding in each scrap of wood
that passes through his hands

every child is born he says
knowing the language of trees
for so long our unformed ear
is pressed to the wall of eternity

with his hands he smoothes the wood
from which a face is beginning
to emerge

tools rest at his feet
the blackened little knife
a bent nail

Karina Borowicz’s forthcoming book, The Bees Are Waiting, was selected by Franz Wright for the 2011 Marick Press Poetry Prize. Read her previous work in Contrary.

by David Ball via Wikipedia

Virid is the spring that snakes through our garden   dappled with sun-shade (snake-skin)    surrounded by choked-up laurels and strange purple flowers that waver in the water like reflected nightmares

“Let me show you La Fontaine,” I take his hand and lead him up the garden path, deeper, ducking our heads for the wisteria     There is an inscription on a garden stone, four letters only         L A U R    I was four years old when I carved it with a shard of broken green grass (I mean ‘glass’)    so many smashed bottles litter our garden

There is a cellar below our house, a catacomb of barrels for bodies or full-bodied Bordeaux    Even as a child I remember hunting in those barrels slipping a hand in to grab at the necks    More than once I toppled into the barrel and was not seen for days until somebody, Mon oncle, perhaps, came down to search in the particular barrel where I slept upside-down and clad in cobwebs

“Are you a child or a bat?” he would ask drunkenly, dusting me off, always the same joke always the same caresses and the sloppy kiss planted on my forehead

He holds the vintage by its neck, a chokehold    has not yet dusted it off    His pants are too loose, halfway down his bony buttocks    his sweater is moth-eaten   He looks poorer, much poorer than he is    But then, so do I: in four days I have not bothered to change out of my nightdress, it is slipping off my shoulder, I am naked beneath it is stained with wine    I cannot change, forgive me

Blame the heat, the Vauclusian heat: it makes me crave the night like a midsummer dreamer and retire at dawn to the sound of larks for a few hours of tossing, turning    At midday I awake, sun-dazzled, sun-bleached and unwashed I let my lovers in at the garden gate    overgrown with grapevines

Sometimes they pluck the sour green grapes crush them between their teeth; I cannot stomach grapes, I have vomited too many times because of them    Yet I enjoy crushing them with my bare feet    My feet which can bear the heat of any sun-stricken pavement which have walked over broken green glass and never bled

Skinks shimmer across our path    Vert et Or    such is our heraldry such is our heritage     Green: for the virid spring, for the vineyards, and for our veins, which show their vine-like tracery under skin thinner and whiter than a skink’s belly    Gold: for the hair, of course    all women in my family have golden hair, all women in my family are named  L A U R—

“We are Vauclusians,” my uncle has told me, “Our heritage is the closed valley, the golden hillsides, the green vineyards below Mont Ventoux;    the gold-walled châteaux grown over with vine leaves; the fiefs the papacy    Our men are knights, given to debauchery    our women spurn poets and marry sadists     The gold of their hair is incomparable    their names are aureate    They die of green plague and choked-up laurels; you will not live to see forty, my dear…”

“Voilà!” I lift my stained skirt and step barefoot into the foaming green waters that spew from the grotesque mouth of a stone Gorgon     He washes off the bottle in the Gorgon’s clear vomit and uncorks it with his teeth, then helps me climb the ledge above the fountain    We take turns swigging    “What year is this from?” he asks me     “1327,” I tell him    He is stupid; he believes me

I tell him that his pants are stupid    I draw up the sleeve of his sweater and dig my nails into his skin, leaving behind little crescents    He gnashes his teeth and snatches away my garment, throwing it into the spring where it floats like a white water lily     He has me on the ledge: it is hard and every thrust is a strike from the sun another glory bestowed on my laureate body    Afterward, I vomit into the spring;     green spittle and golden hair

Laura Elizabeth Woollett is a student and writer from Melbourne, Australia. She is inspired by mythology and eras other than her own, and has a penchant for French literature.

Photo by Adam Hosein

My father had this girlfriend. Her name was Gemma Fay. She looked like Mia Farrow. I think. I only saw her once and she was naked then.

Gemma Fay was my father’s first girlfriend and, therefore, the anti-hero of every cautionary tale he ever told. For years, she represented the myriad horrors that awaited me in the dating world, a l and of seemingly endless poverty and worry and woe.

My father would say:

Don’t spend all your money calling boys long-distance! I did that and Gemma Fay broke my heart…

Don’t worry about the future! I worried and Gemma Fay broke my heart…

For the love of God, don’t read Plath! Gemma Fay did and she broke my heart…

Gemma Fay had been the cause of huge phone bills. She read Sylvia Plath. She broke my father’s heart. Like, tore it to pieces and stomped on it.

Gemma Fay dumped my dad in 1972. It’s been forty years and she has haunted our family all that time.

Gemma Fay was born two days before my mother. My father always transposed the dates. He did this to such an extent that I struggle to recall my own mother’s birthday and, all too frequently, I have wished her well on what was, in fact, the day my father’s ex-girlfriend was born.

(My mother does not discuss Gemma Fay. Her silence is tinged with that unspoken, ferocious loathing women have for the other women who have loved their men.)

My mother and Gemma Fay intersected in my father’s life for the briefest of moments in 1973. He and my mother had just started dating. Gemma Fay was in town and needed to borrow twenty bucks.

Gemma Fay called my father. They met. He gave her the money. He never saw her again.

The aforementioned photograph is tucked away in my parents’ house, on a bookshelf in the library. I saw it when, in a conspiratorial moment, my father showed it to me one boring Tuesday afternoon. But there’s another picture of Gemma Fay. My father didn’t show me this one, but I happened upon it one day.

It hangs in his closet, on the wall, as though it were art.

In it, Gemma Fay still looks like Mia Farrow. She is wearing a faux-Victorian dress, with a high neck and frills around the collar. The sun glints over her shoulder and reflects off her platinum hair. She has the gently puckered expression of someone who is about to blow on a dandelion.

I know why my father kept this picture. I know why it hangs in his closet still. Because there are people who remind us of how we once loved, of who we once were, of the lives we had thought we might lead.

In this photograph, Gemma Fay isn’t a heart-breaker. She’s just a girl. A girl who would ask to borrow twenty bucks and you would give it to her. You would let her break your heart.

Oline Eaton has written extensively on celebrities, gossip and adventure. She is a freelance writer and editor at work on her own biography of Jacqueline Kennedy. Follow her at findingjackie.com.

By Kieran Connellan via Wikimedia Commons

That dizzying last summer we explored the one billion possibilities of bumblebee assassination. We learned lacing the curb with Dr. Pepper to lure them under a false pretense of sweetness was easiest, most merciful, for the shadows of our black devil shoe soles were guillotine-swift and double-quick to evict the poor souls from their black and yellow striped cages. What the hell is beeswax anyways? we wondered, watching the furry beasts writhe in Wite-out on paper plates, or rattle in plastic Tupperware tombs. We put them in ice trays in the freezer and waited, called it a science experiment, while Count Chocula plinked into your cereal bowl and the milk sloshed everywhere and you ate it with a fork. You were just that kind of girl. Then you squeezed half a bottle of honey into the empty bowl and funneled a baby bee through a rolled up magazine, and for the first time in my life I felt guilty for our senseless sin. Don’t bees smell fear? I said, and you shook your head. If they smell fear, surely they suffer fear themselves. I asked you to stop and you told me it was no use, it was too late. As I struggled to rescue our tiny prisoner from his undeserved fate with a pair of tweezers, I didn’t see you approaching with the hammer. All I saw were the gooey guts on the blunt edge, embedded in amber ooze, the broken bowl wobbling across the tiles, the satisfied curl of your lips. Let’s go to your house, you said, mentioning how your father would soon be home, and though I agreed I was secretly angry with you. So as we sagged our way there, dragging our bag of bones through the apricot dusk with its inferno flash sweating sugar-heat, I took flight through the tall grass, left you at the halfway mark on the hill. I thought I saw your sticky fingers waving goodbye the night you went home and never came back. Forgive me: I was too young to smell your fear.

Matthew Burnside lives in McKinney, Texas, and is an editor for Mixed Fruit.

by h.koppdelaney via flickr

The cloud cleared and the sun broke through. Exotic birds with warm colours, probably from Africa, landed on the back wall, as light as air and yet strong enough to cross deserts and oceans. I’m no ornithologist but I’d say they belong to the tit family. One thing you don’t expect is a vulture to alight on the shed, so when I saw one standing there staring in at me, I knew I was hallucinating.

The truth is I had been called to the office for a meeting concerning my future as doorman. Panic. I tried everything imaginable to deal with it, running around grasping at any distraction. I listened to music. I watched a horror film for ninety seconds. I read an interview with a famous grunge singer. He described how once at a party in his mansion, he walked through a room full of guests and jumped out the window. I read poems by decadent Beats and French surrealists whose theme was the stupidity of the world. When nothing worked I hopped in the car and began to drive around town seeking insulation upon rubber tyres and in the steady drone of the engine. My hands felt at ease on the steering wheel as I rolled past a world of people and buildings full of people. Every face seemed familiar, even the dogs outside the shops and children shouting out their own special existence. A tower of plastic and glass loomed up. The plastic and glass was held together by metal and aluminium rivets and stanchions.

I drove down to the beach, a strong wind and beautiful white horses along the shore. I paused at the edge of the sea, then suddenly I began to walk quickly into the vast open space where the receding tide had been. The wet sand squelched under my shoes. I hoped the wind would blow more than cobwebs out of my hair, that I could turn soon and see a toxic cloud of fumes evaporating into the atmosphere, back along in a space I had just left. There was a cruise liner leaving port. I heard the boom of its siren and the band playing Anchors Aweigh. Tiny people waved from the decks. My head remained where it has always been, despite the efforts of the wind and how I imagined it rolling down the strand with its troubles, bouncing along like a tumbling tumbleweed. I sat on the pier and assumed the pose of a man cut off from all known connections to society. I leaned my head in my hand and stared down into the water at a crab scuttling along underneath the stanchion. I watched the herring gulls dive bombing into the brine, then slowly lifted my eyes towards the horizon.

When I got home my grandfather and grandmother were once more sitting on the divan in the bay window of the second floor room with bright sunlight playing kindly on them. He was wearing a cap and a heavy overcoat. His beard was white and long. His hands were resting on a stick. She was wearing a heavy dress over her corpulent figure. Her hair was parted in the middle and tied back behind. They were both looking intently at someone or something, not the camera, his expression full of enquiry and hers swaddled in a soft, pleasant smile. Her hands were held together on her lap as she leaned in naturally against him. They are both long gone but how beautiful a couple they were, how vibrant and real.

As soon as they faded into the light I took their place on the divan in the bay window. When I was a child my grandfather pointed to the factory stacks across the water, saying that they resembled standing cigarettes, ten Sweet Afton. Nothing much has changed. I saw a gassy haze hanging over the marina, masts of ships floating above the docks, fours and eights rowing up river. The cigarette burns in the fabric of the divan were there before my time, though I admit to smoking while reading science fiction comics. When I want to get to sleep, I top the fag and read fiction whose narrators speak in a reflective tone, making me doze off between the lines, drawn into descriptions of dilapidated mansions in remote parts of Ireland or England, or anywhere in old Europe for that matter, drawn to the life styles of decrepit eccentrics, existence absorbed by some useless past-time that somehow mirrors the lives of people who consider their occupations more purposeful; walking the mall in leather-soled shoes, silk socks, designer shirt, tie neatly knotted, three piece suit, a supplier of some useful commodity like gas that puts neon in the lighting system, without which our world would be a darker place or the inventor of some electronic device to improve the lives of the lame. Not to mention the doorman in his uniform. Sometimes my inattentive reading habit fuses with hallucinations such as when I saw a tall, beautiful girl standing by the window with a look of horror on her slender, pale face. Her dangling hands were hidden by shadows though she was holding something in that cold grasp. Could it be a dagger dripping blood ? Her long, black dress swept to the floor, a flower-shaped bodice, also black, hanging loosely to her breast. There was an old map of Europe behind her in the room that had once been used as a schoolroom before my grandparent’s time and in which it is said a murder happened. According to my grandfather, a woman killed her lover while he was sleeping on the couch. She ran the blade of his own fishing knife through his heart. Of all the apparitions that have come to me in the house, this was one I wanted to reach out and take hold of, to feel as real flesh and blood. Nothing happened for as soon as I moved more than an eye, she, like the others blended with the light leaving only the racket of birds in the dawn and the sun again like an old man putting a match to the stove.

There was a bumble bee trapped between the curtain and the glass of the bay window. He tumbled upside down and knocked his black and yellow paunch against the glass wriggling and struggling like a philosopher performing a belly dance. What a funny little chap, his beautiful colours, his antics, his buzzing like a kind of laughter.

Sooner or later I would have to don the uniform and take my flesh and bones back into the world, out the open window, reeling and rolling towards my place of work. I saw myself drawing nearer and nearer, then at last the building. I stepped inside and a corridor opened into the never-ending process of doors leading to rooms like brightly lit aquariums. The workers floated around from rooms into corridors where sabre-sharp light from fluorescent strips caressed the jugular and made a barely perceptible buzzing. Natural light from a window at the end of a corridor seemed very distant. I was naked here without my uniform. Much to my surprise people took little notice of me. They were too busy. Some old timers paused to say hello, was I back? Sally and Celine, well now, there you are, exit doors don’t open as easily without you, then swam again into dense waters, aquatic, deep-sea lips pouting. I came upon an old doorman, about eighty years old, seated on a canvas stool in a closet scraping acid from a burnt-out battery. Sit there, he said. Sorry, mind the cup. I’ll take it up now. Inside a nearby room we could hear a lady visitor addressing the staff, her voice sawing through the air and vocal chords burning brain tissue while thumping out a rhythm that sent discord into the universe. Through a crack in the blind I observed a girl transfixed by this voice. Buzz, buzz.

My hand dangling over the side of the divan touched the floor. I felt around for the packet of cigarettes, eyes on the bee. A car with a souped up engine roared by, drawing my attention to the incessant hum of traffic. Hydraulic brakes rent the air, along with the shriek of a broken fan belt, a faulty sprocket and there was the gunshot backfire of a Harley Davidson. I breathed in like a goldfish wondering was it possible, after all these years, to learn a new way of living and never to wear that uniform again? My needs are simple. I hardly eat these days, a bit of bread dipped in gravy, a mackerel at Easter. Is it possible that this is the end of my old life? Should I kneel and perform some kind of ceremony, a combustion of the uniform, perhaps. At that moment I came eye to eye with a blackbird who had lit on the windowsill. I could see a tiny heartbeat visible through jet black plumage. It had a lovely yellow beak of course and from where I stood the eyes seemed of a purple hue like a doll’s trying to freak me with a message from some other world.

An elderly woman called Isabel, who looks frail and light as air but is tough as teak, comes to clean the house. She found a dead crow in the back yard. She refused to touch it on some kind of superstitious grounds. It’s only a crow, I said. Yes, she said, but I think there is some kind of crow feud going on. There was a lot of action over the trees yesterday evening. She blessed herself. It’ll rot there before I touch it. Her favourite story is about how she found her husband dead on a chair, slumped forward and the cigar between his fingers still smouldering. The crown of his head was warm like sun-kissed clay but already the cold had begun to settle in his forehead. They laid him out in a room off the street. I caught a glimpse of his face propped up in the coffin, out of the corner of my eye. There was a beak-like quality about the nose. Dark strands of hair through more abundant white offered the beautiful sheen of a magpie. I blessed myself out of respect and pretended to mumble a prayer before moving quickly on. His people sat around on chairs near the walls, pale warriors, death-pale were they all. A sudden death, the best death, one of his relatives from County Clare said. The room led into the bar where he had presided for thirty years before a picture of the Cliffs of Moher, the most looked at cliffs in the world, as he often boasted, over a million years old and an inch lost every thousand years. It was there he proposed to Isabel and then they danced on the flagstones made of Liscannor Rock with the shape of eels in them. He pointed to a section of floor around the darts board, the stone transported from distant Clare to this corner of Cork City. Fondly, he spoke of his home in The Burren which can be seen from outer space. There was a picture of Black Head lighthouse on the back bar mirror behind him. It was said that the devil appeared to the women in his village in the form of a goat. He was very black, with enormous head and horns. He stood on his hind legs. His eyes burned like red hot coals. The women, all wearing head scarves, knelt before him and leaned as one towards their master, some with mouths open wide, some with supplicant expressions, some wringing their hands, others with eyes turned towards the earth. No-one ever knew for sure what the Devil said to the women because from the forty or more of them gathered there in the old churchyard, forty different versions of his speech were sprung. It is said that as the Devil addressed his congregation, an enormous jackdaw crooned to the accompaniment of a concertina played by an unknown girl in a black shawl, seated on a stool.

A man with an American accent and no teeth came to collect the broken satellite box. I wondered what happened to his teeth. He was jovial and full of energy dancing around on skinny legs in stove pipe jeans, said he hailed originally from New Jersey. There it is, I said, under the television. We’ve been customers since forever. I have about twenty calls to make, he said, you wouldn’t believe how many of these things are being recalled. He looked at me. What do you do yourself? I’m a lepidopterist, I said, for no particular reason, yesterday it was just a plain old entomologist. What’s that? I collect butterflies, I said. Again this practical technician did not react, every man to his own. I had an aunt in New Jersey, he said, in the country, who used to do that. She also collected moths. It’s all part of the game, I said. I’d love to stand here all day talking about it, he said, I really would, but time and tide waits for no man. He stuck the black box under his arm and with a toothless grin made a quick exit.

I got the dead crow up on the coal shovel and flung him into the bushes at the back, struck by the intricacy of his creation.

That evening a sudden cloudburst broke the sky and lightning ripped through the heavens followed by a mighty thunderclap directly overhead. I stood in the window looking at the rain smashing into the yard. Big drops sploshed into mucky pools and plonked onto the rusty ash bins, old bits of board, ladders and tool boxes. They rattled against the steel bucket where it had fallen during the night. The yard exhaled breaths of raw, mouldy-moss as the garden beyond breathed a botanical smell of damp earth. I didn’t want to go to the office. I no longer wanted to engage with the structures, the inevitable cliquishness and nepotism. If only the girl in black were to appear now at the door, plumage as drenched as any other bird, standing there, black dress glistening with rain drops, hair mashed into her head, that look of anguish in her eyes. I could tell her how she reminded me of a nun I met on the train on the way home from work once, not too long ago. The colour of her garb was the colour of the soot from the tunnel from which a sooty mist seeped as we waited in the station. The flecks of cloud in the sky were the colour of my shirt, the grey, misty horizon over the river was the tweed in my sleeve. I began to talk to the nun and tried to express the feeling that everything was old and worn. Do you believe that anything can be new, I asked her, you know at our age, can we find anything different or original ? She looked at me quizzically and a little sadly. To someone somewhere a radio is something new, she said. You could see that her heart was in Venezuela or Colombia or some place building mud huts with the Indians. Her crucifix was the colour of a silver mist over the Orinoco.

The train moved out of the station and sleep came over me like a hand over a glove. The corridors were filled with sleeping gas. A tiny corner of love glimmered beyond where the pterodactyls prowl. They will protect you if you play ball. No protests or arguments now. They’ll give you just about enough cheese for your bread if you follow the rules and if you are really adept, a turkey at Christmas. If I could stop the motion of the planet, would it be like a train coming to a halt, that creaking and shuddering of steel and timber and glass. There would be an instant of calm before I found myself at last dwelling in a new way on this earth, learning new tricks, neither forsaken, nor handsome-rich in the cesspools, or overly grief-struck, or counting the years until all debts are cleared.

The dangling hand now touched the floor again and my eyes opened, this time to the sound of something missing, no auditory hallucination but a palpable absence, the buzzing of the trapped bumble bee no longer there as he had escaped in his yellow and black uniform and was careening once more back to the hive, to his colleagues and to the Queen. Never have I felt so strange.

Edward Mc Whinney lives in Cork, Ireland.

Then she says, of e.e. cummings,
that when one resorts to numbering poems
instead of titling them, it’s clear that each
is merely the passage of time between tumblers
of whiskey, the most recent version
of an old trick for the acquisition of women,
and I am cockswollen enough to confess
that that is what poets do.
What is a word, after all, but rarefied desire,
abstracted possession ? And who would deny us this,
since in the world as it is we stand to gain so little ?
But I won’t refine my argument. I’m busy, far too busy,
with the shadows beneath her clavicles,
the subtle, laughing movement of her eyes.
I won’t discern from her arch voice, the delicate posture
to which she returns at the end of each marked gesture,
that she’s a well-intentioned but vain woman
entertaining herself with my helplessness before the idea
of my hand on the pricked skin of her pale thigh.
Every spr ing, in this city, another woman, not
beautiful, not advantageously educated or employed,
crouches on the 16 square feet of concrete
outside the patio doors of her studio apartment,
to plant mint and basil in the pot opposite the pot
of marigolds which the rabbits do not eat.
If I knew how to love, if I knew how to do right
in the world, I’d leave this woman with whom
I’ve been talking, this woman too beautiful,
too educated ever to suffer anything but malaise,
and cross the traffic-laden night, the littered
parking lots and battered lawns, to tuck a folded
epistle among the chewed but indomitable basil.
Instead I’m pointing out the seeds of the cottonwood,
borne on coats of fluff wherever the breeze
will take them: a slow, methodical propagation.
In the blare of the streetlight, they are the night’ s
metaphor for the mayfly hatch which doe s not happen here.
Ephemera, they’re called in the Latin, winged
for but one night, to breed and die.
One seldom hears, these days, of a plentiful hatch,
where bulbs are black with the singed dead, and cars
wreck with the slick of them on highways.
I suppose there are people, friends of mine even,
who do not know that the mayfly flies to any
nighttime light, which seven hundred years ago
could only have been the moon and stars
reflected on the surface of the water.
To fly to what shines, helplessly, in a world
which obsoletes your life’s one gesture.
You see, now, how easy it would have been?

Amy Groshek holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Alaska Anchorage. She works as an online learning designer and programmer, and lives in Ashland, Wisconsin. Read Single Life #1, #8 and more poems in Contrary by Amy Groshek.

I am a garden locked up.

Listen here.
I am not interested in being threaded through a needle or woven into your tapestry.
The eye is too fine.
My kneecaps are too wide.

I am a spring enclosed.

Intimacy means
being bruised all the time.
And someone else’s thumb is pressing pressing pressing watching the purple blood rise
up and swallow your cream skin whole.
(there is a net of twisted green veins beneath that no one will see until they cut me
open and untangle them from me)

I am a sealed fountain.

Look.
My fingernails are cold and hard as pebbles, unimpressive and angry.
I’ve used them too carve the dark circles under my eyes so you will know I work, I do the
fucking work, I’ve got it, okay, so don’t worry, I’ve got it.

Here is my ember laid bare.

My love is hot and infested with scorpions.
If I didn’t feel the desert inside me, how else would I know I’m alive -

Kate Douglas is a writer and performance artist living in New York City.

The Bird Sisters
Rebecca Rasmussen
Crown Publishers
2011

When they were teenagers, Milly hoped to marry and have children, while Twiss hoped to stand on the Continental Divide and “to be the world’s most interesting spinster.” Rebecca Rasmussen’s debut novel, The Bird Sisters, opens at least half a century later with Milly and Twiss living together in the house where they grew up. Perhaps, as Twiss concludes, they just didn’t want those other things enough.

The chapters of The Bird Sisters alternate, for the most part, between the present and the past, with echoing transitions creating the feeling of time as a river that flows both ways. At the end of Chapter 10, the older Twiss muses on the unsatisfactory nature of language, how,

a fine sunset, for example, was more than fine. There were no words, or Twiss couldn’t find them anymore, for the way the colors made her feel.

Chapter 11 begins,

When Twiss was a girl, language was language as a sunset was a sunset…Words were vehicles that got her where she wanted to go.

Rasmussen confines the present to one day, which begins with Milly and Twiss finishing their morning tea, includes the arrival of a family with a wounded goldfinch, and ends with Milly ringing the cowbell for supper. The bird sisters, so dubbed by a reporter, have spent their lives taking care of injured birds. That goldfinch serves as a cue to the reader that we’re with the older sisters rather than the younger ones, a cue that is often necessary as the past refuses to stay neatly in its assigned chapters but instead permeates the memories of the older Twiss and Milly. Unfortunately, however, the past in these present chapters often hangs on action that does little to advance the narrative or intensify the drama.

The particular past that intrudes into the lives of the older bird sisters is the summer Twiss was fourteen; Milly, sixteen; and their ugly cousin Bett, visiting from Deadwater, eighteen. Milly and Twiss, despite their somewhat simple delineations as girly girl and tomboy, become fully alive through Rasmussen’s writing, each page a joy to read. The problem, however, arises at the end of each page, when there seems to be no reason to turn it. The Bird Sisters lacks narrative drive, with the questions it does manage to raise—why is the father living in the barn, what is wrong with Bett, will they have enough money to bring Father Rice back, will Milly get married—seeming insufficient incentive to lift the hand.

Still, the writing sparkles with details. At the end of the summer in a borrowed dress, “a handful of sizes too large for her with sunbursts of yellow lace embroidered from the hem to the neckline,” Twiss says, “Isn’t it amazing…It’s like happiness can be sewn.” Earlier in the novel, when Twiss was asked to draw happiness, she “drew a flock of all different types of birds—red, blue, gray, green—taking flight…” She said it felt like freedom. And throughout the novel are echoes of home: Bett, whose parents divorce while she visits her cousins, knows that “home wasn’t going to be home anymore.” For a childless couple, having Twiss come by for a visit “makes home feel more like home.” And for Milly, whose beau doesn’t show up at the fair, “home, even though she knew the route, seemed unreachable now.”

In the only scene to appear twice, both in Milly’s and Twiss’s point of view, Twiss, who doesn’t wear dresses, wears that borrowed dress, and Milly, who doesn’t get angry (“You could cut off her leg and she’d still ask if she could get you anything.”), shoves Twiss to the ground. Mere hours later, life—in the form of an errant father and a cousin in trouble—complicates matters and unlikely choices are made.

Looking back over a life is a privilege and “one of the few marvelous things about aging:”

Twiss could travel from here to there without having to go anywhere at all. Her memories were her suitcases, and her mind her passport…

In The Bird Sisters, a novel that begins with the present but is flooded with the past, that backward look reveals not only the young selves and youthful hopes of two characters but also the telling choices that were made when dreams bumped up against life.

Cynthia Newberry Martin is Contrary’s Review Editor.

Otherwise Known As the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews 1989-2010
Geoff Dyer
2011
Graywolf

No writer I know occupies as many rooms in the storied compound of arts criticism as Geoff Dyer. In Graywolf’s mix of Dyer’s two British-published anthologies (one in 1999; the other, 2010), the peripatetic author traverses photography, film, music, and literary criticism; he also plumbs the well of the personal essay.

Dyer, who’s written three well-reviewed novels, is a world traveler, autodidact, and essayist. He’s a master of the non-expert essay: self-examining pieces and books that use, among other things, photography, D.H. Lawrence, and the Battle of the Somme as his way in. He’s disciplined and ambitionless, an unrepentant time-waster, avoiding, he says proudly, all hard work. Dyer takes his time discovering—and taking apart—his interests, contrasting invention and analysis in each piece he writes.

Growing up working class, Dyer saw mundane, low-paying jobs ravage his parents. In revolt, he’s milked the British dole, refused to teach, refused to have kids. After many girlfriends, he married and settled in London, whose cultural vigor is various enough to contain him. He juggles freedom and boredom. Not without cost. He sometimes envies those with “real jobs.” But, like Rimbaud and Kerouac, his burden is light: “little money, lots of time.”

If we let it and if we do the work, time will grow our passions—such is the trail Dyer’s nonfiction follows, where, with walking-stick, he ambles on the path as much as off. His dallying personality animates the work: he’s ribald, defiant, egocentric—a drunken boat that channels no ideology or political gripe. He’s one “who’s interested in everything”—this, Susan Sontag’s definition of the author.

If there’s an exemplary essay, it’s “Sex and Hotels.” “A hotel room is horny,” Dyer writes, “because it is clean: the sheets are clean, the toilets are clean, everything is clean, and this cleanliness is a flagrant inducement to—what else?—filthiness.” The cleaner the room, the more “it cries out to be violated.” Hotel rooms are “virginal,” he says; what pleasure to tear open the soap box or break the paper strap on the toilet, what fun to “take” the room.

In “The Moral Art of War,” Dyer heralds those who’ve produced book-length nonfiction about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. These firefights have, in the West, bred little poetry or fiction. Who needs to invent anything when unraveling the actual deceit, absurdity, and killing fields of these wars ? And as Dyer points out, “it is difficult to see what the novelist might bring to the table except stylistic panache . . . and the burden of unnecessary conventions.” A novelist’s recalibration of experience via an internalized, fatalistic character is limited to (and limits) that character. By contrast, the new war-based nonfiction seeks a group consciousness—soldier, leader, politician, reporter, author—popping among many minds, plaguing us with the stupidity of war. The best books, by Dexter Filkins and Sebastian Junger, dramatize the hopelessness of the U.S. crusade against terror.

Elsewhere in these sixty-three pieces, Dyer is inspired by a dozen little-known photographers—one, Jacques Henri Lartigue: “If you look hard enough a photo will always answer your question—even if that answer comes in the form of further questions.” An appraisal typical of Dyer’ s probative nature.

Equally compelling is his essay on John Cheever’s journals, in which his messy insights reveal the man’s true art: “For Cheever, the shaping demands of the short story, his acquired habits of fictive resolution, all the aspects of hard-won craftsmanship that stood him in good stead at the New Yorker, worked against his being able to plumb the complex depths of his being.”

In  “Is Jazz Dead?” Dyer acknowledges that rock legends tour the same tunes forever while few critics decry their musicianship. But if jazz legends replay their standards, they’re dismissed. It’s warranted, Dyer notes, because unlike rock, the best jazz is “changeless and constantly changing.” We’re spoiled by the consistent inconsistency of a Keith Jarrett, whose improvisations make past and present styles interact and evolve.

Dyer’s self-entangling rhetoric signals his debt to Roland Barthes: that we discover art’s meaning in how it bewitches us. Turning the Lawrence adage on its head, Dyer trusts his response to the work more than he trusts the teller or the tale. Self-gratification, yes—but that’s the critic’s choice.

Thomas Larson is the author of The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” and The Memoir and the Memoirist.

And Yet They Were Happy
Helen Phillips
Leapfrog Press
2011

In her first book, And Yet They Were Happy, Helen Phillips doesn’t begin at the beginning, or even, as some writers do, at the end. Instead, she selects themes—some sacred and some intimate, some ordinary and some fantastical, some political and some apocalyptic—to weave a complex tale of one couple’s life journey into a series of miniature, interconnected stories.

Phillips divides her book into nineteen segments, such as “the weddings,” “the fights,”  “the droughts,” “the monsters,” “the wives,” and “the envies.” Within each section are numbered chapters where the absurd mingles with the mundanity of human relationships. Intensity permeates every line of the text in these short chapters that depict variant imaginings of the same theme.

In “fight #2:”

She becomes a maple tree. He taps her for syrup. She poisons her sap.  He falls beside a stream. She becomes a stream.  He vomits in the stream.

While in “fight#8:”

The kitchen. Pan on the stovetop. Unsweetened cocoa powder, sugar, five magical ingredients. Pour in water, stir until it becomes a spicy paste. Add milk—yes, whole milk, it has not been easy lately, we need milk that will save us.

The commonplace and the magical smoothly intertwine in the narrative to create an inexact and multi-faceted portrait of this couple’s life across time, relationships, and physical locales.  The stories play out the title’s subversion of “happily ever after,” charting how the now-united two survive obstacles both understandable and unexpected. Unicorn-hunters and ghosts appear in the wife’s attempts to navigate her marriage and its aftermath.  Strange creatures appear in the forests; monsters stalk children from televisions, and magicians in hot-air balloons fill the skies above the couple’s home.

Dystopia also haunts the setting of the novel, which hints throughout of oppressive forces and a fractured world.  In “regime #7,” we read:

They order us to grow raspberries on our windowsills. We don’t know what motivates this law. We do know it’s been a long time since supermarkets carried raspberries; our children wouldn’t recognize them.

And in “failure #7,” the narrator and her husband visit a museum where

we come upon the Hall of North American Environment, but between ourselves we call it the Hall of Nostalgia for Things We Ourselves Have Never Seen.

In Phillips’s world, the veil between the fantasy and the reality regularly tears apart. Even the characters are difficult to classify; one moment recognizable and the next, not. In the concluding section on “the helens,” the narrator is a character named Helen Phillips, a young woman who has an affair with Bob Dylan and also:

a wife who had transformed from a human into something else. The plaque beneath the cage bears only her first name: Helen.

Employing a character with the same name as the author in a fictional work allows this final section to speak not only to the complexity and depth of the work itself but also to the issue of the author as an element of the story, as well as to the ongoing literary conversation on the thin line between fiction and nonfiction.

In stories marked by a shattering of the wall between concrete and ephemeral, a constant shifting of fates and realities, and a core truth that nothing is what it seems, And Yet They Were Happy chronicles two lives bound together for better and worse. Through a realistic kaleidoscope of perspectives, it delicately probes how two people survive in a world that includes large terrors and small unicorns, a world with which we are all familiar.

Harriett Green is the English and Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Northerners
Seth Abramson
New Issues Poetry & Prose
2011

Certain poems evoke a feeling of turning inward and focusing a scope on particulars, so that the world seems to stop, and the leaf, the candle, the frost are the center of the universe. Other poems create a sense in the reader of breadth and magnitude. One of the fascinating things about Seth Abramson’s newest book, Northerners, is that his poetry often vacillates abruptly between the two perspectives. The result feels, at times, like the equivalent of a literary jolt. At the end of this vacillation, moreover, there frequently emerges a synthesis of diverse elements and images.

Abramson worked as a Staff Attorney for the New Hampshire Public Defender for more than half a decade before turning to poetry (Northerners is his second book; his first is 2009’s The Suburban Ecstasies). And the precision in his writing feels reminiscent of a well-reasoned argument. In “What I Have,” he develops a definition of the sense of touch, drawing wonderfully from both rational and mystical realms of experience:

And there is less water in the world
than a famous woman once said, and I know that,
and that the stars in the river
also are real I also know, for they disappear also
and refuse to be touched. And I have touched

bare things, and it works—
it can be the sole unbraided moment in a life—

Later in the poem, he writes: “And the worse of all is anything/ that stays as it is// when touched.” The cause-and-effect relationship in this poem reveals itself over and over throughout the book, as does the repetition of words within close proximity, driving the poet’s points further and further. At the end of “What I Have,” Abramson lands on a synthesis of concepts; he writes, speaking of human beings:

And what is it they leave behin d?
Perhaps not the meaning of time,
                                   but the time of meaning,
and the fact that whatever happens, tomorrow
                   will change it.

In the poem “The Commons,” such a synthesis of opposites also arises; the poem begins with the lovely lines: “Before I worshipped down/ I worshipped up./ Up were the open hands/ which were clouds…” The poet then ends with the thought that what is up is down, too: “I had everything here// that was there. I had two great hands/ and the wisdom/ to lower my guard.” These lines add emotional eloquence to the cerebral weight of the volume.

Northerners is also filled with numerous indentations that nudge its words eastward—many of them the standard distance from the left margin that signifies a new paragraph in prose. They suggest the shadow of a prose structure imprinted onto the poems.

With this volume, Abramson has given us fifty poems that reveal a keen set of observations about compassion, consciousness, and justice. Many of the poems feature men as their subjects, another beguiling dimension. In “Geography,” Abramson writes, “I could forget that a man who matters/ to someone/ matters to someone/ everywhere.”

Yet, as you can see, the poems deeply reflect universal human questions. While the language within these poems can appear dense and not overly yielding at first, its wisdom and familiar repetitions offer comfort. Readers will want to peek at them again and again to see whether their perceptions of Abramson’s lines have changed with time. In Northerners’ poetic world, it seems, indeed, that everything changes when seen and touched.

Associate Editor Shevi Berlinger teaches English at the City University of New York and is at work on a book of poetry. She also runs a food conservation project, Egg in a Box.

You Know When the Men Are Gone
Siobhan Fallon
Amy Einhorn Books
2011

When war zone landscapes flash across the news, some of us, safe in our living rooms, worry about American soldiers overseas. But how often do civilians consider the impact of lengthy deployments and anticipated homecomings on the families left to commune in a “simulacrum of friendship” on an army base deprived of the men?

Siobhan Fallon ignites our consideration through the interconnected stories in her debut collection, You Know When the Men Are Gone.

The military infrastructure–for example, grass of a certain height–at Fort Hood, Texas­ (where the author resided through a series of her husband’s deployments) shapes the emotional interiority of Fallon’s fictional characters in a culture that waits for news. Eight stories put regular-life blues–loneliness, cancer, infidelity–through boot camp, as only stories set against the backdrop of thin-walled army domesticity can.

In her title story, “You Know When the Men are Gone,” the sudden post-deployment loneliness of food shopping for one becomes a psychological battleground for First Calvary Division wife, Meg Brady.

She walked the meat aisle, passing her husband’s favorites: baby back ribs, pork chops, bacon-wrapped filet mignons. She reached out, touching the cold, bloody meat through the plastic. The raw flesh both horrified and mesmerized, and she wondered if a human being would look the same… she would not think such things after Jeremy was home.”

While nothing is the same when the men are gone, deployment is the one thing that everyone has in common. When one officer is ordered to stay home, in the story “Remission,” his wife experiences a bittersweet sense of relief:

There was something unseemly about John being home when all the other husbands were not. Not that anyone was overtly jealous of the Roddys, for crying out loud, Ellen had cancer. And yet John being home made her different from everyone else in a way that even the cancer did not.

It is through Ellen’s experience among her domestic ranks that we come to understand the plight of John on the periphery of his.

More than half of the stories are told from the perspective of the wives, but three of the eight are told from the point of view of the enlisted men. (Fallon’s collection is not about female enlistees.) In “The Last Stand,” Kit Murphy arrives home wounded to discover that his wife has filed for divorce during his absence. Upon reflection, he begins to comprehend her desire for a different life:

He leaned into the wet sink and tried to take the pressure off his injured foot. He stared at his wife. For thirteen months he had dreamed of their home together, the meals she had waiting for him, the hot running water, the refrigerator always full…He had forgotten that Helena hated the apartment on Timmier Avenue, how she had to use a pair of pliers to get the dishwasher to work, how the shower leaked water from one end of the bathroom to the other, how she tried to get a dog-walking business going and failed.

In “Leave,” Chief Warrant Officer Nick Cash, a master at uncovering the truth during interrogations in Bagdad, suspects that his wife is having an affair. Unbeknownst to his family and in lieu of spending the brief furlough visiting his young daughter, he stages a reconnaissance in the basement of his home.

Nick understood the slippery nature of his task. Sources lied. Eyewitnesses missed crucial facts. Even the intel experts stateside regularly screwed up. So when his buddy offered to check on Trish more often, he told him no…The only thing to do was to find out for himself…

Although these stories are linked through character and place, the theme of unrelenting separation is what most unifies the collection. Deployment, re-assignment, divorce, re-deployment, and potentially, death–all threaten the foundation of familial relationships and loom larger than the war itself.

Jodi Paloni is crafting a collection of linked stories while pursuing her MFA in Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She blogs at Rigmarole.

A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet
Eavan Boland
Carcanet Press Ltd (UK) and W.W. Norton & Company (USA)
2011

A woman poet, according to Eavan Boland, needs to resolve her relation to poetic tradition. We need to map the past, “not to learn from it, but to change it;” if we don’t, “it will change us.” Rather than intellectualise the past, Boland instructs women poets to “eroticize” it—in so doing they will be given a second map, one of their own becoming. This intriguing stream of thought is the central argument of A Journey with Two Maps, an argument that all too quickly runs underground revealing this attractive book as having something of an identity crisis.

Boland opens with elements of autobiography: the search for her own map. In her “Letter to a Young Woman Poet,” she ends with an element of instruction. What lies between is a series of unconnected essays that appear to have been written over a period of years and brought together in an attempt to fit her theme. The lives and the poetry of Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath, are examined together with less well-known poets like Elisabeth Langgässer and Charlotte Mew. The essays are all interesting in themselves, but they do not strengthen or illustrate the arguments on becoming.

Boland’s own major challenge in developing as a poet was the “hard to formulate” and “radical doubts” that beset her during her early years of becoming when she was finding her place within an almost entirely male province, possessed as it was of an almost entirely male history: “an archive of silences.” While the autobiographical material is engaging, it is brief and, to a degree, withheld. Boland describes her years as a young mother and poet, yet babies neither scream nor cause maternal ambiguity, creative frustration does not explode, and Boland is never overrun by the contradictions and complexities of being human. “I loved the sensory world of neighbourly routine and small children. The first delicate smell of an Irish spring: which was like crisp white linen.” There’s a safety to her tone, which distances Boland from the insecurities and pressures that most women poets face.

Early in the book, she writes:

And here I could leave it, this story. As a personal narrative; as a chronicle of reading and writing. As an unremarkable account of choices and changes of heart. I could abandon this account, fixed and printed as it is with the image of an indecisive reader and unconvinced poet; a wom an shifting here and there between ideas of art and systems of authorship. I could leave it were it not for one thing: The story changed.

While Boland’s poems advanced beyond these boundaries to leave us lucid directions of becoming, A Journey with Two Maps never really escapes from the enclosure of the above quotation. Restricted by her natural discretion, weighed down by her over-focus on doubt, along with the essays that do not appear to have been written specifically for this book, Boland fails to fully open the Pandora’s box of her argument. We are not given clear examples of what she means by ‘eroticising’ the past and are only shown a glimmer of the hope that the elusive second map might contain.

A Journey with Two Maps is an engaging collection of essays that is overshadowed by our hunt for Boland’s central argument and our hunger for answers to the questions seeded by the book’s provocative title. The reader is left with the sense that the book was created to suit a publisher’ s predatory in stincts. Women poets drawn like moths to the lamp-like suggestion that this book will empower them in their becoming are likely to be disappointed. The same material under less ambitious banners would have made for more rewarding reading.

Grace Wells debut collection When God Has Been Called Away to Greater Things won the 2011 Rupert and Eithne Strong Best First Collection Award and was shortlisted for the London Festival Fringe New Poetry Award 2010.

photo: Anthony Majanlahti

The Soldiers

Today, soldiers will be born
in white hospitals or beside drainage ditches,
on lonely farms or in stalled cars,
their mothers and fathers transformed
into makers of soldiers,
whether from an act of lawful union
(a Paris hotel, the window open, stars)
or the brutal dream-fever of rape
(huts and fields burning,
the lowing of slaughtered cows).
Their faces wiped of blood,
the soldiers born this day
settle into that first sleep,
as deep as death, swaddled
in blankets of fresh cotton or dank wool.
L ater, they w ake with a hunger
that lasts their whole lives.
Somewhere a skyscraper shimmers,
ripples shatter the blackness of a well,
and the day swells with a clarity
of light, of purpose,
neither clouds nor birds c an comprehend
as they p ass through endless sky,
but that, somewhere,
stirs a newborn dictator deep in his heart,
making him shake his rattle greedily.

<< Burning Sappho                     What the Classics Teach>>

Temple Cone is the author of two books of poetry, The Broken Meadow and No Loneliness. An associate professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, he lives in Annapolis with his wife and daughter. Visit him at templecone.com.

photo: Andrew Bossi

What the Classics Teach

For thousands of years, they have searched
fresh parchment or yellowed pages,
human eyes bright with youth
or bleary from too many nights
reading by dim candle or lamplight,
seeking answers to ancient questions:
how to stab a man, how to die shouting,
divide a community, collapse
under the dark madness of revelation,
how to run from a burning city
while bearing your father
on a back weary from combat,
your household gods in your pocket,
your child clinging to your arm
as you rush to the safe harbor,
how to lose your wife,
while always learning how empires begin
in the loss of one’ s homeland,
in exile, in savagery.

<< The Soldiers                    Burning Sappho>>

Temple Cone is the author of two books of poetry, The Broken Meadow and No Loneliness. An associate professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, he lives in Annapolis with his wife and daughter. Visit him at templecone.com.

by Quinn Dombrowski

Burning Sappho

“you burn me”
~ Sappho fr.38, trans. Anne Carson

First, understand
no one felt regret.
This tenth Muse,
whose limbs loosened
at a touch, melting
swift as tallow
into tears, sang
of slatterns and sluts,
made love a city pimp,
tricked out Psyche
in cheapest rouge.
She plucked hearts
easily as lyre strings,
mimicked, mocked
our secret hungers,
baring them to the light.
Even her papyri,
inked with characters
whose couplings
made the world
words, were flimsy
and tempting
as a woman’s lace,
her scent everywhere,
her lovers, rejected
or forgotten,
clutching still at this prize
raiment and the body
echoing within.
It took days to gather
all her books.
Outside the library,
a harbor breeze
stirred the hems of robes,
breathed dust underfoot.
The bundles caught fast,
collapsed in sighs
of feathery smoke
with a s ingeing flash
whose memory lasts
longer than its burning.

<< What the Classics Teach                    The Soldiers>>

Temple Cone is the author of two books of poetry, The Broken Meadow and No Loneliness. An associate professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, he lives in Annapolis with his wife and daughter. Visit him at templecone.com.

Begin:

today you are born, the universe is born, whatever that is is born and has its purpose.

Flowers are born, sea life and mountain are born, the positions of the moon are born, the deer clumsy in the meadow is born—

it is falling away from its mother, it tries to stand but struggles as the springtime and all its birth is born.

In time an end is born, the culmination of the butterfly’s short life is born, the death of the sheep who lived through twenty sheers is born, the agave’s sprout high into the summer is born, the churning of the hurric ane is born and in a bedroom, at this very moment, an end of innocence is born.

Fear the summer cold that leaves you feeling life is leaving you behind, laughing until it’s lost its breath.

It’s struggling to gather new air, this air is new, it is the newest air.

Nick Courtright lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and son. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, and a chapbook, Elegy for the Builder’s Wife, was released in 2011 by Blue Hour Press. You can find more of his writing here.

(after Lorine Niedecker)

In the high weeds, I’d bite. Snap the little sticks,
bash a nest in the dying grass. That would be me,
bearing down among daisies and the branched broomrape.

No pity for a babe mean as that—no way to hold her,
no way to hold her back. There she’d go—all bad teeth and flash,
racing in her red swimming suit just out there past

the clothesline pole. Every Monday, wash-day, that’s her rest.
Read something, write. She’d turn instead to hunting game—
rabbit, chipmunk, vole. Can’t blame her for her bite.

Here she’d come again, all up and down in rows,
the air afloat with fur like foxtail chaff or pollen
from the paper birch. Yellow jackets in a storm beh ind her,

a cloud of hard words, disturbed. She wouldn’t feel them,
couldn’t hear, aside from her own voice, any whirr or bird.
Deaf’ s a child I would love, all the same, crouched there

among the destroyed flowerbeds. The fire in her, all that verve.
The crooked paths she’d dog all day and never hear love calling.
If she did, still never angle, never even swerve.

Photo by Niklas Sjöblom via flickr

February.

All night a storm raged like World War Three. Thunder and lightning rent the heavens.

Wind shook the foundations and rain flooded the chutes. At first light, tankers, trawlers and freighters were still bouncing on harbour waters. Then, slowly, it subsided, shadows of cloud drifting over sea and earth. The clearance after a storm brings the birth of a blue sky, easing through a break in the cloudbank, to roll in over coast and city. The tide was out and a white mass of gulls had come to rest on the mudflats like a constellation fallen to earth for the day. A great flock of dark-winged geese or duck flew from one side of the bay to the other, making fabulous patterns, dipping and rising as though orchestrated by remote control, each goose or duck an essential part of the rhythm of the unit, each one its own part to play, not a dissident soul amongst them. The garden exhaled a moist breath onto the air already thick with vapour. Birds had deserted soaked nests and branches to dry feathers on wire and fence while discovering the hopeful tune that announced the coming of Spring.

I stood in the bay window of the second floor living room, a moment I could dissolve into, leaving all material concerns. It is still possible to live poetically on this earth, despite the stock brokers, gold mines and oil merchants. It is possible to dream of being rescued by a God, lifted above the bungling of humans to commune with higher spirits, fairies and leprechauns. If for days on end I did not go out at all, living modestly on a diet of potatoes and fish, if for days on end I was not present at all, the uniform undisturbed on the hallstand downstairs, if for days on end—but just then doorbell sounded its shrill challenge through the house. I would have ignored it but its persistence made me go down. There was a travelling salesman with a black suitcase. He was in the front room before I could think, Mungo sniffing at the turned up pleats on his trousers. He had a set of tools in the suitcase; drills, spanners, pliers, screwdrivers and wrenches. These implements, all with padded, red rubber handles looked so shiny and pristine that it seemed a shame to think of them one day, twisted and rusty and dripping with burnt oil. The sun shone brightly in the window as he laid his wares out on a blue velvet cloth. I’m not much good at D.I.Y., I said, though my grandfather was a boiler maker. He paid no heed, talking nine to the dozen like a man suffering from hyper tension. His clothes reeked of cigarettes. I stood in the sunlight and admired the array of technical equipment. If only I could use them, I thought. There was much that needed repairing in the house. Well, said the travelling salesman? It’s just that I’m not very good with my hands, I said. There’s more than one way to skin a rabbit, he said, leaving me at a loss to see the connection but already he was placing his tools back in the case with an air of resignation. Can I offer you a cup of tea, I said? No, no, not at all he said, have to keep on the move, thanks very much. Once, I said, I considered acupuncture to make me more skillful. The travelling salesman looked at me with a strange grimace on his harried face. I’ll tell you what, he said, I’ll give you a free sample and he placed a beautiful screwdriver with the trademark red handle on the piano. He looked at me sadly. His right eye was bloodshot. Lovely place you have here he said, it’s just that I know these old houses always need things done.

I stepped past the uniform on the hallstand, back up to the second floor living room where I failed to recapture the mood of earlier, no, my head began to rock again as though the storm was being replayed on giant screens, in HD, in there. I looked around at the ramshackle disorder in the room; desk and table, a mahogany wardrobe, a divan, my grandmother’s armchair with the elbow rest where she played Patience and an armoire in which family heirlooms like birth certs and death certs, photo albums, bundles of postcards held together by elastic bands, medals and stamp collections lay gathering dust. If for days on end— here we go again. I stepped to the wardrobe and pulled out my grandfather’s fawn suit and decided after all to take a turn around town, to loosen the limbs and steady the nerves. The old suit seemed cut for me, even my posture fell with that of it’s original owner.

I felt like a seagull floating in from the lighthouse cliff to have a look at these bipeds in their extraordinary habitat. I saw a chef with an exceedingly tall, white hat smoking outside a bar. I saw a young boy chasing a girl and when he caught her, he held her from behind, placing his left hand on her left wrist and his right hand on the hem of her mini-skirt while she shrieked with joy. She was wearing red high-heeled shoes and white ankle socks. I saw a chubby, little girl with a tennis racquet tapping a green ball against the footpath. She was wearing a pink coat and a black cap on her yellow curls. She had short arms and a disproportionately large head. A man wearing green scrubs like a surgeon crossed my path carrying a large timber plank. A tall, elegant lady passed in a long black coat. She was talking to herself and gesturing with her right hand as if to someone nearby. I noticed that her fingers were particularly long and slender. I leaned against a doorway for a minute and heard the sound of someone practising a violin, not very well. It came from overhead. Then the music stopped and I heard a loud slap followed by the wail of a child. My head felt dizzy, every whisper so meaningful and yet everything so meaningless. I saw the people passing as I’d never seen them before, like they were swimming in blood and around each one a penumbra made up of ghosts, a vortex of spirits like an invisible halo determining their movements. I would have begun to run but I could hardly walk. I took a short cut through an alleyway, skirting around broken glass. Steam poured up out of a cellar grating. I crossed back onto our street and stowed safely once more in the second floor living room, tried to rediscover the earlier mood. If for days on end…I don’t know for how long I sat there. Does anything really exist? The storm seemed real enough. The birds on the wire, the leftover piece of fried cod stuck to the pan, the travelling salesman, now there I had to pause, maybe I had imagined him. The screwdriver was where he’d left it though, as real as any weapon to be used in the night against intruders, the rubber handle, its undeniable weight, the elongated shaft of steel. At that moment another shrill blast of the doorbell ripped through the house. This time it was a neighbour collecting for the renovation of the church steeple. She reminded me of someone I couldn’t place just then. I noted that she had prominent teeth that looked like they could chew through the black, iron bars on the gates of the church and work their way around to the railings. Are you off work, she asked and a kind of panic clutched at my heart, when it came to me that she had the face of a whore I’d seen on a trip to Rome? I had seen her very briefly looking in at me through the window of a pizzeria but it was long enough to leave a lasting impression, a mad face and horse’s teeth. The previous day I’d had my pocket picked on a tram while on my way to the Estadio Olimpico for a Serie A match between Lazio and Verona, victim of the oldest trick in the book, the crowded tram, the wallet stuffed full like a little hay stack, the stepping down onto the street, the realisation. It was as inevitable as having missed it, the score in the match should be Lazio 5, Verona 3. As I stood on the street with my hands to my head, a beautiful woman appeared before me and said in English; Are you Albright? Albright, I said? No, I said are you all right. Is anything the matter? My wallet was stolen on the tram. Was your passport in the wallet? What about credit cards? Luckily, I said, they were in the safe in my hotel room, just cash. The Police, she said ? She began to open her purse. No, no, I said and began to wander off across Largo di Torre Argentina, in the general direction of my hotel which I didn’t reach until some hours later when it was already evening. It was across the road from the Temple of Minerva a few corners from Termini Station. I noted the whores as always, circling these seedy streets and the pimps in leather jackets with daggers for eyes, hanging around ill-lit corners. The gentleman at the desk, elegantly clad in a perfectly cut suit which reminded me of my own uniform, stiff with rigour mortis on the hallstand back home, smiled as he handed me the key to the room. From one side of the little elevator you could see out on a dimly lit, deserted street, cars parked at all angles. The hotel room was spacious with a great double bed. To get the electricity on you had to shove a card into a special slot inside the door. The little fridge didn’t work. I lay in the dark with the hotel sign flashing on and off outside the window and suddenly before me I saw the face of the pick-pocket. I smiled at him as I leant across to click my ticket in the machine. I saw a thin, tense face with twitching nervous eyes, wholly focused on his work. I turned on the tv and watched the many highlights of the match I had missed and then fell into a sleep full of screams and terrors. Rome. Roma. The eyeless statues of Roman Emperors frowned on me from every vantage. They stand on bleak, white marble slabs with huge heads made of white clay, enormous holes for nostrils.

In the morning I took a shower. The nozzle crackled and sputtered. I walked along until I came to a long underpass. This is what it was like stepping out of imagination into reality, this place of legend. A group of men followed me into the underpass. I glanced back a little nervously. I crossed a piazza into the student district of San Lorenzo, cobbled streets that twisted and turned in all directions. Tubercular beggars, some of them blind, encroached on the path. I wondered when they’d eaten or what they’d eaten. I had my little wad of money for that day’s spending safely stuck down my sock. I wandered around until lunch-time, then stepped into a pizzeria. It was rough and ready with timber tables covered in red and white check cloths and fat candles with lava like overflow of wax stuck in crude, ceramic candle holders on every table. The busy waiters ran enormous pizzas from the open oven to the tables. I squeezed into a seat near a window. The waiter brought me a mug of birra that tasted good enough to lower four with one of those enormous pizzas. He told me that his name was Ismael and that the chef, his uncle, was Pepe. That was when I saw the face of the whore in the window, horse’s teeth, wasted, yellow skin, black, sunken eyes gazing at me as I raised my head out of the cheesy pizza. And though they floated there no more than a moment her features were strong enough to leave an everlasting imprint on my imagination.

If, for days on end— I wrote, for the hundreth time that day, then nothing else, my head rumbling with unfinished sentences, incoherent thoughts as I wandered the house, hollow now and falling apart, silent passageways and corridors, rooms populated by the dead who sometimes come back to life without warning. In a disused back room, for example, I came upon my grandfather, the boiler-maker and boat builder and I was forced deep into the recesses of memory to find a valid connection, something in him that is continued in my blood. It is dusk. His feet are firmly planted on the rug that is filled with burn holes, sparks from the fire and ash from his cigarette. He is so still that I think he is asleep but when I look I see that his eyes are open and he is staring at the patch of sky visible through the window. He liked to tell us that his father had been executed by the British. They accused him of writing seditious pamphlets though in truth he was taken from his home at random. If he had written anything at all my grandfather said, it was nothing more than some melancholy love poems. He also liked to relate a Celtic myth in which a bird thrusts itself on a thorn in order to sing its most beautiful song. I now noticed that, his wife, my grandmother was standing in the bay window, a lady with a pale, oval face gazing out at time falling rapidly like rain into the tide. Two swans flew by, a spectacular sight. With her, I felt in communion with them, out over the water on heavy wings, half here, half somewhere unknown, something from the heavens calling, voices from outer space playing tricks on us.

I retreated to the bedroom where I began to doze in my vest and t-shirt and woollen pullover, under two duvets, the moon like a yellow lamp held aloft by human hand, shining in the window and they executed me again before dawn. The sky was dark above the church steeple. We were marched to a piece of waste ground outside the town and stood before an embankment lit up by enormous kerosene lanterns. There were eight soldiers in the firing squad. They were in full Winter uniform with sabres hanging from heavy military coats. They wore tall, black hats and on their backs, knapsacks for the march that looked like pillows strapped to their coats, holding provisions or extra ammunition. Already they had executed at least three of my comrades and there were others in line, some looking on with horrified expressions on ghastly pale faces, others covering their eyes with their hands. There was a Franciscan Monk in a green cassock spilling holy water on the corpse at my feet from which a stream of blood flowed. I was next in line, wearing a white shirt, open at the neck and yellow trousers, not given time to dress properly before being dragged from my home. I fell to my knees, arms spread in a spectacular motion of appeal and a look of horror in my little dark eyes as my head strained towards the weapons as a moth is drawn to the flame, eight bayoneted rifles no more than three feet away.

~

Edward Mc Whinney lives in Cork, Ireland. Find more of his stories here.

Image by Sébastien Maury

Then, there was the next time, the last time, the one time when things became grand enough to unfurl all sense of belonging, a hearty red ribbon, carried behind, blowing in deep ripples, red, yes red, always red.

What was red? She never knew, and never wanted to know about red—the red of roses or blood, all easy fairy tale red, how many clits of red was she supposed to have licked, washed, rubbed with a silty hand? Wh at could red be without all its being red. She wondered this the way she wondered over a pause in conversation, or a crack in a perfectly thick, white cloud…

Red lipstick stuck on red lips all sticking red, clot glob red, on lips, too vaginal to be anything but obvious.

This is what the feminists said: roll red lips, roll, red of blood, of power, of coming into the body’s own red places, the hovering miasmic shifting of red into red into red. Little Red Riding Hood. Slut + Victim–hedonist {2x desire+2y abnegation) = this girl, that girl, no girl, all girl, take out the e and make a y and there is a womyn there in the womb of this woman.

She hated these cloying interpretations, these witch loving, period worshipping pagan feministos, who rose with the sun and danced in moon circles around huge bonfires that licked at their offerings, their sage and their smudging, their blood tasting ways. Would she even ever want to bite into a placenta? Shouldn’t they be dumped, after all, into buckets at the feet of rubber booted doctors who attend these birthing women?

Here was an anchor: the weight of herself, her feet, best feet ever, stuck in sand, water flowing over and over and over until toes disappeared, and she could imagine herself an ocean rock, a statue, a solid, impenetrable piece of something that rushed and wound and flowed and creased and breathed with such slow, slow rhythms.

Here was another way to look at it: The brain refuses the stillness of stillness, all stillness is born of still-birthing, which is dead, really, there still-born, not dead-born, the body laying still, quiet, something other than death, but other than breathing. What is still in the tiny body? What is still that is not dead?

Inside the place where her body grew numb, or fatigued, or just grew, there was a hole of red, all red, weren’t all the body’s caverns red, after all? Where was a romantic red in all this dying goo? What could a red red rose possibly have to say to her now, or the prick of a finger on a white embroidery sheet. Yes, yes, marks they would say, those feminists again. Marks, traces, evidence, of a body’s presence, a body seen, known, speaking, a refusal of the virgins’ directive, a disruption of purity, so much purity in white women, white snow, white sheets whose blood marks are hung in the desperate celebratory proof of a woman unsullied before the husband’s penis has staked his claim.

But then, what of a geranium, and its raw, heavy scent, earth and spice, all assertion, insistence? What of a clematis, winding its way up this post or that, curling around rusty fences ? What of a symbol shed of symbol ?

Impossible.

She had tried straying there before, into that place, that land, of things just are what they are. And she knew better than to ever try to know that. But she remembered, nonetheless, and fondly, her teenage hippie self, taking acid and laying on the ground, all stretched out, smelling the grass, saying over and over and over again: but it’s all so simple. She loved that girl, that pretty, happy girl with her jingle jangle skirts, and her long hair and her Jesus sandals. She was the girl of her dreams, that girl her who loved the earth, the flowers, the sun, and no red lips. She was the girl of all girls, the girl she carried in some place like another rib, being saved, one day, to be pulled forth into her own Eve-girl.

But what was what it was? Nothing, of course, so interpretation came back at her, like a slingshot, an arrow, a bullet—all heading directly for the center of her head. Wasn’t that the place where the bindi was drawn, and could she draw one there even though she wasn’t Hindu? She would like a huge round circle there, a bull’s-eye, a thinking third eye, a window, a shelf, a perch for pondering, for understanding, for knowing.

She could feel it rising, up, up, up, in metaphorical balloons, red balloons, red rage balloons made light with all their air. Could rage rise, into some airy height, could it hover and dart and, finally, collapse in its punctured exhaustion? Could there be a way to know a rage that floated rather than sank? What railways could rage open, what rocks could be blasted through with the fierce, unyielding gaze of rage. Do not go gentle was only for men, though, not this raging woman who must assign her red, red rage to a red red rose, to a hovering beauty mark, a ridiculous sentiment. Rage, rage against the dying light. Far too late, that dying light. Rage against the light of mornings, of rivers, reflecting knife-like bursts of sun into the eyes, rage against red rivers of red, of withering red flowers, of the chipped red paint on a young girl’s toes.

There could be red anywhere, any time, and it could arrive as a surprise, a new red, as in a strawberry fresh from its branch, plucked from beneath the cascading umbrella of its drooping stems. Red in a shape unlike a heart, but reminding one of it n onetheless. Red in a shape that so perfectly matched the shape an eating mouth would form. She would think she could be a red mountain made of strawberries, she would think as she lay in the hay between the plants, and stare up from beneath at the berries hanging in their secret groves. She would think herself lucky to carry the red stains of berries on her fingers, and wished herself brave enough for the dribbling delight that washed itself over the little girl’s sundress in the row beside her.

There was a way that red bothered her, in its constancy. There were the red and yellow curtains of her childhood kitchen, the only colors in that kitchen that she found authentic, rich enough. Her mother had been fond of light colors, colors that she could only describe as “mealy” to herself, because her mother couldn’t bear honest assessment. Light, pale, mealy yellow walls, in a semi-gloss, because, her mother reminded her, a kitchen got dirty, and needed to be washable. That hue, that glare, seemed, to her, to match the instant coffee, and the corelle living wear dishes, with their gold flowers that only seemed to taunt the weak and woozy yellow walls. But in that kitchen, two red things: a telephone, and a pair of curtains, deep, deep red, with rich and bright yellow flowers. Of course, the hues were all off, and the curtains, much like the dishes, only mocked the yellow of the walls, called its cowardice out. But she loved the red things, the red phone, with its rich deep shine, the sound its dial made when turned, something between a sizzle and a small crashing wave.

Each year, the only red food that made it into the kitchen were tomatoes, and, from time to time, red food coloring. The tomatoes her mother bought were weakly red, as weak as the yellow of the walls, and they arrived hard, and stayed hard, so she learned to slice them wafer ting for her grilled-cheese sandwiches, and their color against that vivid orange yellow of Velveeta cheese (product) became richer by association, proximity. But in August, with its thick and wet heat, there would be fresh tomatoes, brought home in a round basket from the farm, red and ripe and smelling altogether of a life outside. Her mother would announce that it was tomato gravy time and she would bend, then, with the disappointment of such redness, such ripe and complete redness undone by her mother’s pots and pans. The gravy would cook for hours, and the tomatoes, mixed with the sugar her mother profaned them with, would lose their bright red-ness, and cook into a sad orange, made into lumps by her mother’s violating masher. Was it any wonder, then, that she could never eat the tomato gravy, that to take a bite of it was to take a bite of something wrong, and that to let it cross from her mouth into her body would be an utter violation of the very idea of red? But she was forced, and, retching or no retching, dry heaving or not, August became a fearful month for her, as it bespoke the repeated scene of red betrayal.

If red were the color of coffins, then they would, perhaps, stay above ground, and our cemeteries would be filled with shiny red mounds and we would visit with cheer and exclaim about the colors, the shine, the way the enamel was holding up. Visiting death would be like visiting a classic car show, and the relatives of the coffin dwellers would stand by their loved one’s coffins, ready to talk proudly about the container that held the remembered, now dismembered body.

Red would be a ghost, a time-traveling piece of something fondly remembered, a ribbon, dangling, blowing, trailing wind and air until its lightness became heft, and all the weight of all the worlds’ red shoulders would drop and crumble and the world below would river and rage red.

~

Karen L. Carr lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and teaches all manner of writing and lit classes at Rhode Island School of Design and Rhode Island College.

My co-workers greeted me in the faculty lounge of the Las Vegas private school where I teach American literature with hugs and slaps on the back, as if I’d just finished a long, grueling race, a race I’d run with such speed, made up with such endurance and stamina, that I’d broken records. We stood around the water cooler, and I told them about the drugs and the sick; I told them about how good it was to get back to work to get my mind off things. I was purposely vague, telling them, “Just to be here is great. To not think about things.” I didn’t elaborate, and they didn’t ask me to define “things,” but there it was. They knew what I was talking about. They had to have.

“Things,” I muttered as a I’d pour a cup of coffee into the little styrofoam cups near the coffee machine. “Mind off things,” I’d say ripping open two packets of sugar and pouring them into the black coffee, a noise like a tightening coming up from the cup, as the sugar disappeared to the bottom.

“Well, it’s just good to have you back,” they’d said. “Glad to have you back.” What else should they’ve said?

“Great to be back,” I told them. “Great to be anywhere,” I’d say under my breathe, stirring my coffee with a wooden stirrer.

Someone got some water from the cooler, and as they pulled the lever a huge bubble of water glugged up from the bottom, and I turned to watch it as it dissipated.

I ate a donut.

They stared at me, gripped my shoulder, or stood close.

They said things like, “Well. You look amazing.” They told me, “You look like nothing happened.” I was wearing a hat not because I lost any hair yet, but I was readying them for a day when I would show up and my head would be patchy, a grid of of scalp and loose hair. I was becoming the cancer patient before their eyes so they wouldn’t see him when he was really there, in their face, a reminder of things.

A history teacher named Gary, a guy known at work for always wearing a Hawaiian shirt, gave me a fist bump. He said, “ Most excellent, brother. Most excellent.” He winked. Said, “Most excellent.”

I smiled, left the room, walked to my classroom, and popped some pills to help with the nausea. I also popped some pain pills to help with the bone pain and severe headaches, the residual effects of the chemo cocktail I’d been shot up with one week earlier.

Despite the lingering hangover it felt good to be back in the classroom and leading my kids through The Catcher in the Rye. One of my favorite students, Stevie Cavallero (yes, “Stevie.” Not “Steven.” Or “Steve.”), raised his hand within the first two minutes of our first class. The thing about Stevie is that he’s always got his hand in the air, and so when I saw it I didn’t think much of it. It’s like he walks into my classroom and he’s got things he needs to get off his chest. Sometimes it’s the most irritating thing I’ve ever experienced as a teacher, and I’ve worked in all kinds of neighborhoods, including a few years as the Dean of Students at a southside Chicago Jesuit school where the feud between the Latin Kings and Satan Disciples was my biggest problem.

But there’s Stevie Cavallero and his hand in the air. He’s got it high today like it might even hurt his shoulder socket it’s stretched so high. I had just started class and said something like, “Ok. Last time we met we were talking about –,” and there’s Stevie’s hand high in the air. I might have tried to ignore it for a time, but it’s like he’s always trying to out match me, like we’re in a teacher/student stare down. Stevie is all about calling my bluff somedays and most days, to be honest, Stevie wins. Stevie gets the best of me, and it’s something I haven’ t figure ou t yet. I might get up in the middle of the night in a fit because in my dream there’s Stevie’s hand, and he’s itching to speak.

Anyway, there I was in third period class, Stevie’s period, and I was like, “Good to be back.” (Insert Stevie’s hand here). “As you can imagine we’ve got a lot of work to do … (Stevie’s hand. Still in the air) … alot of catch-up with me being out and all, but before we begin I want to talk a little about my treatment.”

I pace my classroom alot, and so there is plenty of times when my back is to an entire group of students. Somedays, the pacing isn’t a way for me to gather my ideas or mull over the discussion happening amongst my kids about the novel, but it’s the only way I’ve figured to keep Stevie’s hand out of my vision. Yet here I was, turning around because there’s no more room to pace, there’s nowhere else to go, and there’s Stevie’s hand in the air. Waiting. Like something out of a Sartre novel. Like I was a character in Sarte’s vision of hell, and it’s me and Stevie and Stevie’s hand in the air — in eternal inquiry before anything has even freaking happened that would even remotely beg of curiosity.

I wanted to talk to them about what I would need them to do over the next week. I had to require that they clean their desks and hands with antibacterial wipes because I knew my white blood cell count would get low. I knew that there’d be days when they’d be coughing and sniffling and that germs would be everywhere. Being in a high school is not the best of atmospheres for a guy who has just been through chemotherapy, especially days seven to 14, when the white cells are at their lowest (mine would go as radically low as 0.02, which I don’t really even know what that means, but my doctor broke out the SARS mask the other day for me to wear, which I refused). I was telling them I’d have to take my temperature three times a day and that I had already been given a shot called Neulasta that would help promote the growth of white blood cells in my bones. Until this time passed, they’d have to do their part in the health of the room. I felt that being this open about the process, the basic parts of the method, would help eliminate any fear they may be having in regards to my treatment for the two spots growing in my right lung. It was, as some of my colleagues would say, “a teachable moment.”

And there was Stevie’s hand.

“Stevie?” I asked. “Stevie, you got a question?” I asked with all the patience I’ve learned to have as a high school teacher. “I didn’t see your hand,” I said with all the irony I’ve learned to have as a high school English teacher.

“Yeah. So. You still, like, have hair,” he said as if he was wildly disappointed in the way the side effects had yet to take hold. Like he’d been gipped out of something. Like this whole experience for him, my return, wasn’ t really wor th the price of admission. I could just picture Stevie Cavallero walking around school, through the streets of his gated community in summerlin, a master-planned community outside of Las Vegas, eating dinner with his folks in their massive house, thinking, “What’s Torch gonna look like? What’d he mean when told us he’d have no hair? Like, no hair at all? Or patches?” Cavallero at his locker: “I mean. Like. His head’ll be bald. Like. Just skin?” Cavallero in gym class trying to do as many sit-ups as he could in a minute, thinking, “Eyebrows. Like no eyebrows?” Cavallero spacing out while cramming for his Chemistry exam. “Eyelashes. That’s hair. All his hair ? I mean. Like. No eyelashes? What the hell will Torch be like?”

I laughed and said, “You sound disappointed, Stevie.”

He looked around at his classmates because they all started laughing. They were on the verge when he asked the question because they knew Stevie the way I knew Stevie. They grew up with him, the school being a pre-K through 12th grade private institution. They saw his hand way before his hand shot up into the air above his head in real time. They knew what was coming. See, Stevie Cavallero is highly neurotic. It’s not some dangerous psychic condition that’ll bring the boy down, but rather there’s something New York about the kid, some cross between Woody Allen and Richard Lewis. He sits at his desk like he’s holding the sucker down with his hands, his whole body hugging the desk portion. Most days it seems like it’s the only thing holding him to the ground, his hold on his desk. He’s not very big, a skinny kid, sort of nerdy, and he wears his uniform (khaki pants and navy blue polo shirt) all perfect-like (he’s a throwback in a way. Like he still believes that pants should be worn at the waist and not halfway down his ass like his boys. So, there’s Cavallero with his pants hiked up on his real waist and kept tight by a brown, braided belt, shirt tucked. He’s the dean’s dream, Cavallero is). Beyond the build and uniform there’s his head of hair, which is more of a kind of helmet of tightly wound, blond curls (i.e. a young Gene Wilder).

Anyway, the whole class was waiting for it. He was known for asking these kinds of questions, and usually, because they’d be sort of provocative, seeing things in the texts most other kids were too bored or not yet able to see, kids’d snicker and roll their eyes because what it meant was he and I were going to some other place, digging deeper into something substantial and meaningful, something beyond plot and narrative arc. Yet, when everyone’d laugh the way they did that day, he looked around at everyone’s reaction. Sometimes his hand would go to his head and he’d hit his forehead and respond as if he were drawing new responses out of himself with his hands. Like maybe they were laughing or snickering or moaning because he didn’t say it right, and so he’d try to reformulate it and he’d get all twisted up and say more than necessary, working through the problem of articulating the exact nature of his inquiry.

He’s the kind of kid who knows he’s getting an A, and I’m not talking about an A- but the full on A. Stevie’s A is so A that it’s obscene, almost 100%, maybe more somedays. Yet, there’s Cavallero walking into my office with all seriousness asking, “Uh, yeah. I was. Like. I’m like wondering what my grade is. I mean. Like. What’s the grade? Like what am I getting in your class?”

And he’d stand there, behind me, as I looked it up on my computer, with full knowledge of the kind of A that will stand out in the last column of the grade book. He’d stand there. Pace. Work his hands through his hair. Like he was on trial or waiting for trial or waiting for the verdict of some trial only he is working through, as the accused, the judge, the jury, and executioner. The computer is doing it’s business and Cavallero is spinning through the various levels of Dante’s Hell he’s so fond of because he references it with almost everything we discuss in my class. He’s clutching his hair like he’s in pain and the intervening silence is breaking him down, pulling him apart at the molecular level and the pain is so great that the only way to manage it is to pace behind my back and pull at his hair and mutter things like, “I mean. I know I could’ve done better on that last quiz. I mean. I know. Like. That last thesis sentence, boy. What a killer. Like. I mean. Man, I should have run it by you. I mean –”

“Stevie. You’ve got an A,” I’d tell him. “Look.” I’d pull my seat away from the desk slightly so he could get a better look and watch him lean in.

Cavallero’d lean in over my shoulder, his eyes squinting to mine through the data of the screen, the sub-par performances of everyone else, and search out his A. He’d then scan the whole long line of A’s like it was a line of poetry he was saying under his breath the shortened name I’d given each assignment, finding a meter and rhythm to it, trying to discern what went into making that one A. Then he’d smile, deeply relieved. Like the boy’d just barely managed to avoid some kind of existential shipwreck. I always was trying to not laugh. He was 15, and this was his great worry. I admired the boy for his intensity. I like Stevie a lot. He’s incredibly smart. He’s one of my best students. Ever.

So, anyway, everyone was laughing because Cavallero felt ripped off that I’d not lost my hair yet, and I’m standing there in front of them, under their gaze, after a round of chemotherapy. I’m standing there looking pretty healthy. Cavallero thought I’d be skinny, have the bony look of a stage IV cancer patient, a being I fear deeply because I know how close I am to that vision Stevie has built for me in his mind. But I wasn’t that. I’d suffered for sure, was sick for days before I returned to work, was so sick I couldn’t see straight and so I didn’t open my eyes for days. Eating Ativan to try to sleep it away and taking Hydrocodone to ease the pain of headaches that swept down on me without mercy. He wanted that vision there, in front of him, and so he put his hand in the air and said, “You still have all your hair.”

Stevie’s re-articulating the statement, yet his ideas are everywhere and his thoughts are scattered in the wild landscape of his mind in the back of the classroom where he’s sat all year in total fear of me and also challenging almost all of my prepared readings into The Scarlet Letter, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and so on from Columbus to Delillo. This is probably why I adore him, his fearlessness goes right after my University-of-Chicago-trained-mind from Whitman to Dickinson, from Kerouac to Ellison. He’s near berserk in the back of the room that day about my hair because they’re all laughing, and I was standing there with hair and holding down the fort with, “You sound disappointed, Steven.”

What’s so funny here is that we’re all laughing at this joke about cancer. I have a very rare cancer, and this is the third recurrence, and, on some level I know that I am merely buying a little more time with each new treatment and surgery. The whole thing with cancer for me is deeply serious in private and I rarely bring it to work, but when I first told them about my cancer in August, because I was going to miss some time for some surgery, they were very wary, as I knew they would be. They didn’t know what to say, but it needed to be said. I stood there, at my podium, and told them, “I have cancer. It’ll be fine. There’ll be a surgery and then, boom, done. Quick and easy.” Little did they know how much I was lying, how the smile I wore and the joking nature I acquired for the experience of telling 75 students was a put on; how afraid I was to look at Cavallero in the back when I had to tell his class because I think he knew how scared I was. Hell, he knew how scared he’d be. He asked me later, “Are you scared? I mean. Are you afraid. Like what’s it like? I mean. You won’t die, right?” He was trying to maneuver through death by measuring my proximity to it, by the fear I had for it. Like if I wasn’t scared then I wouldn’t die and vice versa. I wished it was that easy. I told him I was scared.

Back in August, I told them the standard things. I said, “I’m strong. I’ll get through this.” I said, “It’s a little spot on a muscle in my back. They’ll just snip it out.” I made a motion with my right hand like cutting something in the air with scissors. “I’ll be gone for a little while. Then I’ll be back.”

But this time. Oh boy. This time was much different. I had to tell them I had cancer in my right lung. That the little thing from before, a mass that grew along a muscle deep in the abdomen grew up and had enough know-how, was intelligent enough, to navigate it’s way from my pelvis to my lung.

“I have cancer in my right lung,” I think I told them. I said, “I’ll need a few rounds of pretty high-grade chemotherapy. I tell you all this, guys, because I’m going to change a little bit. I’m going to get really skinny and probably lose all my hair.”

When I told them this it was like I was telling myself to be cool, that there was no need for alarm. It was like putting on an old hat. But cancer isn’t like putting on an old hat, no matter how many times you’ve had it because it’s not you doing the damage in your body. You’re the medium for some spectacular biological and molecular warfare, an ancient battle ground for control of DNA. I have nothing to do with it or the outcome. So I told my kids, I said, “I’m going to get hell, and then I’m going to give it back.” And in the back of my own mind I smelled the fear I have of the dark places of my mind and how much time I give to things: the idea of death everyday, and how I wake up to the bone-chilling word. Like right when the alarm goes off, there’s “C A N C E R.” Like a billboard for a new resort and casino that I’m forever staying at in the Las Vegas of my mind.

When I stood there telling them I was telling me. Because whether I like it or not, those kids, however much they get under my skin most everyday, those kids are my life. I teach them to try to get them to ask themselves, through the study of literature, about their own lives and the meaning of what they have and are living through. I ask them to write well, and I ride them hard if their topic sentences and thesis statements are weak, and I sort of go crazy when they don’t provide me with textual evidence. Telling them all this stuff about cancer I realize they are a huge part of my life. I see them during the school year more than I see my wife, and when I’m with her I’m trying to get her to understand the experience of being with them. All of them. Like Stevie Cavallero and Max Newman and Jess Molasky and Chloe Spiltoro. I’m trying to fill her in on the weird things James Castle and Anthony Gord and all the other teenagers I live with for 8 hours a day for nearly nine months do all day long as sophomores in something so innocent as high school.

“I have cancer. I’m going to be all right,” I told them. Even though I had no clue. Telling them was telling me. It was like looking in the mirror. Who knows. I could be dead in four months. I didn’t know. It’s terrible not knowing.

Anyway, there was Cavallero, freaking out like Larry David, and he finally spits out, “I mean. I mean. What I’m trying to say is. I mean, what I’m trying to say here is that I thought. I mean. I thought your hair falls out when you get chemo. And. I mean. I mean. You stand there. You have hair. I just want to know. I mean. You have hair. Chemo takes hair. So,why do you have hair?”

It’ s a valid que stion. I tell him, “You sound so … I don’t know. Disappointed. Like I’ve taken an experience away from you. Like you paid to see the freak behind the curtain at a carnival, and once you get behind the curtain, the freak isn’t too freaky and so you’re all like, ‘Hey, man. like. I want my freaking money back!’”

I tell him this with a big smile on my face so he knows I’m kidding him, ribbing him good. And there we were. Laughter all over my classroom. I’m laughing so hard that I hide my face because I’ve been playing this tough-guy role all year because I’m new to the school and I’ve been making them toe the line since the beginning and they’ve been pushing and shoving back. I’m trying to hide my laughter, but it’s not working. I’ve been holding them to this standard, holding this bar over their head like I was holding the sword of Damocles over their pretty little heads. But there we were. mid-March, and we’re all laughing at Cavallero because I have cancer in my right lung and he had expectations after my first round of chemotherapy and I wasn’t quite meeting them yet.

“No. No. No,” he said with his hands in the air, clutching his head and hair, a grin coming over his face. “Not a freak. I mean. I mean I just want to know why you have hair.”

“It’ll fall out, Stevie. Trust me. I can’t stop what’s coming,” I told him. I said, “It’s all going to come out. You’ll see. It takes time. They don’t just shoot you with the medicine and, wham!, it falls out. It’s a gradual process.”

Yet his question is a poignant one, and one that I had been thinking about for the couple of days before I went back to school. The more I kid Cavallero, the more I think to myself, He’s right. It’s weird that my hair hasn’t fallen out. His questions and the intensity of his inquiry is equal to mine with my wife. Sometimes I think I didn’t get enough chemotherapy. I’ll tell my wife, “I don’t think they gave me the drugs.”

She says to me, “No? What do you think they did to you then in the hospital? What do you think they put in your veins? What do you think made you so confused and sick and lay around for days without your eyes open because your head hurt so bad? Was it a joke, your vomiting, the pain?”

And she’s right. But I’m Stevie Cavallero all of a sudden. The eternal skeptic. I’m Diogenes at the gates of chemo.

After the kids settle we begin our work on The Catcher in the Rye. They are moved by Holden’s descent into near madness. Things get heavy in the novel, and I have to take on Allie’s death and I have to talk to them about dying and I have to ask them to dig deep and think about losing someone they love so they can see with what pain Holden shoulders and wanders into the landscape of New York City. Sometimes the room is so quiet as they listen to me read or listen to me talk about dying with an urgency that I haven’t felt before in my teaching, there’s silence so heavy and so right-there that I think we could eat it and get full on it for many years. And recently we dig so deep that when the bell rings as the end of the class we jump in our seats and look around in embarrassment because none of us want to think we’d gone that far in and stared at it so willingly or given ourselves over to the thing we’d stared at with so much courage even though our own self-interest was begging us to look the other way.

***

Two days ago, going to the bathroom in the faculty restroom near my office, I realized that my hair was falling out. There, in the restroom, at, like, 11 a.m. Whole clumps of pubic hair were coming out. I could pull them, with really no effort at all, from my skin. Whole clumps were in my hand, and I dropped them into the toilet and watched the little hairs fall away into the yellow water below.

I gasped.

I didn’t think I’d feel weird about it.

But, it was like, “Wow. Ok. Now it begins.”

I zipped up and washed my hands and stared at myself in the mirror. I said to me, “You’re going to have to fight again. Fight like a mean bastard. You’ve cancer. Right lung. Two spots.”

This morning when I woke up, the hair on my head felt weird, crunchy almost. It was like the follicles in my head were gaping holes. I pulled at the little hair I had left (I had shaved it almost bald in anticipation of the chemotherapy) and little fingertip clumps of it came out. I showed this trick to my wife at lunch today. I pulled a little out and said, “See. Look at this,” half amazed and half appalled.

She just stared at it. We stared at it. We were silent.

“I guess the drugs are working,” I finally said.

She rolled her eyes.

It’s like a trick I can perform, this pulling it out on cue. I do it again and again throughout the day until my wife finally has to say, “Are you kidding me? Is it necessary? Please stop. It’s just gross.”

Like a circus freak, the guy behind the curtain, the song and dance show. Dog and Pony. Tricks on command. I laughed. But it’s bothersome. In a week or less I’ll be bald. A new man. But what will follow? Now there’s a question for my boy, Stevie Cavallero.

I never meant for you to wake up. What I wanted and prayed for was not what I meant to happen. Your friction-warmed surface, your curves my own hands carved and defined, your medium too rich and hard to be worn away in one man’s lifetime—I would never have given all this up, my love, if I’d known the gods were listening. Now in sleep your face has lines I didn’t cut, your yielding skin barely contains your warmth, and you dream. You’re no more a dis appointment than any daughter. Forgive me as I’ ve forgi ven my gods, not because they were innocent, but because it makes mortal life easier to bear.

R. Gatwood is concise.

Under the Mercy Trees
by Heather Newton
Harper
2011
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I once stood at my grandfather’s knee, watching him do tricks with rocks. Later I backpacked by myself in France. I married at twenty, became an attorney in a high-powered Atlanta law firm, then the mother of four. With one friend, I walk and talk; with another, I hike mountains and go to clubs in San Francisco. In Mary Gordon’s novella, The Rest of Life, the old woman Paola searches for the wick running through her life that makes her “the same person who was born, was a child, a girl, a young woman, a woman, and now she is old.”

Bertie, however, one of four point-of-view characters in Heather Newton’s debut novel, Under the Mercy Trees, prefers to focus on the mystery of how different we can be:

She pondered it at her kitchen table now. How one man could be many. First young and spirited, worth sampling at any cost. Then old, swaddled in sameness.

Martin, the main character, can be quite different. In New York, he’s a gay man, while at home in North Carolina, he’s the not-gay brother. Around his family, “he seemed to remake himself, squaring his shoulders, losing the give in his limbs.” As a young man, he had a bright future as a playwright; now he drinks too much and is unable to hold a job. In a lovely bit of symmetry, the first chapter, in Martin’s point of view, begins with the word Broken and ends with this sentence:

The image Liza [Martin’s high school sweetheart] had of him bore little resemblance to who he really was, but around her he was his best, most beautiful, and noble self. He was unbroken.

Add to this conundrum that Bertie, Martin’s sister-in-law, believes there might be one self more true than the others. Years ago, she had an affair: “She did it to bring herself back.”

Under the Mercy Trees begins with the disappearance of Martin’s brother Leon. In addition to Martin and Bertie, the other point-of-view characters are Liza and Ivy—the sister who sees ghosts (as well as other more important things). The novel, its four viewpoints allowing the reader to see the insides and outsides of multiple characters, is divided into four parts by newspaper clippings that keep the reader abreast of the search for Leon.

Heather Newton’s writing is tight. It’s also poetic and rich in sensory details, as this sentence in Bertie’s point of view, describing her husband James, shows:

In the ridges of his corduroy coat she could smell his whole week, the smoke of barrels lit to warm searchers, metal from the sling blade he used to cut underbrush as he looked, the single paper-bagged beer she knew he had snuck on his way home, a thing she didn’t begrudge him.

And yet James hid this side of himself—the single beer on the way home—from his wife. In another excerpt, Bertie wonders, “which Leon James was grieving for”:

When they were all younger, Leon was something, with that full head of black hair and smart grin always forming around some tall tale. But as he got older he talked less and less, until his mouth rusted shut like an old mason jar lid.

Like Mary Gordon’s Paola, I’m also someone who searches for the wick. And in Under the Mercy Trees, there’s evidence to support this view that, like Russian nesting dolls, who we were is buried inside of who we are. Nineteen of the forty-one chapters include a compelling drop into the past. Plus, within Ivy, the only first person narrator, the ghosts of her past mingle in her present. Benjamin Percy wrote that true suspense is about the coming together of  “what is outside the characters (whatever intrudes on their lives) and what is inside the characters (whatever they desire that is just out of reach).” In Under the Mercy Trees, an ambitious and assured debut, not only are both of these elements present, but the search for Leon is the perfect physical manifestation of the inner searchings of these characters. Perhaps the more import ant question is not whether there is some wick that connects all of our different selves, but whether who we are on the outside is an accurate reflection of who we are on the inside.

Cynthia Newberry Martin is Contrary’s Review Editor.

Bring Down the Little Birds
by Carmen Giménez Smith
2010
The University of Arizona Press
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This slim memoir is soaked in the partum-based worry many mothers-to-be endure. The birth year Giménez Smith covers overlaps with her mother’s prognosis of, and tre atment for, a brain tumor. These threads, as well as some fictive turns and angry toddlers, are laced together, making for a strangely eloquent and fragmented meditation on motherhood’s woe. Few joys of pregnancy intrude—pickles and ice cream and padding around the house barefoot. A poet, editor, and teacher, Giménez Smith is too honest a writer to row that clichéd river.

For the author, a second child and the family’s ensuing chaos guarantee lost time—away from her students, husband, and writing. How will she survive? How did her mother do it? How will she bear her mother’s illness? And then how quickly she feels guilty and possessive, constantly making adjustments: “There are no amateurs in the world of children.”

Bring Down the Little Birds is a hyper-shifting collage—parts taken from Giménez Smith’s (actual) journal, parts lifted from her mother’s (imagined) writing, parts written in the throes of birthing a second child. The memoir races forward with space breaks and divisional asterisks separating thoughts and scenes—the fragmentation fits the author’s write-when-you-can, beleaguered condition.

The book begins with Giménez Smith’s imagined “discovery” of her mother’s journal.  “I daydream that I’m thirteen, sitting in an attic in my mother’s wedding dress. I discover a notebook, in it the evidence of my mother’s secret life.” In fact, Giménez Smith’s mother, who came from Peru, settled in New York City, and had four children (one dying in childbirth), undergirds the memoir as the stalwart Mom whose standard the daughter emulates and contends with.

In creating her mother’s journal, Giménez Smith makes the woman into the kind of mother who’ll be more useful to her than, or perhaps a balance to, either the stalwart Mom or the actual one who’s ill. “Because I cared little for my mother’s interior, it didn’t exist for me. My mother couldn’t be a mystery. . . . She was only a mystery when I needed one for the story I made of my life.”

Unlike the falsifications of James Frey, this fictive/imagined voice has a purpose: to embody the stress of Giménez Smith’s expanding family through the conjuration of what her mother must have endured. “I would have liked to have known her [the mother] better,” she writes, “but I was too occupied pulling her out of herself. Now the tables are turned—it’s a brand new table.” Mothers are always becoming their mothers.

A constantly unsettled wanting guides it all, in and out of childbirth: the desire to escape, to be helped, to be pitied, to re-inhabit the fear and love associated with her own birth. Such is the time-hopping terrain of this memoir, whose engagement comes from the disciplined interweaving of remembrance and emotion.

Equal to the mot her as a transformational dynamo are her experiences with her children. Study the texture of this instance in which Giménez Smith presents us her most shameful act.

But one day my son slaps me across the face. A straight-up bitch slap. And within a microsecond of his hand touching my face, I slap him back. Stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury. Wow. I’m that mother, the one yanking her kid by the arm out of the grocery store, the one who gets really close in her kid’s face and hisses.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. The Spanking Mother. The Mother Trapped in a Cycle. I tabulate the long-term effects as I weep in the bathroom, as my husband sits on the other side of the door. He is furious and forgiving. Me too. Mama, hold you.

Those last three child-forgiving words are heartbreaking. You can hear in the prose a kind of melded authorial identity, a mosaic of voices—narrator, observer, satirist, rationalizer, quoter (from Medea), pleading child. The passage is like a stew: thickened on rage, simmered with guilt, salted with irony, and served scalding.

In the end, the mother’s tumor is the least spun thread of the memoir; it’s kept at bay by the other voices. But it’s OK. Giménez Smith’s mother, flying to Peru for treatment, has proved more useful as myth than presence, just what her daughter-now-mother has required.

Thomas Larson is the author of The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” and The Memoir and the Memoirist.

While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction
by Kurt Vonnegut
Delacorte Press
2011
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In his 1997 book Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit.” Vonnegut was the Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, and he once wrote, “When I myself am dead, God forbid, I hope some wag will say about me ‘He’s up in Heaven now.’” This mixture of modest wisdom and wry humor is what always attracted me to his writing. When I began to read this second posthumously published volume of his early stories, I was hoping to hear the same no-nonsense, conversational voice that spoke to me in Cat’s Cradle and Jailbird.

What I found instead might be best described as a series of cautionary tales. These sixteen stories include booming businesses, glamorous celebrities, generous inheritances, empire builders, successful salesmen, wealthy widows, characters called George and Nancy, and a frustrated opera singer who makes a fortune selling donuts.

In “The Humbugs,” two artists discover that there’s little difference between being a wealthy hack or a critically acclaimed pauper. Each feels as fraudulent as the other because neither feels he has fulfilled his potential. “The Epizootic” poses a question that seems chillingly relevant today:

I used to wonder what was going to become of all the Americans like him, a bright and shiny new race that believed that life was a matter of making one’s family richer and richer and richer, or it wasn’t life. I often wondered what would become of them, if bad times ever came again, if the bright and shiny men suddenly discovered their net worths going down.

This story suggests that those who have the most will be the ones who lose the most, but that their money isn’t actually the most important thing at stake. Both stories exhibit a generous skepticism about the wisdom of pursuing riches as a goal.

Several stories deal with how easily love can become misdirected. In “Jenny,” a man perfects, and then falls for, a robotic refrigerator manufactured in the image of his ex-wife. In “Hundred Dollar Kisses,” when a man lusts after a dreadful woman whose photo he’s seen in all the magazines, we’re told, “ Everybody pays attention to pictures of things. Nobody pays attention to things themselves.” This sort of observation wouldn’t seem out of place in one of Vonnegut’s novels.

Dave Eggers, in the foreword, highlights Vonnegut’s moral voice and refers to the collection as “mousetrap stories.” And they do click satisfyingly shut. They’re not exactly trite, but they feature rounded plots that finish on neat endings. Although at times I would prefer the messier tell-don’t-show of Vonnegut preaching directly at me rather than these carefully constructed parables, the endings of these stories have value judgments implicit in their conclusions. Vonnegut’s later, more knowing, voice is still intrinsic to the plots and their resolutions even if not so evident in the narrator’s tone. Perhaps these stories add more to the aliveness of his life’s work by not simply being “more of the same.” Perhaps they offer insight into the nursery conditions from which his later writing matured.

In Timequake, Vonnegut wrote, “We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!” This view of life pulses through two characters in this collection. Earl, in “With His Hand on the Throttle,” constantly ignores his wife to play with model trains in their basement. And Ben, in “Money Talks,” knows that fishing for clams can be as fine as any fortune. In these stories, it’s not about the office or the salesroom or the bank balance, but instead the value of life is firmly rooted in the fart ing around.

The stories in While Mortals Sleep may have been written in post-World-War-II-America, but they have much to say to today’s not-so-bright-and-shiny world. Will a die-hard fan be disappointed? Will a new reader wonder what the fuss is about? Difficult to know. However, Kurt Vonnegut is up in Heaven now with his stories living on, and, more than a little bit, they make me appreciate being alive.

Pauline Masurel is a short fiction writer who lives in the South West of England.  Her website is at www.unfurling.net.

Talismans
by Sybil Baker
C & R Press
2010
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In Sybil Baker’s linked story collection, Talismans, readers simultaneously experience the emotional and geographic territory of Elise­’s world as she navigates loss and pursues connection–from girl to woman and from small-town Virginia to Southeast Asia. While each story represents a key moment in Elise’s life, the collection shows her evolution over two decades. Herein lies the beauty of the story cycle form.

In the first story, “Firefly,” we learn of a seminal event that unifies the set of ten stories: Elise unearths a letter and one half of a photograph that features her dead father. “That letter said my father had found love and a good life … Someone had cut the photo, so that half of it was unknown.”  The missing half of the photo positions the heroine for a quest. The tangible piece with the “razored edge” provides her with a magic charm, a talisman.

Yet, this discovery is only a whisper within the plot of a riveting story involving another loss. In fact, most of Baker’s stories lead us to events outside the father mystery, showing Elise developing character through the vaguely connected steps she takes. The theme of the absent father is a current, not the river.

It is unusual to find a story collection structured in parts, but Talismans is divided into two.  Part one includes four stories that portray Elise’s coming of age in a quiet neighborhood, living with, and eventually parting from, a mother who is lost in the lonely existence of her music. From “Tempo,”

I wore the gingham and floral dresses you sewed, dresses pressed and starched every morning…short dresses vulnerable to a flip, a gust of wind that exposed my underwear, my bare thighs. I wanted pants like the other girls…

And,

Because of your music, you would not know. You would not know the wispy gray fog, always on the periphery…

The mother/daughter stories as a quartet stand united and strong. The last of the four creates a purpose for reading on. “And then she was playing ‘Fur Elise’ over and over, waiting for the rest to come.”

Comprised of six additional stories, Part II depicts Elise in search of the soul of her father’s choices on not-entirely-friendly soil—Southeast Asia, during a time when Americans were merely tolerated for the tourist dollars they brought. With nothing left to lose, she believes in risking each day on the strength of something thin in her pocket. “I tucked my thumb into my shorts pocket and rubbed the half-photograph of my father.”  Elise collects and trades talismans along the way. Her grandfather’s World War II pea coat encloses her with a sense of protection on her travels. She leaves it with a lover but takes his address.

Like the book, Elise herself presents as two parts of the same whole. On the one hand, she is sure-footed and wily, plucky and loose. On the other, she regularly slips into the world of an imagined life, an illusory consciousness. This contradictory self creates a sense that, as a woman, she still carries inside the vulnerable child we meet in the first story. From “Talismans,”

Not far outside of Saigon, the minibus veered around another curve… I pressed my fingers to the window and imagined our bus skidding off the road and tumbling to the valley below.  With each turn of the bus, the world outside would be a vacation slide show gone awry… I would be the only survivor.

In the final story, “Grape Island,” to a village girl who touched her life,

Elise would write the letters that she had wanted to get from her father, letters that talked about food and weather, but also asked and answered other questions: How are you feeling today? Do you miss your parents? Who do you love at this moment?”

By the end of the collection, Elise’s adventure allows her to become for others what she longed for herself.

Jodi Paloni is crafting a collection of linked stories while pursuing her MFA in Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She blogs at Rigmarole.

Speech Acts
by Laura McCullough
Black Lawrence Press
2010
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In her poem “What Can Happen in the Dunes,” Laura McCullough writes:

My body was fertile, then not,
then fecund, again, with language. There’s
a connection between the throat
and vagina; tighten one, they both clench,
the throat taking what’s bitten off,
whatever is more than the mouth can handle.

This poem, perhaps more than any other in the collection, summarizes the two main drives of Speech Acts, McCullough’s 2010 collection from Black Lawrence Press, which explores the connections between language and sexuality, in what seem to be ways only McCullough could imagine. In “Giving Good Bard,” McCullough’s attention to the sounds of words is impeccable:

…cock sucking’s not bad, the soft o of cock sliding
into the u of suck, the repeating K sound, the one syllable
word followed by two, and that second word a great
verb, to boot!…

Her work is flawless as she follows these two threads.

Unfortunately, after finishing the collection, I vacillate between feeling that McCullough is trying too hard and not trying hard enough. An instance of the poet forcing the issue can be found in “The Orthography of Provocation,” where, at one point, McCullough writes, “…as the rumbling nostrums / of that cement truck grinding down the road.” I have pondered this line for hours and have yet to figure out how a cement truck can have “nostrums.”

An instance of McCullough not pushing hard enough can be found in the poem, “Beauty, I Said”:

I never said that thing you said
I said that time when we were dancing
and everyone was so drunk no one
remembers what anyone said. I’m sure
I said something, but not what you
said I said…

Thematically, the poem fits because it is about a specific “speech act.” It focuses on a misunderstanding between the speaker and the beloved. But given McCullough’s unparalleled attention to the sounds of words in other poems, this poem falls flat. It is a “he said/she said” with little attention to language, sound, or any of the other elements of poetry.

If I sound as if I’m being hard on McCullough’s collection, it’s because it had the potential to be pitch perfect, if only the weaker poems had been omitted. Contemporary poetry can’t get any better than “Speaking Malagasy on the Isle of Vanilla,” which, to borrow from Walt Whitman, “contains multitudes.”

The poem starts out with a note explaining the overnight collapse of Madagascar’s economy when Coca-cola changed its formula, substituting synthetic vanilla for real vanilla. The poem interweaves geopolitics, linguistics, psychology, and biology—beautifully:

…It is not a Romantic language, but has
borrowed a little from the French who took so much.
It’s an island language, Austronesion, and plurals are managed
with a beautiful efficiency: more than one book: book-book;
more than one child: child-child. It’s hard for the Latinate
mind to imagine…

The poem ends just as perfectly:

…and tenuous like the vanilla flower
blooming for only one day, both male and female, the thinnest
of membranes between them waiting to be stripped away.

Speech Acts could have been a strong, slim volume at sixty pages. As it is, the strong poems are sometimes like so much grain lost in the chaff, and, if readers are in the habit of reading their poetry collections straight through from front to back, the weaker poems, sadly, are the ones that lay heaviest on the reader’s mind, making a collection that starts out strong much more anticlimactic than it deserves to be.

McCullough also has a 2011 collection, Panic, just out from Alice James Books.

Shaindel Beers is Contrary’s Poetry Editor.

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Photo by Melody Koert via flickr

Edward Mc Whinney lives in Cork, Ireland. He’s neither all that young nor all that old.

He h as been a regul ar contribu tor to Contrary, writing stories of Irish life and Spanish exile. This is an index of his stories published in Contrary, 2005-2011. For more recent stories, please do click here.

The Cork Landscapes:

Advice: Get the Farewell Right

A Monday Morning

An Ordinary Day

Conversations in the Tax Office

This House

Infidelity, Almost

Olaudahs in the Rain

Incident in a Travel Agent’s

(Editor’s Introduction to The Cork Landscapes)

Excerpts from Exile in Catalonia:

Forty Nine

Who Do You Want to Be ?

The Cat in the Kiosk

Weaver Fish

On Goya Street

No Further Need for Niceties

Locked Out

Excerpts from The Hell Porter:

The Hall Porter

After Reading Thomas Bernhard

The Myth of Sisyphus

Unattached stories:

Beginnings

Little Bird

A Funeral