Evening Street Review Number 10, Spring 2014

Number 10 Spring, 2014
EVENING STREET
Review
Minotauromachy, 1935 Pablo Picasso
It was all a dream. The Minotaur never died.
Published by Evening Street Press

Dublin, OH
EVENING STREET REVIEW
NUMBER 10, SPRING 2014
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Culture Hero: Manic-Depressive Power
Near the End
of Its 5000 Years of Rule
Planet Earth, 20th Century
Cover photo:
There are as usual different versions of this story in ancient
Greek sources. The essence is this: Minos, king of Crete, was given a
large beautiful white bull by Poseidon, god of the sea. Minos’ wife,
Pasiphae, fell in love with it (the familiar woman-hating line in most
myths) and gave birth to the Minotaur, half human, half bull, usually
imaged with human body and bull head. Minos had to put this being in
the equivalent of a prison—the Labyrinth built by Dedalus beneath the
palace of Knossos.
But Minos’ son Androgeon was killed by a bull at Marathon
and Minos declared war on Athens unless Athens sent 14 young
Athenians, 7 male, 7 female, to Crete to be devoured by the Minotaur
every year. Theseus, son of Athens’ king, volunteered to save them.
With Ariadne’s help (the ball of thread with which to find his way out
of the Labyrinth), he found the Minotaur and killed it.
On the way home with Ariadne, he raised the wrong sail as a
signal (black instead of white) and as a result his watching father
committed suicide.
This is both a male myth and a political lie—”those savage
Cretans”—justifying the Athenians who, around 1500-1300 BCE,
invaded Crete and destroyed what they could reach.
EVENING STREET REVIEW
PUBLISHED TWICE A YEAR BY EVENING STREET PRESS
NUMBER 10, SPRING 2014
CONTENTS
BY THE EDITOR Occasional Notes:

Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff
A. E. Housman 6
NONFICTION
STEPHANIE E. DICKINSON Young Widows of Whalebone 9

GAIL MACDONALD Digital Heartbreak Still Hurts 80
POETRY I
SOME SELECTIONS FROM POETRY CONTEST S UBMISSIONS
HELEN KAY CHAPBOOK

MARILYN CAVICCHIA
Barbara, Driver, Chrysler Town & Country 21
Justin, Driver, Chevy Volt 22
Lauren, Driver, Mazda 3 23
Julie, Driver, Ford Taurus Wagon 25
Robert, Driver, Buick LeSabre 26
Marjorie, Driver, Cadillac DeVille 29
Nancy, Driver, Toyota Avalon 30
LUCIA MAY
Blond Boy 32
Blond Boy and the Plan for Eastern Europe
(Generalplan Ost) 33
Blond Boy and the Weaker Sex 35
Burglar 36
Don’t Forget 37
Hunger 38
Reunion Retreat 39
SINCLAIR BOOK LENGTH

ANITA S PULIER
Guilty by Association 40
Regrets 41
Recycling Mink 42
Airless 43
The New Math 44
Local Sluts 45
Just in case 46
JUDY IRELAND
Growing Girls in Iowa 47
My Father Voted for Nixon 48
Arguing about Chaos 49
Lot’s Wife 50
Snowbirds 52
My Sisters in Iowa 53
Farm Woman with Shotgun 54
FICTION
DINAH COX The Dot 55

DONNA SPECTOR The Jesus Year 68
JESSICA GREGG “When Vivian Greer Came to
Sing” 86
RAYMOND GASTON One Hour 99
POETRY II
TONI ORTNER History of Loss 66

HARRIET SHENKMAN Laying Stones on a Grave 79
MARK J. MITCHELL San Francisco Sestina on a
Found Theme 89
INEZ GELLER A Dostoevsky Heart 91
JENNIFER L. FREED Words for my Father 92
Time Lapse 95
Passage 96
Klezmer 97
BY THE EDITOR Neglected Help:

Robert Lowell, Charles
Bukowski, Sara Teasdale 103
CONTRIBUTORS 109
6 / Evening Street Review
OCCASIONAL NOTES
Terence, this is stupid stuff (A. E. Housman)
‘TERENCE, this is stupid stuff:

You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, ’tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.’
Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,

There’s brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
6
Editor / 7
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,

Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.
Therefore, since the world has still

Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,
I’d face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
’Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul’s stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.
There was a king reigned in the East:

There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all the springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup

And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
—I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.
1896
/ 9
STEPHANIE E. DICKINSON
YOUNG WIDOWS OF W HALEBONE
From under the camera’s hood, the photographer peers at them

as he fuses their faces into a sepia eternity. Already a hundred years
those eyes have stared, and their bodies, except for their faces and the
men’s ungloved hands, remain hidden like humid hyacinth. Here are
three wedding photographs, three generations of brides. Because the
grooms are destined to not grow old, they’ll make of their wives young
widows. A generation is skipped—the generation I belong to, who,
perhaps afraid of being a widow, was never a bride. The story of each
is written in the hieroglyphics of an age.
1
Josephine & Joseph
***
Reid’s Studio is where they stand in their wedding attire. See
how my great-aunt Josephine’s shoulder presses great-uncle Joseph’s.
The girls wear Victorian collars and starched white dresses of
whalebone and hook. Mutton-leg-sleeves. Their net gloves hold long-
stemmed roses. Like beautiful dreams you hear in your inner ear. The
young men’s solemn faces shine above their stiff collars and suits
pressed by flat irons. The bride and best man are sister and brother; the
groom and maid-of-honor are brother and sister—the wedding party
entire. Teenagers, virgins all. [The best man John Telecky will marry
the maid-of-honor Emily Buresh and they will become my maternal
grandparents]. The blue-eyed/dark-haired foursome has movie star
looks. I know each of their fates yet I try to read what their gazes say.
Not one shows teeth and only the bride has what might be a lip smile
on her mouth, while the groom’s hand looks shy, self-conscious. The
children of Czech immigrants, this generation of Czechs marries
Czechs, and looks no farther than the pews of their country church for
mates. The bride has known the groom all of her life—the most
handsome boy in her Sunday school.
***
1909, the year of the first wedding. A new twentieth century
takes its terrible baby steps. The Great War has not yet happened,
although rumblings between the European Alliances can be heard, but
not here, not this far into the heartland. Iowa. Imagine a world before
9
rural electricity or flush toilets and running water where these people
chore from dawn to dusk. In Germany, Trakl has yet to write. In
America, No Farewell to Arms. No Great Gatsby. The Somme, the
Russian Revolution, the Armenian genocide, none of it has happened
yet, no antibiotics or polio vaccination, no television. And on the farm,
work horses plow furrows. The horses carry the loads; the dark blue
beasts are seven-hands-tall in their fetlocks and bridles. My forebears
never shoot their work horses or sell them for meat when they reach an
age too old to plow. Man and beast forge bonds under a boiling
Midwestern sun. Much beloved, the gentle giants graze the pastures
having earned their rest a thousand times over.
***
Joseph’s face reminds me of a young Paul Newman, but his
hand is already knotted from farm work. The four leave the studio and
ride back to the bride’s father’s farm in a horse and buggy. I picture
them stopping to eat raspberries ripening along the road under a haze of
dust. Joseph cleans the fruit with his tongue before offering it up to his
bride. He thinks, looking at her, she is mine. Her eyes answer, I am
heat lightning girl. I fall from your summer sky. They both laugh.
Raspberries. Just picked fruit.
***
The moment lies dormant in my grandmother’s picture drawer
through World War I, World War II, Korea, Sputnik, Vietnam, the
Cold War, until at her death the wedding photograph card passes into
my mother’s hands, and then into mine. I have no one to pass the relic
onto and at my death the moment will die too.
***
For a wedding present, Josie and Joseph are given land and a
farmhouse. And now the apprentices of work become masters of
drudgery. This generation of women wears visible harnesses so they
can plant and pull, sew, make bread, wash clothes using scrub boards,
fill cook stoves with cobs. They grow strong as windbreak trees. Bred
to knead the dough, throw and pound it with the heel of the hand, pick
up the axe and guillotine the hen, pluck the boiled feathers, cut the
carcass into thigh, wing, grit bag, and oh the tiny heart to be fried with
the gizzards. All this Josie does gladly. Hers, he is hers.
***
Dickinson / 11
Great-uncle Joseph fathers four children before his thirty-first

year, my great-aunt birthing them in the same bed as they were
conceived. It is spring planting when he goes into a field to dynamite a
stump, the tree itself already cut and used to repair the barn. Alone, he
packs the gunpowder around the base of the stump and lights the fuse.
He runs for cover. That part of the tree left alive aims a splinter into his
brain and my great-uncle’s head is pierced by a wood projectile. Josie
finds him in the field. Does she try to drag him to the house or hold
what is left of his head in her lap and think of those raspberries? Does
she leave the young ones, saddle a horse, and ride for help? William,
Joanna, Esther, Edwin. Two in country school and two at home the day
their father goes into the field with the dynamite. Once the murder tree
budded and sought the sun, its branches casting green shade over milk
thistle. Joseph’s funeral takes place on the front lawn of the Buresh
farmhouse. My seven-year-old mother remembers only how green the
grass was and someone carrying a camera like a hatbox with an eye in
the middle.
***
He’ll leave behind a wife so in love with him she’ll never
marry again. “I won’t let another man raise his children,” she says. My
great-grandfather, a gruff and forbidding man, takes his weeping
daughter on his lap and rocks her. “It hurts so much,” she cries. At nine
her eldest son William becomes a man.
***
When I knew my great-aunt Josie the hardship years had
already been gotten through. She’d reached her late seventies,
comfortable in a small house with red-frame porch windows across the
gravel road from the farm where her son Edwin lived with his family.
You couldn’t ask your elders questions like do you still remember your
husband? Do you miss your own impossible beauty? My great-uncle
must have loved looking at her as he drank the farmer’s coffee from the
blue-speckled pot, how even after four children he liked to touch her.
Pullet, he may have called her, soft one.
***
How did Josie and her four children survive the Depression
when corn sold for 2 cents a bushel? All five of them worked the farm
and the families helped. Yet of the two couples in the wedding photo,
all four children of my grandparents graduated from college, three
going on to postgraduate degrees, while only one of Josie’s children
went to college; the others graduated from school to the fields. Esther,
the youngest, married at sixteen. Then as now a household headed by a
single woman is often poorer with fewer opportunities for her
offspring.
***
Farm women whose hearts are strong die hard. Great-aunt
Josie deserved an easy death but suffered bone cancer and lost a leg to
gangrene. Did she wonder if her husband would come for her, now that
she was wrinkled and hobbled, one-legged? Morphine blurring the
beginning and end; the four-cornered sheets of the hospital bed
softened to mulberry-treed petticoat, the shudder of her first married
night. I hope when she met him in the tunnel of light she was once
again a girl, all bloom and fruited tomato, running wild seed. Beloved,
she might call out in her death haze as she passed the garden she fed
her young children from, trailing the corn and its veiling silk, the
squash vines snaking through dirt with blossoms like top cream.
***
More morphine hallucinations. He’s standing in a grove of
shagbark hickories with their hairy trunks and long rust-colored
needles. She sets out for him. Her groom leans against a trunk,
breathing. A miracle. She loosens a strip of bark from the trunk and
presses her finger against it as if to taste where she’s made the tree
bleed. Yellow sap like juniper-scented honey. He holds her wrist,
draws her finger to him and licks it clean.
***
A young widow is different from an old one. She belongs to
her own tribe and is either a saint of towering strength or an
untouchable, tainted by death immersion. Or was that true for
yesterday’s generations of widows, not today’s? A young widow with
children in America is indistinguishable from any other single mother.
Her presence might not be considered bad luck at a wedding yet her
showing up alone makes people think of the dead spouse and mortality.
There’s a subtle shunning. Here in the first world the institution of
marriage is changing with same-sex couples entering the state of
matrimony. In West Africa, a widow must be cleansed of the death
stain. The hair on her head and pubis are shorn and she is made to
drink the water used to wash the body of her dead husband.
Dickinson / 13
2
The year of the second wedding, 1946. We’re in a century of
tomorrow, the American Century, the World War’s been won, and V-E
and V-J days celebrated. America’s economy, its infrastructure
undamaged by fire bombing and nightly raids, its people fed and far
from the scourge of fighting armies, and its returning veterans about to
be educated by the GI bill, is ready to explode. The calamity of
Europe—two stones one atop the other—clears the way for the rise of
USA.
Florence and Philip

***
This wedding photograph’s not a flat sepia card but able to
stand on its own. The bride is older than the groom, not a teenager like
her mother and aunt had been on their wedding day, but thirty-six. My
mother Florence wears her shoulder-length auburn hair in a Rita
Hayworth style, the late 40s bangs and waved sides. Her dark blue eyes
look directly at the photographer. I know their color but in the portrait,
more varied in its tones than sepia, you’d only be sure of her new
husband Philip’s dark brown eyes that shine from behind his wire-rims.
His black hair cut short and combed back from his forehead shows its
widow’s peak. He wears a pin-striped blue suit and a maroon tie. Much
like the suit he’ll be buried in. His face shows sensitivity and
intelligence, the qualities important to Florence. “Too picky,” my uncle
once said. “Your mother was too picky.” Her gown’s all satin and lace,
a waist-length trimmed veil and the flourish of train and stephanotis. A
gown so lovely it makes the insects go silent like when the sun passes
behind a cloud.
***
Unlike the generation before, my mother has traveled far from
the Iowa farm. Escaping the seduction of gunny sacks, she’d been in
the Red Cross during World War II and while stationed in California
five men proposed. Those years were happiest of her life, when she
was Miss Telecky, who looked beautiful in her uniform, and worked as
a salaried director of recreation. Although the groom is a Chicago boy,
he’s spent four years as a Merchant Marine lifting oil drums on tankers
sailing between Brazil and North Africa, hauling precious fuel cargo
across the Atlantic to feed the Allied war machine. Soon he’s to study
conservation biology, but that lifting will come back to haunt him when
doctors discover the weakness of his heart and its shrunken aorta.
***
Her Red Cross war’s over too, and Florence is teaching high
school math in Reno, Nevada, when the two meet at a church bonfire
hotdog roast. My mother roasts hers until its skin blackens and his
opening words to her are, “You must like carbon.” He’s seven years
younger than his bride. “Women live longer than men,” he reportedly
said. Did he mean that based on the actuarial tables, he and Florence
could be expected to live about the same number of years? My mother
will live 64 years longer than him.
***
They’ve both journeyed a great distance to find their spouse
and Florence has brought him home to the same country church where
Josie and Joseph wed. After the ceremony the newly-married couple
drives in the green Hudson to Lasswell Studios [once Reid Studio] in
Cedar Rapids for their wedding portrait. Tin cans rattling from the
bumper, JUST MARRIED soaped over the doors. Photographers do
not travel, the wedding party comes to them.
***
Here at Lasswell’s they face the camera in their happiness.
Florence’s sister is matron-of-honor and Philip has chosen his brother-
in-law for his best man. The privations of war are too close at hand to
tempt the fates with abstentious display of bridesmaids and
groomsmen.
***
There is one surviving video of the wedding reception held on
my grandparent’s farm. Grainy, spliced together, the old celluloid gives
the viewer a sensation of being inside a snow storm. Florence has
bought a Super-80 movie camera, and asks her cousin Edwin, second
son of Josie and Joseph, to capture the afternoon, the shaking of hands,
the fluttering leaves that no longer exist except here where the human
ghosts talk and smile from chairs set up on the disappeared front yard.
There’s the summer kitchen and grape arbor and my mother who
shields her bangs with one hand as she crosses the grass; the other hand
hikes up her gown. I see my paternal grandmother trip and giggle. My
maternal grandfather, who’s already shed his suit coat and tie, cuff his
shirt sleeves to elbow. The trees bend in a vanished wind and the
cotton-pale leaves fly up like fleece. I can see all the gone ones
warming themselves in the July sun. Fields of snow corn growing in
every direction.
Dickinson / 15
***
In their beginning, my father Phil interned on the Pheasant
Project at Summer Lake, Oregon, east of the Cascades in the Ponderosa
Forest. My parents lived in a hunter’s cabin. He hears the peasants
cooing as he walks toward the canal. The majestic males and their
dowdy ladies are already up. No music. The music is the dryness
rubbing itself against rock and scrub brush, the music of ponderosa
pines in their blue-green feathering. Florence, a robe tied over her
nightgown, is boiling water for coffee. Her body’s in bloom. She’s
pregnant with my oldest brother and my father, not knowing how poor
and sick his heart is, will be happy.
***
I try to comb through the time that no one remembers to find
something/anything of him. I see only the photographs that decorate
my mother’s walls. Here’s a man with a wrestler’s physique and a five-
o’clock-shadow. Here’s one of him straddling the Harley-Davidson he
rides from Chicago to Reno in the on-going infinite moment. Here’s a
yellowed clipping of a speech he gave to a ladies garden club on tree
planting. I do not remember his death or his funeral. Two fragments.
The first is the tiny house in Dixon. My brothers climb into the black
pickup truck, the one that belongs to the State of Illinois Department of
Conservation, my father’s employer. Perhaps he’s taking my brothers
to check deer feeding stations. Perhaps they’ll talk to the white-tailed
deer and follow them into the trees, the shimmer of a lake on the other
side, water in the doe’s eyes. All I know is they’re going on a fantastic
adventure and I’m not. Left behind with mother, I see my brothers’
small heads in the cab. And I don’t recollect the man driving the black
pickup.
***
In the second fragment my brothers and I stand on a grassy
knoll next to a tall building, a hospital of six stories but to a three-year-
old a skyscraper. Our mother’s on the second floor at the open window
telling us to talk to Daddy. We miss you. Come home soon. Like a
dream of heat simmering in the broth of cut grass and bushes moiled
with flies and wings vibrating with pale life. I vaguely know my father
lies sick in the room my mother waves from. I don’t know the hole in
his heart keeps shrinking and he has to keep breathing deeper to feed
his body with oxygen. That breathing exhausts him and an oxygen tent
is the best this era can do. This isn’t the Chicago hospital where he’ll
die but a small town one where the general practice doctors tell my
mother Phil can live for years with his heart if he’s careful. The heart
specialist writes my newly widowed mother he didn’t expect my father
to grow old. I keep trying to remember something more about the
second story window. All around me it’s summer but not in the
hospital that seeps cold like the dark beneath a house. Where children
with their dirty hands and germs are not allowed.
***
His heart thrums against his breastbone, then crashes like an oil
drum. Brazilian sun—a magenta fireball explodes, flying apart. He
stops breathing. My father’s thirty-six-year-old body is brought by train
back to Iowa and the country cemetery where he’d said he’d like to be
buried. Graves surround a long-limbed white church with a steeple that
can be seen for miles. After the funeral the family gathers at my
grandparent’s farm for a meal. William Buresh, Josie and Joseph’s
oldest son, now a grown man in his forties, sees Florence and her three
young children, and remembers his father’s death. The sun is bright;
pins and needles of light jab his eyes. The adult man and boy-self walk
behind the barn and weep.
***
My mother in her first year of widowhood learns Braille and
gets a job teaching at the Iowa School for the Blind.
***
The widow’s youngest, I grow up like a weed.
***
Brethren, you think something strange and terrible is
happening to you. For my mother, widowhood meant something
strange and terrible had happened to her.
***
When the plane JFK, Jr. piloted took him, his wife, and sister-
in-law into the ocean, Florence said, “At least they died together.”
***
In the northern Indian province of Haryana, a twenty-three-
year old man bludgeoned two widows, one his thirty-five-year old aunt,
on a public street. He pointed his finger at the women and accused
them of having “loose character.” The villagers watched him beat
Dickinson / 17
them to death in order. An honor killing. Away from the Indian cities
where tradition rules daily life, Hindu widows are made to shave their
heads and wear white cotton. They’re kept indoors, given little food,
and not allowed to go out or they are forced out of the home into a life
of prostitution or begging. They’re allowed no jewelry and eat only
plain food. Child brides as young as one, two, and three are married by
their parents. If the boy dies she remains a widow unable to marry for
the rest of her life. It is suttee without fire, the same lying down in the
flames. When Hindus marry it is for seven lifetimes, yet only the
widow is forbidden to marry after the death of a spouse and must await
her own death and rebirth; the widower can marry after his wife’s
cremation.
3
The year, 2011, and the new Internet century speeds through its
first decade of steps. Islamic extremism, the mass extinctions of
animals, destruction of the last primordial forests, the rise of China’s
economic juggernaut and Asian cranes adding new structures to the
skylines of Beijing, Ho Chi Ming City, to Seoul, and Bangkok. The
American Century is over. The worldwide web connects the global
village and it’s a twenty-four-hour-we’re-open-for-business world
where everything’s for sale. Porn. Drones. Cloned animals like the
spidergoats. Goodbye to the brick and mortar stores, to letter mail and
the post office, hello to social media, the paperless world of I-Pads,
Kindles, I-Phones. Time ratchets itself up, the man/machine interface
proceeds in full-sprint.
Amanda & Dustin

***
I sit with mouse in hand clicking through a computer slideshow
of wedding photos in lifelike color. I can enlarge my niece to fill my
monitor screen and zoom in on her hand and the ring that Dustin is
slipping onto her finger. I click. Here Amanda faces the photographer
in a v-necked gown with elbow-length veil, her long ash-blond hair has
been swept up and shows off the milky skin of her neck. She’s fine-
featured with high cheekbones and he’s dark-haired, blue-eyed, and a
head taller than his bride. A handsome couple. Born and raised in
Texas, they pick a rustic town outside of Austin to marry in. It’s an
outdoor March wedding. In the slideshow I lose myself in the crisp
blue sky like the color of bride and groom’s eyes. The weather is
chilly, and later the sky clouds over.
***
Tuxedos are worn by the male members of the wedding party
and for the bridesmaids it’s coral-pink gowns with spaghetti straps. All
glow like tiny suns, like toast glistening with marmalade.
***
This photo gives me pause, the couple stands before the altar
and the minister, Dustin’s father, a white-haired man who resembles
Johnny Cash, pronounces them man and wife. I see joy. Later the
newlyweds turn in profile with Dustin resting his forehead against
Amanda’s head. He’s twenty-eight and she twenty-seven. His eyes are
closed as if he’s struggled a great distance to this moment and is at rest.
Content. He’s in the glade and so still the locusts leave their wings in
him like oak seeds. They’re in love and my niece has saved herself for
tonight.
***
Dustin and Amanda hold each other on the dance-floor. They
look at each other like sultry wild grapes about to gorge on rain and
sun. I watch their wedding on video. I am a virtual guest.
***
Ninety-seven-year old Florence attends the wedding; her
dementia that she’s valiantly fought is closing in on her, yet she out-
dances her two sons and grandson to Motown. It is likely the last time
she’s happy.
***
One year and one day later on a Monday, the unthinkable
happens. Dustin visits a friend in the town where he went to high
school. He’s in the bathroom of the old house his friend rents. It’s been
a long time and his friend knocks and asks if he’s okay. Dustin thinks
he’s passing a kidney stone, because the pain is dizzying like the white
Texas sun pounding. He’s not sure where the pain is coming from.
Worse than all the childhood fevers, the live oak trees buzzing with
gnats shadowing the window of his boyhood room, the heat and
weakness, and his mother setting saltine crackers with raspberry jam
beside him. His friend has a college class to go to. “Dustin, is it okay if
I leave?” Sure, sure, he must say. He’s had a kidney stone before. He’s
taken pills, a prescription medication. The pain is bound to pass and his
friend needs to get to class. The last words anyone will hear. “Sure, go
Dickinson / 19
on. I’ll be okay.” When his friend returns a few hours later, the
bathroom door is still locked, and then the cold fear sets in. He breaks
down the door and finds Dustin inside. Dead. A handsome twenty-
nine-year old man has stopped living.
***
It will be months before the autopsy results are known.
Cardiac arrest brought on by a prescription medication.
***
My niece like her grandmother and great-great aunt before her
has been told she’s a widow. She has more in common with Josie than
Florence as her man died of an accident that could have been
prevented. If she’d not been at work, if the friend had called 911 and
not gone off to class, if Dustin hadn’t swallowed the pills, he’d be
alive. If Joseph hadn’t gone into the field with his dynamite, or the
wood projectile had missed him entirely, the history of a family would
be rewritten. My father’s heart could not be repaired in his era.
***
Amanda bears his absence like she bears Dustin’s last name.
She’s parted with the apartment where they lived together and given
away his clothes with their smell of him sewn into the fibers. A bright,
soft-spoken career woman and one with deep religious beliefs, she
struggled to write her goodbye eulogy to her husband. Finished it took
the form of a letter. Again I am a virtual guest this time at his funeral. I
watch my niece’s face brighten as she addresses him, trying to laugh at
how she’d talked him into a ballroom dancing class, how she could
have danced forever with him, and then lifting her face almost
beseeched him to return to her. This man I’d not met.
***
Dustin’s body is cremated and Amanda climbs a mountain trail
west of El Paso in the stunted pine forest and outcroppings of rock
called Big Bend. Unsealing the urn, she finds the trough of bird sound
and hush and scatters the ashes over ancient rocks, the laccoliths and
faults, the last of Dustin’s sense of humor, his love of fishing, his lips
on her neck, the man who would father her children.
***
Death by dynamite, death by blood clot, death by medication.
***
Any messages from the dirt brides and grooms who lie under
pines in cemeteries beside gravel roads—bones and ashes gone decades
apart into the ground? All you hear is the wind whistling, like the wind
itself hurts. Josephine has waited faithfully and when Joseph comes for
her soul she’s again her eighteen-year-old self. Between the two, the
way even in that first pose they leaned toward the other they lean now,
anxious for a taste of the animal tenderness. And that chemistry
wrought between the dark-eyed Phil and wasp-waisted Florence
brought forth a new generation. The prospects of a young widow in
America before the First World War differ from those of a post-Second
World War baby boom widow or young widow today. They are vastly
different yet the emotional stigmata of widowhood remain the same.
You need luck in this life and to become a widow too soon is unlucky.
You’re tainted. Who do you blame for bad luck? To be a widow is to
no longer believe in the wedding promise, the happily ever after, the
money envelopes, the rehearsal dinner, the white-beach flowers. To be
a widow is to embarrass and make uncomfortable. It’s a bride betrayed
by the lace and gauzy veil into the dark forest of ancient tragedy.
***
The husband enters the field with his gunpowder and eyes the
stump rooted stubbornly in black soil where he’ll soon plow furrows.
The roots hold fast like fists to the clodded dirt now that the tree steeple
and leaf canopy is timbered. The roots feel the lightness; knows an
amputation has taken place. The stump fears more searing pain and
saw cutting its trunk asunder, remembers the swaying and lowing of
green hair, the top-heavy fullness falling. A widowing.
/ 21
MARILYN CAVICCHIA
SELECTIONS FROM “SECRET RIVERS”
BARBARA, DRIVER, CHRYSLER TOWN & COUNTRY
If that balloon truck cuts me off one more time,

I’m going to smash into it. Asshole.
What kind of idiot keeps turning their signal
on and off like that? Yeah, go ahead and
get in the left lane. We all know you’re in
a big hurry. You’re so much more important
than the rest of us. All I’m trying to do is
get myself home without being killed first.
It’s like the whole world has gone crazy,
and no one’s locked up anymore.
You never know who’s behind the wheel
and what they might do. When I think
of how we used to hitchhike on those
summer days, and nights. I got
through it all and am alive to tell
the story (though I did once have to
jump out into traffic—every hitcher
has a story like that).
21
JUSTIN, DRIVER, CHEVY VOLT
I guess it figures, around here, that

only the usual five of us would speak out
at tonight’s town hall meeting. One lady
took a brochure, but I saw her wad it up
in her purse, get back into her mega-large
Hummer or whatever. That’s the way it is.
It’ll be better next month, in Columbus.
I shouldn’t have used terms like
proppant and slickwater. I shouldn’t
have raised my voice. It was like
yelling at my grandma. I definitely
yelled at other people’s grandmas,
the ones talking about how they hope
to get a nice check, how much they
need it, how the company studies
say there’s very little risk, and how
we don’t want to miss this opportunity.
I shouldn’t have said that it was
an opportunity to poison grandbabies.
I felt things turn, then, even further.
It was easier in college, talking to
people my own age, people who
wanted to save the world, people who
didn’t live in a world so far past saving,
so many decades beyond saving
that fear begins to look like hope.
Cavicchia / 23
LAUREN, DRIVER, MAZDA 3
It’s a lot better here now,

and I’m starting to feel
pretty good about my decision
to move back home, even though
I know a lot of people thought
that was a big disappointment
because I didn’t go be an artist
in New York or whatever.
Yeah, it’s no fun to live in a

dead town, even if it’s the one
you grew up in, and you know
pretty much everyone. Everyone
who stayed, that is—I know
plenty who got out as soon as
they could, or sooner (a couple
suicides in my class, and it wasn’t
all that big of a class, either). But
in the past six months or so,

there’s all this new business,
new people. New guys, too,
but it’s not like I’m a slut or
anything. I don’t hang out
at the Super 8, you know?
I’m just saying that it’s fun
to flirt, that’s all, and I like
the ones from other places,
like Texas. I don’t know
all their stories already,
their families and all that.
I don’t have to think about

their girlfriends or wives,
how I was in cheerleading
or track with them, or
how mad they’d be if they
saw me talking to their guy
like this. That’s the thing
about guys who aren’t local,
but if some of them do bring

their wives and have kids,
and stay at least a while,
then maybe I could finally
teach art, which is what I
went to school for, instead
of working at Hobby Lobby,
which a lot of people say
is close enough, but I know
it’s really not.
Cavicchia / 25
JULIE, DRIVER, FORD TAURUS WAGON
I’m showing apartments

every day now. This one
lady, she keeps calling me
to complain about this
and that. Her flight was
delayed, and now there’s
a storm somewhere
between Columbus and
here; she’s not used to
driving in snow,
and she doesn’t have
any sweaters. Listen,
I’m not going to pick
her up from the airport,
and about the sweaters,
I’m sure they have Google
in South America, where
she’s from. She could
have looked up our
weather from there,
especially if she’s so
brilliant that they
have to import her
from a whole other
continent. All she is,
is a scheduler. She
schedules the workers.
She must be damn
good at it, is all
I have to say.
ROBERT, DRIVER, BUICK LESABRE
Figured I’d be further along in life

by now. Figured I’d retire, do things
for my kids. Maybe move away,
or at least fix what I’ve got here.
Lot of houses boarded up.

Lot of houses torn down.
Some, like mine, still standing

but crumbling, a little more
every year, or even every
season. Some winters, I think

one more good, stiff wind
will knock us down the hillside,
quicker than a wrecking ball.
The teardown crew came for

Sottosanti’s house last year,
after they moved Greg’s mom
out to Minton, to the care center.
Used to be that me and Greg

were friends, in a way. Used to be
that he and I would fight. Sometimes
with each other, sometimes against.
He’d talk to me about music,

Frankie Lymon, Del-Vikings,
all of that. He used to joke
that he was black, too,
and it was true, almost.

The Italians around here
Cavicchia / 27
had a real hard time,
so they lived side by side

with us, and we were always
good neighbors, in and out
of each other’s yards, though
not houses. Not much. Greg

would sometimes come over,
make eyes at my sister, Yvette,
though everybody knew
that couldn’t happen. So Greg

married a nice Italian girl, or
maybe Czech, and he moved
out to Spencerville. It’s nice
out there, but I hear there’s

still KKK. Don’t believe the sign
about the Quaker abolitionist.
Maybe he did live there once,
but that’s been a long time ago.
Somewhere along the way,

the Italians became white.
Greg became white, and I’m
still black. If you believe
things like that don’t matter

anymore, and if you think
a knocked-down house
or a boarded-up house
or a falling-down house
are just facts, aren’t
something ugly, then
someone’s been
lying to you, and
maybe it’s you.
Cavicchia / 29
MARJORIE, DRIVER, CADILLAC DEVILLE
Henry was always a dog to me.

That’s what no one ever knew.
People thought I was so well
cared for, with my Mary Kay
products and my suits for
Sunday mornings, when we’d
go to breakfast after church, not
at Elby’s Big Boy, but someplace
nicer, like the Wagon Wheel.
You know, that place that
used to be by the river?
Anyway, the thing of it
was, he was always atoning
for something, Henry. Henry,
who planted forsythia bushes
but never could love me enough.
NANCY, DRIVER, TOYOTA AVALON
I used to carry a paper bag

with me, to breathe into.
It’s true. I kept it right here
beside me, and I used it
at red lights, to keep
the panic down. I had
a whole system of
back roads and no
left turns, or at least
none without arrows.
I was hypnotized a few times,

laid out in a recliner, told that
my car was a sanctuary, a place
of great peace. I drifted along
on that idea, and then

went back to back roads
and paper bags. One day,
I got on this interstate, I-70,

by accident, merged onto it
while I was thinking about
something else. And that’s
what did it, I guess. No bag

since then, and I can pretty much
drive anywhere, make left turns
whenever I want. Sometimes
I imagine we’re all white blood cells,

platelets, I don’t know—something
in the blood—moved by a great
Cavicchia / 31
muscle, a heart I can’t see

but can feel. Shift into drive,
foot on the gas, breathe once,
drop into the bloodstream.
Go.
LUCIA MAY
SELECTIONS FROM “BLOND B OY”
BLOND BOY
The blond boy runs with his pigeon

at his chest along the border
of “Germany” and occupied Poland.
He is running to his friend’s
house to trade pigeons.
The blond boy’s father drops his scythe
in the family field as a brown-shirted
Wehrmacht soldier on bended knee
aims his Mauser at the boy and fires.
The blond boy becomes an old man.

He tells this story in a Cleveland diner.
He does not say anything
about Jewish boys’ corpses in mass graves
and how they were flattened
by earth and other stacked corpses.
How the corpses were called figuri,
which in Polish means figures,
not bodies. These are not his stories.
His stories are the glories of God’s miracles.

Our Lord Jesus in his infinite wisdom
spares him, his humble servant,
to live and spread the Word of His mercy.
32
May / 33
BLOND BOY AND THE PLAN FOR EASTERN EUROPE

(GENERALPLAN OST)
Cattle wagons transported

children aged six to ten years
to temporary selection camps.
A sympathetic Nazi guard
could sell a Catholic child back
to its Polish family for 25 złoty.
The blond boy is twelve in 1939

when the Nazis invade Poland.
He is too old for Germanization,
too old to be desirable enough
to undergo racial exams by experts.
Some younger Polish gentiles live

and die as Germans, unsuspecting,
but he is too old to forget Polish
nursery rhymes and his Polish name.
Armed Nazis seize him from the family farm

and he is conscripted as a Zivilarbeiter—
civilian worker— forbidden to swim
in public pools, to ride public transport,
to own a bicycle or, under penalty of death,
to have sex with a German.
By law the blond boy’s wages are lower than

German citizens’, his nutrition substandard.
He chips stone seven days a week
in a German quarry. He may not attend
church and must wear a purple “P” badge.
His superiors encourage him to sign

the Deutsche Volksliste for benefits
like more calories and freedoms.

He refuses to sign and after the war
is spared being tried in Poland for high treason.
May / 35
BLOND BOY AND THE WEAKER SEX
When the boys were seized from their families

by the Germans to dig anti-tank
trenches in the Polish countryside,
they were first sent on cattle cars to Nuremberg.
For three days and three nights

there was no food, water, or heat.
There were no bathrooms in the train cars.
Being a clean people, the Nazis,

upon the boys’ arrival, ordered them to strip
and stand in line outside for several cold hours
to await their turn to shower at a single spigot.
The female guards enjoyed gawking

at the boys and fondling them with sticks.
If a boy responded with an erection,
a guard struck it.
The blond boy grew up and marveled

that he and the prisoners did not rebel,
that the boys accepted their penalties
like cows on the farm before the knife.
BURGLAR
Before my parents' first separation I awoke one night to find the police
at our house. My parents knew that my brother Billy sneaked out his
bedroom window at night to drink beer with his thirteen-year-old
buddies. That night they locked his window when he was gone and left
the side door open with the lights out. Later when Billy returned he
found his bedroom window locked and the basement window grout
planted with razor blades. So he sneaked in the kitchen door. My
father, who had been waiting in the dark, pushed him down the steep
stairs to the basement. My mother called the police and said, “A boy
just broke into our house.” So the police took him to jail and kept him
until the next day when my parents admitted to knowing who he was.
For the rest of his life Billy would have the scar where his teeth
pierced his lip as he fell.
May / 37
DON'T FORGET
My mother separated from my father, Lu, when I was five because

there was an incident with my sister. He wanted me to call him on the
phone every night. I forgot one evening and when I realized my
mistake the next day, I called him in a panic. He told me, “If you
really loved me you wouldn't forget.” On Saturdays when we had our
“dates” he would sometimes draw me cute pictures of cats and
squirrels. Sometimes he drew sad pictures of pierced hearts with blood
dripping, or an old woman, his mother in Poland. When he'd drop me
off at my mom's, I'd run to my bedroom and cry.
HUNGER
Lu sat with my mom and me at the dinner table but we no longer

spoke to him. It was close to the end of his forty-day fast. He wore a
pained expression, like that of Christ on the cross. He sat shirtless,
grimy from mowing the lawn. Rivulets of dried sweat formed patterns
on his chest, further suggesting Christ at his crucifixion.
He read aloud to us from his Pilgrim Edition of the King James Bible.
If he needed to scratch his back he would use a dinner fork, not
skipping one jot or iota of the Word. The wave of his stench had a
singular quality, the fetid smell of an empty, dry stomach. Only evil
could produce this stink, as if it billowed from the rank mouth of hell.
Maybe it was the breath of his sins escaping his repentant body. It was
a good thing that I had attended Girl Scout camp where I learned that
if you breathed through your mouth in the latrines, you wouldn't smell
anything. I did this while eating soup at the dinner table, its lack of
taste a glad price.
I hid a set of silverware for myself in the back of the flatware drawer
so that I would never have to use a fork that touched his skin or mouth.
I held my breath if I had to pass him in a room.
May / 39
REUNION RETREAT
Lucian would not have recognized me, his daughter, even if he were
not suffering from early Alzheimer’s. It had been twenty-eight years
since we had seen each other. At the appointed time he stood in the
Cleveland Sheraton hotel lobby stock-still, his raincoat folded over his
arm. He was dressed as I remembered him: suit, dress shoes, spit and
polish, Brylcreem with middle notes of Mennen aftershave.
I introduced myself, my husband, and two grown daughters. There

were his jokes and complaints about the hotel buffet, after giving
thanks for it in Jesus’ name in a Scottish/Polish accent. After decades
of revising the family mythologies, there was little to say that could
connect us. I was about to learn that the information that mattered had
been missing and came from a world before my own beginnings, from
his life as a boy in Nazi-occupied Poland and Germany.
ANITA S PULIER
SELECTIONS FROM “I DON’T REMEMBER
BOOKING THIS TRIP”
GUILTY BY ASSOCIATION
Every interview
as tornado survivors sing Jesus loves me
by the coffins of their children
Every zealot
eating the heart
of another zealot
Everyone
raped, mutilated, murdered
by teenage rebels and military madmen
leave me dragging against

the planet's boggy bottom
without traction
the origin of the species

the big bang
the human genome
the blackest of holes
and still adrift
resigned to some remote connection

to accept punishment
plead guilty by association
40
Pulier / 41
REGRETS
The birds are eating Goldfish snacks

scattered on the beach by our kids
and our kids' kids.
We have gathered to cast off our sins

and celebrate the Jewish New Year.
Growing up in a secular home

where tradition was self- created.
I have little knowledge of this holiday.
The Jews of my past were survivors

of steaming NYC tenements and streets.
Survivors of struggle.
My Jews had little time to worry

about casting off anything.
Everything was precious,
even sins held tight.
And so as I watch my husband's family atone,

throw bits of bread into the glittering Pacific Ocean,
pelicans diving, sea gulls wobbling,
retrieving each morsel tossed,
I allow my mind to stray
and wonder if these bright yellow, over-salted,

pumped full of chemicals Goldfish snacks
are killing the magnificent birds gathered around us
and who on earth to apologize to.
RECYCLING MINK
For my parents,
Brooklyn College socialists,
it was the era of contradictions.
Suburban houses and martinis,

the struggle to earn a living,
support aging immigrant parents,
raise kids, protest.
Even the Cadillac that appeared

one day in our Queens driveway
never changed the pitch
of Soviet, Mao ardor
or dimmed the passionate arguments
at dinner table gatherings.
And when the cold New York winters

blanketed the house with ice and snow
my mother got a deal on a mink coat
which added a certain zip to her stride
while marching with Women's Strike for Peace.
And when she died,

I inhaled those aged dried out pelts
infused with her scent,
and paid a tailor to create
a ragged lining for my winter coat,
dutifully recycling
while cushioning the sharp edges
of my world without her.
Pulier / 43
AIRLESS
On the day Grandma Rose vanished,

a flash of pulsing lights and sirens
snatched her from the small flowery
wallpapered room across from mine.
In the ripe hysteria of death

they exiled me to Joycie's house
where I watched her family chew.
I did not complain

I did not cry,
I did not tell them how disgusting they were.
Too small to know

the rules for grieving,
wide eyed and empty,
unable to catch my breath,
I huffed and puffed

through empty days,
longing
for the return
of automatic breathing.
THE NEW MATH
We lacked the prescience to know

what power lay in numbers.
Oh, how we girls longed

to be certified of value
before we finally understood
we had to certify ourselves.
By then we were desperate

and redefined middle age as
“X equals as many years
ahead as behind”,
knowing full well

the sea remained miles away,
the rivers bone dry.
Pulier / 45
LOCAL SLUTS
The same ad appears daily

in my spam file “Local Sluts”
It says, “Free access to local sluts”.
On the one hand

it's nice that they are
“local” and that folks
won't have to tangle
with the morning rush
or freeway traffic jams,
nice that the complexity

of meaningful relationships
will be simplified, as I assume
people that are local
are familiar, easy to understand.
I imagine a gathering
right here in my neighborhood,
presided over by a young man covered in chains,
his gold teeth caps shining in the morning sun.
He explains that neighborhood schools, libraries,
shopping malls, banks and dentists' offices
are opening their doors to welcome
local sluts as part of our community.
Can GPS or Siri locate these people?

Local or not I am worried about them.
I would like to buy them a meal and talk.
But I have reliable information that

Local Sluts operates out of Nigeria.
“Local”, it seems, refers to the world
made small by fiber optics,
and I should probably search
closer to home for souls to save.
JUST IN CASE
you receive a text message

from my phone
soon after I die
ignore it
rest assured it will not be from me
don't hesitate
to cancel the account
scatter the ashes
after-all, I must have
whispered a million loving secrets
directly into your ears
which you can access
anywhere
without a signal
/ 47
JUDY IRELAND
SELECTIONS FROM “CONCRETE SHOES”
GROWING GIRLS IN IOWA
We grew in rows between the green tractors,

the black nightshade, the pigweed, and the corn.
We had a long growing season,
and mothers with terrible wingspans,
and aunts who came to visit
carrying black vinyl purses full of bones,
chips of limestone and curled-up willow switches.
No matter how they tried, we grew up wild,

big-eyed and defiant, burned by the sun.
With heavy thighs and strong teeth,
we thundered through the fields out of reach
of mothers & aunts who could not stop the motors,
with their green and yellow gears, from turning.
Our hair hung down, crazy silks among the rows;

banshees in the corn, we coupled in the furrows.
Convinced we were eternal, our coming of age took ages,
and the fields grew shiny and wet with great big girls overflowing.
47
MY FATHER VOTED FOR NIXON
My father voted for Nixon

but still I loved him.
I loved him even when his shame for me

was a big flashlight, and I stood inside
the brightest of circles without a shadow,
imperfections gleaming.
I loved him when he sat at the big formica table,

fork poised over cold mashed potatoes,
looking at his fat teenage daughter
in her too-tight clothes,
then looked away, saying nothing.
My love was truly without condition.

I took all the blame.
Even after he died, memory made him
something entirely different.
I spent hours loving him back into a shape
I could recognize.
I remember wanting peace.

I remember hating the war.
I remember him marching in his white Navy uniform,
my heart hurting with pride.
He was everything that was not me,
but still, I loved him.
Even now, I think of my father

without illumination.
I beckon to him without hesitation.
A shameful daughter,
hot cheeks still burning,
I let him live on
in the dim sun
of my yearning.
Ireland / 49
ARGUING ABOUT CHAOS
“The nature of things,” my friend writes

“is hereditary, steadfast and classical.”
He lives in Kansas
and will soon be a grandfather.
I write back, page upon page,
arguing for chaos and chance.
Maybe life is different in the city.

Maybe because I will have no grandchild,
I can believe in the absence of plans,
the inability of science
to predict all things.
Life is tornadoes and lightning strikes.

Waking up each morning is purely roulette.
And the things you trust can disappear
like Star Trek officers beaming up.
I remember my grandmother smiling

as she fell to her knees in the flowerbed.
“Look here,” she said, “This wild rose
came up volunteer.”
She planned the colors of her garden,
and then, by chance,
a small red bloom simply appeared.
I dreamed this morning that someone

was making me think about too many things.
I had to figure out infinity
on top of everything else.
I thrashed around in my bed
and woke, wound up in the covers
like a tamale.
By accident, I thought of my friend.
I envy him.
He seldom remembers his dreams
and will soon be a grandfather.
LOT'S WIFE
I grew up with preachers pounding the pulpit, singing

their phrases, pounding sin into my head
and the preacher's wife sat in a pew three decent
rows back in her blue and green stayknit dress
with her two perfect sons in their scrawny suits
and you knew she kept her eyes closed
and her nightgown buttoned when they did it,
and the sweat on his forehead would be living water
showers of blessing and you knew he said sweet jesus
under his breath like praying would put her back together
and she would sigh, so sanctified, baptized, pure
because she hadn't looked.
My own mother lay straight under my father

but he didn't pray so I was born this way, of woman,
of sin, of pain, in need of grace. And we were all
born needing, swaying in the pews and singing
from heavy books hallelujahs and Jehovah’s
and abide by mess and wishing we were on our knees
with someone else even if it was a sin.
We wanted to be crucified not forgiven,
and our evil natures raised us off those pews
several inches and we sang with extra breath
and greater volume to make up for wicked thoughts.
And I could not forget Lot's wife, how unfair it was

to turn her into a pillar of salt when all she was doing
was looking. She opened her eyes
and maybe her nightgown wasn't buttoned
and maybe she was born to look behind her, peeking
after evil. And so she was given the ash, the dust,
the salt of us all and when we look, we feel her
on our own skin and we taste her in our sweat
and if we wonder why she had no name
we don't dare say it. We know we were born
in Gomorrah and God is only letting us live
because he's bored with dirty tricks
and bored with boring women in two-toned stayknit dresses.
And Lot's
Ireland / 51
wife is our christ and savior.

She looked and She knew, just before She turned,
salt of the earth, bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.
SNOWBIRDS
You see them often in airports.

The man says something to his wife. then walks off.
The woman hesitates, gathers up her bags, his newspaper.
an empty water bottle that needs throwing away. She hooks
one arm through the straps of the tote bag, then realizes
she can’t put her sweater on. She puts it all down again, and begins
over
He looks back, and frowns. He keeps on going.
She rearranges her bags — the one with the large baggie
full of snack mix she packed in her kitchen that morning.
a smaller baggie with a moist washrag,
and a separate plastic container that holds their medicine.
She refilled his bottle of blood pressure pills before leaving home.
and she brought his reading glasses. By the time she starts
down the concourse, he is out of sight.
She walks on, wide-hipped and listing toward one side.
She parts the oncoming passengers who dodge by her
with their rolling cases, cell phones jammed to their ears.
She hates gate changes. She could hate her life. but
there’s no time. She continues on, searching the crowd
for him, his long arms swinging on each side, his wallet
making a subtle square bulge in his right-hand back pocket.
She sees him sitting at the new gate.
He points impatiently at an empty blue vinyl seat next to his.
This gate is crowded. he says. He was lucky
to find two places together. He raises his voice, repeats himself
until she says, Yes, lucky. Lucky we get to sit
together.
Ireland / 53
MY SISTERS IN IOWA
My sisters smoke cigarettes and laugh deep laughs,

part gravel, part alto. The family's shrunk down to a few of us,
stubborn and willful, mostly single, never married or paired off for
long,
returning always to that state of self that is undaunted, undivided,
free of attachment, female bodhisattvas of the corn.
The thought occurs to each of us separately
that the other two are hard to get along with.
Too damn bad.
We're the same age now as the people in our parents'

photographs. I imagine my sisters posed like the gray bodies
standing in front of now-ghost houses, staring straight ahead,
trying to look nice but half wild and wanting to take off, cross-prairie.
It's a long life.
And in the spring, I see them holding cigarettes between tight lips
hanging clothes on the outside line, eyes squinting
against rising smoke. I see them looking up
into the pear tree, gauging this year's harvest,
counting pears, green leaves everywhere
like returned relatives, familiar, welcome,
wonderfully temporary.
FARM WOMAN WITH S HOTGUN
Don’t step one foot onto her land.

She’s confused many a corpse
by carrying them out the door, feet first.
Mother, husband, fox, thief, not one has ever found
its way back.
If you read to her the lines by Rumi

about not being broken down
but merely dropping leaves for a further spring,
she’d say she never heard of such a thing.
She rests the barrel on her upper forearm

like a baby’s head. She doesn’t speak,
she barely breathes. All she can do is stand
and refuse to step back. Refuse to step back.
/ 55
Dinah Cox
The Dot
My twin brother suffers from premature hair loss. Refusing all

topical creams, dyes, drugs, or implants, Aaron motors around our
prosperous neighborhood with the confidence of the newly divorced.
He drives a convertible, one of those high-end brands with X or Z as a
suffix. He’s not actually divorced, though, he’s married to a woman
ten years his senior, a computer programmer who, in spite of staying
away from conditioner, hairspray, gel, or mousse, has the kind of
curly, brown hair you might mistake for a movie star’s. Her trademark,
Aaron says, without irony. He’s right: she’s beautiful.
They make a fine couple, though people are always asking
why such a gorgeous woman would marry a toad like him. The same
is true about my own marriage, I suppose, except in our case I am the
toad and my husband is the princess. My brother’s hair loss, though,
draws attention to his other flaws and for that reason I admire its shiny
grandeur. Were it not for that sunburned patch of skin I know I would
want to kill him for sure.
“We’re late,” my husband said one morning before we were
supposed to go over to my brother’s house for brunch. My husband,
always concerned about potential tardiness, taught sixth grade at the
same middle school where I’m paid about two cents an hour to keep
the DVD players in good repair and occasionally order science videos
from The Discovery Channel catalog. Like most American History
teachers, my husband did double duty not just as the coach of the
peewee football team but also as the sponsor of the Academic Quiz
Bowl Squad. Sometimes he left his stopwatch hanging around his neck
even after we’d gone to bed for the night.
“We’re not late,” I told him. “And what if we were? No one’s
going to send us to the principal’s office.”
“I don’t like to be late,” he said, hurling my purse across the
room as if it were an errant catcher’s mask in an otherwise immaculate
equipment room. “I like my waffles hot,” he said, and before I could
collect the spilled contents of my purse he was out the front door.
I reached under the couch to retrieve a lipstick tube and
wondered again why I bothered with make-up. All the kids at school
called me The Owl. I didn’t know what they called my husband, but I
suspected they’d assigned him a considerably more flattering
nickname. Always Mr. Cool Guy, my husband, Chet is his name—
short for Chester—was fond of telling jokes like the following: “How
55
do you break a sixth grader’s finger? Answer: You punch him in the
nose.” For this, the seventh graders thought him some kind of god.
I fumbled with some loose change under the rocking chair and
finally arranged myself for a more relaxed departure. Aaron and Faye
lived only two doors down, so one might have imagined we enjoyed
the kind of relationship where borrowing a cup of sugar or a step
ladder was common as the morning paper. Not so. Tension replaced
our usual neighborly merriment as soon as Aaron graduated from
dental school and started losing his hair. Imagining themselves older
and richer than their boring old sister and brother-in-law, Aaron and
Faye started running with a more sophisticated crowd. Now they’re
talking about replacing their Formica countertops with granite,
building a gazebo in the backyard, and eventually, having children.
Chet and I could never compete. “Well, I figured at least one of us
should be on time,” Chet whispered as I slid into the chair beside him.
“Shouldn’t you be wearing more make-up?”
“Oh come on,” I said. “What are you afraid of?”
He was afraid of looking like a dork. All attempts at
swaggering in front of middle schoolers aside, my husband pretty
much was a dork, and if I was honest with myself l had to admit his
slow-wittedness was one of the reasons I decided to marry him in the
first place. Lately I was sorry I did.
“I hope you’re ready for some fresh melon,” Faye said from
the kitchen. “Today’s honeydew comes from South America.”
“Oh you bet we are,” Chet said. “Really hits the spot.”
Aaron brought in a basket of sweet rolls and Chet said, “Oh,
we just love sweet rolls. The other day Sylvia ate almost a whole roll
of those cinnamon rolls in a tube. She leaves off the frosting, though,
says it’s too sweet. Don’t you honey?”
“Oh, you know us,” I said. “Crazy for sweet rolls.”
“That’s just the problem,” Aaron said. He folded his limbs
into a chair at the head of the table and said, “Too many people are
crazy for sweet rolls. Not you two, of course, but the kids! Christ, if
I’ve done one filling I’ve done a thousand.”
Faye put Aaron through dental school by working two jobs
doing tech support by day and web design by night, but he didn’t
appreciate her as much as he should have. His practice had been up
and running for a little longer than a year, and already he talked as if
he wanted to retire. Cynicism along with a strange, small town
nostalgia united Aaron and me. Together we were like matching
broken down tractors in a space age economy.
Cox / 57
Most twins find creative ways to depart from the personality

traits of their siblings, but our entire lives Aaron and I had been the
same. I was not the wild one; neither was he the smart one. Born of
ugly but overeducated parents, Aaron and I were co-valedictorians in
high school, but finished last and next to last respectively in the same
tortuous track meets. We went to the same college where we both
double-majored in Biology and Classics. He eventually married Faye
in the same city park where I married my husband. His job, as it turned
out, paid him a lot more money than mine paid me. His bald spot,
though, gave me an odd sort of pleasure I could only describe as
something like laughing gas. You didn’t want to laugh, exactly, but
crying, too, seemed out of the question.
“How’s the team?” Aaron asked my husband. “Quarterback
learn how to throw yet?”
“Oh these kids are runners,” Chet said. “Fast.”
They spent a few minutes on the intricacies of first downs and
field goals while I stared hard at my sweet roll. I wished Faye would
come in from the kitchen.
Aaron winked at me and said, “Good fan base, though, right?
A great clamor at touchdown time? I’m sure your wife is full of, you
know, pep?”
Aaron knew the collapse of the Middle School Pep Club came
as a result of my shifting my extra-curricular allegiance away from
athletics and toward the Science Club and Student Council. Wearing a
rain poncho and waving a pompon every Friday night wasn’t exactly
my idea of a good time. Never afraid to exploit existing tensions
between my husband and me, Aaron went on to cup his hands over his
mouth and make the pretend sound of a roaring crowd.
“We don’t need a Pep Club, anyway,” Chet said. “We have a
mascot. And a cheerleading squad. Last week, we had confetti
shooting out of cannon.”
Faye came in from the kitchen and placed cut glass bowls at
each one of our places. She said, “I caught the first quarter on the
cable access channel. The confetti looked more like snowflakes, but
then I guess the picture wasn’t very good. You ought to see our new
entertainment system in the basement. Who wants coffee?”
“I’ll help,” I said, standing. “Let’s go.”
She followed me into the kitchen and I felt guilty for once
again allowing myself to become a dinner party cliché. If the men
talked about football while the women tended to domestic duties,
quilting circles and hunting expeditions were sure to follow.
“Maybe they should make their own coffee,” I said.
“Aaron doesn’t drink coffee anymore,” she said. “I suppose

Chet drinks decaf these days?”
“Tea,” I said, embarrassed. “I’ll bring him some hot water.
Later.”
Faye plugged in the waffle iron and stirred batter in a bowl.
All these years and I never thought of her as the hostess type. When
they were first married she always wanted to order Thai food every
time Aaron wanted her to grill hamburgers in the backyard. For the
sake of Aaron and his career, she sometimes pretended to care about
wifely duties. Like me, she never imagined twenty-first century
marriage demanded public appearances accompanied by adoring gazes
at her husband, but she played the game as well as anyone.
“Aaron and I have an announcement,” she said, dropping
crushed pecans into the batter.
“Oh no,” I said. “Are you sure?”
“Not that,” she said. “Not yet.”
I fiddled with a stack of coffee filters and said, “Good.
Everything all right?”
“Oh yeah, we’re just doing some more remodeling, that’s all.
Aaron’s putting in a hot tub. They’re knocking out a wall.”
“They have to knock out a wall to put in a hot tub?”
“It’s big enough for four,” she said. “And the septic tank has
to be moved. They’re breaking ground tomorrow morning.”
“You’re welcome at our house,” I said, immediately sorry I
did. “While the wall’s knocked out and everything.”
Faye poured batter into the waffle iron and told me about
Aaron’s plan to expand his dental practice. Teeth whiteners and
implants, she said, were very big business these days. The two of them
would sleep in Aaron’s office during the renovation. The dental office
had a fully equipped kitchen and executive washroom, she said. And
besides, they needed access to a computer.
“Chet and I have a computer,” I said. I wondered why I felt
such a pathetic impulse to brag.
“Oh we need a fast computer,” she said. “Aaron’s website and
everything.”
I’d never really looked at Aaron’s website, but I imagined a
rotating gleaming white molar on a royal blue background. Maybe his
photograph in the middle.
“Of course,” I said. “But if you want to come over for dinner
or something. Any time.”
Cox / 59
Faye finished a platter of waffles and we joined the husbands

in the dining room. They were in the middle of a conversation and
didn’t notice our arrival.
“But I don’t believe in multi-national corporations,” Chet said,
his eyes squeezing shut and his lips sucking at a spoonful of fruit. “I
don’t see any value in what you’re talking about.”
Aaron said, “No one really believes in multi-national
corporations. They believe in the money. That’s all. Can’t you get
behind a simple idea like that?”
“It’s not so simple,” my husband said. “Oh good, the waffles
are here.”
Aaron said, “Look Chet, I’m just like you, okay? I don’t use
pesticides on my lawn, I give to Habitat for Humanity, and I vote for
the democrats, every single time. I’m even supporting that lady school
board candidate you and Sylvia seem to like so much. So what’s the
big deal? I want my children to have a viable future, that’s all.”
“You don’t have any children,” I said.
“That’s true,” Faye said. “We don’t.”
Aaron grabbed two waffles from the platter without using a
fork and said, “Oh, and I suppose we all should stop brushing our teeth
just because we don’t have any cavities.”
“I’m getting false teeth,” I said. “Like George Washington’s.”
My husband laughed and Sylvia suppressed a smile.
Aaron reached across my place for the butter. “Fine, Sylvia,”
he said. “Keep on being irresponsible. Go team.”
My husband complimented Faye on the waffles and everyone
ate in silence for a while. I tried not to think of the insides of our
mouths, our tongues flattening against our gums, our incisors
encrusted with syrup. My husband and I played these little dinner
party games with Aaron and Faye on a fairly regular basis, but we
weren’t really friends. We were consumers who shared the same
demographics.
For a long time, my belief in civic duty allowed for a fantasy
of Friday night football games, free dental care, websites broadcasting
all of our many virtues. If we could just make friends with a family of
firefighters we might burn down the Pentagon without anyone getting
hurt. No longer could you make jokes about mass destruction and still
claim your rightful place in the highest tax bracket. The future, I knew,
demanded a stone-faced emphasis on hearth and home.
“Chet and I just bought new bed linens,” I said. “Four hundred
thread count sheets.”
My husband started in on the magic of memory foam

mattresses and Aaron nodded. Faye brought in another platter of
waffles.
“Feather pillows are too hard on Chet’s allergies,” I said, but
before I could give my speech on synthetic fibers, I felt a sudden
sharpness against one of my back teeth. Something was amiss.
Faye said, “What’s the matter? Oh shit, your tooth. Oh god,
there was a pecan shell in the waffle batter I’m just sure of it. Aaron,
do something.”
I said I was fine, and Faye fussed over me for a while. I
watched as Chet drowned himself in orange juice. Later, Aaron
brought out the blueprints for the new hot tub. We all pretended to be
impressed with the underground heating system, our grunts and
murmurs meant to signal appreciation for Aaron’s technical expertise.
Aaron leaned his chair back from the table and, in an instant, almost
lost his balance. I resisted the urge to push him to the floor, but
managed to sound concerned when he said he felt a little light-headed
from eating too much. Before long I gave Chet the signal for an early
departure. We made plans for them to attend the middle school
football game the following Friday.
Later that night my gums began to bleed.

“Tie it to a doorknob,” Chet said, doing yoga in front of the
late night news. “Or make yourself an ice pack from the freezer.”
“I’ve done all that,” I said. “Not the doorknob. But the ice
pack didn’t help.”
We agreed I should call Aaron in the morning and arrange for
some X-rays.
“Aaron will know what to do,” my husband said. “He always
does.”
“That’s just the problem,” I said. I squirted toothpaste on my
finger.
“Use a toothbrush,” my husband said. “Does a better job. You
know I think Aaron’s a bright guy? He’s always annoyed me a little,
but I think he means well.”
I told him I couldn’t use a toothbrush; the bristles provoked
my bleeding gums. But Chet believed in the power of household
appliances. Earlier that day, I had been grateful he didn’t ask to see the
warranty on Aaron’s new big screen TV. When Aaron and Faye
purchased their new deep freeze, Chet brought his camera into the
garage and took not just one photo of it, but an entire series from
multiple angles. Once, when Aaron and Faye were first married, he
Cox / 61
spent so much time reading the instruction booklet that came with their
food processor, Faye offered to let him take it home.
“You can use my electric toothbrush,” he said. “That should
massage your gums.”
“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll find time for Aaron to look at it
sometime tomorrow.”
He rose from the downward dog and dove into bed, his arms
outstretched in front of him as if he were some kind of disabled
superhero. I tried again to brush my teeth with my finger, but gave up
and came to bed.
He said, “We could do it, you know. We could beat them.”
“We already beat them at Backgammon and Bridge,” I said.
“What’s left?”
“No, I mean we could really show ‘em up.”
“I don’t want to have a baby.”
He buried his head underneath one of the pillows. I heard his
muffled voice say, “How did you know that’s what I was going to
say?”
“I always know”, I said, and he seemed to accept the finality
of the day’s events. I knew Chet didn’t want a baby as much as he
wanted another member of his fan club, a football-sized human to toss
around at PTA meetings. When my job as middle school media
specialist finally sent me over the edge, I wanted to go to graduate
school. I didn’t want to be pregnant while writing term papers and the
last thing I needed was mandatory diaper change at exam time.
Doubtless my husband would decorate the child with the school colors
and carry it around on his shoulders, but I knew I would be left with
the dirty work. For these and many other reasons, I always insisted on
birth control.
“Don’t talk to me,” he said, still underneath his hypoallergenic
pillow. “I’m tired.”
I said, “I know.”
I didn’t talk to him all that night and into the next morning.
When we pulled our separate cars into the middle school’s parking lot,
I saw him fixing his hair in the rearview mirror of his practical sedan.
To me, he looked like a cotton ball. We didn’t speak as we walked in
the double doors and past the principal’s office. When he stopped in
front of the gym, I told him I was going to Aaron’s office right after
school.
“The tooth,” I said. “Maybe he can fix it.”
“I’ll fix myself some soup,” he said. “For an after school

snack.”
I spent most of the morning alphabetizing Reading Rainbow
episodes in the library. At lunch, I did not, as I usually do, make my
way to the coaches’ table in the teachers’ lounge. Usually, I stop in to
see Chet during his planning period, but today I stayed away. After
school, I skipped my usual admiring glance through the window of the
weight room and headed straight for the parking lot.
The exterior of Aaron’s dental office always impressed me

with its silver chromed street lamps and its lush tropical lawn care.
Next door was a plastic surgeon and across the street a whole row of
chiropractors, their wooden signs advertising a false quaintness in an
otherwise neon-glowed commercial district. Aaron’s regular patients
had cleared out for the day by the time I walked into the lobby. I held
my jaw firm against my open hand.
Aaron sat on top of the reception counter looking over what
looked like a page from the Wall Street Journal. Poised in his right
hand was a yellow highlighter marker.
“You’re such a wimp, Sylvia,” he said without looking up.
“Faye’s in Exam One. She’ll get you started.”
I passed a poster of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir holding up
their toothbrushes as if they were a thousand torches on a thousand
Statues of Liberty. Brush, the poster read. Because God Demands It.
“So I guess we’re going to do it,” Faye said, attaching a spit
bib to the collar of my shirt. “Start trying, I mean. Good thing twins
run in the family. One for Aaron and one for me.”
It was as if she had spent the day talking on the phone with my
husband, together, their devious minds spreading something like tooth
decay to every hungry mouth in America. I knew what would happen
next. Aaron and Faye would have a baby or maybe two and I would be
expected to throw a baby shower, followed by a christening at the
Presbyterian Church, pre-school at the skyscraper with the monkey
bars out front, an impressive career as a spelling bee champ, and
finally, my sweet-cheeked niece and/or my dashing young nephew
would start high school and either play football or become the captain
of the cheerleading squad, my husband’s graying cotton-ball sideburns
still standing watch over the sidelines.
No way, I decided. My husband and I would move before I
would let myself become Auntie Owl. Or maybe we would get a
divorce and I would move. In any case I would find a way to make
Cox / 63
Aaron suffer for his upper-middle class bliss. No way he should play
lord of the manor while I wasted away in film projector land.
“Fix the tooth,” I told Aaron when he came in from the lobby.
“And don’t talk to me.”
“I guess you heard our big news then,” Aaron said. “One thing
about genetics, any child of mine will look a lot like you.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said. “You’re calling me ugly. You’re
calling me ugly to my face. Well you’re ugly,” I said. “You have acne
scars that would make models faint.”
“I’m not calling you ugly,” he said. “I’m calling you crazy. If I
called you ugly I guess I’d be calling myself ugly, too, then. You’re
pretty, Sylvia, you’re just not very—refined.” Aaron poked at my sore
tooth with a sharp instrument. He asked me if it hurt and I said yes.
“No problem,” he said. “We’ll make an appointment for a
crown. Until then I’ll give you some codeine.”
By this time, I found myself fantasizing about using one of
Aaron’s fancy gold-plated drills to bore a hole through the roof of his
mouth. I didn’t want him calling me hysterical, though, so I acted
casual.
“Construction started today,” I said. “On the hot tub?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “They knocked out the bedroom wall. I
guess Faye told you we’re sleeping here tonight.”
“Yeah,” I said. “My gums feel better. Thanks.”
“I’ll put it on your tab,” he said. He laughed. That funny twin
brother. That funny, smart, successful twin brother. I longed for him to
spend just one minute feeling as useless as I did on a regular basis. My
fingers closed around my car keys, but I could not remember which
one started the car and which one opened the trunk. Leaving the dental
office should not have seemed like such a chore. Maybe I wouldn’t
leave at all. The time was ripe for action.
Aaron and Faye stood over a carton of dental floss and waved
me off. They must have thought me little more than a grateful twin
sister with a toothy grin. Little did they know I was right then
formulating my plans.
“We’ll see you at the big game,” Aaron said. “Rah rah.”
Pretending to exit the lobby, I instead ducked into a broom
closet in the marble-floored entryway. I sat on an overturned mop
bucket and waited.
“She’s jealous,” I heard Aaron say to Faye. “I think Chet’s
sperm are blanks or something.”
His remarks only hardened my resolve. I waited in the broom

closet a long time. Knowing my husband would be worried, I
considered sending him a text, but eventually decided to make him
wait. I heard Aaron and Faye going over figures from the Wall Street
Journal. They messed around with the dental office website, debating
at length whether or not they should run a discount on root canals.
Finally I heard them go to bed.
After I was sure they had been asleep for at least thirty
minutes, I crept out of my hiding place in the broom closet and
retrieved a yellow highlighter marker from behind the reception
counter. I took off my shoes and passed through the executive
washroom and into the fully equipped break room. The foldout couch
tilted at an angle, and light from the streetlamps shone through a
window. Aaron slept with his arms tight around Faye’s shoulders.
After uncapping the highlighter marker and inhaling its
slightly toxic scent, I drew one little dot on the top of Aaron’s bald
head. The dot seemed to me a great idea, an embryo that would grow
into an entire planet, an asteroid, a sun. I made the dot bigger and
Aaron took a swat in my general direction. Relieved he still had his
eyes closed, I made the dot bigger still. Now the dot was the size of a
saucer. I imagined Aaron going to one of my husband’s football
games, his head like a great misshapen loaf of bread rising from the
back row of the stadium. I made the dot even larger, long lines of
buttery goodness flowing down toward Aaron’s ears.
Now the dot was the size of a dinner plate and Faye was
beginning to stir. I walked out of the break room and the dot stared at
me from its crowning glory on the top of Aaron’s head. Worried they
might hear me unlock the front door, I slipped back into the broom
closet, curled up in a corner, and rested my head on a pile of dust rags.
Again I decided not to call my husband. Eventually I would go home.
For a few minutes, though, I sat there listening to Aaron snore. When
we were old—toothless and gray—he would garner great respect and I
would draw looks of disgust from schoolchildren passing me on the
street. For tonight, at least, I had evened the score.
“You were gone for a long time,” Chet said when I walked in
the front door. “What were you doing?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing important,” I said. “I mean, nothing that anyone
would ever notice.”
He seemed content with my feeble explanation for my
whereabouts, and nothing happened for a while. Chet didn’t win any
Cox / 65
football games. My tooth didn’t get any better. The hole in Aaron’s
and Fay’s backyard never became a hot tub, and in its place they
poured another concrete block and added an extra room for the baby’s
nursery. I sent them a handmade card when their son arrived. On the
cover I drew a smiley face—a big, toothy grin, a wrinkled nose that
looked like a raisin, and two hard, mean dots, for the eyes.
TONI ORTNER
HISTORY OF LOSS
Sitting on a windowsill at Payne Whitney I watch the East River.

Barges piled high with sand and coal towed by red tugboats float
slowly by. It is a long journey to reach the open sea. There are no
words to explain the wild currents beneath the tide.
Posted in the hall is a typewritten list of rules a patient must follow or

Forfeit Pass to Freedom and Return to Start. Each day the level of the
river changes, leaving a wet mark on the concrete wall. Dogs yelp in
the lab.
When questioned, Dr. Pinney insists they are thoroughly anesthetized.
Old patients recline in the lounge comfortable with restrictions, eager

to repeat stories to the first available listener, a million easy facts at
their disposal, familiar with analysts’ jargon, and quick to use it to
excuse themselves. How easy to be observer not participant.
Tricia at the age of eight went from Bellevue to Mt. Sinai to Roosevelt
to Payne Whitney through sixteen major operations and does not know
anymore whether the pain she feels is imaginary or real.
“I hold a dark secret no one can possibly hope to understand,” she

says. “Can no one love me?”
Anne, beautiful, young, French, and quick to talk has committed

herself for an indefinite time in September is getting divorced. She
admits to a history of loss, secretly walks from window to window
trying each bolt to find one loose and push her way out quick through
broken glass.
Tricia says, “I am open as a fallen angel.”
Anne puts her hand into boiling water protected from pain by induced
alpha waves. Joan of Arc burned more quickly.
A girl in a striped gown walks hour after hour around the cobbled
garden path, in and out of hedges to Paris, Rome, Madrid, and back
66
Ortner / 67
making undecipherable signs with her hands, muttering Voodoo

chants to the gardenias.
Some display scars like veterans’ medals on arms, wrists, necks.
In Occupational Therapy an aide has each new patient draw three

pictures to depict condition. If a fish floats in a tree or a flower lacks
roots, it becomes a matter for grave discussion. I wonder what would
have happened to Paul Klee whose ladders led to the sky.
The paranoids believe someone listens in to every conversation. They

wait to turn in circumstantial evidence, terror filed on white 3” by 5”
index cards.
How patiently we stand with heads bowed, hands at sides, waiting in

silence for the blue pills, the white pills, the red pills, the yellow pills.
Mouths open to swallow like obedient children at communion.
DONNA SPECTOR
THE JESUS YEAR
What we did was, we prayed in his Jaguar. God was always

listening in 1958 when things were simple, and God was a father. He
took care of his children, didn't like them to stay out too late, and He
wanted to know what went on in Jaguars. So we held hands, not too
tightly, bowed our heads--Joe's almost touched the steering wheel, he
was so devout--and closed our eyes. We prayed that our friends would
come to know Jesus: Mary Sue Boltz, a renegade artist who called
God “the man upstairs”; Billie Evans, whose mammoth breasts
delighted fraternity boys at their beer busts; Sara Smith, whose
leukemia was in remission and who drove around campus like a
demon; and, finally, Joe's best friend Paul Norton, who was flunking
out of UCLA and didn't care.
“We ask this in your name,” Joe said.
“Amen,” I said, sitting on my free hand so I wouldn't scratch
any of the itchy places that always plagued me during prayer.
Afterwards, Joe walked me to the door of the sorority house at
UCLA, and we kissed lightly, with our mouths shut. I didn't like kisses
in those days. I was too busy thinking about God and my grades and
about being too poor to live in the sorority with rich girls who didn't
want to know about Jesus. Even though I often felt miserable about
their casual attitude toward money and God, I didn't want them to be
damned. It seemed unfair, a punishment too horrible for the simple sin
of indifference.
Which always led me to the Buddhists. I worried about the
Buddhists and others who might not have been introduced to Jesus.
What would happen to them? I didn't know what to think about the
Jews, because my father was a Jew who was upset over my “Jesus
business.”
“Eighteen,” he'd say, wiping his glasses on his shirt. “You're
too old to succumb to mass hysteria.”
“This isn't mass hysteria, Daddy. It's personal.”
“Personal!” He'd put his glasses back on and squint at me, his
face tense with disappointment, as though he finally realized the
consequences of raising a daughter to make her own decisions.
“Oh, Daddy, please!.” I'd resist the urge to push back the hair
falling into his eyes.
Sometimes I would dream about overpopulation in Hell. All
those souls--I always saw them still attached to their bodies --jammed
68
Spector / 69
in every which way so they could scarcely breathe. “What do you

think?” I'd ask Joe.
“You're being too literal,” he'd say. He was two years older, a
USC business major who was going to run his father's corporation
someday, and he knew how to focus his attention on the essentials.
I had met Joe and, through him, Jesus, in late June after high
school. On our first date we went to a Young Life meeting, where
teen-agers sang hymns, spoke radiantly of the happiness and sweaters
and cars Jesus had given them and invited me to accept Jesus into my
heart. I tried to picture a door in my heart through which someone,
even though he was dead, could enter. I couldn't quite do it, but the
cookies afterward were hypnotically warm and laced with melting
chocolate chips. Joe and I sat in a corner with our lemonade.
“Will you do it, Lizzie?”
“Well, I don't know.” I studied his earnest, obsessively
handsome face and wondered about the stories I had heard. Had he
gotten a girl pregnant in the ninth grade? Did his parents pay for her to
go away and have the baby? In high school he had been mysterious,
alluring, a near-sighted ascetic who might have stripped off his Brooks
Brothers clothes at night and rolled in the brambles to quiet his lusts.
One day when the school bus passed his parents' Tudor mansion, I saw
his black Jaguar roar down the curving driveway and cut, with a
dangerous flourish, right in front of a station wagon filled with
children. He had taken svelte blondes with hair sprayed pageboys to
places like Ciro's, and they all reported with a sigh that he never even
kissed them.
“Why me?” Short and dark, I lived in one of the pastel stucco
houses on the common side of town. Furthermore, I was half-Jewish,
wrote poems in the margins of my science notes and had never been to
Ciro's.
“Because you're different.” He touched the tips of my fingers
clutching my lemonade glass, and I felt a distinct tremor. So this was
my destiny! Very well, then. I understood it was all or nothing. No Joe
without Jesus. I gave myself up. Not to Jesus exactly, but to the
euphoria that came from submitting.
“All right.”
“Oh, Lizzie,” he said, “you'll never be sorry.”
And for a long time I wasn't. I loved the communal
ecstasy at those summer Thursday night gatherings. They sang “Jesus
loves me, this I know” with such certainty that I could forget I had felt
nothing when I knelt down and said yes to Jesus.
“What I love,” I said to Joe, “is the way this makes sense of
the universe.”
“Yes,” he said.
We were parked in his Jaguar in front of my house that
evening in late July. The tart smell of the borscht my mother was
making to please my father blended with the honeyed scent of sweet
peas in the warm air. As usual, Joe was not invited to dinner.
“I don't care how rich he is,” my father would growl. “He's
perverting your mind!”
“Oh, Sid,” my mother would say, “she's just young.” Secretly,
my mother was pleased I had chosen the Christian side of things, even
though she was opposed to unseemly excess in all areas but money.
“Just don't bring him around when I'm here!” My father would
slam the door to his study, where he was working on another wild
business scheme to pull him out of bankruptcy.
“Daddy?” I'd put down the Bible I'd taken to carrying for
reassurance and opened his door carefully. “Just let him come over
once. So you can meet him.”
My father wouldn't answer. On his hands and knees he was
studying drawings of plastic piggy banks that tipped their hats. He
rearranged them like a game of solitaire on his brown, worn carpet.
“Oh, well...” I said that a lot in those days, because I couldn't
please everybody. When I wasn't working at Montgomery Ward’s or
going out with Joe that summer, I read the annotated New Testament
in my room.
To my father, Joe had become synonymous with Jesus. Even
though he was Jewish, my father got queasy around any sort of
religion, having abandoned his own when his parents refused to
recognize my mother. He didn't mind when my mother took me to the
Presbyterian Church on Sundays, as long as we didn't talk about it. But
Jesus popping up in his own home was a personal affront.
Summoned by Joe's three-note honk, I took to hiding my Bible
in my purse before I ran through the living room where my parents
were nestled together on the sofa watching Milton Berle and eating
popcorn.
“I don't understand,” Joe said, as we zoomed out to the
Hollywood Bowl for an open-air concert. “You've met my parents.”
“Yes, but they don't like me.” Instantly, my spine ached with
such tension I thought it might snap. I wiggled my shoulders against
the plush leather seat and tried not to remember Joe's mother's eagle-
eyed disapproval when she discovered I needed a scholarship even to
go to UCLA.
Joe kept his eyes focused on the freeway. “My father does.
Spector / 71
And my mother will come around.”

Stunned by the array of silver, crystal and china on their long,
mahogany table draped in Quaker lace like a bride, I had picked at my
salmon with what I hoped was the right fork. Joe's father was
concerned. Did I feel all right? But Joe's mother knew the real reason.
“Where did you say you live?” I felt the stain from nervous sweat
spread down the sides of my new cotton dress from Wards. A pretty
floral print on special, extra cheap with my ten per cent discount, it
didn't fool Mrs. Thompson.
“I'm not rich enough,” I told Joe.
“Don't be silly.” Joe clenched his jaw and took the turn in the
Pasadena freeway with just enough speed to make my heart pound. I
understood: I was silly to insist on something I knew was true. At the
same moment I knew he had gotten that girl pregnant. The words were
so close to bouncing out of my mouth, I gasped.
“What?” Joe said.
“A small pain,” I said, and, to divert us both, “How do your
parents feel about your love of Jesus?”
Joe laughed bitterly. “They think I'll get over it. At least I’m
not...”
When Joe stopped, I silently finished his phrase: Jewish.
But I chose not to know what I knew, a useful but deadly habit
people mislabel naiveté. The summer rushed on toward college in a
flurry of hymns, honeysuckle, dew-damp grass and the luxurious
leather seats of Joe's Jaguar, which, like Jesus, gave my world a sense
of comforting order. To prepare for the necessary ordeal of sorority
rushing, I memorized whole sections of the book of Luke and bought
my dresses on sale.
By the end of September I had passed through the terrors of
tea and tinfoil conversations with only one incident of bed-wetting and
no mention of my Jewish father. Why should I? I told myself. My last
name was Greene, it could pass, and my father certainly wasn't
religious. At least I made my mother proud by joining a Christian
sorority. Joe took it as a matter of course; he had easily joined the most
prestigious fraternity at USC.
Weekdays, after classes that fall, I worked as a drudge, cutting
out movie ads and sorting them into piles according to studios for the
Beverly Hills Citizen newspaper.
The job gave me enough money to buy books, which I read
diligently after dinner until it was time to attend Campus Crusade for
Christ meetings Tuesdays and Thursdays or, other nights, to pray in
the closet with Dianne Byron. A member of a Hollywood church
famed for speaking in tongues, Dianne was such a pariah that she had
the only single room in the sorority.
I lived in the back of our elegant old house, in a dorm room
with seven other freshman pledges who disliked me because of my
friendship with Dianne and Jesus. I got up at 6:00 a.m. every day to
pray on the roof and to practice speaking in tongues. I never could get
the hang of it, but I wanted God to give me a definite sign.
“Why don't you let God sleep in?” Billie snapped at me one
morning in December when I knocked her hair dryer off the dresser
while I was pulling a sweater over my pajamas.
“I can't,” I said. I was beginning to have doubts, and excessive
devotion seemed the only way to handle them.
For one thing, there was the card I received from Billy
Graham. “Dear Friend in Jesus,” it said, “Send love and money.” Then
there were my science and philosophy courses that made my
Fundamentalism seem simple-minded. And the phony sociology poll
Campus Crusaders were taking on campus as a way to meet and
convert unbelievers. Their friendly faces turned stony when I said at
one of our meetings that God didn't like hypocrisy and we should quit
doing this.
“You, too,” a voice sometimes hissed at me, some buried part
of myself, as I walked across campus or rode the bus to work past
palm trees and bougainvillea. “Hypocrite!”
Once in mid-January I knelt all night on the roof and
demanded that God show himself to me. By morning I was cramped
and frozen. God had given me nothing but a bad cold. What did He
want of me?
By March Joe, too, was having problems. He began to send
me letters about his temptations, the torments of lust, to which he
sometimes succumbed in solitary, late-night sessions in the science
lab. “Pray for me,” he wrote. “Your friend in Jesus.” I wasn't sure
what he meant, but I remembered Billy Graham's closing. I felt sad
about everything.
“I don't want you to go to Hell,” I told Mary Sue, whom I
adored and who forgave me for my eccentricities.
“Don't worry about it,” she said.
We were studying dance under Carol Scothorn and were
choreographing a dance together using Bartok's pieces for children.
Neither of us read music, so we spent a lot of time tapping the notes as
we worked out the movements.
“This is about a lost girl who ultimately finds peace in Jesus,”
I said.
Spector / 73
“No, it's not.” In a full split with her head touching the floor,
Mary Sue looked like a little boy doll. “It's about two friends who
struggle for power.”
I watched her in the mirror and inhaled her lavender soap
smell. “Don't we have to agree?”
“I guess not. And, by the way, I don't want you to pray for me.
It gives me claustrophobia.”
At the end of that year, I was more infatuated with Mary Sue
than with Joe or Jesus. The beauty of her arrogant freckles and her
straight blonde hair down to her bottom tormented me, as did her wild,
collage paintings that radiated light.
Two years older than I, she shared a room with Evie, another
art major. I visited their cluttered room as often as they would tolerate
me. On weekends I brought them left-over petit fours I had stolen from
the sorority kitchen. We ate the sugary, pink and white cakes greedily,
sitting cross-legged and giggling on their mounds of discarded clothes
and paint rags, while Evie's hamster chittered away in the closet.
No one knew that was all I had to eat until Joe came to take
me out to dinner, because my father was struggling just to pay my one-
hundred-dollar-a-month sorority bill.
Whenever Joe came to pick me up, I was late, dallying in that
perilously wonderful room where Jesus was extraneous and Hell at
best a silly idea.
“Lizzie!” Mrs. Martin, our house mother, would call over the
intercom. “Joe's here.” Mrs. Martin was impressed with Joe, as were
all the girls but Mary Sue and Evie.
“Oh, no!” I'd say. “I'm not even dressed.”
“Why don't you dump him?” Mary Sue would say. “Just stay
here with us.”
But I couldn't dump Joe, because we were getting married. He
had proposed, with a diamond ring, a perfect blue diamond, the last
Saturday in May. In his car, of course. Everything important happened
in his Jaguar. We had come back from a lavish dinner at Trader Vic's
and were parked in front of the sorority. I had overeaten as usual
because I was starving, so I felt slightly sick. I remember the exquisite,
cold flash of the diamond in the yellow light from the street lamp, the
warm smell of leather and the pain in my stomach where the lobster
thermidor sat like a sullen lump.
We had just finished praying when Joe pulled out the ring in a
maroon velvet box. “Would you marry me? I don't mean now. When I
finish college. I've prayed about it for a long time, and I know it's the
right thing.”
“You mean we'll be engaged for two years?” My eyelids and

ears began to itch so terribly I was sure I'd gotten hives from the
lobster.
“Yes,” Joe said. “I want you to be mine in Jesus.”
“What do your parents think?” I scratched my right ear as
discreetly as I could and moved on to my left. If I touched my eyes, I'd
smear my mascara.
“I haven't told them yet.”
“Why not?” The itch had spread to my knees and underarms.
“I'm waiting for the right time.”
Something was wrong, I knew it, but I held out my hand and
kept it steady as Joe slipped the ring on my finger. Except for my
short, unpainted fingernails, my hand looked like an advertisement in
Good Housekeeping.
“Oh, well...” I said.
“I knew you'd be happy.” Joe tentatively touched my right
breast. Then he jerked his hand away and gripped the steering wheel.
“I have to tell you something. I had a girlfriend in the ninth grade, and
she got pregnant. She...” He stared at his hands; I could see his tense
cheek muscles in the pale light and imagined him naked in the
brambles. “She had the baby, but I never saw it. I think she gave it
away. I don't know. She lives somewhere else now. But all these years
I've been praying for forgiveness for my sin.”
“I'm sorry,” I said, knowing now I would have to marry him.
The ring felt so heavy my hand dropped to the seat.
That night I dreamed Joe and I lived in the Sahara, in a house
with no walls. The furniture was ornate yet tasteful; sumptuous rugs
were spread on the sand. At the dining table we were entertaining Joe's
business clients and their wives, who wore rings just like mine.
Everyone drank too much whiskey and talked so fast I couldn't
understand a word. Then Jesus walked in wearing a business suit and
carrying a briefcase. His shirt open at the neck, he wore gold rings and
chains, which looked slightly odd with his beard, but I understood he
was a lawyer. He winked at me because no one else recognized him,
took a shot of whiskey and began to negotiate a business deal.
Somewhere out in the dream desert I saw Mary Sue in a pale
blue leotard and tights. Desert winds blew her hair and the sand out in
giant swirls. “This is bullshit!” she yelled, and everyone vanished but
Joe and me. We tried to speak to each other, but we were in a silent
movie. As the sun melted behind the mountains and drenched Joe and
me and the desert in blue light, I shuffled glasses and cups like chess
pieces across the giant table. There was something I needed to say, but
Spector / 75
it would have been useless to try, even if I had known what it was.
“I dreamed about you,” I told Mary Sue from her top bunk bed
in her room.
“Tell me.” On her knees, she was gluing gum and candy bar
wrappers onto a canvas and brushing them with gold model airplane
paint, but I knew she was listening. When I had finished, she rocked
back on her heels and rummaged through a bag of stale Halloween
candy. “Your feelings about Jesus are really changing, aren't they,
Lizzie?”
I hung my head over the edge of the bed and watched her
through my curls. “I don't think so.”
She shrugged and tossed me a Mars bar. “When you and Joe
aren't talking about the man upstairs, what do you talk about?”
“Oh... Lots of things.” I peeled back the wrapper and sank my
teeth through the stiff chocolate to the gooey insides.
“Like what?”
All I could see was Joe with me in the desert, our skin blue
with loneliness, our mouths moving and no words, nothing.
“If you marry him, what kind of life are you going to have?
Will you be happy being a model wife and entertaining his business
clients?”
I rolled onto my back to avoid Mary Sue's shrewd eyes.
Misery flooded through my limp body as I doggedly ate the candy.
Why did it taste so salty? Then I realized I was crying. “I don't know. I
can't talk about it.” Her sheets smelled like lavender. “Next year can I
live with you and Evie?”
“Yes.” She threw a dirty orange blouse onto my stomach. “To
wipe your eyes.”
Evie's hamster raced madly as the wheel screeched round and
round in its cage.
That summer while Joe was in Europe with his parents, I
worked behind the soda fountain in Rexall's. Evenings, when the surly
afternoon heat had settled into the San Gabriel Valley for the long haul
and sleep was impossible, I read Dostoyevsky, Camus and e.e.
cummings. Or I wrote poems in a journal I kept under my pillow.
Here is one I found recently in an envelope with some of Mary Sue's
blonde hairs:
Is it only
at the thought of loss,
the endless echo
of lonely pain,
that I in you
and you in me
are recreated?
Sometimes after dinner the phone would ring. “Lizzie,” my

mother would call. “It's for you.” Then, her hand over the receiver,
she'd poke her head in my room and whisper, “Someone from that
Young Life group.”
“Tell them I'm asleep.”
“At eight in the evening?”
“I don't care.”
My father was delighted. He had given up plastic piggy banks
and was writing an epic poem for children. “Which do you like better,
Lizzie? The Stranger or Crime and Punishment?”
What could I say? I was mesmerized; reading those books was
like watching a car accident. A horrified, guilty fascination.
Once Mary Sue called me from Georgia, where she was
visiting her aunt. “How's the man upstairs?”
“I haven't seen Him lately.”
“That's good.”
In the fall I moved into Mary Sue's and Evie's room. I got the
bottom bunk bed across the room from theirs. It was always gritty with
cereal, shreds of lettuce and hamster pellets because Evie liked to let
the hamster run free during the day. I had to be careful not to trip over
cans of brushes or slide on tubes of oil paint into a lethal high-heeled
shoe waiting under a pile of underwear to stab me in the instep. Mary
Sue stole a DISASTER AREA sign from some street workers and
tacked it to our door. Underneath was a poem I wrote on paper with
burned edges telling people to beware.
“You've got to promise not to get up early for the man
upstairs,” Mary Sue said.
“Okay.” Although I didn't tell Joe, I was glad to sleep in a
little.
On our first date that fall I wore Evie's new peach-colored
shift, a shocking two inches above the knee.
“I don't like it,” Joe said, staring at my knees and the even
greater expanse of thigh exposed when I pulled my legs into the
Jaguar. “Your roommates are a bad influence.”
“Maybe you're right,” I said. “My knees aren't that great.”
“That's not the point.” Joe stomped on the gas pedal, and the
car leaped angrily away from the curb.
Little by little I discovered the fun of being a bad girl. Mary
Sue, Evie and I refused to clean our room, even though we were
Spector / 77
warned by the house mother and finally required to pay a small fine.
Claiming I was needed at dance rehearsals, I stopped attending
sorority meetings and parties and Campus Crusade gatherings. I quit
praying in the closet with Dianne and stayed as far away from her
reproachful eyes as I could. Once I even canceled a date with Joe.
“Have you noticed, Lizzie,” he said sometime during that
period, “how restless you've gotten during prayer?”
“Yes.” I was watching a run speed down my stockinged leg as
I tightened and released my calf muscles.
“Why is that?”
Rebellion was one thing; honesty another. “I don't know.”
How I squirmed at my cowardice!
But at the end of January I was given a chance to redeem
myself. The sorority was doing some minor rushing at the semester
break, and one of the girls everyone especially liked, Ethel Rosen, was
known to be half-Jewish. A mandatory meeting was held, and this time
I couldn't get out of it.
“I think she's charming,” Susan Wentworth said, leaning back
in her chair so her pink cashmere-covered falsies pointed toward the
ceiling. “And she doesn't look Jewish.”
“She's only half Jewish,” Mrs. Martin said. Ensconced in a
large, chintz armchair, she had come to the meeting in a chenille
bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. “On her father's side. And it is a
matriarchal tradition.”
“I don't care,” Billie said. “There's no way you could get
around that name. Rosen. I mean, what would everyone think?”
“I'm not prejudiced,” Sarah Smith said. She was filing her
nails, and she was thinner, which worried everyone, although the
doctors still said she was in remission. “But I think we just can't do it.
After all, this is a Christian sorority.”
Across from me Mary Sue and Evie sat cross-legged on the
floor in grim silence.
Then Dianne Byron stood up. “I'm half Jewish,” she said, with
only a touch of defiance. “I thought everyone knew.”
A palpable consternation and embarrassment spread through
the room. Dianne Byron, who could win any unpopularity contest
hands down, and now this!
“Dianne,” Mrs. Martin said with controlled civility, “I do
think you should have told us.”
My teeth began to chatter. Did I have to align myself with
Dianne and all she stood for just when I was breaking away? I
buttoned my cardigan with frozen, shaky fingers. No, damn it! I
wouldn't. I had emerged from my pariah period. Let Dianne make a

fool of herself for no reason. Who was Ethel Rosen to me? Nothing.
Nobody. No, I wouldn't!
“Hypocrite!” hissed that blasted inner voice.
I stood up. “Oh, well...” I said. “I guess you should know. I'm
half Jewish too.”
An excruciating silence settled over the room.
Dianne looked gratefully at me, but I remained stony. “And
you don't have to worry about it. I've decided to move out.”
Mary Sue and Evie stood up. “We're moving out, too,” Mary
Sue said.
“You're doing what?” Joe said. As usual, we were in his
Jaguar.
“Moving out.”
Joe sighed. “Listen, Lizzie, I need to tell you something. I
talked with my parents recently about this marriage business, and I
don't think they'll ever approve. It isn't that they don't like you; it's just
that...”
“I'm poor and Jewish?”
“No! It's, well... Oh, maybe you're right. And with all these
short skirts and your new attitude, I don't know. I need someone I can
be, well, proud of, you know what I mean?”
“Joe,” I said gently. “Take back your ring. I could never live
in the desert.”
“The desert?”
“Never mind. Here.” I pulled off the ring and handed it to him.
Later, after the amazed and dismayed gossip had died down,
and Mary Sue, Evie and I were packing our things so we could move
to a campus dormitory, Mary Sue said, “I'm so glad about Joe. But
how did you get the nerve to stand up there with Dianne and tell them
all you were Jewish?”
I straightened up and brushed lettuce shreds off my skirt. “I
think...” I grew very still. “I think, for once in my life, I heard the
voice of God. And, believe me, it wasn't pleasant.”
/ 79
HARRIET SHENKMAN
LAYING STONES ON A GRAVE
She follows the railed corridor,

sun flowers painted on the wall.
Pushes open the heavy wooden door.
She forces one foot in front of the other,

stops, and bends in the roadway,
a stone in her hand.
The screeching of a tractor-trailer

stopped abruptly behind her.
“Lady, are you nuts?”
He’s the one who’s nuts. She has

to keep the dead in place.
A woman in white tugs at her arm.

“Let’s go back to Zion Gardens
for a nice cup of hot tea.”
She dreams of her sisters falling like plant

stalks into the open ground, a bullet to the
back of the neck, their screams silent.
She follows the railed corridor again,

sun flowers painted on the wall. Fingers
a stone in her sweater pocket.
“Where are you going, dear?”

“To the grave.”
The woman in white takes her by the elbow.
“No, you belong in the recreation room.”
79
GAIL MACDONALD
DIGITAL HEARTBREAK STILL HURTS
When an email with the subject line “help?” appeared in my

work account’s inbox in the fall of 2012, my initial inclination was to
hit delete and continue scanning the queue. In the waning weeks of a
busy semester teaching at the University of Connecticut, I had no time
to waste reading about my miraculous connections to royalty in
Kenya, or some tear-jerking story about how my donation could save a
homeless dog, a worthy politician, a starving child or all of the above.
But I did not hit delete. I opened the email and read it, a small
decision that led to an eight-month relationship that, in the end, broke
my heart. The email was from a woman whose name is similar to
mine. She pleaded with me to reach out to her 30-year-old son, who
she described as a great writer with aspirations of becoming an
international journalist. She wrote that he had been frustrated and
beaten down by life’s misfortunes, including the death of his father
when he was a young teenager. She provided me with a link to her
son’s blog and his email address.
Thinking “scam,” but curious enough about this mom who
(almost) shared my name and who had blindly taken a risk to make an
outrageous sounding request to a stranger via email, I replied with a
brief note. How did she find me? Where was she from? Why me?
My questions brought a lengthy response. Turns out her love
for her son and feelings of frustration at being unable to guide him,
spurred the email from more than 6,000 miles away in Kyrgyzstan.
She was an American living in central Asia with her husband, who
traveled the world working on international development projects. Her
son lived in coastal California. She chose me after a random Google
search of her own name.
Google found me instead.
“Gail, the reason I decided to write YOU was your
background and the way you look in your picture,” she wrote,
referring to a photograph on the university web page. “You look kind
and ‘real’, not someone who brags about herself and accomplishes
nothing.” Then she provided me with more details about her adult son,
painting a picture of a young man who was educated, well read,
worldly and adventurous, but drifting through life without pursuing his
dreams and becoming more frustrated and angry.
I told a few friends, colleagues and my husband about the
unusual communication exchange. They looked perplexed and warned
me not to step into this quagmire. But I kept thinking: What if I had
80
MacDonald / 81
shimmied to the end of a digital limb seeking to help my daughter?

Wouldn’t I hope that someone did the decent thing? How long could it
take to write an email, after all? Ten days after receiving the mom’s
email, I contacted her son.
“I'd be happy to communicate with you, give you some
thoughts about a writing career and whatever else you might have
questions about,” I wrote. “I'll leave the ball in your court as to what
you'd like to ask or talk about or even have me read some of your
writing.”
That’s the end of it, I thought; I hit send.
Why would this fellow want his mom meddling in his life
from the other side of the world? Perhaps this was all her dream, not
his. Two days later, I found his reply in my inbox. He wanted to
“meet” via Skype. My journalistic skeptic meter was still on high alert
and, rather than Skyping, I asked him some more questions via email
to help pin down specifics about his skills, experiences, challenges and
aspirations.
Over the next months, we exchanged numerous emails and
slowly I discovered his mom had been correct. This young man was
bright and charming, passionate about his desire to live a meaningful
life and write about international affairs. He was discouraged about the
shallowness of the world, its preoccupation with materialism and the
experience of striving to learn in college classrooms filled with
younger students preoccupied with beer.
I provided him with long “how-to” lists aimed at motivating
him toward a freelance writing career or back into the classroom to
complete his undergraduate degree. I sent him links to writers’
conferences, lists of books to read, organizations to join and writers
groups where he could find like-minded people to build relationships.
Sometimes there were weeks-long gaps in our correspondence. At one
point his mother inquired how it was going and I emailed her to say I
hadn’t heard back from her son in quite some time and had become
convinced he’d given up. Always, he proved me wrong. Another note
would appear in my inbox and he’d tell me of his progress: he was
reading “Writer’s Market,” had taken a class he enjoyed and was
considering applying for a newspaper internship. By May he wrote
that he wanted to go to journalism school. We had a long phone
conversation about what he, as an older student with a depth of
knowledge gleaned from living around the globe, might look for in a
journalism program.
Over the next month, he often updated me about his search
and the conversations he had with journalism professors at several
universities. His enthusiasm was contagious. At a journalism

educators’ conference in June I asked several people what programs
might cater to this non-traditional student? I emailed him the
suggestions.
I eagerly opened an email in my inbox on July 18. The subject
line was “Greetings.” It was a new addition to an older email
conversation. But this message was not from the young man I had
been writing to. This email was from his mom. She wrote that her son
had been killed in a motorcycle accident in California five days earlier.
“We are all still in shock,” she wrote. “Gail, thank you for
being so wonderful to him. He thought so highly of you and was
moving in the right direction because of your guidance. You made a
huge difference in his life.”
I stared at the note for a long time. I too, was in shock.
In his book “Distant Witness,” National Public Radio’s Andy
Carvin writes about how the Arab Spring unfolded on social media.
The book also explores the unlikely strength of digital relationships.
When he learned of the death of a Libyan citizen journalist whose
videos had riveted viewers around the globe, Carvin said he tweeted,
“I live-tweeted Mo’s stream last night until 1:30 a.m. Then I went to
bed. I feel so f---- selfish. I should have stayed up. If I’d known…”
Then Carvin contemplates the absurdity of his own words: “If
I’d known what exactly? That he would soon die? … I felt this all-
consuming guilt for not being online when he died, as if somehow my
presence in front of a keyboard in Washington, D.C. could have kept
him alive.”
I had similar irrational thoughts when I heard of my young
friend’s death. If only …. What? Always the skeptical journalist, after
I received the mom’s email, I searched online for news of the fatal
motorcycle accident. Perhaps I was seeking proof that the abrupt end
to this unusual eight-month relationship was real, that indeed the
whole implausible series of communications was not the scam I had
originally suspected. I found brief news reports noting the California
Highway Patrol was seeking witnesses to the fatal accident.
Listed as the victim was my young friend.
I did not need the news report to verify that I was grieving.
The tears, the lump in my throat and the pressure in my chest was real
enough. I thought of the loss of this promising young life and of his
mom, with whom I shared the bond of knowing a mother’s love and
(almost) a name.
I typed her one final email: “His experiences would have
made him a great journalist in the very best sense of that word. I had
MacDonald / 83
hoped we would meet one day when he was enthusiastically working

as a journalist in some far-flung region.”
I signed off with a more personal note: “My heart goes out to
you and your family.”
I hit send.
MARK J. MITCHELL
SAN FRANCISCO SESTINA ON A FOUND THEME
Lost memories are found in the ocean.

—Spotted on a streetlight post,
Waverly Place, Chinatown
Fog laid on the city with a Chinese brush,

a gray ship slides out of Suisin Bay.
Angel Island is caressed by clouds.
It is this morning but it feels like memory.
No sound but a tide at the seawall.
Water is being drawn back to the ocean.
This is a beautiful place, perched on the ocean

beneath earthquake light. Cool moisture brushes
that spot you missed shaving. All the walls
are selling something. Even on the bay,
ships are sheathed in logos, so your memory
won’t lose brand names. It clouds
the purity of a gray day. High clouds,

they predicted last night. All day, a cold ocean
current mirrors them. Sense memories
tease your fingers—the shape of a brush
you used in grade school to paint this bay.
Just a picture. Your mother pinned it to a cork wall.
Leave it. Look past brassy seagulls. The walls

Of that old prison are cold and gray as rain clouds.
It rides like a decaying ship on the bay—
It can’t sink and will never reach the ocean.
When she took your painting down you brushed
it off, packed it down into dead memory.
And now you don’t want it back, that memory.

You’ve locked it safely behind cool walls—
Sure, some Sundays it would bob up and brush
your mind. You let it scud off like a cloud
when sharp light bounces off the ocean.
You’d let it slide out of sight into its own bay.
84
Mitchell / 85
But this morning, like that ship coming out of Suisin Bay
now—no cargo left, its work a memory
of merchandise while it aims towards the ocean.
You almost hear the hollow ring off metal walls—
Bulkheads, you mean. Never mind. Watch the clouds
Over Angel Island as they moisten coastal brush.
Watch tides leave the bay, hear their kiss on the seawall.
Let go of your memory. Forget, even, those clouds.
Try to capture this ocean with your lost paintbrush.
JESSICA GREGG
“WHEN VIVIAN GREER CAME TO SING”
When I think of Vivian Greer – a memory laced with the smell

of snow – it’s my mother’s own voice calling to me that comes to
mind first.
“Hurry Louise! Hurry!”
It was early November and winter had been with us for more
than a month. I had returned to St. Boniface High School for Girls
more than three months before, and Mama had filled the void of my
absence with several new records – as she always did.
She was waiting for me then in the living room, by the blue
painted cupboard that held her turntable. The cupboard’s doors were
open, and Mama was smiling with the close-mouthed, knowing joy of
someone who had a surprise.
“Listen, Louise,” she said. “Listen.” She placed the needle on
a record. Then she closed her eyes and stood in stillness in our living
room, her hands folded over her heart, right over left, so that I could
see the pearl ring Pop had given her. She kept her head up, her
Teutonic hair braided in a coronet that crowned her head like a golden
wreath. All of her life, Mama’s hair never bore a strand of gray. As she
got older, it dulled from the lantern light I remembered as a child to
the straw color of advanced age. But on this afternoon, her hair still
looked sunlit yellow as she stood with her eyes closed and her hands
folded over her heart.
“Close your eyes,” she whispered and I did as she said.
I heard a woman’s voice, a soprano that pealed through our
living room like the church bell that rang into the thin, cold air of our
Sunday mornings and called us to service. The song was
“Liebesbotschaft,” a message of love. I could translate it easily: “All
my wishes, my hopes and songs shall fly with you on your wings.” I
had heard the lieder sung many times, but never so beautifully. When
it ended, Mama shut off the record player and I opened my eyes. Her
hands were on her wet cheeks.
“Who is it?” I asked her.
“Vivian Greer.”
Vivian. I was in my second year of required Latin. Vivian
meant “full of life.” It was the perfect name for a woman with such a
lovely voice. The woman on the album cover was lovely, too. Her
brown skin was the color of ginger cake, her lips wide and full -- hers
was the perfect mouth for singing. Of course, she was so sophisticated
86
Gregg / 87
in the evening dress she wore on the album cover. What singer wasn’t
sophisticated?
“I want to hear more,” I said.
Mama placed the needle on the record again and came to the
arm of my chair, where she perched with her hand around my
shoulders. We listened to the whole record once and then again,
playing it until Pop walked home from the college at six. Seeing us
sitting as we were, he smiled and took a seat on the sofa. He slipped
off his shoes, his chalk-dusted trouser legs stretched across the coffee
table. He was a head taller than my mother, a black-bristle-haired man
with Norwegian features and thick glasses. (I was his resemblance
right down to the squint.) As a rule, he approached music – and life as
well – with a much quieter zeal than Mama. He had a mathematician’s
need to count the rhythm and enumerate each note. But he was still a
music fan.
“Who is it?” he asked as he listened to my mother’s new
record.
“Vivian Greer.” The name came off my tongue as though it
were my own, that quickly had I taken her into my life.
“Vivian Greer,” Pop repeated. “She has a lovely voice.”
“Listen, Nils.” Mama found the groove for “Ava Maria” and
then sat next to Pop. She put her hand on his shoulder before she let it
rest on her leg. It was a familiar snapshot, the two of them on the sofa
listening to music, their hands lined up side by side so the little fingers
touched.
Pop closed his eyes and nodded his head in admiration. When
the song was over, he was silent for a moment. Then, “It is a voice I
could listen to almost as much as yours, Ellie.”
My mother blushed.
I blushed, too, for I wasn’t a small child and I didn’t like to
hear this silliness between my parents.
We let the record play as Mama fixed dinner, sandwiches for
such a late hour. She mouthed the words to “Liebesbotschaft” not
daring to mix her own soprano with Vivian Greer’s, although in truth
my mother had a honey-streaked voice that led our congregation
through the Doxology every Sunday with even assurance and joy. She
had discovered her ideal, though, and that night we silently ate our
meal as we listened to Vivian Greer.
This was, of course, the time before we owned a television. It
was 1949, I believe, so the war was still a painful memory, those days
when Mama listened regularly to the newscasts with a heavy heart,
Pop next to her, for once his eyes wide, even as his mind added up the
woeful consequences. Both of them cried with relief when the war was
over, and then once again music, and not news broadcasts, filled the
house. At least this was how I remembered it, as though the victories
overseas were a signal for every symphony and singer to begin to play
again. My parents no longer talked of Hitler, concentration camps, or
wounded men. They silently listened to Eva Turner and Marian
Anderson; they spoke of operas, arias and lieder.
Bozeman was a small college town – a good enough place for
a dreamer, because dreams were certainly encouraged here. It was a
place where mountains were to be hiked and books were meant to be
read. My family lived two blocks from the college in a stucco
bungalow with two bedrooms, a large wide porch, and a backyard
where my mother grew geraniums and sweet peas. Years later when
my friends from college visited, they expected a ranch, horses, and
even real-live Indians. The nearest reservation was outside of Billings,
one hundred and fifty miles away. Our town was a tight-knit
community of Scandinavians and Dutch and Germans with skin tones
that ranged from cream to peach to wheat, reminding me of the myth
of the Eskimo people and their one hundred words for snow. I fit in.
For sure, everyone knew that Mama was a foreigner. But when all of
the girls of the sophomore class at St. Boniface stood together for a
class picture, no one could pick out who was the one whose mother
had fled to this country.
That December, the Mountain Music Society met to select a
roster of musicians who would be invited to Bozeman that following
year. Mama took her copy of Vivian Greer’s record and reported to
Pop and me later that the decision was unanimous: The Mountain
Music Society would invite Vivian Greer to sing in Bozeman that
spring. Not long after, a formal acceptance letter arrived, and the date
of the concert was circled on the kitchen calendar, beckoning us like
spring fever.
The headmistress allowed me to miss school on the
momentous day, to await the soprano’s arrival with Mama and some
of the women from the Mountain Music Society. The train came on
time, and right away we spotted her. She was shorter and stouter in
real life, with round, womanly arms and shoulders. My stomach
jumped from nerves as Mama rushed onto the platform to bring her
into the station, and suddenly there she was before us: Vivian Greer.
She wore a coat of black curly lamb’s wool with a white mink collar
and matching hat. She smelled like spiced flowers – Mama later told
me it was a perfume called Chanel. What most impressed me were her
/ 89
Gregg
eyelashes, which were longer than anything I had ever seen for the
good women in Montana never had reason to wear fake ones.
There we stood – all of us – momentarily star struck, until at
last Vivian Greer held out her hand and one by one, all of us
graciously shook it.
I must say that I felt like a dignitary as I followed Vivian

Greer and the rest of the ladies into the Baxter Hotel on Main Street. I
walked with my head up and a smile on her face, like I was a famous
singer, too.
The hotel was the tallest building in town, tan brick with
arched doors and a high-ceilinged lobby. I had never been in it before
and found myself looking away from the women for a moment so I
could study its claw-footed sofas and velvety drapes. There were brass
ashtrays on stands, two oil paintings of the Bridger Mountains, and a
doorway that led to a bar. The hotel, I knew from my parents, was
where professors came to stay when they lectured at the college, and
where the Mountain Music Society always brought performers.
So it was with some surety that Mama walked to the
mahogany front desk. “Check in for Miss Vivian Greer, please.”
The clerk fingered through a small file box and pulled out a
card he gave to my mother. “Sign here, please.” He was a grown man,
but he had the discordant voice of a teenaged boy in the back of a
school chorus.
Mama smiled, “Oh, no,” she said patiently. “I’m not Miss
Greer.” She motioned for the singer to come forward. Vivian Greer
stood as straight as my mother, her smile was honest, her grace
remarkable.
The clerk looked at my mother in her veiled hat and the other
women in their finery. Finally, he looked at Vivian Greer and back to
my mother again. He mumbled something to her, his words a cluttered
string of sounds.
“Pardon me,” Mama said.
“The hotel doesn’t let rooms to colored people.”
My mother leaned in to the clerk and quietly explained, “This
isn’t a colored person.” She flustered. “I mean … this is Miss Vivian
Greer, one of the best opera sopranos in this country. The Mountain
Music Society has reserved a room in her name.” She looked pointedly
at the man behind the counter, but he didn’t allow his gaze to be
caught.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “But we don’t let coloreds stay
here.”
Nobody said anything. It was so silent that I could hear the

grandfather clock behind the claw-footed sofas tick, tick, tick. We
stood there awkwardly, longer than we should have. After our glorious
entrance, I didn’t know what to do. It was impossible to pack up my
shame, cram into my purse – like a crumpled tissue or an extra tube of
lipstick – and walk back out like something hadn’t happened. I felt like
this was our fault, because we had pretended to be something we
weren’t, some place we weren’t.
Finally Mama, her face a pained white, turned to the famous
singer, “Miss Greer,” she stammered, her accent sounding thicker than
ever. “My husband and I … we have lovely home … Plenty of room
… It’s no hotel … ”
Vivian Greer smiled at my mother. “Thank you,” she said.
“I’m sure your home is lovely.”
That night, Vivian Greer stood in the Montana State College

auditorium and sang all the songs from her album—“Liebesbotschaft,”
“Ava Maria,” and the others. I have to this day never heard anyone
sing as well as she did. And Mama and I clapped louder and longer
than anyone in the audience, except for the other women who had been
with us that afternoon in the hotel lobby.
I know I should have felt lucky that Vivian Greer, the best
soprano in the United States, spent the night at my house and ate
breakfast the next morning with me, fifteen-year-old Louise Evanson
of Bozeman, Montana. And I did. But long after her visit, I would
remember how she had been turned away from the hotel, and how I
had understood at that exact moment that I was no longer a girl and
that life would change. Because I no longer wanted to live in a little
snow globe of perfection where wars happened in radios, and people
looked the same. This town might be a place for dreamers, but my
dreams would come true somewhere else.
When Vivian Greer came to sing, it changed my life.
/ 91
INEZ GELLER
A DOSTOEVSKY HEART
Agony benumbed,
ice with a St. Petersburg heart
in Westport, Connecticut.
Winter explodes on Main Street.

Chalk-virgin snow blankets
roads toward library intimacy.
Numb with disappointment,

the Volvo is frost-frozen.
I pray for a troika.
A February blizzard
imprisons Birch trees,
buries quivering crocus.
I ache for a miracle clearing.

Long for a Nevsky Prospect,
a taste of Moscova vodka.
My Dostoevsky heart contracts.

No book shop today.
Pages of a novel shiver despair.
91
JENNIFER L. FREED
WORDS FOR MY FATHER
I asked you a few years ago, when I was old enough

to dare,
how it was you never taught me
about what you were.
Y our answer, quick and cutting:
“You never asked.”
As though
the barrier had been built by me,
my childhood lack
of questions an old insult
bound up with that other insult
carried home in years of paper Easter Eggs and Santa
Hats
the teachers had us make in school.
But how could I have

asked, when I was so young ,
I didn’t know
enough to know there was a question?
What I knew was

Mary Kate at recess in third grade, asking me
if I was Catholic or Protestant.
I knew Helen on the school bus, complaining
about Sunday School. I knew how it felt
to steer their talk away, afraid
to let them know I did not even know
the words
that shaped this region of their lives.
When I was ten

there was the friend at end of summer camp
who said she’d miss me oh so much
and could I please
come visit her – but not
if I was Jewish,
since her mother hated Jews.
92
Freed / 93
I never told you,

held the knowledge of such hatred
like a stone beneath my tongue.
This much I now understand:

a Jew and an Italian,
in 1959, against both
families’ wishes.
So you both chose to favor neither
side, to let us children choose
ourselves,
and you must not have thought

of what it is to be a child,
the way now, in your late years,
you speak of TV shows from long before I ever lived,
as though what shines bright within your mind
must also shine in mine,
and so you did not see that in your silence

and our ignorance,
we two children could not
choose
so much as slip.
The first of us, your only son,

slipped soon enough toward Jesus.
Do you ever think to wonder why
your second child did not?
I will tell you:
Though I knew nothing
of your childhood, nothing
of Father Coughlin, or
kike, or Yid, nothing
of Abraham or Moses,
somehow I absorbed the word
that named my difference
from my peers,
that could make a stranger hate,
that made you
the way you were.
And I am waiting, still

lacking
the right questions, but
waiting
for whatever words you might yet find
a way to give me, and
we are running out of time.
Dear distant daddy, you must know
that we are running out of time.
Freed / 95
TIME LAPSE
I drive trapped
behind erratic slowness
on the narrow, tree-lined road.
When at last I’ve space
to pass, I see an old woman,
straining forward,
hands tight on the wheel.
That will be me.
My mother
on a pale green couch leans in
toward my aunt, listening with eyes
on lips,
the ruddy blush of scalp showing
through her hair.
That will be me.
Just a year ago, maybe two,

I was graduating college,
stepping off an airplane onto foreign soil,
not knowing
what was coming next,
not needing
to know.
Then I was first-kissing a new man, then
love-aching, then daring
to love again. Everything
was possible.
Now suddenly here

I am,
more than half way through
my life,
and everywhere I see the careful gait,
the stiff-necked turn of head,
the knotty hand gathering up the bright red coat, then
reaching out to stop
the closing door.
PASSAGE
Doors are closing, have

already closed.
From the cracks beneath: summer
light, the murmuring of once-
familiar voices, a foreign tongue,
beyond me now.
Through the window,

the scattered sticks that rained down
on the grass during the storm
will never again
be magic
wands, or tiny tent poles, or swords,
but only
sticks, a chore
that shrinks the afternoon
still smaller.
Saturdays are seldom

Saturdays, just
days.
Crow’s feet creep

around my eyes.
On my daughter’s head, my
thick hair. On her wrists, my
wide hands, while I am left with
what I used to see
when I looked at my mother.
Ahead of me, a hallway stretches, its walls

richly patterned, much like
those around me now.
At its end,
one door.
Freed / 97
KLEZMER
Full house, few other than

gray heads.
Careful feet, some like loaves of bread.
Brown spots on the hands
that tap on the knees when the players begin
to play – First the fellow
with the beard, then the girl in the red:
clarinet, violin, voices weaving
in a braid. Then the cello, saxophone, slide
trombone. The lilt
and the flutter. Now the twirl and the swirl
and the dance
and the tap of your feet
and the bob of your chin – Oh
to dance!
You can’t move
as you would, trapped as you are
by the weight of your days,
but you can hear
it – the sound of the world you knew
as a child, the rhythms
that bent your mother’s kitchen knees,
that timed the chop of her knife, and
the stir of her broth, and
the knead of her challah,
and you didn’t know it then – you didn’t know it till
just now,
Sunday, 2:00 PM, live at the JCC –
that this
would be the thing to lift
the sullen sky,
to loosen your clenched jaw –
This
would be the thing
to carry you
back home.
/ 99
RAYMOND GASTON
ONE HOUR
Ten Minutes. That’s how long Maggie Butler had been

standing at her own front door. She was staring into the mirror just
inside her apartment, and wondering if she could truly go through with
this. Why, she hadn’t been on a date in fifty-five years, not since
Harold had asked her out. They had gone to a movie and then
dancing—she doubted that tonight would be anything like it— that
evening had been so special, and it had amazed her— the draw, the
crave, the need she had felt with her six, no, now seven years dead
husband. He had been so kind on their first date. Didn’t care that she
didn’t know any of the new dance moves everyone, including himself,
were doing in the club that night. “You look great,” he had yelled over
the music, one hand barely on her hip.
These earrings—too yellow, she thought, and slipped them
out from the holes in her ears, sagging each year further downward
only slits now. She placed them on the table below the mirror and
looked again at her reflection. Quite suddenly, so that it almost scared
her, she felt her heart flutter. No, she couldn’t be excited, not about
something so small— not about this. The blue eye shadow, was it too
much? It had seemed fun when she was applying it. She thought about
washing it off, but decided not to. She didn’t have time anyway. One
last gaze at herself, making her wonder what Harold would say, would
he have told her she was pretty— felt a drop of guilt below her
diaphragm. Then she opened the door, stepped through, and shut it
behind.
A twenty-five minute bus ride from her apartment to

Columbus Circle, and despite the delay at her door, she was still
leaving early enough to beat him there, if just barely. The bus wasn’t
too crowded— not like it would be on her way back, rush hour, she
would be lucky to be offered a seat— but now—empty enough she
needn’t worry. She chose a seat across from a mother carrying child,
pressed firmly against her chest, tied there with a rough orange sash,
almost as if the woman were afraid her infant would escape if held
looser. Then, there it was—a feeling she had been having often as of
late—like the last sip of tea more bitter than the previous ones—a
reminder of what you’re truly drinking. She had felt that same way
about her own son. Harold had teased her. Had said, “whatever will
the boy do when it’s just me and him, and I won’t let the world break
99
on me like you do?” As it was, well, at least they had been close in
their own ways. Again, Maggie looked at the woman—a bitter look on
her face.
Was it thoughts like this that made the woman’s expression
so? Maggie forced herself to look away before she asked the woman
how her day was going, if she was okay. Out the window she glanced,
at the stalled traffic on Broadway, and Maggie wondered if maybe she
shouldn’t ask, if maybe the distraction would be nice, would keep her
from thinking about where she was going and the man she was on her
way to meet, who was named Charles. Not too close to Harold, she
thought twisting the cuff of her blouse between her thumb and
forefinger.
A tickle jumped in her throat, and Maggie coughed. The
woman across the aisle looked at her —meeting her eyes. Maggie
smiled. But the woman looked away—reaching up— carefully shifting
in her seat so as not to disturb the baby, and pushed the yellow strip
above her seat. Then she got up and moved to the rear doors. The bus
stopped and she got off. Maggie watched her walk around the corner,
clutching her child ever closer as the bus pulled back into traffic, and
then she was lost from view and Maggie tried hard to forget that taste
of bitterness.
She and Charles were meeting at the Bar Buchon, where he

assured her there was a lovely view. And although she didn’t know
what he looked like, they had agreed to meet at three pm, thinking they
would have to recognize each other— as the bar was sure to be nearly
empty at that hour.
After three months of fighting against her distress and
complaints, her son had set Maggie up with an online dating profile.
And although she had scrolled through several men’s profiles during
the previous six months, Charles was the first one she had contacted;
mainly because he also enjoyed Harold Lloyd films and partially
because his photo was like her own— a picture of his dog: Butternut.
Two more stops. Her knees hurt. So she scooted forward on

her seat and stretched her legs out in front of her. Oh no, she had
forgotten to change her shoes. In disbelief she stared at the brown
orthopedics, the ones her son hated. Maybe she could get off at the
next stop, catch a bus back, change, and then— No— there was no
time—she was only going to be ten minutes early as it was. They
would have to do. Besides, maybe Charles wouldn’t look down—
maybe he would be wearing orthos too— how cute, and she suddenly
Gaston / 101
hoped this would turn out to be the case, what a great story it would
become.
Firm against her fingers, the yellow plastic strip, she stood
and walked to the front. There she braced herself behind the driver and
watched his hands turn the wheel as he slid the bus to the curb—not as
strong as Harold’s had been, but strong—she didn’t suppose that
Charles would have hands like that. He still worked, wasn’t retired,
but it was office work— “pencil pusher,” his profile said.
Columbus Circle seemed busier than usual. There was
construction going on in the center of the roundabout and Maggie
wondered what it was they were doing, trying to remember,
unsuccessfully, if she had read anything about it in the paper.
“Thank you,” she said to the driver, stepping gingerly down
from the bottom step.
The doors closed behind her, and a hot blast of exhaust
pushed her dress against the back of her legs as the bus pulled away.
She glanced around, flushed at the sudden caress, and thankfully saw
no one watching.
It was so very bright at the bar, and it hurt her eyes to look
out the floor-to-ceiling windows that climbed the four levels of the
atrium. Outside, the park across the circle was filled with people, and
squinting, she watched a group of construction workers who sat
shoulder to shoulder, on a row of benches eat their lunch. So late
though, shouldn’t they be knocking off now instead? Maybe they’re
working later now, the heat had broken the week before. Hot of
course, it would be until late September probably, but not unbearable.
She glanced down the bar at a man sitting by himself on the
opposite end. Handsome, but far too young to be Charles— she turned
to the bartender and ordered a ginger ale. The bartender who himself
couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, made a face at her order
and then shot ginger ale from the gun into a glass and placed it before
her.
Of course, she told herself many times throughout their

marriage, they would have ended up together regardless. Even if she
hadn’t gotten pregnant from their first night together— That craving—
on her part it was too much for her to resist. And she was sure he had
felt the same. Had barely let her have a moment’s rest those first years
after Jack had been born. It had tapered off, sure, but, well, that was
life sometimes— the passion of things being replaced with an
assuredness.
The ice-cubes in her ginger ale had begun to melt. Still

though, no Charles. Had she gotten the date, the time, wrong? No, she
was sure they had agreed on three pm today, Wednesday. Maybe
something had happened to him, at our age nothing is guaranteed—
maybe he fell— hurt himself.
The young man at the end of the bar ordered a beer. Then
began looking about the restaurant as he waited for the bartender to
pour it. Their eyes met. He had kind eyes, and there was a question
behind them.
“Are you Charles?” she heard herself asking. The man
looked at her.
“No,” he said, “sorry, I’m not.”
Feeling foolish she stood, Charles wasn’t coming to meet
her, what had she been thinking? From out of her purse she drew her
wallet, and after placing four dollars on the bar, she turned and walked
toward the escalator. The man watched her go.
“If she’d been younger I would have said yes.”
“What was that?” The bartender asked, not having heard.
“I said, if she’d been younger I would have said yes.” The
man finished his beer, paid, and then left. Wiping the bar-top down
with one hand the bartender cleared the man’s glass, and then the old
lady’s. He placed them in the sop sink beside each other, and then after
wiping his hands he took the money from off the bar and set it in his
tip drawer. It was almost empty. September was already here, and he
guessed most of the heavy summer tourist season was over— still, the
jar was light for a Thursday.
Maggie Butler stood at the bus stop on the far side of
Columbus Circle, but she wasn’t looking south across the circle,
craning her neck, hoping for an empty bus. Instead she faced into the
park, and she smelled hot asphalt, almost sweet, and thought that if her
son called her later and asked how the date went, she would simply tell
him that she hadn’t gone.
Originally published online by The Commonline Journal

/ 103
NEGLECTED HELP
Robert Lowell, Charles Bukowski, Sara Teasdale
Robert Lowell
Man and Wife
Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed;

the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;
in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,
abandoned, almost Dionysian.
At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,
blossoms on our magnolia ignite
the morning with their murderous five day's white.
All night I've held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad—
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—
and dragged me home alive. . . . Oh my Petite,
clearest of all God's creatures, still all air and nerve:
you were in your twenties, and I,
once hand on glass
and heart in mouth,
outdrank the Rahvs in the heat
of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet—
too boiled and shy
and poker-faced to make a pass,
while the shrill verve
of your invective scorched the traditional South.
Now twelve years later, you turn your back.

Sleepless, you hold
your pillow to your hollows like a child,
your old-fashioned tirade—
loving, rapid, merciless—
breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.
103
“To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage”
“It is the future generation that presses into being by

means of these exuberant feelings and supersensible
soap bubbles of ours.”
—Schopenhauer
“The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.

Our magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen.
My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
free-lancing out along the razor's edge.
This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.
Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . .
It's the injustice . . . he is so unjust—
whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.
My only thought is how to keep alive.
What makes him tick? Each night now I tie
ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .
Gored by the climacteric of his want,
he stalls above me like an elephant.”
Skunk Hour
For Elizabeth Bishop
Nautilus Island's hermit

heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son's a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village,
she's in her dotage.
Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria's century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.
Lowell / 105
The season's ill—

we've lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.
And now our fairy

decorator brightens his shop for fall,
his fishnet's filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler's bench and awl,
there is no money in his work,
he'd rather marry.
One dark night,

my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull,
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind's not right.
A car radio bleats,

'Love, O careless Love . . . .' I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat . . . .
I myself am hell,
nobody's here--
only skunks, that search

in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.
I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air—
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage
pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.
Charles Bukowski
Throwing Away the Alarm Clock
my father always said, “early to bed and

early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy
and wise.”
it was lights out at 8 p.m. in our house

and we were up at dawn to the smell of
coffee, frying bacon and scrambled
eggs.
my father followed this general routine

for a lifetime and died young, broke,
and, I think, not too
wise.
taking note, I rejected his advice and it

became, for me, late to bed and late
to rise.
now, I'm not saying that I've conquered

the world but I've avoided
numberless early traffic jams, bypassed some
common pitfalls
and have met some strange, wonderful
people
one of whom
was
myself—someone my father
never
knew.
escape 1942
in San Francisco I watched them

march into the
Bukowski / 107
shipyards
with their hard hats,
carrying their
lunch pails.
my father had written me

from Los Angles: “If you
don’t want to go to War
then work in the
shipyards, help your country
and
make some money.”
I was insane.
I just sat in a small room and
stared at the walls.
now, many of those

shipyard workers
have found that
they were exposed to
asbestos
poisoning, and some of them
are now doomed to a slow
incurable
death.
one thing I found out

early
about my father’s advice:
ignore it
without remorse
and you would avoid
many of life’s
ordinary agonies.
there would always

be
enough
of the other
kind.
Sara Teasdale
ON THE DUNES
If there is any life when death is over,

These tawny beaches will know much of me,
I shall come back, as constant and as changeful
As the unchanging, many-colored sea.
If life was small, if it has made me scornful,

Forgive me; I shall straighten like a flame
In the great calm of death, and if you want me
Stand on the sea-ward dunes and call my name.
/ 109
CONTRIBUTORS
MARILYN CAVICCHIA is an editor at a bar association and a

communications specialist for a child welfare agency. She earned a
bachelor’s in English and a master’s in journalism from Ohio
University. She lives in Chicago with her husband, two children, a box
turtle, and a fancy goldfish. Her poems have recently appeared in
Graze, Carnival, DUM DUM Zine, and Hawai’i Review (forth-
coming). Secret Rivers will be her first published chapbook.
marilyncavicchiaeditorpoet.wordpress.com
DINAH COX has published or has stories forthcoming in Prairie
Schooner, Cream City Review, Copper Nickel, J Journal, Salt Hill,
Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at
Oklahoma State University where she's also an associate editor at
Cimarron Review.
STEPHANIE E. DICKINSON’s first novel Half Girl, winner of the
Hackney Award (Birmingham-Southern) was published by Spuyten
Duyvil. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines like
the Ontario Review, Water-Stone Review, Calyx, Stone Canoe, and
others. Several have been reprinted in Best American Nonrequired
Reading 2005 and New Stories from the South, Her story “Between
the Cold Hearts and the Blue Dudes”• won the New Delta Review ‘s
2011 Matt Clark Prize. She’s an associate editor at Mudfish.
JENNIFER L. FREED lives in Holden, MA. Her work appears in
Poetry East, The Worcester Review, Cloudbank, JAMA, and other
publications. Her first chapbook, These Hands Still Holding (2014)
was a finalist in the 2013 New Women’s Voices Chapbook
Competition. She has taught ESL in China, The Czech Republic, and
in the U.S, where she currently tutors refugees in English and life
skills. Her website is Jfreed.weebly.com
RAYMOND GASTON, Venice, California has written three novels: It
Started Out Silently, The Bowling Club, and The Way your Father
Dies, as well as numerous short stories. He was the founding editor of
Lunch Ticket, recently presented his work at the Hawaii International
109
Art and Humanities Conference, and has been invited to the French
Government's IHEAP fellowship program for boundary pushing art.
INEZ D GELLER’s work has appeared in many publications, most
recently in the literary journal Quiddity. Her plays Vodkalogue and
Solitary Waltzers have been staged in West Port, CT and Fort
Lauderdale, FL. She lives on the edge of the sea in Fort Lauderdale
and writes passionately about passion. She is a graduate of the College
of New Rochelle, Manhattanville College, and Fairfield University.
JESSICA GREGG is a teacher and writer who once lived in Bozeman,
Montana, where the tales of celebrity visits from long ago inspired the
story “When Vivian Greer Came to Sing.” Her writing has appeared in
the Seattle Review, YARN, Baltimore Sun, and Christian Science
Monitor. She now lives in Baltimore and regularly blogs at
www.charmcitywriter.wordpress.com
JUDY ANN IRELAND’s poetry benefits from the authenticity of the
Midwest's working class culture, and the excesses of South Florida,
where she currently lives and works. Her poems have appeared in
Calyx, Saranac Review, Eclipse, Cold Mountain, Hotel Amerika, and
other journals.
GAIL BRACCIDIFERRO MACDONALD is a freelance writer and an
assistant professor in residence in the University of Connecticut's
journalism department. She lives in Connecticut with her husband.
LUCIA MAY is a violinist, poet and long-time arts advocate who lives
in St. Paul, MN. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Main
Channel Voices, Hot Metal Press, Paper Darts, The Mom Egg, and
The Awakenings Review. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in
2013 by Verse Wisconsin. She was offered the Starting Gate Award
by Finishing Line Press. She was a 2013 Finalist for the Helen Kay
Chapbook Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press. Her website is
luciamaypoet.com
MARK J. MITCHELL studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under
Raymond Carver, George Hitchcock and Barbara Hull. His work has
appeared in periodicals over the last thirty-five years and in the
anthologies Good Poems, American Places, Hunger Enough, Retail
Contributors / 111
Woes and Line Drives. A chapbook, Artifacts and Relics, is

forthcoming as is another novel, A Book of Lost Songs. He lives in San
Francisco with his wife, the documentarian and filmmaker Joan Juster.
TONI ORTNER is a poet and author who lives in Brattleboro, Vermont.
She hosts the Write Action Radio Hour from 5-6 pm the last two
Sundays of each month where she interviews writers who read their
work. She is Vice President of Write Action Board, a not for profit
group that supports writers in New England. She has had l4 books
published by small presses. She will be writing a new column called
“Old Lady Blog” for vermontviews.org. Her website is toniortner.com.
ANITA S. PULIER retired from many years of practicing law in New
York and New Jersey and served for six years as a U. S. representative
for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom at the
United Nations. She is currently a director of the Jane Adams Peace
Association. Her chapbooks Perfect Diet and The Lovely Mundane
were published in 2011 and 2013. Her poems have appeared both
online and in many journals.
HARRIET L. SHENKMAN is a Professor Emerita at City University of
New York. She is on the Advisory Board of the Women’s National
Book Association, NYC. She won an award in poetry in the Women’s
National Book Association 2013 Annual Writing Contest and in the
Women Who Write 2013 International Poetry and Short Prose
Contest. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals and
webzines, and in the 20th Edition of the Calliope Anthology. Her
poetry chapbook Teetering will be published in May, 2014. She lives
in New York with her husband Jerry.
DONNA SPECTOR's plays, Golden Ladder and Another Paradise,
were produced Off Broadway. Her eighteen full-length plays and
many short plays have won prizes and appeared regionally and in
Canada, Ireland, Sweden and Greece. Her poetry collection, The
Woman Who Married Herself, a finalist in the 2010 Sinclair Poetry
Prize, was published by Evening Street Press. Her poems, plays and
stories have been published in many literary magazines and
anthologies. Her novel The Candle of God was published in 2012.
FATAL MYTH
Moses told the Israelites to make war.

So they warred against Midian, and slew
every male. They burned the cities
and took captive the women of Midian
and their children, and took as booty
all their cattle, flocks and goods
as the Lord commanded.
But Moses was angry and said,

“Have you let all the women live?”
He listened to the Lord, and then he said,
”Kill every male among the children,
and kill every woman who has known man
by lying with him. But keep alive for yourselves
all the young girls
who have not known man.”
So they did as the Lord commanded

and killed every male among the children
and all the women who had known man
and kept as the spoils of war
thirty-two thousand women
who had not known man by lying with him.
Numbers, 31:1-54
“If we believe absurdities,

we shall commit atrocities.”
Picasso with his friends at Mougins: Valentine Penrose, Lee Miller, Dora
Maur, a friend, Paul Eluard, and Lise Deharme (Collection of Sir Roland
Penrose)
Photo taken in August 1936, the Spanish War just started. They
are in Mougins, near Cannes on the French Riviera. Picasso is shorter
than 4 of the 5 women, maybe all 5. Was this behind his needing to think
of himself as a big strong tough bull? Famous, he took women when he
wanted them; at times friends gave him their women, as Eluard did on
this occasion. (Eluard, a minor French poet, is the one in the photo
looking sort of giraffe-like in his tallness. He loaned Picasso his wife on
this day.)
After the early pink and blue periods of relative realism, Picasso
had become the painter of women as grotesque cartoons—cubic, surreal,
and Roman. The hatred is vivid, as it often was in his daily life.
$12.00
ISBN 978-1-937347-18-5
50995
9 781937 347185
Evening Street Press

Dublin, OH

Evening Street Review Number 10, Spring 2014

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Evening Street Review Number 10, Spring 2014

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Number 10 Spring, 2014

Minotauromachy, 1935 Pablo Picasso

It was all a dream. The Minotaur never died.

Published by Evening Street Press

. . .all men and women are created equal in

PUBLISHED TWICE A YEAR

Associate Editors: Donna Spector, Steve Abbott,

Managing Editor: Barbara Bergmann

Interns: Jessica Kastor, Kailen Nourse

Evening Street Review is published in the spring and fall of

For submission guidelines, subscription information, published

© Copyright 2014 by Evening Street Press. All rights revert to

NUMBER 10, SPRING 2014

BY THE EDITOR Occasional Notes:

STEPHANIE E. DICKINSON Young Widows of Whalebone 9

SOME SELECTIONS FROM POETRY CONTEST S UBMISSIONS

HELEN KAY CHAPBOOK

SINCLAIR BOOK LENGTH

DINAH COX The Dot 55

TONI ORTNER History of Loss 66

BY THE EDITOR Neglected Help:

Terence, this is stupid stuff (A. E. Housman)

‘TERENCE, this is stupid stuff:

Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,

And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,

Therefore, since the world has still

There was a king reigned in the East:

They poured strychnine in his cup

From under the camera’s hood, the photographer peers at them

Great-uncle Joseph fathers four children before his thirty-first

Florence and Philip

Amanda & Dustin

BARBARA, DRIVER, CHRYSLER TOWN & COUNTRY

If that balloon truck cuts me off one more time,

JUSTIN, DRIVER, CHEVY VOLT

I guess it figures, around here, that

LAUREN, DRIVER, MAZDA 3

It’s a lot better here now,

Yeah, it’s no fun to live in a

in the past six months or so,

I don’t have to think about

about guys who aren’t local,

but if some of them do bring

JULIE, DRIVER, FORD TAURUS WAGON

I’m showing apartments

ROBERT, DRIVER, BUICK LESABRE

Figured I’d be further along in life

Lot of houses boarded up.

Some, like mine, still standing

season. Some winters, I think

The teardown crew came for

Used to be that me and Greg

He’d talk to me about music,

and it was true, almost.

had a real hard time,

so they lived side by side

not houses. Not much. Greg

that couldn’t happen. So Greg

out there, but I hear there’s

Somewhere along the way,

things like that don’t matter

MARJORIE, DRIVER, CADILLAC DEVILLE

Henry was always a dog to me.

NANCY, DRIVER, TOYOTA AVALON

I used to carry a paper bag

I was hypnotized a few times,