Evening Street Review Number 20, Spring 2019

Number 20 Spring, 2019
EVENING STREET REVIEW
Published by Evening Street Press

Sacramento, CA
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NUMBER 20, SPRING 2019
. . .all men and women are created equal

in rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.
—ElizabethCady Stanton, revision of the
American Declaration of Independence, 1848
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EVENING STREET PRESS
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PUBLISHED TWICE A YEAR BY EVENING STREET PRESS
NUMBER 20, SPRING 2019
CONTENTS
BY THE F OUNDING EDITOR Occasional Notes:

A Revaluation of all Values 6
POETRY
GANNON DANIELS My Mother’s Skin 12

Flak 12
ELIZABETH WEIR Master Craft 14
New Orleans Bronze 14
ALISON H ICKS The IV Pole 15
LINDA FUCHS Pondering 16
RODGER LEGRAND Sleepwalking 29
NAOMI RUTH LOWINSKY To a Kinsman From
Before the Divide 30
JUDITH J ANOO The Hay Barn 32
Beaches of Normandy 33
Sparks 34
Take To The Streets,
February 15, 2003 35
Alphabet 35
HOWARD WINN Newspaper Obituary Page 37
EVE POWERS Uprising, 1956 44
When Ella Died 45
The Children are Singing 46
GEORGE LONGENECKER View from a Bay Window 48
Everything Washes Away 49
GEORGE STALEY Walking 50
STEVE DENEHAN My Mother 56
Tire Swing 57
STEVEN PELCMAN My Mother’s Cupboard 58
WILLIAM SWARTS Grave Words: My Epitaph 60
DAMON MCLAUGHLIN This Hawk Pair Destroyed Its Own Nest 68
LESLIE G C OHEN Sixty-Four 70
POETRY cont.
M T JAMIESON The Big Guy Swept The Dust 72

Analogue Cowboy, Outdoor Theater 73
BRIAN C FELDER Hard Knocks U 82
Nap Time 82
Partners in Crime 82
The Dream Lives Yet 83
CAMERON MORSE Poem Written During a Funeral Service 85
Purgatory 85
JOHN T HITCHNER Snow Upon Green 90
DOUGLAS C OLLURA Inspiring the Troops 93
JAMI MILLER Relapse 94
79 94
Locked Up 95
JEFFREY ALFIER The Corner of Monmouth
and Broad Streets 101
Summer Landscape: Gildford, Montana 101
Second Story 102
VICTORIA ANDERSON Spottings 104
JOAN P RESLEY Girls Gone Sober, Mondays @ Noon 105
The Whole Foods Equation 106
MARGUERITE GUZMAN B OUVARD The Light Inside and Outside 115
LAURA F ALSETTI Let’s Assume This Doesn’t Work Out 116
RHEMA S AYERS Transient Magic 118
RONALD M ORAN On a night two months ago 120
MATTHEW L ANDRUM At the Kalahari Resort 124
RICHARD N BENTLEY Inland 125
RICHARD LUFTIG How Autumn Prevails 126
PATRICK T HERON E RICKSON The 1968 Mexico City Olympics
A Retrospective 128
Collateral Damage 129
MATTHEW MENDOZA Short Path To Ecstasy 131
STEPHEN R ROBERTS Senior Citizen Résumé 132
Nature with Mud Hens 132
PHILIP ST. CLAIR Astral Cigarettes 134
MICHAEL CERAOLO Free Speech Canto XXXIII 142
Free Speech Canto XXXIV 143
Free Speech Canto XXXV 145
Free Speech Canto XXXVI 146
POETRY cont.
MEREDITH H OLMES What is Zen? 148

Mixed Emotions 148
Election Journal November 9, 2016 149
SUELLEN WEDMORE Caravan 150
MITCHELL UNTCH Immigration 152
Encounter 153
Twin 154
RICHARD WIDERKEHR Luck and Sorrow, She Said 159
RUSS ALLISON LOAR I Knew a Young Man 161
Legions 161
FICTION
JULIE W AKEMAN-LINN A Rocket V-8 8

HOWARD R W OLF Second Time Around 17
MICHAEL FRYD Therapy 38
NAN LUNDEEN Margrethe’s Winter Coat 51
DAVID PLIMPTON Quasi-Tame Shrinking Felines vs.
Throwback Expanding Canines 61
SHAE M HALL Wash N Dry 74
RYAN M M OSER The Farmer's Pond 97
JANICE E RODRÍGUEZ Best Served Cold 108
STEVEN SHEFFIELD COOKE Bait And Switch 136
NICOLE W ALDNER Night Skies 163
NONFICTION
PAMELA C ARTER A Bipolar Child 87

KIT-BACON GRESSITT Coconut Boy 121
TERRY S ANVILLE Old Don Quixotes 156
BY THE F OUNDING EDITOR Neglected Help:

Needing Freedom: Plath, Jeffers 168
CONTRIBUTORS 170
6 / Evening Street Review
OCCASIONAL NOTES
A REVALUATION OF ALL VALUES
I think all the great religions of the world–Buddhism, Hinduism,

Christianity , Islam, and Communism–both untrue and harmful. . . . With
very few exceptions, the religion which a person accepts is that of the
community in which she or he lives, which makes it obvious that the
influence of environment is what has led to acceptance of the religion in
question.
Religion is based primarily upon fear . . . fear of the mysterious,

fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it
is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand.
Opposition to birth control makes it impossible to solve the
population problem, and therefore postpones indefinitely all chances of
world peace; it also secures that women incapable of surviving childbirth
shall die in futile confinements.
–Bertrand Russell, Why I am Not

a Christian, 1923
In my extensive travels on lecturing tours, in after years, I had

many varied experiences with babies. One day, in the cars, a child was
crying near me, while the parents were alternately shaking and slapping it.
First one would take it with an emphatic jerk, and then the other. At last I
heard the father say in a spiteful tone, “If you don’t stop, I’ll throw you
out of the window.”
I generally restrain myself as long as I can but at length I turned
and said, “Let me take your child and see if I can find out what ails it.”
“Nothing ails it,” said the father, “but bad temper.”
I felt to see if its clothes pinched anywhere, then glanced at the
feet–there was the trouble, the boots were at least one size too small; the
feet were cold as ice. I warmed them in my hands and soon the child fell
asleep. They were young parents, so I just said, “When your child cries,
remember it is telling you as well as it can, that something hurts it, either
outside or in, and do not rest until you find out what it is. Neither
spanking, shaking or scolding can relieve pain.”
–Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More, 1897
6
Editor / 7
Now seeing a chance

for the mind to rise at last out of the long night
of animal life–
baboon hierarchies, gorilla harems, the tyranny
of genes, chemical imbalances, the power of gods.
What joy to live in,

what a Revaluation of All Values!
Unless
a second night falls,
so fast we hardly see it coming
and die where we are
in this brief scientific/technical glory
that multiplies power and madness, frees us
and kills us at the same time
–from Dawn Night Fall, 2012
G.G.
Reprinted from Evening Street Review #8

JULIE WAKEMAN-LINN
A ROCKET V-8
“Ice cream—that’s your big surprise?” Jason said as his dad drove
into the ice cream shop’s parking lot.
“When I said cherry, you goof, I didn’t mean a sundae.” His dad
stomped on his brakes, pitching Jason toward the pickup truck’s
dashboard as they stopped in front of a red convertible. “There she is—
what Gramps used to call ‘cherry.’ Your dream car for your seventeenth.”
The convertible’s chassis hulked over its tires. Somebody had
folded its top down, creating a black canvas deck. Its long hood hovered
like half closed eyelids over the headlights. A monster.
“You’re gonna buy it?” He didn’t want a car.
“We’re gonna—together,” his dad whispered. “I’ll get us a steal
of a price on her.”
Jason didn’t move. If he didn’t get out of the truck, he’d wait out
this latest insanity of his dad’s. He set down his Gatorade among the
Mountain Dew cans and trail mix wrappers littering the floor of the
pickup. “Don’t embarrass us, Dad.”
“Let’s give this beauty a close look before we make an offer.” His
dad climbed out. “You’re gonna love it.”
He hated it. In the midday sun, the balding spot on top of his
dad’s head gleamed. Jason found a baseball cap stuck behind his seat.
“Wear a cap, Dad, or you’ll burn again.”
His dad lay his hand on the red fender and hissed a sizzle sound.
“It’s hotter than hot. Hot car—get it?”
Jason ha-ha-ed on cue—his dad couldn’t resist stupid puns. “Let’s
go for maraschino cherries instead, you know, on ice cream.” Jason
launched his hint as a joke, but his dad didn’t laugh. Heat rose off the
asphalt and the metal of the car in waves. The car’s hood, as long as his
friend’s Mini Cooper, had faded to gray like the car had stuck out of a
barn for years. “Isn’t it too old?”
“1972 is vintage. She takes leaded gas, so we’ll convert the tank.”
His dad circled the car, half crouching, gliding his hands along the
convertible’s open compartment, passenger’s side to trunk to driver’s side,
like he stroked a purring cat.
“Sounds like honking huge mess.” Auto repairs on something this
ancient would be greasy. Nothing like a quick check engine computer
readout like his mom and step dad’s Lexus.
8
Wakeman-Linn / 9
“Nah, probably not the whole tank, but the cap of the tank.”
Jason bit back a groan. His dad was obsessed with stuff—rock n’
roll albums, old cars, baseball cards—from his childhood, his happy easy
times, before marriage and divorce. Jason got sick of hearing it, but he
forced himself to be patient. His reality was every morning when he woke
up, he checked the color of the sheets to remember which parent’s house
he was sleeping in.
“The leather interior is in immaculate condition.” His dad opened
the driver’s side and slid in behind the steering wheel. He brushed his
fingertips across the dashboard. “Your mom and I could have used a car
like this. Beautiful original wood trim, too. Burled elm.”
Jason leaned over the passenger side door, thinking how weird it
was for his mom to come up in this conversation. “The backseat leather
has cracks.”
“Oooh, bench seat. You’ll have some fun.” He snickered.
Sometimes, his dad talked like an old movie. His dad called it
what—a bench seat? Wider and deeper than any car he’d ever ridden in.
Then he got it—his dad was cackling about a private make-out place and
Mia. She wanted him to have a car for Homecoming but afterwards,
maybe he’d finally get lucky. Still, it grossed him out his dad connected
him and girls and sex.
“Nuts. It’s not a stick. A real muscle car has a manual
transmission.”
“I don’t know how to drive a stick shift.” Jason drifted to the front
of the car. The wide grills with 442 stuck on them shone with freshly
washed black finish. The Oldsmobile emblem gleamed, compared to the
faded paint. “Maybe we could look at a Mini Cooper, instead.”
“Stick or no stick—no biggie. Your long legs wouldn’t fit in a
Mini-whatever, anyway. What matters is the good times we’ll have
keeping it running.” His dad half smiled, half-begging Jason to smile, too.
“I think it’s a Rocket V-8?”
Jason recognized V8. Eight cylinders would suck gas. His pal’s
Mini ran for two whole weeks in between fill-ups. He wanted to say “Dad,
you know, I don’t want a car. I’d rather more money for my new iPhone’s
data plan,” but his dad would explode at the mention of his mom’s gift or
worse—cry. He echoed, “A rocket.”
“I’ll get the keys. Let’s try her out.” His dad jogged to the ice
cream shop, his gut wobbling from too many Mountain Dews.
Jason leaned against the faded hood. Patience with his dad had to
be his superpower. He prayed the monster was already sold.
His dad returned, spinning the keys on his fingers. “You’ll make
the monthly payments. Your mom promised to make the insurance
payments. I’ll pay for any parts.” He tossed the keys in a long upward arc,
but Jason missed the spiral and they dropped into the dust.
A negotiation as huge as the car had already begun behind his
back with his mom and dad talking to—not screaming at—each other. He
picked up the keys, shook off the dust and lobbed them back at his dad.
“You drive.”
His earnings, bagging groceries at Whole Foods, would be eaten
up, his free time with Mia would disappear. He’d be hanging out with his
dad fixing it. The biggest part—his mom had agreed to contribute—it was
the first time his parents had agreed on anything since the divorce.
Repairs on this mastodon were likely to be endless. His dad’s
mechanical skills might have been okay when he worked in Gramps’
vacuum repair shop before Jason was born. Driving a UPS truck didn’t
exactly require mechanical skills. Where were they going to find a hoist
and tools? Break into the UPS depot?
His dad swung the driver’s door wide and hopped in, motioning
Jason to get in. “The guy says it starts a little rough.” He turned the key
and the engine tick-ticked. He frowned and pumped the gas pedal and
tried again. The starter caught and rolled over. Under the hood, something
boomed.
Jason jumped. “God-almighty—was that backfiring?”
“We’ll change the starter first thing.” One hand on the steering
wheel, his dad lay his arm along the seat back and surveyed the parking
lot. He twisted the wheel, muttering, “she needs power steering fluid at
the very least.”
The convertible rolled forward five feet, his dad cranked the
wheel harder and backed up and reversed and they pulled out. If the car
needed a three-point turn to face out of its spot on the grass, parking this
boat in his high school parking lot wasn’t going to be easy. His friends
would laugh their asses off at this car.
On the road, a Frito-Lay delivery truck approached from the
Shady Side Road curve. His dad said, “Watch this.” The red convertible
shot out and fishtailed, tossing Jason side to side. He snapped his seatbelt,
lap only, in a hurry. His dad laughed, “Woohoo!”
They blazed down Muddy Creek Road, doing fifty in a thirty-five
zone. The wind whipped Jason’s hair into his eyes. He wished for
sunglasses, but deep down, it was kind of cool, speeding, racing against
nobody.
Wakeman-Linn / 11
At the corner, they spun onto County 468 and his dad took it up to
sixty-five mph, the odometer needle wiggling. An old guy on a chopped
Harley overtook them, passing close and puffing black exhaust over them.
Jason closed his mouth against the smell but his dad, mouth hanging open,
grinned like he was the teenager.
“Isn’t this the best?” His dad shouted over the road noise.
Jason bobbed his head yes, so he didn’t have to open his mouth.
Ahead a green tractor putted half on the shoulder, half in the lane.
“We’re gonna whip his John Deere ass.” His dad slammed on the
turn signal.
“The curve, Dad?” Jason yelled but his dad punched the gas
pedal, and the red convertible pulled even with the tractor. Ahead a
pickup truck coming straight at them. “Drop back,” Jason screamed. He
braced against the dashboard, his dad’s fucking elm dashboard, praying
for a roadway miracle, the pickup to brake or the tractor to pull over.
The red convertible surged forward, lurching ahead of the tractor
and sliding into their lane. Jason felt his stomach heave against his ribs.
The pickup truck stopped on the shoulder, the driver cursing after them.
Jason glanced at his dad, his face tilted to the sun, his hat blown
off, pure delight on his wrinkled face. They buy the stupid car, they’d
work on it, and he’d have a place to be alone with Mia. A double payoff
for this father-son bonding adventure. Jason’s money and his time pouring
down a red convertible rathole.
“Wanna grab a pizza with me?” his dad asked.
“How about ice cream instead of all that grease?” Jason asked.
His mom and dad talking—the ancient wreck might be worth it. Over a
hot fudge sundae, the deal was struck, the car was theirs.
GANNON DANIELS
MY MOTHER’S SKIN
My mother’s skin after a day in the sun

warm and brown, she sits at her dressing table
making a dangerous journey on the top of her head
cliffs and dales high peaks rounded sweeps I touch
her back where her bathing suit left a mark
where her bra has pressed a permanent trench
another precipice she calls from
another treacherous trek she happened to manage
She teaches me silently—smiling at her daughter’s wonder.
When she had agreed to Hospice instead of continuing

her worrisome travels, she asked sheepishly if she could
still have her showers; the sponge baths given by the young
male orderlies—we laughed, but knew her skin still
warm and brown needed the touch of soap and sponge
washing her cleanly from here to there.
FLAK
From the patio (I was 10)

I could see
my father down below
falling
asleep in the big cord
hammock strung between
two trees.
Protruding belly
sturdy and round
covered by a short
sleeve three button
open collar untucked
brown trousers
black socks slip on sandals
on the ground.
12
Daniels / 13
The newspaper
in his left hand folded
to the crossword
his glasses resting
over his bald forehead
because his eyes
were rubbed before
shutting them down.
If we had just let him rest

even for a little while longer
maybe that would have
made a difference
in the timing of his heart
allowed him to recharge
instead of waking
him up
to carve the dinner.
Then again maybe

we were right to call
him close to watch him use
his hands and listen
to his decisions and hold him—
hold him if we could have
and ask him everything
in those last runic moments.
ELIZABETH WEIR
MASTER CRAFT
Bonsai means a tree

in a shallow dish, a tree like
any other that has potential
for growth and space, light and sky,
but it is a tree that has been root-pruned,
like a foot-bound Chinese girl-child,
limbs trained for elegance of form,
undesirable growth plucked
until it becomes an
exquisite miniature
of itself,
a thing
small
and convenient, a possession to be
prized, admired and kept indoors.
NEW ORLEANS BRONZE
Jean Baptist le Moyne de Bienville stands wigged and tall,

chin tilted, frock coat lifted in a Louisiana breeze,
breeches tied above determined calves. He holds
a staff and a scroll, lands gained with a fresh thumbprint.
Behind the honored founder, a priest in sack-cloth robe,

heavy rosary hanging from his waist, face, impassive,
his work done.
Seated below them both, a Chickasaw chief,

features finely cut, deep-set eyes, down-cast,
his people’s peace pipe empty in his hand.
14
/ 15
ALISON HICKS
THE IV POLE
watches over bodies more fragile than itself

through nights that are never dark and always interrupted.
Sentry, dripping saline, sedatives, antibiotics,
accepting all bags hung on it.

It accepts all patients it is wedded to by tube and blood,
calibrated to needs not its own but a series of someone else’s,
to a number that commands

injection that makes the eyes grow soft
and pain a stream easily stepped over.
It has danced with every partner it’s hooked up with.

Roller-slide and grip-slipper step to the bathroom,
tubing grapevining around appendages.
When it passes its fellows in the hall, protocol excludes open recognition.
If all the poles in the unit were to be brought together,
would they jostle, bump antler tops?
When the bags run out, when an arm kinks and flow is disrupted,
it calls with a sound no one cares to hear.
Underneath the noise—something more than alarm?
15
LINDA FUCHS
PONDERING
the closer the end approaches

the more I ponder what has been
embarrassed by youthful indiscretions
remembering poor choices
and acts of stupidity
I am taken over by regrets
then a friend reminds me

these things just mean I am human
the only thing that truly matters is love
for myself, friends and family
for Earth and any I have yet to meet
I try to forgive myself

let these worries float up
into the great unknown
where it lifts these concerns
off my shoulders
now I can enjoy what is left
16
/ 17
HOWARD R WOLF
SECOND TIME AROUND
“So glad we met the second time around…”
Ten miles north of Lockport, NY, Ludwig Fried, connoisseur of
uncertainty, sat, near twilight in the middle of May, semi-slumped in a
sun-tracking chair on his small pine deck that overlooked Lake Ontario.
The swirls and curlicues in the still glistening grain of the wood reminded
him of inner worlds and distant galaxies.
Imagining that he was in the crow’s nest of a 19 th century
Portuguese caravel, he liked to pretend that he was setting sail for some of
the far-away places he still wanted to see and write about: Keats’s
Hampstead Heath cottage, Tolstoy’s Yasnaya Polyana estate, “the old
Moulmein Pagoda.” But he wasn’t sure if it made sense at his age and
stage of life to voyage out. For better and worse, wasn’t his life as
complete as it could be? What could he find out there that he hadn’t
already found?
A retired Lecturer of Composition and Memoir Writing, Niagara
County Community College, “mini-man of letters,” as he thought of
himself when low, “mildly successful” when upbeat, he scanned the
horizon line and arc of Lake Ontario from west to east.
He could see the Canadian shoreline curving towards Hamilton
and Toronto, the CNN Tower, visible on this clear evening, and the
pulsating beam of the Thirty Point Lighthouse only fifteen miles down
Lake Ontario Road. His perch gave him a sense of belonging to a larger
world than the one in which he lived mainly by himself.
“You call that living, the asshole of Canada?” he heard his late
father say. “But it’s not Canada, pop, it’s America.” “So what? It’s still
an asshole.”
Long divorced, many friends retired to Arizona, California, and
Taos—recent lady friend unable to overcome her grief for a late husband;
brother, retired dentist, Boca; daughter and grandchildren, Israel—he
found himself more or less alone. Maybe not the general human condition,
but definitely his.
And not so uncommon at his age and stage of life for many of his
contemporaries, privileged rebels, who had resisted living life as usual in
the 1960’s, but comparisons were useless—it was his life. Statistics and
demographics didn’t help when Daylight Saving Time ended and he felt
on the verge of entering a darkening world.
Grandson of Czech exiles, tending to look at life more through the
17
shadowy lens of Prague’s Franz Kafka than the Brooklyn bifocals of

Hasidic rabbis who found light and joy even in the shadows and dark
corners of the world, he was grateful now for the wide sweep of the
lakeshore and the perspective it encouraged.
Not about to give in to the forces of introspective entropy, he still
sometimes thought that the human race was a flawed species living on an
endangered planet in a universe destined, according to his secular bible,
The New York Times, for extinction. But it was more a mood than a
conviction.
He was especially grateful for the panoramic view on this evening
when he needed to make a decision. Should he or shouldn’t he accept
“Archy” Fine’s wedding invitation just a month away on the cusp of the
summer solstice. Not “to be or not to be,” but important to Ludwig, for
whom all irreversible decisions seemed to be a step towards the gallows.
The ceremony would take place only a few miles away in one of
Midsummer Winery’s secluded organic apple orchards, heritage acreage,
not far from where Archy’s surprisingly younger bride to be, Francine,
had spent summers in her family’s opulent lakeside estate.
Improbably and unexpectedly, old Arch, fingers gnarled, long
divorced veteran of serial romances with former artsy students, would tie
the knot with Francine Chapin, Bennington graduate, Freudian, film
historian (Eastman House, Rochester), only child, estranged from her
socially snobbish parents, owners of a golf course that reluctantly
admitted minorities. Especially if they had Ivy League degrees.
Francine—scholar, free spirit, agile body, accepting of his
uncertain Viagra-assisted amatory overtures—had put a bounce in his
step, he reported, a Sousa-like rhythm after some years of just shlepping
along: “Got lucky at an Elder Hostel in Taos where Francine was
lecturing on ‘D.H. Lawrence’s Cinematic Vision: Sexuality and Rebirth.’”
Archy, distinguished Chaucer scholar, former Dean of
Humanities, Bard College, now living in a condo off Lexington Avenue,
had been one of Ludwig’s great roommates at Columbia during the late
“silent generation” where they had spent many late hours on the cusp of
the Ginsburg and Kerouac generation discussing their futures at the fabled
West End Bar.
Arch, valedictorian, Bronx Science, 160 IQ, had been confident
that he would climb the academic ladder, while Ludwig, prone to slipping,
was uncertain if he could find a voice that would link stand-up comedy
and Henry James, the poles of his quirky imagination: Lamb House and
the Borscht Belt.
Wolf / 19
“It’s risky, Lud, very risky, late in the day for another Jewish
American writer, stick to criticism, that’s the path to tenure.”
The wedding itself wasn’t the problem, as dicey a January-May
arrangement as it seemed to be on the face of things. The guests who
would attend were the cause of his angst. For Ludwig, anxiety came with
a German accent.
Helen Fine, Archy’s first wife, now a Buddhist and Quaker,
committed to “higher truths,” as Archy had reported, “eager, dear soul, in
the spirit of cosmic harmony, to forgive you for your early devotion to a
career, not me,” retired Curator of Sacred Books, St. Bonaventure
University, New York’s Southern Tier.
Daniel Blum, Greenwich Village Marxist, French wine expert,
Professor of English (Vassar), author of a brilliant article, a “citation
classic, “Being Right On The Left Bank,” and a four decade old work in
progress—Adorno and Adon Alom: Crisis in the Bronx.
Robert Greensward, well known postmodern and experimental
poet, author of a cult volume, Enameled Frost, Don Juan, barely getting
by on social security in a rent controlled apartment in Brooklyn Heights
and long term residences at artist colonies, Yaddo, MacDowell, always on
the lookout for a live-in possibility with a patroness of the arts who had an
adequate trust fund and ample bosom.
Tiffany Printz, daughter of two Bronx-born Munich-trained Park
Avenue psychoanalysts, writer, shapely implants, whose biographies of
closeted Hollywood lesbians had made her wealthy, to say nothing of an
inherited International Style beach house on Provincetown Bay with wrap
around windows and a teak deck.
He hadn’t seen any of them for many years. Out of mind most of
the time, they were often present in Ludwig’s recurring dream of having
his short fiction rejected by this “editorial board” who had attended
Archy’s first wedding.
The old wedding had been a pastoral affair on Lake Cazenovia,
service presided over by a “bi-curious” Unitarian Universalist Minister
who read passages from Emerson’s essay on “Circles” and Leaves of
Grass.
A little over the top, looking back to the apocalyptic 1960’s, but
pleasant enough to recall. Still, did it make sense for Ludwig, a minor
league Gatsby, to revisit the past? Archy had “invited all the stars, the old
crowd.” None of them had lost their imposing presence in Ludwig’s
mental firmament.
Archy had written: “The service will be held near Golden Hill
State park, your neck of the woods, not far from where Francine took her
first Martha Graham-style ballet lessons, Lockport. I’m just inviting the
old crowd. Francine wants to know my ancient history. We’ll send
announcements to everyone else. Maybe have a larger celebration later.”
All graduate students in English at Princeton at the time of the
first wedding, except for Ludwig when he was working in the mailroom at
Doubleday & Co. and collecting rejection slips, the old crowd had made
him feel like an outsider, marginal.
They hadn’t exactly looked down on him in any obvious or
intentional way on that weekend, and maybe they were just avoiding a
delicate subject, but none of them had made him feel that he would make
it as a writer.
“And you haven’t, big shot,” he heard his father say, “give me a
break, whoever heard of The Catskill Quarterly, give me Women’s Wear
Daily.”
Like Arch, they had known that it was safer to have a Ph.D. from
an Ivy League graduate school than a pile of rejection slips and some
acceptances from obscure journals if you wanted to make a living as a
literary person in America during the dull Eisenhower years.
If they hadn’t thought of him then as a loser, they didn’t want to
encourage him to become one. They all seemed to be going up in the
academic escalator while he was going down at the time of the first
nuptial and the few years after when they would come into Manhattan on
weekends and exchange clever banter at The Princeton Club bar.
Alexander, the bartender, distantly related to the Romanovs, always put an
extra olive in their dirty martinis and asked him if he wanted a bottle of
BUD.
They would talk about the job offers that were coming in over the
transom while all he could report was another rejection slip from
Commentary, The Partisan Review, and obscure magazines in Ohio and
Oklahoma. In those days, they seemed like Dom Perignon to his
Manischewitz. If he thought they might be saying a Kiddush for him then,
he was worried it might be Kaddish this time.
If he attended the wedding, the old feelings might return. He had
spent years in a garden variety of psychotherapies trying to disentangle
the past and the present, but he hadn’t been a successful patient.
“Customer! You’re paying through the shnozzola, forget this
patient crap!”
As his father had failed in the low overhead garment business,
busted when America shifted from gabardine shmattes to synthetics, so
Wolf / 21
Ludwig had been able to move the goods in those days only in the bargain
basement of small magazines.
As his father had been plagued with “returns,” Ludwig had been
unable to overcome fully a history of rejection slips, even though he knew
in rare moments of clarity on an evening such as this one that he had done
as well as most minor writers in America.
“Like Minor Leagues, kiddo, face it.”
After all, 95% of them who were featured in Poets & Writers
were less well known than poor Joe Gould who had made only a few
scrawled entries in some coffee-stained notebooks. Most MFA degrees
stood for Minor Faculty Artist.
That word “minor” was Ludwig’s Scarlet Letter, Achilles heel,
psychological hernia, self-flagellating cat-‘o-nine-tails, and he was afraid
that meeting the Princeton crowd again would put him on the wrack with
his writer’s balls in a vice and his ego in a Cuisinart, a whirring blunder.
And there would be no way to conceal the truth of the life he had
lived. Archy had urged each of the featured guests write out a brief
biographical statement, in the form of a desiderata:
“Let’s catch up and get to know each other again in case we’ve
forgotten how much we meant to one another, how special we were. Let’s
rekindle the old flame around a camp fire.”
If Archy thought they should act as if they were going to
Canterbury and staying at the Tabard Inn, where they would regale each
other with inspirational tales of brilliant Princeton evenings in Holder
Hall, Ludwig wasn’t sure he could take it.
They had been Edmund Wilson to his F. Scott Fitzgerald. Of
course, they weren’t Wilsons and he wasn’t Scott or John Peale Bishop,
but there was some emotional truth for him in the analogy, especially at
three in the morning when he needed a shot of Chivas Regal to fall asleep.
“Go, don’t be a putz,” he heard his father say, “go, sell yourself,
what are you, a bum?”
His late father made sense some of the time. If he didn’t attend
the wedding, he never would know if he had managed to come to terms
with what his life had added up to. In fact, he wouldn’t know what it had
added up to if he didn’t meet the old crowd, an exclusive eating club who
sometimes had a nosh in his unconscious and occasionally woke him in
the middle of the night and made him feel that he had consigned himself
to a life in the literary Gulag.
But he would come late, keep his distance, test the waters, and he
always could leave. But he couldn’t insult Archy, boon companion of his
Manhattan youth, and, given where Ludwig lived, the nearby town of
Wilson On The Lake, he would have to come up with a lame medical
excuse not to attend.
He also owed something to Dr. Ernst Lichtenstein, his personal
trainer of the mind for so many years, whose last words to him had been,
“As Goethe says, ‘To thine own creativity be true.’”
He couldn’t go against Dr. Lichtenstein and Goethe, but he didn’t
have to punish himself. He had been to enough prize fights in the old
Madison Square Garden with his father to know how to bob and weave,
feint and jab, if it came to that. He would duck, spar, and leave the ring if
anyone tried to hit him below the emotional belt.
“That’s my boy, remember Al Singer? He taught you how to
throw a punch!”
He did remember Al: washed up, alcoholic, had thrown a fight in
1931, ruined his life. Ludwig’s father, Al’s childhood friend from their
Mott Street days, had kept Al on the payroll as long as he could.
“Never take a dive, kid, remember Al.”
At least he had a month to work on his desiderata once he found
out exactly what it was. Having a vague idea that it was written by John
Donne, it came as a relief somehow to learn that it wasn’t penned with a
quill by a major 17th century poet, but a forgotten American versifier, Max
Ehrmann (1872-1945).
Max had been born in Terre Haute, Indiana, not Cambridge or
Oxford, so Ludwig felt a little more at ease about going up against a poet
whose one poem was as famous as Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” but
whose work wasn’t included in The Norton Anthology of American
Literature, a fate comparable to anonymity for an American writer.
“You call that work?” he heard his father say.
***
He walked slowly down a path through the apple orchard behind
Midsummer Winery that led to a small hill overlooking the shore of Lake
Ontario below which a chuppah had been erected on a freshly mown
lawn. Pleased that he had arrived not a minute too soon, with evening
coming on, he could slip away in the shadows like Red Grange, the
Galloping Ghost, a childhood hero.
Archy, wearing blue jeans and black cotton turtleneck, and
Francine, in a white line dress with festive opalescent Mexican
embroidery, stood hand in hand beneath the chuppah to the side of which
a string quartet of young Eastman School musicians were playing Samuel
Barber’s Adagio For Strings.
Wolf / 23
It seemed a bit doleful for the occasion, but then he could see that
there was a poignant sadness about Francine. He could imagine her
balletic movements as she moved solemnly through Pueblo ruins.
Only the old crowd sat in a row of Adirondack chairs in front of
the chuppah, looking for all the world like the dignified dead in the last
scene of Our Town. He scanned their lineaments as he stealthily
approached and sat in a lone chair behind them.
He was surprised that he recognized the old crowd: Helen, Daniel,
Bob, and Tiffany, all of them gray and stoop-shouldered. Daniel heavier
than he had been, Bob slimmer, Helen, gaunt, Tiffany, subtly botoxed and
face-lifted, they still were unmistakably themselves after all these years.
He wondered how he would look to them since he seemed to see his
father’s worried post-bankruptcy face brim of his fedora wrinkled, when
he looked into the mirror these days.
He looked around to see who would officiate at the ceremony. No
one who looked like a rabbi seemed to be present. Ludwig had been to
some avant-garde weddings, but this one seemed a bit theatrical, a stage-
set for an upbeat version of No Exit.
Archy stepped forward and gestured towards Ludwig, “Now that
my old roomie is here, I knew he wouldn’t stiff us, we can begin.”
The Princeton quartet, not the musicians, turned around and
nodded approvingly, it seemed, to acknowledge his presence, even to
welcome him.
Archie continued, “Free spirits that we are, Francine and I have
decided, in effect, if not in law, to marry ourselves. We’ll be our own
officiants, as they call them in traditional houses of worship. Veterans of
the 1960’s, battered, but not defeated, we’re beyond tradition. And, by the
way, we won’t be singing any songs from Fiddler on the Roof.”
“Right on, brother,” Daniel shouted, raising a clenched left fist.
“Dead lyrics,” Bob chimed in.
“Tevye’s a bore, macho,” Tiffany added.
“I knew I could count on you to raise the glass ceiling.”
“Thomas Merton would approve,” Helen said just above a
whisper.
As if seeking his approval, they turned around to look at Ludwig.
“Yes, to thine own creativity be true, definitively,” he added.
The Princeton backfield, single wing, as he still thought of them,
smiled at him. Archy and Francine intertwined their fingers like a Hopi
bread basket and stepped forward.
Archy spoke first: “I, Archibald Fine, join you, Francine Chapin,
the liberated spirit for whom I have been searching, lo, these many years,
some of which have been, indeed, low, in a journey of body, mind, and
spirit.”
He paused, smiled, looked at the old crowd, flashed a peace sign,
and added, “I hope I haven’t left anything out. If I have, you’ll tell me
around the campfire.”
Francine disentangled her fingers put her palms together Hindu
style.
“Shalom, loyal members of Archy’s ancient tribe. I, Francine
Chapin, join Archibald Fine, the archetype of wisdom, no pun intended on
this sacred occasion, as his partner in a journey to the peak of Mt.
Parnassus.”
As inspirited as their words seemed to be and as unlikely that
their union really would work, Ludwig had to admit that he had said in
earnest many more fanciful things to younger women in his Ponce de
Leon quest for…he wasn’t sure what to call it. That had been part of his
problem…confusion.
None of the old crowd seemed perplexed. They were visibly
moved by this improbable union of two such different, even contradictory,
spirits. A set of opposite pairs, it occurred to him, they had moved closer
to each other as Archy and Francine exchanged something like vows:
Greensward leaning towards Tiffany, Helen edging closer to Daniel.
Some Goethean affinities seemed to be in the air.
Archy continued, “I promise to make every effort…at my age,”
he winked, “to become a member of Francine’s tribe, to join her in a
dance of life seven times, as tradition dictates, around her inner campfire,
well, I did go to summer camp where the upper Catskills meet the lower
Berkshires,” he winked again.
Francine didn’t so much smile as she glowed with the warmth of
a spiritual satisfaction that coursed through her body.
“I promise to climb, to the extent that it is possible for me, to the
summit of Archy’s learning. After all, Bennington wasn’t Princeton. I
wore leotards, he donned, as it were, a scholar’s robe, and really wore one
at King’s College later. In ourselves, we’ve been incomplete, but
now…now…we hope…I think you know what I mean.”
Both quartets, stirred, moved closer to each other. Violins neatly
touching violas, a Marxist inching towards faith, a Park Avenue best-
selling author, guilty about success, betrayed by aging, gravitating
towards a poet who had been willing to pay the price, if not the rent, for
his brilliant obscurity.
Wolf / 25
The string quartet finished the piece and walked quietly away just
as the sun began to set over the Peace Bridge.
“Here’s to us, all of us,” Archy said as he and Francine stepped in
unison on a ruby-red goblet, Bohemian cut-glass, wrapped in an
embroidered white linen cloth. Greensward spoke up, “Here’s to
deconstructed symbolism.”
“And reconstructed lives,” Tiffany said, putting her arm around
him.
“Thesis and antithesis,” Daniel added, as Helen gazed
meditatively at him.
“Now join us for your desiderata and, of course, marshmallows,”
Archy said, taking Francine’s hand and walking towards the slate smooth
shore where a campfire, catered, had been built for them.
“I’ll let Lud enlighten us first,” Archy said, “we need most to hear
from him, he’s been the most out of touch.”
“Show ’em what you’re made of, kid, I’ve been waiting for this
moment. Hit ’em in the kishkes, remember the Bronx cheer.”
“I’ll give it the old college try,” Ludwig said.
“You can do it, Lud, I read one of your stories in the Almost
Dead-End Review when I knew you might be here.”
“Bob’s right,” Daniel said, “me, too, that great monologue in
‘Normie the Private,’ you were marching with the masses when we were
piling up footnotes instead of putting up barricades.”
“Marginalia for me,” Helen chimed in.
“Forbidden assignations with senior professors, love in the stacks,
hidden lives, you were out there, Lud, we were cloistered, weren’t we
Daniel?”
“Tiff’s right, Lud, you were on the front lines of history.”
“But look where I ended up?” Ludwig said, embarrassed by his
frankness, gesturing towards the vast emptiness of Lake Ontario, no green
light in sight.
“We all get lost, Lud,” Archy said, hugging Francine, “it’s what
we learn that matters, the way out of the maze.”
“Look at us,” Francine said quietly, beaming at Archy.
The circle around the campfire tightened as they spoke. Helen and
Daniel now seemed to be a couple as did Robert and Tiffany.
“We all get broken, kid, some get stronger in the broken places,”
he heard his father say. “Amazing, pop, you’ve read Hemingway.” “I had
to do something in Florida, didn’t I?”
“We’re waiting for you, Lud,” Archy said, adding some kindling
to the fire, “you’ve kept your distance for too many years. Hasn’t he?”
The Princeton quartet nodded.
“I’ll be damned,” Ludwig said.
“Aren’t we all? Capitalist conspiracy,” Daniel chimed in, half
serious.
“Well, here goes,” Ludwig said, “I hope no one is recording this, I
don’t want it to go viral.”
“You should be so lucky.”
They all smiled.
“I went unsure of myself among the literati and glitterati and
found that I was greeted with silence. I tried, as far as possible, not to be
envious or resentful…are you sure you want me to go on with this?”
They all nodded.
“I tried to speak the truth, to tell my story, even though it became
clear that it wouldn’t become a major motion picture…well, I never really
believed that.”
“I knew you had a bullshit detector!”
“Sounds familiar,” Robert said.
“You’re speaking for the masses, the silenced,” Daniel added.
“Success can fuck you up,” Tiffany said.
“I knew that there would be writers greater than I, but I tried not
to think less of my work for all of that…”
“You were right to do so,” Helen said quietly.
“I’ve tried to think well of my achievements, but I haven’t always
succeeded…”
“You should have called, Lud,” Archy said, some pain in his
voice.
“Don’t interrupt, Arch, we’ve had our say, he’s speaking for the
rest of us,” Francine said, “go on, Ludwig, please.”
“My life hasn’t been an origami. It hasn’t unfolded as I hoped it
would, I regret to say, so I came here with some reluctance...”
“We needed you to come, Lud, you’ve spoken for all of us,”
Helen said, “more honestly than we would have spoken for ourselves.
We’ve all lived incomplete lives, we’re all serious losers, isn’t that clear?
That truth makes us closer, makes closeness possible, doesn’t it?”
“Thanks, Helen.”
“She’s right, Lud, look at me, leisure of the theory class.”
“You’re looking at a footnote in someone’s online literary
history,” Robert said.
“I tried to stop the clock, look at me, but not too closely,” Tiffany
Wolf / 27
said, voice lowered.

“And I had no children,” Helen added.
“The clock stops for everyone, sonny, it’s just a question of when,
but you’re still ticking.” “Slowly, pop, slowly.” “But ticking.”
“We’re finally together after all these years,” Archy said, “that’s
what’s important.”
“No need to read my spiel,” Daniel said as he put a crumpled
sheet of paper in the fire, Ludwig spoke for all of us.”
One by one each added a scroll. The fire flared up, all the logs
now glowed. With a prompt from Archy, they sang in unison an old camp
song they all knew, “…friends, friends, friends, we always shall be,
whether in fair or dark stormy weather, by this lake our vows we
make….”
As a young couple paddled by in a canoe, feathered their oars and
waved at them, the seven of them sang even louder and locked arms.
“See, what did I tell you, do I know my customers?”
***
Looking back a few weeks later, he thought of the couple who
had paddled by the improbable gathering of the at once disparate and
unified souls on that magical evening. It must have seen to them, he
imagined, that the group had stepped out of a painting by Breughel, Franz
Halls, or Norman Rockwell—a living portrait that they might have called
“A Merry Gathering of the Guild.” They would have seen only the joie de
vivre, no tincture of sadness, the spark of life, no flickering.
They might not all stay bonded, but they had fanned a dying
ember in him and given him some hope that he, too, might now have
enough confidence to go out into a larger world again and meet someone
who might need him and whom he might need to make their lives more of
a circle than a row of chairs.
“The odds are long, sonny.”
He felt that he had been given, even seized, a second chance. The
words of two favorite poems came back to him from his high school
years—Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” Kipling’s “Mandalay.”
It was too late “to seek a newer world,” and he didn’t have
enough medical coverage to go “somewheres east of Suez,” but Archy’s
wedding, or something like a wedding, had shown him that even he,
Ludwig Fried, ruminator, equivocator, floater, might be able to paddle
away from the shoals of self-doubt and…
“Close the deal.”
At that instant, he saw the beacon of the Thirty Mile Point
Lighthouse sweep across the shoreline below his house.

“I told you, sonny, never take a dive! I made a comeback, didn’t
I? I left your mother a bundle.”
If nothing else, it might be a story he could write and read to the
wedding party when, as they planned, they all met again in Tiffany’s
beach house to celebrate Archy’s and Francine’s first anniversary on
Provincetown Bay, and he might even have a partner then.
“What are you, a pilgrim?” “Sort of pop, sort of.”
/ 29
RODGER LEGRAND
SLEEPWALKING
At some point last night

in a dream or awake
or hovering
somewhere in between
I began to roam
the apartment.
Sleepwalking?
I think I might have
dusted a little,
maybe run the vacuum.
And I cleaned out
the refrigerator,
needed to make room
for a sack of dreams
to store in the crisper
to keep them fresh
as long as possible,
since I no longer
have the energy
to pretend
they might become real.
After all this time
when I wake up
I can still feel your body
lying next to mine.
29
NAOMI RUTH LOWINSKY

TO A KINSMAN FROM BEFORE THE DIVIDE
Irony gleams in your eyes Africa glows

in your skin You’re not smiling in the yearbook photo
Neither am I We were kin in the tribal lands
of High School Belonged to the intelligentsia Argued
existentialism civil disobedience Mutually Assured
Destruction Yours the wise crack wit Yours

the panther mind How you loved knocking down
my idols I must have looked like Pollyanna
standing before the assembly pleading my earnest plan
to desegregate the student government You knew
that few on either side of the divide

would give a damn We never spoke
of Emmett Till too close to your terror
We never spoke of my crazy Aunt Ljuba
from Bergen-Belsen We never spoke
of sex You kept your secret in the closet Nor did I tell you
my father was concerned about us always together
I tried to tell him it wasn’t like that Then what
was it like? Why do I miss you to this day?
The truth is with you I was free to be
strong minded loud mouthed a bitch

on wheels Just the kind my father despised
After graduation I lost you
Lost me Found me anew
when the goddess swept through and poetry began
30
Lowinsky / 31
Once I heard you on the radio

a distinguished professor of history To my delight
you proclaimed America a “mongrel nation”
I called you up You weren’t interested in what’s
become of me I guess you’ve had your fill
of bleeding heart Jews But now

after Orlando after Charlottesville
after Sandra Bland Michael Brown Trayvon Martin after
Jews Will Not Replace Us
I need your irony your terrible knowing
your idol smashing wit
JUDITH JANOO
THE HAY BARN
had a loft, a swallow perch, and if we rushed in

the birds whipped past us, their wings parting us,
parting the peace we came for, into the old barn

no longer housing lambs, or Shetland ponies
for the local summer camp. No hay even.

I’d look up after the birds dispersed and see the Sistine Chapel
in the high beams, thick oak shoulders etched in red

as if the builder lay on his back getting them in place
to reveal their exact purpose—

keeping sheep, keeping the slant roof
that let heavy rains wash down, dampen the piercing images
that grew as I sat back on my elbows, you with me, brother,
younger, stronger, more tender inside. You, the hand-hewn

beams of the barn, and I, the wren ready to fill the space
with song. I saw in you the oak that grew

like the arching towers along the shore, that you saw
wanted carving, that would give us shelter when the anger,

silent as the hay-dry space we lay in needed to blow over us, over
the lingering scent of hay and pine shavings, distant scent

of milkweed, puff of cattails, of escape. And this was our escape.
Broad and strong, I thought you’d hold up,

the solid one who stayed in place, would not give way
when all you had was taken.

In you, I saw the etchings of angelic figures
32
Janoo / 33
that kept you building,

your exhaust sleeping away until
your rafters opened
BEACHES OF NORMANDY
Crossing coves hand-over-hand, clasping

rope anchored to beaches of gunfire, crossing
beaches of gunfire; fishermen, farmers,
teachers, turned soldiers, turned onto beaches

of gunfire, gentle men, enlisted men, the drafted,
their landing craft wind-shifted, water-mined
in iron pieces off beaches of gunfire,

foot soldiers fog-blinded by the military deception
D-Day, facing beaches land-mined, staked,
barb-wired, foot soldiers facing arial fire,

the enemy’s and their own, sent to clear the beaches
for the amphibious landings, souls
crying for leaders lost to sea,

seeing ahead only bodies, embankment
beaches of gunfire with no choice but to advance,
and the man I knew who made it

up the banking on Omaha Beach that day,
never really made it off the beaches of gunfire.
Nights he paced the hall outside my room,

sweating out the dead he failed
to save, crossed to mount
the hundred fifty-foot bluff,

a shooting duck out of water
without a chance in hell of making it,
college runner not shooting even a deer

until this day when on the beaches of gunfire
he outran the worst of it
and kept running.
SPARKS
Peonie’s bursting sphere,

horsetail’s fiery trails
fizzle down, rings
within rings, night sky
fountain, streamers
crackle, sparkle out,
roman candles, hot air
balloon red, silver flash
pop, umbrella opening,
gold willowing, smoke
on the water, parachute
green, blue, chartreuse,
purple dragon, touch
of boom, boom, sizzle,
aerial symphony
fireflies, shooting stars,
alka seltzer, cherry
seltzer, pink champagne.
I’m newborn, airborne, free,
past guilt at fireworks’
enchantment, that for him
meant bombardment.
Finally over
air strike, cover,
run for shelter,
ears, eyes, hide.
Janoo / 35
TAKE TO THE STREETS, FEBRUARY 15, 2003
“I wish I could shut up, but I can’t, and I won’t.”

Desmond Tutu
Is it dangerous, she asked

exiting the bus against ten degree gusts,
walking Manhattan’s Third Avenue,
dark casement awaking like Rembrandt
stroked the morning, our numbers multiplying,
spilling into Second with neglected appeals.
Sure we were all mad
after the attacks, shocked back, but what had these people done?
Wives of firefighters waved banners: No blood for Oil,
businesspeople, blue-collared, poor, frayed, disabled,
babies in strollers, Grace Paley,
9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows,
Susan Sarandon spoke, and Desmond Tutu,
half a million strong, said the man behind us
as we merged onto First, the reports will pinch it,
say we’re hippies, lefties, gut our numbers.
His suit had ridden many buses—
they always turn down the volume. The world
marched that day against a rampage that would
yield no chemicals or Al-Qaeda. Those who’ve
walked the street never again see only pavement. No,
my daughter then told a friend, it isn’t dangerous to walk,
only to not say a word.
ALPHABET
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

The dog—not a flinch, yip or nip, lazy
—an understatement, canine of apathy,

not even the fox leaping and grazing
the dog’s tail sparks a rise.

The blackboard all chalked up,
blocked letters spanning the face of the slate,

erased to write again of the dog and the fox,
this time in cursive: long flowing sentences

sure to explain the canine’s depth of lethargy.
The male fox is called a dog, but not this model.

Could be golden retriever
curled up like the cursive c in quick,

which isn’t a descriptor of this dog.
Any fox whiled by such indifference

after reams of penmanship fatigues,
calls in a quick brown skulk of foxes,

twenty-four of them darting and yelping,
yet nothing moves the dog. What’s worse,

being provoked or being ignored?
Is the lesson from this infinite line improved

handwriting? Or is it becoming
like the dog, unearthly dismissive,

Or like the fox
quick and ready again

to bring life into the dog?
After your hundredth time writing

you find
it’s not the nature of the alphabet

to spell it all out.
/ 37
HOWARD WINN
NEWSPAPER OBITUARY PAGE
They are all smiling,

some more broadly than others,
some with barely a smirk
or a curving up of the lips.
Living mostly long these days
past the prime of the portraits,
they are how they wish to be remembered,
or how the survivors wish to recall them,
even if they grew wizened and wrinkled.
That is for those pictured,
in depictions selected by grieving
or relieved relatives,
one never knows which,
or perhaps by the deceased
in preparation for the expected
solemn or hilarious memorial service,
depending upon the sense of humor
or the desire for dignity and acknowledgment
and a dream of permanent memories.
Take your choice.
The pictures do not speak
nor do the dearly departed,
only the obit in simple text
summing up for who knows exactly
what quirky reader of obituaries?
37
MICHAEL FRYD
THERAPY
The trouble started six months ago, Terry comes over and don’t want
to fool around or nothing. She says. “Nicky, my aunt Patty was over for
dinner last night and she asked when we gonna get married, and I said I
don’t know, we never talked about it. And she said how come? We been
dating eleven years and we’re not even engaged. She thinks you’re never
gonna marry me and I’m just wasting my life waiting for you.”
So I say, “This is bullshit! What’s the rush? It’s not like you’re
knocked up or something, and we gotta do it right away. Why do you
listen to that skinny bitch? She’s always looking to make trouble.
Someday she’ll fuck with the wrong people and she’ll get her mouth
closed for good”
“It’s not just aunt Patty.” She says, “I checked with my boss, she is
real smart, and she says my aunt Patty is right. She thinks you’re never
gonna marry me because you’re afraid of commitment, and you need
therapy to get over it.”
I say, “I don’t know nothing about this commitment crap, whatever it
is, but I’m not going to no shrink, only crazy people see shrinks. Those
two know it alls should go to a shrink to learn not to stick their noses in
other people’s business.”
Terry starts bawling like her heart’s gonna break and she says,
“Nicky, you know I love you but I’m not gonna to be like Olga who
waited thirty years for Joe Mac, and when he finally proposed she was too
old to have children. You gotta do therapy, get over this fear of
commitment so we can get married, have children, be a family.”
I try to hug her to make her stop crying and I say, “I want it too Babe.
Don’t let those bitches upset you and ruin our fun.” But she pushes me
away, makes her I’m not fucking around face and says, “You want it too
Nicky. Really? So tell me when we gonna get married. Give me a date! It
don’t have to be tomorrow, but I need to know: a year from now, two
years, three years. I want a date Nicky, or we’re finished.”
I can’t give her a date, because I don’t think about things like that, but
I know I got to do something. Once Terry makes up her mind you can’t
move her. I say, “Listen, Babe, I can’t give you a date but to show you
I’m serious, I’ll go see a shrink to work on this commitment thing, as soon
as I find a good one.” When she hears that she stops crying, and kisses me
all over. She’s so happy and grateful I don’t even mind too much when
38
Fryd / 39
she tells me I don’t need to look for a good one, her boss gave her the
name of a shrink who helped her when she was having trouble.
I figure it’s all bullshit, a fucking waste of time, but if it makes her
that happy, and stops her pushing for a date. I’ll do it. The union medical
covers shrinks so at least it’s gonna cost me nothing. The next day I make
an appointment. I don’t know why I am nervous when I get there because
there’s nothing wrong with me, I am just trying to keep Terry happy, but
you come to a place for crazy people, and you never know—you just
never know.
I never been to no fancy place like this; it puts old Doc Morelli’s
office to shame. The carpet is so thick you sink in it like the sand at the
Shore. The walls are covered with so many diplomas it makes you think
the guy had to be a hundred before he finished going to school.
Everything, the walls, the carpet, the furniture is light and I’m afraid if I
touch something It’ll get dirty. If my Mom was here, she’d put plastic
covers on everything.
I’m surprised when the Doc turns out to be a young guy, only a
couple years older than me, so I’m wondering when he got all them
diplomas? He’s dressed in a nice suit, the kind you wear to funerals, tells
me to sit down and asks what brought me here. So I tell him all about
Terry’s aunt and the fear of commitment bullshit. He sits there, nods his
head and I start to feel better, I can see he understands what I’m talking
about. He may be a shrink, but he’s still a guy.
When I’m finished Doc says, “I hear you, Nick, what you’re
describing far more colorfully than most is a common relationship
problem. This is a couple’s issue and we can’t work on it with just you,
we need Terry here so I’d like you to bring her to our next session. Can
you do that? “
“Sure, whatever you think is right,” I say. I feel great when I leave
Doc’s office. Who woulda thought seeing a shrink would be that easy? I
can’t wait to tell Terry that Doc wants to see her so he can straighten her
out. She’ll see who’s right, her fucking aunt or me. When I tell her we
need to go to the next session together, she starts bawling again. She says
I’m the one with the problem, not her. I’m just trying to stall. She don’t
need to see Doc. She’s got no problems with commitment; she’s ready to
march to the altar this minute.
I’m pissed, I’m doing this all for her, and she won’t even give Doc a
chance to show her she’s wrong, but I know once she digs in its no use
trying to push her, so Wednesday I go back to Doc alone. He looks
surprised when I show up by myself.
“Where is Terry, Nick? I thought we agreed I needed to see both of

you.”
“I tried Doc, but Terry don’t want to come. She says it’s all my
problem, she don’t need to be here.”
“Are you sure Nick that she won’t change her mind? It’s hard if not
impossible to resolve a couple’s problem with only one member present.”
“Doc, She’s Calabrese on both sides, them people never give in. You
can kill them, but you can’t make them do nothing they don’t want to do.”
Doc thinks a bit, gets a twinkle in his eyes and says, “This is very
hard, Nick, maybe even impossible, but if you’re sure you can’t get Terry
to change her mind, I’d like to try an experiment. I’ve never done this
before, but it might just work. How would you feel about group therapy?”
“Hey Doc.” I say, “I don’t feel nothin’ about it, but if you say that’s
what I gotta do, then I’m there.”
“Very well then, we’ll try it and see what happens. it might be
interesting.” He says. “I will see you in the group at nine PM next
Wednesday.
So next Wednesday I show up, and Doc brings me into this room with
no furniture just a bunch of chairs in a circle, and they’re all filled with
broads, nothing but broads. The Doc and I are the only guys there, and he
don’t really count. So I start gettin’ nervous again, I never been part of no
knitting group or nothing like that, and I’m not about to start, but I got no
choice. So I pick a chair and sit down between those two girls about
Terry’s age, and try looking at my shoes.
Doc tells the girls I’m a new member of the group and asks me to
introduce myself and tell them why I’m here.
I keep my head down and say. “Hi. I’m Nick, and I’m here because
my girlfriend asked me to do therapy.”
Well, when I say that, I get a lot of attaboys around the room from
everyone except Doc who looks at me kinda disappointed and says,
“Nick, you need to tell the group why your girlfriend wants you to be in
therapy.”
So I go through the whole thing again, Terry’s aunt Patty, her boss, all
the fear of commitment stuff, and before I even get a chance to finish they
turn on me. They call me an immature Bozo, they say Terry’s aunt Patty
is right I’m a selfish bastard, I only think about myself, and I use Terry to
satisfy my own needs.
I keep quiet a couple of minutes, ’cause I know broads ain’t like guys;
when they get wound up they go crazy and you can’t talk to them, but
enough is enough, so I look up and holler “Yo! You got no cause calling
Fryd / 41
me no names. You don’t know nothing about me and Terry. I never hear
her complain about me not taking care of her needs, ’cause I always make
sure I do right by her.”
I’m pissed, but Doc steps in before I forget myself and say things
you’re not supposed to in mixed company. He says “Nick, don’t take what
the group says personally, they’re giving you feedback, showing you a
woman’s point of view, how Terry feels about your refusal to set a date
after eleven years.”
I don’t care what Doc calls it, where I come from they’re giving me a
load of shit, but I’m not going to argue with him so I shut up and go back
to checking out my shoes. I’m not feeling very warm about them broads
when we finish, and I swear I’m never going through this bullshit again.
But when I see Terry she’s so happy and so grateful I’m doing this for her
I feel I can’t disappoint her and quit right away. I figure I’ll go back a
couple more times and then I’ll be off the hook; nobody can say I didn’t
try.
The next week everybody’s so busy talking about their own problems,
they forget to pick on me. So I sit there and I listen and let me tell you
after a while I can see why these women are so bitter. They have hard
lives; you won’t believe the shit they have to put up with from men. I get
so pissed I want to go find those guys and beat the crap out of them. When
I say that, Doc tells me violence is never a solution, but I’ve seen a lot of
guys straightened out by some baseball bat therapy, and even if it don’t
work, it’s still worth doing ’cause they deserve it.
After a few weeks I start feeling comfortable with the ladies, worry
about them like if they were my friends, not friends like guys I hang out
with, but I kinda look forward to seeing them. It’s funny, ’cause I never
had no lady friends before. I mean I love my Mom, and Terry, my
brother’s wives and even my aunts, but I never think of them as friends.
All that good stuff goes to shit one Wednesday. Donna is crying; she
talks about her scumbag boyfriend who keeps promising he’s going to
leave his wife and marry her, but it’s been five years and every month
he’s got a new excuse. I feel so bad for her I wanna kill him. I tell her to
dump the lying bastard, five years is long enough and if he didn’t do it by
now he’s never gonna come through for her.
That’s when the whole group turns on me like I’m the bad guy,
“You’re one to talk.” They say, “You think five years is too long to wait,
how about eleven? When you gonna step up to the plate and make it right
with Terry?”
“It’s not the same thing,” I tell them, “I love Terry, and he don’t care
about Donna, he’s just stringing her along.”

“Bullshit!” They say, “It don’t make no difference if you love her or
not, she’s still left hanging like Donna, and if you think her boyfriend is a
scumbag what does that make you?”
Donna stops crying, looks at me kinda mean and says, “You’re right
about Frank, Nick, you know what he’s really like because you’re a phony
just like him. He’s never going to leave his wife, and you’re never going
to propose to Terry. You’re a hypocrite, act like Mister Sensitive Macho
who understands my pain and wants to beat up Frank for hurting me. Well
buster, I wish I was strong enough to punch you in the nose for what
you’re doing.”
It gets ugly; they start calling me names and use language I didn’t
think classy ladies like them knew. I never run from a fight, but I got both
hands tied behind my back, I can’t punch them out like I would if they
were guys, and I can’t tell them to go fuck themselves because even
though they’re ganging up on me I know them, and they’re good people,
so I get up and walk out before I forget myself.
When I leave group I go to Walsh’s tavern to have a couple of beers
and cool off. I sit down at the bar and order a Rolling Rock. The Flyers’
game is on; Tom the bartender says we’re doing good, the game’s tied but
we won all the fights. The Flyers are hustling, hitting everything that
moves that isn’t wearing orange, but I’m having a hard time concentrating
and that never happens when I’m watching the Flyers. I can’t stop
thinking about what the ladies said. I don’t like it, but if they’re right I’m
doing Terry wrong and that’s not good, because she’s so great and has
always been there for me.
I start thinking about why don’t I want to set a date? What I’m afraid
of? My brothers are married, they look happy, and everyone knows their
wives ain’t nothin’ close to Terry; she’s great looking and everybody likes
her. Even my Mom who never give her red gravy recipe to my sisters-in-
law, she give it to Terry.
I take a few pulls on the Rollie, and remember in high school Coach
used to say, “There’s no room for pussies in football or in life, if you’re
scared go home! If you wanna play for me get off your ass, strap on your
jock and give it all you got.”
Coach was right, Terry and I make a great team, and, maybe it’s time
to get off my ass and play ball.
I pick up the phone and text Terry “Let’s do it.”
She answers. ”Nicky! You’re bad! My parents are still up.”
I text her back “I don’t mean that doing it. I mean let’s get married.”
Fryd / 43
It takes a minute or so till she texts back, “YES! YES! YES! YES!
YES! YES!” There is also a lot of that emoji shit girls like, a crying face
and lots of hearts, so I know she’s happy, and I guess I am too now it’s all
settled.
I go back to watching the game, order a Yuengling. Rollies are fine,
but you need a serious beer to watch hockey.
EVE POWERS
UPRISING, 1956
My father sits straining

toward the small TV screen,
Oh, God, bless the Hungarian
with joy and bounty,*
where men in black fedoras
and suit jackets,
their white shirts open at the collars,
stand in a Budapest street
firing their rifles at unreachable Russian bombers.
Extend toward him a guarding arm;
His Hungary,
once again overrun.
Tears refuse to fall
from his eyes.
long torn by ill fate,
He would be out there
in the streets,
unprotected,
shooting his rifle
at the bastard planes
though he knew the bullets
would fall uselessly short of their target.
My father slaps both hands

onto his knees
and pushes himself
up from the couch.
Bring upon him joyous times
What is there to do
but cook chicken Paprikas
and drink a glass,
many glasses,
of Egri Bikaver,
Bull’s Blood wine,
as the blood of Hungary
44
Powers / 45
spills on the cobbles once again.

Bring upon him joyous times.
* from the Hungarian National Anthem
WHEN ELLA DIED
The day Ella Fitzgerald died

I wasn’t getting a kick from champagne anymore
or even Kamakazi cocktails.
I was camping in the desert
looking for death and resurrection
or maybe a crumbling scroll
telling me how to live sober
and still hear the music.
At sunset the canyon cliffs burned orange.

Rain was brewing—a hundred robins knew it,
and were singing like their last song.
The clouds opened,
I ran to my car through
air thick with sage
and huddled on a half-unfurled pad
as the downpour pounded the roof.
When darkness fell I turned on the radio for comfort.

A newsman said Ella Fitzgerald had died that day.
Ella—who’d run numbers
and been a lookout for a whorehouse
when she was a kid.
Ella—the reform-school runaway
who’d won her first contest
singing in a raggedy street kid dress.
And me in a desert
hoping to scrabble my way up the rocks
before I hit bottom.
They began playing her songs,

and when that innocent, sweet,
effortless voice
floated out of the radio
I cried like I’d lost a life-long friend.
Sometimes, when no one was around,

I’d tried to sing like her,
but how could anyone come near
that God-given sound?
I wanted to ask her:
How did you make heaven
out of hell?
Tell me—
in what secret place
did you hide the purity of your voice,
to be unscrolled,
young and undefiled,
every time you sang?
THE CHILDREN ARE SINGING
All the windows are open

and the children are singing at school—
a lusty singing
that knows no unison,
sounds flung toward a note,
smashing into each other,
collisions of life and glee
fueled by breath-emptying spasms of the belly,
that destroy the careful printing
on the wide lines of cheap workbooks,
throw the orderly arrangement of desks
into dancing confusion,
and mock all the teaching
meant to prepare them
for that death-in-life called adulthood.
Powers / 47
No, the voices say,

we will not forget this moment,
this singing,
we were all together
and life poured through us,
our bodies an orchestra of joy.
GEORGE LONGENECKER
VIEW FROM A BAY WINDOW
From our bay window we have a three-way view,

not of Boston Harbor or any bays, but of
Garrison Street and Huntington Avenue,
where at ten, long after sunset,
tourists return from restaurants and neighbors walk dogs.
Below in an alley, lies a man,

on a scrap of carpet salvaged from trash,
He bellows and screams on and on;
a police siren wails in C sharp, but passes.
Something’s not quite right with this view from our B&B,
and it hasn’t been right for a long time—
that within sight of the Marriot and Lucca’s,
where diners drop $500 for dinner parties,
someone screams from an alley
and nobody really listens.
Oh, there may be help, a place to sleep for a while,

a few people who care enough to hand him a five,
but he’s the detritus of the United States of America,
tossed aside like the unneeded scrap of carpet
on which he sleeps, a piece that didn’t fit,
easier to fund a new war, perhaps,
than deal with waste of the past.
Early next morning

he’s gone along with his carpet,
already people walk their dogs,
return with Sunday papers, cups of coffee,
bags of croissants and bagels.
48
Longenecker / 49
EVERYTHING WASHES AWAY
There was a Cajun café I liked, by a bayou,

one of those slow-moving south Texas creeks,
I went there after Bobby died,
(but that’s a another story, a different poem)
when I needed a margarita and some comfort food,
something to wash away tears and pain—
they had great crabs and oysters—
jade and bougainvillea surrounded its covered deck,
green growth so lush it almost ate the building,
five or six slider turtles basked in a manmade pond.
I wonder what’s happened to that café.

I can see it, though it’s been more than 20 years,
see crab cakes and fried oysters
floating off of plates, out of the kitchen,
chefs, prep cooks, dishwashers,
wading to the parking lot—
¡madre de Dios! ¡mierda!
tables float out to join sewage and lawn chairs,
and slider turtles, free at last from their pond,
seem baffled by all this water,
which rises up out of bay and bayous,
over kitchen stoves, snuffing burners left on,
washing away dinners, margarita glasses,
as all of Houston floats in brown water.
GEORGE STALEY
WALKING
I walk at 4:30 AM.

There are few people around
the Oregonian delivery guy
a worker heading to her McDonald’s job
someone waiting for the early downtown bus.
I enjoy the dark, the quiet.

I can plan my day
work on poems
untangle stresses
let my mind wander elsewhere.
One morning
a woman in a dark SUV
cuts the corner
spins me to the pavement
stops for several seconds
and drives off.
The quiet of that dark morning

and those to follow
allow me to consider
if her life changed
and how that would affect those
who rely upon her for guidance.
50
/ 51
NAN LUNDEEN
MARGRETHE’S WINTER COAT
The box makes an appearance at 8:05 a.m. From the corner of her
eye Margrethe Schneider watches her daughter-in-law heave and shove
the cardboard box loaded with old winter clothes for Lutheran World
Relief across the kitchen linoleum to the back door. The old woman turns
from the sink and catches a few words sounding as if they come from
inside a distant cave. “Carry to the car . . . snowstorm . . . Robert’s.”
Lydia shouts as she slaps tape on the box, perspiration beading on her
forehead. “Otto!”
Her hearing aid rests on the windowsill where snow and cold air
poke at the cracks. Snow already and two weeks until Thanksgiving. She
sniffs the nutty scent of his pipe tobacco. He must be sitting in his chair
reading the paper enjoying his second cup of coffee—he says she makes
the best coffee.
She scrubs an eggy plate and wonders if Penney’s still has that
navy winter coat she wants. Stylish. Covered buttons, not those cheap
plastic ones, nein. Remember the knitting bag, she tells herself. She’ll
finish the red wool scarf to go with the new coat tonight, yet. Lydia thinks
she’s a scrawny old biddy like to die before she gets enough good out of a
new coat. Humph. When Hans was alive—no money for herself. Now she
has plenty, ja, thanks to William.
Hans. Humph. Always tight with the money from the time they
boarded the steamship in Hamburg; 1887, it was. Traveling in steerage on
the cheapest tickets so he could afford land in the new country. Thank the
good Lord for William. He did good by her, running the farm after Hans
passed. A noisy baby, though. She’d held him, born at sea, close to her
breast to protect him from ravenous rats and mice and gave him the teat to
silence his cries the moment he screwed up his face on the jam-packed
ship.
She wrinkles her nose, remembering the stench from unwashed
bodies on the ship and then in the bumpy, clanging immigrant cars that
carried them to Davenport, Iowa. Slept sitting up on hard benches because
Hans refused to pay the conductor a dollar, twenty-five cents for a straw
mattress to throw on the floor.
Margrethe’s shoulders tense when she senses Lydia coming up
behind her. Lydia’s brittle voice punctures her silent world.
“Mother! What did you do with your winter coat?” Margrethe can
51
hear when someone stands close to her and hollers, but careful not to
smile, she keeps her face impassive, deaf to questions about her old coat.
“I found your boots, but your coat ain’t in the closet. Just leave those
dishes. I’ll do ’em later. I want to get you out to Robert’s before the snow
gets worse. I hate those dang country roads.”
She hears Lydia huff in frustration at her silence, and soon the
woman’s ever-present scent of Ben-Gay has left the room.
Hot water swishes over the plate. A thorough rinse, the water
feeling good on her hands. A smile creases Margrethe’s wrinkled face at
the thought of her youngest. Robert was a happy man with a ready laugh
before he hurried to enlist after Pearl Harbor and served in the Pacific.
Margrethe had gotten down on her knees for him every day, as she had for
Peter. He came back from the war quiet, his laughter stilled, but he came
back, danke Gott. Built a good life with Jane and Karen, ja. Bought a new
Singer! And then Jane bought one of those new-fangled steam irons—so
easy to press seams. Already 1952, and times change.
She tucks a stray hair back into the tight bun at the nape of her
neck and turns to dismantle the stove top, removing grates and wiping
down the porcelain surface with a blue and lilac dishcloth she had
crocheted. Wrenches the lid off the teakettle and peers in. Caked with
lime already. She hunts fruitlessly under the sink for the vinegar—Lydia
must have moved it again—and hurries into the front room, dishrag in
hand, where Lydia stands hands on hips glaring at her husband. Otto
knocks pipe ashes into the ashtray standing beside his chair, strikes a
match, and draws anew on his pipe.
Margrethe asks where is the vinegar. Lydia looks at her blankly.
Did she talk German again? Lydia leans in toward Otto, her lips moving,
her face flushed.
Otto turns his head, winks, and turns back to Lydia who pivots on
her heel and stomps in her black oxfords to the laundry room off the
kitchen.
“Here!” She thrusts the jug at her mother-in-law. A frown line
marks the bridge of her nose. “You better not be starting on that dang
teakettle again.” She hollers at a slightly lower decibel than usual as if she
wants to sound kinder for Otto’s benefit. “Roads are gonna be bad, and we
have to drop off the box for World Relief at the church.”
Ja, ja, mein Gott! Her son will not drink his coffee from water
boiled in a dirty teakettle while she’s out to Robert’s. Good thing she
baked rye bread yesterday. It will last him till she gets back. Wiping her
hands on her bib apron, Margrethe pours vinegar in the kettle and sets it
Lundeen / 53
on the gleaming stove. After it boils and cools, she’ll apply elbow grease
using her hand-made knife, a keepsake from her fourth child, brown-eyed,
blond-haired Peter. She clicks her tongue as she remembers Hans
mocking Peter, saying he had cow eyes. Ach, only twenty-nine and in his
grave already, so lonely over there in France. But he did good, fought and
died in the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918, a battle they say helped
turn the tide against the Second Reich. Not like those Osterbergs. They
were good neighbors—made hay together every summer, but they sent
their boys back over to fight for the Fatherland in both world wars. There
was never a question for the Schneiders.
“We’re American now!” Hans had declared, bringing his fist
down on her kitchen table. She agreed with Hans on that, glad to be
American and grateful for the rich Iowa soil that, with hard work, gave
them a good living. And that Hitler! She shudders. She misses the farm,
where standing at the sink she saw broad fields waving corn in the
summer, snow-swept in winter, not a view of the neighbors’ garage, like
now. Never minded the work. Every summer, putting up hundreds of jars
of garden vegetables, butchering chickens, and the boys and Hans killed a
hog every fall. Hans made his own sausage. Very popular, Hans’ sausage.
Humph. The corn crops were very good, even carrying her and William
through the Depression, Hans gone already in 1920. Although one year, or
was it two? Hail took all four hundred acres. But they were spared
tornadoes. Hit all around them. One spring, took the neighbor’s barn.
Nothing left but sticks.
Otto comes through the kitchen and squeezes her arm on his way
to the basement to stoke the furnace. Ach! What time is it? Here she is
staring out the window, yet. She counts back: five years already she lived
with Otto. She knows he can use the rent she insists on paying. Rubs her
shoulder. Not too bad today. Straightens herself. She made it to age
eighty-four before willpower wasn’t enough to shovel coal into the big
farmhouse furnace. The fire sometimes went out in the middle of the
night, and she wasn’t about to call William out of his warm house three
miles away in bed with Clara. She’s stopped asking Otto whether the want
ads have jobs. He makes ends meet with that janitor job evenings over to
the elementary school. Tightens her jaw. That lumber company should
have found different work for him after he fell off that ladder and broke
his arm in three places. Three places! Drei!
Snowing harder now, swirling around the driveway. Otto’d have
to shovel before they could leave. Iowa winters are just as bad if not
worse than German ones.
The hot vinegar she pours down the drain steams her glasses.
Peter’s knife in hand, she scrapes, thinking of the old country. As a child,
she forced herself to ignore the smell of cows and pigs under their farm
home in Schleswig-Holstein because the critters kept them from freezing
in winter. She scoops out the caked leavings from the kettle and raps the
spoon against an old newspaper. She glances out the window, and in her
mind’s eye sees cousin Augusta, her pug nose red with the cold, rolling a
big ball of snow for a snowman. Long gone now and bearer of the only
news from the old country. Wrote that Margrethe’s parents died before
World War I began, first Mutter of pneumonia, and Vater a year later of
unknown causes. Mutter’s face faded with time, but her hands stubbornly
hold onto clarity in Margrethe’s mind. The powerful hands of a big
woman, large-jointed, strong thumbs, but ah, so gentle when she sat
Margrethe down to braid her long hair. When she had to leave home to go
to work, Margrethe had been unable to make the braids, so her bun was
born. She takes after Vater, who had been slight and nimble.
Would she have boarded the steamship in Hamburg if she’d
known she’d never see them again? What choice did she have, three
weeks married and eight months pregnant. At the time, she refused to
think about the finality of their goodbyes, but Mutter knew. And she saw
it in Vater’s robin’s-egg-blue eyes—tears of sadness that she hadn’t lived
up to their expectations, but twinkles of happiness she would have a better
life—ach, no promise of a happy life with Hans, but she never told them
what he had done.
There had never been enough money, nor could she abandon her
duties as wife and mother, to visit them before they were gone.
She blinks against the bitter vinegar smell and her eyes, ringed by
creases, water, remembering how after Germany invaded Poland in 1939,
cousin Augusta fell silent. If she did try to mail letters to America, they
never made it. Several months after the war ended, she opened Augusta’s
first letter with trembling hands. Starvation had claimed three of their
neighbors, one a six-year-old girl. Augusta didn’t know how her village
would survive the approaching winter. Coal and wood were scarce.
Mein Gott! she was grateful when the Lutheran World Relief
started up in October that year, glad she could knit hats and mittens for the
annual November clothing drive at St. Paul’s, knowing many of the boxes
would go to Germany. Blessed with strong hands and big-jointed thumbs
like Mutter. Her knitting needles clacked every time she sat down. Seven
years, the war ended seven years ago, already. She bears down, gripping
the knife.
Lundeen / 55
The acrid vinegar smell fills her nose. Her forehead aches. But
vinegar is her friend. After she scrubbed her husband’s pus and blood off
the kitchen table with her own lye soap, she wiped down the floors and
walls with hot vinegar water—the table, ja, her mind skips to William’s
proud twelve-year-old smile when he and his brothers Peter and Walter
carried it into the kitchen. William had crafted it from heart of pine, and it
was sturdy enough to bear his father’s weight while the doctor lanced
Hans’ infected middle ear. He died right there on her table from an
abscess on the brain. She shrugs—penicillin had yet to be discovered.
How many years was Hans gone now? She counts. Thirty-two. With him,
a violent end, a violent beginning.
She’d been scrubbing the floor on her hands and knees in the
Schneider household back in the old country, working as a maid to help
out her folks, when their only son Hans came up behind her and forced
her into a brutal embrace, the result of which was William and marriage.
For years, she set her jaw and tolerated his use of her body, giving
birth at home to nine children, no cries breaking the silence until a child
found voice.
Rinsing the kettle with hot water, she captures the dregs in the
sink strainer which she knocks against the waste basket to empty out.
A change in the house’s atmosphere when the back door slams
behind Otto on his way out to the car with the box for the World Relief.
She watches him open the garage door, heft it into the trunk, and grab the
snow shovel.
There. That is done.
She plucks her hearing aid from the windowsill and takes it to her
room where she tucks it into her pocketbook. She’ll need it at Robert’s.
Her visit couldn’t have come at a better time, ja, because tomorrow, the
boxes, including the one safely in the car now, will go from the church to
the World Relief, and German winters can be so bitter. Jane said they
were driving into town to Penney’s tomorrow, anyway, to buy wool for
two new skirts Karen needs for school. If Penney’s doesn’t have the coat
in petite, she’ll shorten the sleeves and the hem, herself. Until then, she’ll
make do with her spring jacket.
STEVE DENEHAN
MY MOTHER
In 1982 the snow came

flakes fell
silently
heavy white feathers
my hot breath on the cold window
“each one is different,”
my mother said
but there were so many and
for the first time
I doubted her
I woke the next morning

an unnatural glare straining
against my curtains
peeking through I found
the world changed
with dazzling
purifying
white
We had days of snowballs

created armies of snowmen
felt icy tendrils slide down our backs
and never were tired
until our heads touched our pillows
In 2018 the snow returned

my hot breath on the cold window
the snowflakes burning brightly
as they fell
through the porchlight
my phone rang
I answered
“each one is different,”
said my mother, eighty years of her
“I know,” I said.
56
Denehan / 57
TIRE SWING
I hung a tire swing from the bough of our sally tree

some days later came the sun and brought
excited footsteps
the open and slam of the back door
giddy shrieks and back and forth creaks
looking out the kitchen window I saw
the shade sent running by her smile
our garden grateful for the falling honey
someday I will take her to New York

to see old men play chess outdoors
sheltered from determined yellow
by maternal oaks
they will not marvel at her as I do
having raised their own daughters
when they stood taller
these days trickle on

guests passing through
leaving us eventually
no matter how warmly
we receive them
I feel different
I feel the same
though, just like the puddles
and the lake
the mirror surely lies
we fold up our unsaid words

put them in our pockets
and keep them safe
and unforgotten
the time of nursery rhymes is gone

long live these tire swing days
STEVEN PELCMAN
MY MOTHER’S CUPBOARD
For years afterwards, the chipped plate sat

in silence entombed behind glass
reflecting only color fading from the
memory of the hands that had last held it.
It had kept the warm touch lingering

to itself unwilling to share
the secret of color or of tears
that had fallen upon it.
The plate was damaged when the family

had been tossed from their home
onto the dark German street
holding only their bodies in place
watching the flames rise and the

white smoke purifying the air;
the plate dangling from a child’s
limp arm then hugging it
to become the surviving doll and safety

of their home now burning through
the youth she had just given away
to the growls and laughter of soldiers.
Odd to think it could live beyond

the years of everything breakable
and echo the moans of the dying
now housed in a glass chamber.
Mother looks upon it occasionally

as her reflection passes by the faces
of family sitting round the table
but she never touches it
58
Pelcman / 59
and wonders what their last meal

had been and can still feel
the warm breaths of laughter
and the Friday night candles flickering.
WILLIAM SWARTS
GRAVE WORDS: MY EPITAPH
Shhhhh……
I’m writing
the next chapter of
my autobiography.
60
/ 61
DAVID PLIMPTON
QUASI-TAME SHRINKING FELINES VS. THROWBACK
EXPANDING CANINES
Maude, a small, spry, senior citizen female and Smokey, a young,
larger, strong male, were eastern U.S. suburban felines. DNA research and
analysis comparing modern cats like Smokey and Maude with their wild
primordial ancestors show the two varieties are remarkably similar. If that
means Maude and Smokey retain most of the survival skills of those
ancestors, it might be because the feline species developed remarkable
threat memories, from long experience, like when the saber-toothed tiger
mixed it up with the dire wolf. The retained memories were probably
stored in feline mental photo, smell and audio files, then forwarded
through innumerable generations to a current file catalogue in Smokey’s
and Maude’s heads, able to be consulted for comparison when a possible
threat was encountered, then quickly assessed either as potential predator
or no evasive action necessary?
As sharp as Maude and Smokey’s savage traits might be, they
could have been dulled by years of cushy suburban amenities, the photo
archives not yet updated with images of evolving predators. So could the
cats be counted upon to distinguish bona fide predators, through sensory
input, from creatures Smokey and Maude encountered regularly and now
possibly regarded, at least from a safe distance, as laughingstocks in the
attacker department, such as domestic dogs?
Smokey and Maude still had a yen for the wild they could see
from their residence, sentinels at the window or in their cat patio,
guarding their turf under cover of daytime confinement, looking for any
movement, escaping from the house to the wild at the least opportunity,
patrolling the estate for hours, returning when hungry or thirsty. But then
add into the mix the ellipsis of darkness, in which the cats didn’t operate
much anymore, except in their basement, and what might you have? It
was one thing battling small vermin in residential enclosures, another
dodging monsters out in the open among wild, dark shadows.
Coyotes are wild, clever and highly adaptive canine family
members. Called tricksters by Native Americans, these agile, strong and
speedy hunters have keen senses, such as an olfactory capacity said to
outpace the not-too-shabby ones of Maude and Smokey, not to mention a
blood-curdling vocal repertoire. Migrating from the west to the east,
coyotes have interbred with eastern timber wolves, producing one of
nature’s Frankensteins, a coyote-wolf hybrid with increasing wolf genes,
known as the coywolf, larger and more fierce than its ancestral cousin.
61
Coywolves have sidled into residential neighborhoods as their former

habitats disappeared due to human encroachment, like sprawl
development.
Talk about unintended consequences, coywolves have found their
new habitats inviting, possibly because of fewer human hunters and a
more varied food and water supply—mice, rabbits, woodchucks, beavers,
squirrels, birds, crops, ponds, swimming pools, and so-called domestic
pets. Then there are helpful humans providing a coywolf smorgasbord
with menu items sprinkled inside such things as bird feeders, compost
heaps, trash bins, pet food bags and pet bowls.
Smokey and Maude were alone at home, their human family away
on a jaunt, during which the pets had a human caretaker, who twice a day
provided brief care, all of which was fine with the cats. Less drama and
agitation, more time to catch up on much-needed daytime slumber.
The human family (except the two children, the cats’ primary
caretakers and chief lobbyists) and the caretaker wanted the basement
door cat opening closed, fearing the fearless felines would catch vermin,
as was their wont, and bring them upstairs as trophies, leave them around
dead or alive to scare the hell out of the caretaker by making a live
appearance or, once dead, start to smell. So the humans taped cardboard
over the opening. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time to the
genius human masters, but not to Maude and Smokey, who, with the
basement off limits, couldn’t keep their instincts sharp, perform volunteer
extermination services, and bolster their self-esteem.
When normal paths and appetites are blocked, or if their curiosity
is sparked, felines figure out how to overcome obstacles, as though they
were humans who can’t stand a closed door with a sign reading
PRIVATE, NO ADMITTANCE. Smokey, being the more aggressive of
the duo, loved to run at those closed doors. With the hint of a devious
smile, he would bound at any offending door with his front paws extended
and, if unlatched, it would rocket open. With prison guards gone, Maude,
schemer that she was, informed Smokey by twitches of her tail that his
gymnastics might open the way to their basement rec room. Smokey’s
first try failed to push the larger stiff piece of cardboard through the
smaller opening. Then he got serious and backed up as far as he could into
an adjoining room. This gave him a longer charging distance, but he was
disadvantaged by having to charge the cardboard at an angle. He took off
like a jet and gave the barrier a good jolt, both paws connecting together.
As luck or design would have it, the cardboard careened away, hanging to
one side by a strand of tape.
Plimpton / 63
Even had they been so inclined, it was too late for Smokey and
Maude to worry about being fingered as culprits when the misdeed was
discovered. No choice but to head down to the basement and check
whether any creatures had been bold or stupid enough to invade their
erstwhile haunt. On the stairs, the hunters noticed an unfamiliar fresh
breeze. It put them on alert, signaling dangerous interlopers, new prey,
and maybe even the chance for a jailbreak.
It was past dusk, the purple of a clear early evening having faded
to a moonlit nighttime, the felines stoked to exercise their instincts. The
cat custodian wasn’t due back till morning. Departing the upstairs glow of
a timed light, Maude and Smokey continued curiously but warily to the
basement, their vision adjusting quickly to see shapes and, most
important, movement, as they ventured into the dark side. They sensed no
intruders of rodent or other persuasion. On the cold basement floor,
springtime air billowed in more stridently. Exploring, Maude discovered
an unexpected basement escape hatch between the bottom of the bulkhead
leading to the backyard and the ground, created by a log four inches in
diameter propping open the bulkhead, the work of a human, who, in his or
her haste, neglected to secure the premises before rapidly departing on a
much-anticipated sojourn.
After she pointed out the opening to Smokey, as if moths drawn
to a moon-like flame, the duo zipped through the opening, skittering to
nearby lilac bushes that gave a hint of protection from flying predators. In
seconds, they were buffeted by a paradoxical amalgam—the thrill of
nocturnal stalkers and the chill of prey. Predators might be legion—foxes,
raccoons, skunks, fishers, owls, even coywolves, all out for an evening
exploration.
The cats’ conundrum was obliquely illustrated in the film, The
Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). A cloud of radioactive gas envelops a
boater who starts to shrink, everything in proportion. In the end, he is
stalked by a cat many times his size. He escapes to his basement, from
which the cat has been barred, the human protagonist now imprisoned in a
Kafkaesque realm and presumed dead, becoming so small he is able to
exit through window screen squares to a yard that looks like Amazon
jungle. Things were analogously stark for Smokey and Maude.
Still under the lilac bush roof, the cats focused on their new
milieu. No activity in their yard or neighboring ones, but warring instincts
yet clashed—hunting prey and protecting territory vs. eluding danger.
They almost scurried back inside, wisely spooked, the turf be damned.
But no apparent threats emerged and the would-be hunters became more
comfortable, if not less vigilant, deciding to venture onto the open lawn.
They took divergent paths, still within eyesight, sound and smell of each
other. Perhaps they coordinated; perhaps not, but, as long-time partners,
each was presumably primed to exchange signals with the other. Their
backyard was bordered on each side by a fence, maybe four feet high,
child’s play for a coywolf to vault. Even if Maude and Smokey tried to
escape a backyard threat by bounding over the fences, they’d be going
from the frying pan into the fire. The lawn was bordered on the back by a
narrow strip of woods, adjacent to which ran a utility power line, a
coywolf turnpike without tolls, akin to the many roads, golf courses and
walking trails that slice into foreign, enemy and easy prey coywolf
territory.
Suddenly an eerie howl emanated from the power line, rippling in
short waves, calculated to shiver feline timbers, with a muted backdrop of
barks. Smokey and Maude were about 40 feet from each other, both about
175 feet (more than half a football field) from the bulkhead and 120 feet
from the woods. They couldn’t see or smell who or what might be
advancing in their direction, but each gave a slight growl to gird their
loins and be sure the other had gotten the unearthly auditory signal. Their
ears swivelled to catch nuances, then dropped backwards and flat against
their heads. Their tails, previously straight up in a bold, inquisitive pose,
darted straight back, then sloped down, probably denoting a less than
confident posture.
Silvery moonlight had transformed the lawn into a bowl of milk,
the cats’ outlines like charcoal lumps easy for anything with good night
vision to spot; except, not by accident, the cats had moved inside a fat
shadow stretching across the lawn, the alter ego of a huge backyard pine
tree. They gauged flight or fight options, the notion of a night patrol
receding as it dawned on them their cat patio wasn’t a safe haven, its
metal mesh door firmly latched and roof only five feet high.
Then another cry, high pitched, and a series of more distinct
intermingled barks, a medley of voices saturating the woods. The chorus
stopped as suddenly as it had begun, turning to a palpable quiet. Smokey
and Maude arched their backs, their body and tail fur standing on end,
enlarging their apparent sizes, the defensive value against coywolves in
serious doubt, but prey accept and employ what instinct and reckoning
gives them. The cats’ noses went into overdrive.
From the power line, some coywolves, having experienced the
irritating daytime human vibe of suburban neighborhoods and shifted to a
more nocturnal lifestyle, identified the scents of the agitated cats. The
Plimpton / 65
coywolves veered off the power line and drew near the cats’ kingdom. In
a flash, a male and a female coywolf, both in their prime, peered in Maude
and Smokey’s direction from invisible vantage points flanking their
newfound prey at opposite ends of the tree line bordering the backyard.
Two coywolf youngsters watched 25 feet behind their parents, eager to
join the escapade.
Finally the cats caught the fresh canine-like smell, an aroma
different to them than that of large domestic dogs. Eliminating
neighborhood dogs from the suspect list was small comfort to the cats,
who got the drift serious predators were afoot, no matter how you sliced
it. Silence held sway, as did Smokey and Maude’s heightened alertness.
It wasn’t clear whether the coywolves could spot the cats in the
pine tree shadow. Being cautious, they stood stock still and hesitated,
hope fading that posing as statues in their ribbon of darkness could protect
them, assessing the shrinking odds on survival. Smokey was closest to the
pine tree, long dead, without bark, some limbs amputated, a skeleton of its
former self. The pine, without branches a coywolf could reach by a leap or
a climb, took on potential as a feline safe house. Maude was farther from
the pine tree, but closer to the bulkhead, than Smokey was.
Maude, more experienced than Smokey, in a desperate survival
move, fractured the waiting game, dashing for the basement in a furry
streak. Not yet pinpointed by the coywolves and coming out of the
shadow’s murk, Maude gained a split second advantage before they
launched themselves, as though race horses blasting out of the starting
gate, quickly closing on her with a speed estimated at over 40 mph, even
if Maude could, at her age, reach a cat’s reputed 30 mph maximum.
Smokey had almost bolted for the pine tree when he realized the
coywolves were after Maude’s moving target and not him. When they
were almost abreast of Smokey, he showed some inspiration by letting
loose a screech, much louder than an everyday meow, knifing into the
coywolves ears, diverting their attention, causing them to skid and reverse
course toward him, a suddenly more proximate prey.
Maude hardly slowed as she hurtled through the basement
opening, across the floor and up the stairs, anxious about, if not already
mourning for, Smokey. The latter, unburdened by such sentiment, bolted
for the beckoning pine tree with long, bounding strides, as fast as he
could, but still no match for his pursuers’ size, strength, speed and leaping
ability. Redirected, they soon started to gain on Smokey, ready to spring
into renowned 13-foot catapults. His last hope was to jump as high as he
could up the trunk, simultaneously sinking his front claws into dead wood
and propelling himself further up, out of the chasers’ reach.

As Smokey leaped toward the trunk, the male coywolf followed
suit, the distance between them continuing to shrink. The coywolf’s jaws
opened wide, aiming to snare Smokey’s body. No such luck. Instead, they
snapped shut halfway up his tail, severing it neatly, which, considering the
alternative, was a blessing. As the coywolf descended with its meager
catch, Smokey suffered an excruciating but momentary burst of pain, a
fortunate whip’s lash propelling him even more rapidly up the trunk and
away from the female coywolf that had mimicked the male’s jump. No
vital artery sliced open, the blood on the wound soon coagulated, but not
before a small amount soaked into a tree limb.
But the coywolves weren’t done. They returned their focus to
Maude and followed her scent to the bulkhead. They listened for alarms or
other activity. Nothing. With their muzzles, the coywolves rooted around
trying to widen the opening. All they succeeded in doing was rolling the
log away from the bulkhead, so it dropped to the ground. Maude was
sealed in and Smokey out. Even had Smokey been disposed to venture
down, which he wasn’t, he watched the coywolves nosing around the
bulkhead and knew better. He took refuge on the thickest and highest limb
he could find, patiently awaiting the return of halcyon times, while the
coywolf hunters snarled and paced around below. The two young
coywolves, as if playful pet neighborhood dogs, aimed a few yips and
yaps at Smokey before team leaders realized he wasn’t a sucker and the
commotion increased the chance of discovery by human busybodies. The
coywolf family slunk away.
A mystery for the caretaker. Where was Smokey? What had
happened? Calls for him weren’t answered. Sitting on a radiator cover and
looking out a back window the morning after the attack, Maude spotted
Smokey perched high in the dead pine. So, upon the caretaker’s next
appearance, Maude paced and meowed, trying to draw attention to
Smokey’s predicament. Not surprisingly, the caretaker heedlessly
assumed Maude only wanted to go out to her cat patio or chase a bird.
A basement search proved fruitless. A phone call to the parents of
the human family, followed by one parent’s nagging doubt, brought them
home. Smokey meowed loudly as the two children entered the backyard
on what they feared would be a vain search for him. A long extension
ladder was used to get Smokey, hungry and surprisingly cooperative,
down from his safe house. With horror, the tail injury was discovered. He
was rushed to the vet. Thanks to virulent bacteria from the male coywolf’s
capacious mouth doing their dirty work, an abscess had started to form,
Plimpton / 67
the wound already emitting pus and a foul stench. It was drained and
antibiotics administered. What creature had inflicted the injury remained a
human mystery, so Smokey received a battery of vaccination shots. After
being held overnight for observation and dressing changes, he was
reunited with Maude. They nonchalantly accepted being waited upon
hand and foot, their cause aided when the guilty human family member
deduced what might have happened (Maude joining Smokey in harm’s
way before somehow returning alone to safety) and bravely admitted
culpability.
Unable to strut around with his former long, twitching
appendage, Smokey felt odd and a little insecure, the feline tail and its fur
having evolved over many millennia into an early warning system against
danger from the rear. Nor was he wild about the daily ritual of wound-
cleaning, salve and fresh bandages. But he was resigned to the new
circumstances, including a rabies quarantine. In Smokey’s
Weltanschauung, half a tail was better than none, no use crying over
spilled blood, and never look a gift horse in the mouth.
As far as relating the adventure when asked by human family
members what happened, Maude and Smokey showed their patented
ambivalence and aloofness—no apparent interest in delivering the goods,
looking up at them as if to say, “Get the photo, if you’re able. We’ve got a
shot at surviving in a pinch, but not if we have to depend on you. To err is
human, to forgive divine and we know who we are. So let’s not speak of it
anymore.”
DAMON MCLAUGHLIN
THIS HAWK PAIR DESTROYED ITS OWN NEST
This hawk pair destroyed its own nest

way up in the mesquite across the street
in the pocket park where some asshole
lets his dog shit and never cleans up
after it. No one really gives a fuck,
I think, peeking through the thorns,
the miniscule leaves on these branches,
along the deep grooves of old bark
and thin lime shoots of the new.
Last spring three nestlings were born.
Last summer all three fell into the puddle of grass
we have here in the desert, hop-flew for a day
while the hen kept watch from some
lower bush that has no name I can think of.
Then, there were two nestlings. Then, one.
Around here, coyotes sing on time every sunrise
after their late shifting of the neighborhood.
State land borders us to the south, open desert
to the east and north, trails and rattlesnakes
and occasionally a tortoise, more secretive
than a mountain lion, in my experience.
Soon developers will grind it all up
into houses. The row of models takes months
to build, but the rest appears overnight
like mushrooms after rain to suck every
last nutrient out of the earth. Maybe
it’s because I’m a Hawkeye that I care
about those damn hawks so much. I am.
And I do. I don’t remember when exactly
that aerie disappeared, that dark spot in the tree
with its downy beaks my kids craned their necks
to see, tiptoeing on the picnic table.
Maybe September. November.
It doesn’t matter. This morning I backed
out of the garage, and there was the daughter—
I like to think it was her—camouflaged poorly
68
McLaughlin / 69
atop the neighbor’s acacia in full-bloom

with its little yellow pom-poms, regal already
in her white chest and jet eyes sifting through
the motes, the bees performing their dangerous
but pretty work, the river rock and pebbles
and brittlebush and patches of mostly sorry
grass that is not grass at all, and I like to think
she had returned for me, maybe, though I know
she had not. No one needs to tell me she had not,
that she hadn’t returned for anything
but a ground squirrel or that pug that shits up
the park, generally protected by its backyard
from predators. But what I do know? But what does
anybody know about anything? What does anyone
know about hawks and loss and mercy?
LESLIE G COHEN
SIXTY-FOUR
Locked together in silence,

our words quickly disappear
like vapors under a desert sun.
“How are you?” my tentative offer.

“How was work today?"
“What do you want to eat?”
No longer we.
I
Unanswered, as if unheard,
her reply
a cold stare.
Tender words, once loving,

now unfelt, forgotten, lost
like dandelion fibers scattered by the wind.
Years of resentments,
once tiny pebbles,
have become high stone walls.
Fearful of being alone,

we are frozen statues
in bed.
One morning she speaks,

"We have to give it another try . . . or else."
Or else!
I wonder . . . but don’t ask.
.
Nodding to her, the therapist begins,
"What do you want from the relationship?"
70
Cohen / 71
“He is unable to love.

never compromises.
never listens.
Never . . .”
On and on—a familiar litany.
I tune out to threads of whimsical music:
Send me a postcard, drop me a line

stating point of view.
Indicate precisely what you mean to say.
Yours sincerely, wasting away.
Eyes on me.
“And what do you want from the relationship?"
I pause . . . a long pause,

searching for words.
“Just . . . peace . . . friendship,
I guess,” muttered softly, slowly
like a blind man's wary footsteps in snow.
I speak, as if
from a vacant space inside.
Tepid words devoid of feeling,
of hope.
Tuning out again:

WilI you still need me?
Will you still feed me?
When I’m sixty-four
“Is that all? Nothing more?”

“Yes, that’s all,” I whisper.
“We didn’t hear you.”
“Yes, that is all.”
M T JAMIESON
THE BIG GUY SWEPT THE DUST
The Big Guy Swept the dust from Home Plate,

Lest a Called Strike be cause for debate.
Prophet Baserunners at First and Third,

Jacob and Esau waiting the word.
Next up was Moses, from The Red Sea,

His Bat carved from a Burning Bush tree.
He Stepped Away, a sandal to lace.

The Runners each returned to their Base.
Peter, the Catcher, jogged to the Mound,

While Paul, the Pitcher, toed at the ground.
A slow Wind-Up, and a Double Steal.

Both Runners Safe, there was no appeal.
Half the crowd, an Alleluia roar,

Isaac’s fair son had now Tied the Score.
The Big Guy Swept the dust from Home Plate.

Heavenly Softball, truly first rate.
From Softball in Heaven collection
72
Jamieson / 73
ANALOGUE COWBOY, OUTDOOR THEATER
Outdoor theater, Saturday night.

One double feature, in black and white.
Dirt road and gravel, out west of town.

Cartoon started just after sundown.
A giant movie, a giant screen.

The biggest rabbit he’d ever seen.
Sound came from a box, suitably wired.

Hung on saddle, no window required.
Stories, town’s people, evil bad guys,

And true heroes, black masked in disguise.
Wagon crashes, Indian chases,

Cattle stampedes, wide open spaces.
Warm popcorn for himself, and his horse,

Extra salt, over-buttered, of course.
Outdoor theater, Saturday night,

Analogue Cowboy thought it alright.
From Analogue Cowboy collection

SHAE M HALL
WASH N DRY
Wash N Dry is less than ten minutes from her apartment. It’s a
dump, but only $1.50 to wash and the same to dry. The week before
Donna collects her husband’s pocket change and on Monday nights she
hops in her old Corolla with a few baskets and stays at the Wash N Dry
for hours. She busies herself by thumbing through old magazines:
Woman’s Day, Family Circle, Time. She watches reruns of Law and
Order, Divorce Court, and Judge Judy on the small mounted box TV.
Donna zigzags past the small grey buckets on the white tiled
floor. She has maneuvered through these buckets every Monday night for
months. And every Monday she wonders when they will fix the water-
stained ceiling, browned and cracked like dried soil waiting for the next
rain.
She claims her usual corner under the dingy fluorescent lights. It
reveals her incoming grey roots that need a monthly touch of Dark
Espresso Brown from the box, Clairol number 43.
After loading four washers, she sits down in the empty
laundromat with an old issue of Home and Garden and listens to water fill
the machines. Donna can smell Fresh Linen or Mountain Rain, something
generic she’d bought on sale. She smooths her old high school t-shirt,
frowns at her favorite pair of worn jeans; they’ve seen better days. She
glances at the cover of the magazine with a living room she will never
own. Donna begins to thumb through the wrinkled, dog-eared issue.
She glances up from an article about home-made centerpieces,
You Can Make These From Items Around Your House! as a car pulls in
the lot. An Audi? A Lexus? Some expensive car Donna has seen on a
commercial. The headlights glare through the glass window of the
laundromat until they rest on Donna and then shut off. She continues to
flip through the magazine until the small bell on the glass door jingles and
a woman on an iPhone bursts in.
This is not the kind of woman who lives in this neighborhood.
She’s probably from the other side of town, where they own their homes
and have a sitting room or den. The school districts are better and the front
yards are green with freshly planted flowers.
The woman wears nice clothes. She has a small waist, breasts too
large on a gym body that has seen hours of spinning or yoga. Her hair has
seen the inside of an upscale salon. She is the kind of lady with regularly
74
Hall / 75
scheduled nail appointments and spends too much on handbags named

after people. The kinds with LV or DB. Her shoes clack on the tiles,
expensive pumps. She is everything Donna has never been. Donna can’t
help but stare.
“I’m at some shit hole drying my clothes.” The woman pauses.
“Because my dryer broke. I already washed, I just have to dry. I even had
to stop for change.” She looks around the laundromat for an empty dryer.
“It’s near a Dollar Store. It might as well be in the hood, Suzie. I
mean, seriously, it’s filthy. No. No. I couldn’t get a fucking repairman
this late at night.” The woman looks at Donna like she has a bad taste in
her mouth and then rolls her eyes.
The woman unloads her clothes as she “MmHm’s” and “yeah’s”
into her iPhone.
“There’s only one person here.” The lady lowers her voice. She
looks at Donna and quickly looks away. She’s wearing a lot of makeup.
She looks like the Clinique counter vomited on her face. “Trust me,” she
laughs. “She wouldn’t know the difference between Nordstrom and
Target.”
Donna looks around the dimly lit room, the sound of the washer
sloshing, the sound of the ceiling dripping, and the sound of the woman
clacking her expensive shoes on the floor. She sees the outdated washers
and dryers, the grimy change machine, a vending machine with little
overpriced packets of detergent, Tide and Bounty and Downy. There is no
other sound and no other person except her and the woman. A little part
of her held out hope. She feels her face grow hot; she shifts uneasily in
her chair.
She thinks her stuff is too good for me?
“I’ll meet you in fifteen minutes.” The woman looks at Donna as
she slams the dryer lid shut and drops her quarters in the slots. The change
clings into the compartment, the sound of metal on metal as the quarters
hit the bottom of the change well. The clothes begin to tumble.
Donna looks back down at her magazine, pretending to read the
article on centerpieces. She bets the woman has an expensive centerpiece
in the middle of her table, sitting under a large, sparkling chandelier
hanging over a heavy, cherry dining set that seats eight. Donna can
imagine dinner parties, clinking wine glasses, little gold embossed plates
beside larger gold embossed dinner plates. Are those small plates for
dessert or bread? But either way, all the dishes belong to a set, unlike her
individually purchased thrift store pieces, mismatched with chips in two
of the bowls.
And too many spoons and too many forks. Wealthy people always
have too much silverware on the table. Why should they worry? They
don’t have to wash it anyway thanks to a working dishwasher or even a
maid service. Donna’s kitchen table seats two people, and her table is
decorated with unpaid bills, Take-Out Menus, pizza coupons and junk
mail.
The woman erupts into laughter as the door jingles behind her.
When the car disappears from the parking lot, Donna’s eyes shift
across the room. The dryer is spinning, expensive clothes in a cheap
overworked Kenmore.
Nearly an hour later, bored with a rerun of Law and Order, she
hears the lady’s dryer stop. Donna walks over, curious. The thought
comes so suddenly it surprises even Donna. But she is intrigued,
impressed, that she has had this thought at all. She has never even
considered it, but now she wonders why she never thought of it on all the
Monday nights she sat here alone. She wants to know. She has to know.
Donna wants to see the clothes the woman has left behind to dry.
She opens the woman’s dryer and retrieves the first thing she
sees. It’s warm and dry in her hands, a royal blue sweater. It’s soft, softer
than anything she’s ever owned. She strokes the material, admiring the
color and texture. Donna peeks inside again, snatches at something denim.
She lays out a skirt across the top of the dryer; it’s the shortest skirt she
has ever seen.
She is still alone in the Wash N Dry, her car the only one in the
lot. And it’s late. She sprints to the bathroom and shuts the door quickly
behind her. There is no lock and the walls are covered with random
scrawling. Tammy Loves Jason, Matt Wilson is a Dick!, Kayla was here,
and a few For A Good Time Call… are scratched and inked on every inch.
There is no toilet paper, but she doesn’t need any. The sink is pulling
away from the wall; a pale orange calcium ring circles the drain.
Donna removes her old t-shirt, and lays it on the closed toilet lid.
She shimmies out of her jeans. She can smell the expensive detergent as
she pulls the woman’s sweater over her head. It fits perfectly, warm and
soft. She shimmies into the skirt—just a little too tight. Or maybe not,
thinks Donna. She’s grateful it’s Monday because she only shaves her
legs on Sundays.
She admires herself in the large, stained mirror above the sink,
something she has not done in a very long time. Her body never birthed a
child, but it has seen some years. Still, she has maintained a decent figure.
But it is a figure her husband shows no interest in. She smoothes the
Hall / 77
sweater over her breasts and shifts her weight to strike a more flattering
pose. She wishes she had some make up, though she hasn’t worn any
since her last trip to the grocery.
As good as the expensive sweater feels, she should return the
clothes. The woman could come back soon and find Donna parading in
front of the mirror in the dirtiest bathroom she’s ever been in. And she
was wearing someone else’s clothes! Someone else’s clothes. Donna’s
stomach flips. She smiles at herself in the mirror. She’s excited. She
makes a pouty face like one of the women in the magazines. Okay, she
looks a little better than good. I look great, Donna thinks, pushing her ass
out and smoothing the sweater.
She plays with her hair in the mirror, piles it on top of her head;
she runs her fingers through it to give it volume. She stops to admire her
long lashes, her brown eyes. They are a nice color, but to her they are dull.
At the very least they’re friendly. Donna wishes she had a salon cut, a
little makeup. She wishes she had a different face altogether. She’d like to
erase the crow’s feet coming in, she didn’t even earn them from smiling
too much.
Donna exits the bathroom in the sweater and the skirt. She can
hardly believe she is still wearing them. She considers the consequences.
But still, she does not take them off. They feel right on her.
She has never read Cosmo before, but someone has left a copy on
the table beside the ashtray. She plops into one of the plastic lawn chairs
and listens to the swishing of her clothes. She chuckles at the bold titles
on the cover of the magazine: How To Woo Your Man in Bed and Things
That Will Make His Toes Curl. Donna has no one to woo and there are no
toes to curl. She crosses her legs and smoothes the skirt. She does not
know that side of John anymore, and she really has no desire. It’s possible
John’s sleeping with someone at work.
She doesn’t see him until the door jingles, startling her. He wears
a red sweater over broad shoulders with black pants and black shoes. His
hair is neatly combed and he’s well-shaved with dark eyes.
Donna feels stupid, inadequate, under his gaze. What is she
thinking wearing these clothes? She wonders how ridiculous she looks to
him. She looks away as he walks across the stained white floor, through
the obstacle of buckets. He smiles, his eyes crinkling in the corners. He
carries two laundry baskets nestled together under his arms.
The man sets his baskets on the floor. One is empty, and one is
piled high with khakis, socks, miscellaneous things that Donna cannot
make out.
“Nice place, right?”

This makes her blush, why she is unsure.
“A fine establishment,” she replies. He laughs. He has nice teeth,
bright white and perfectly aligned, an ad for Colgate. Donna smiles an
imperfect smile back, her crooked row of lower teeth, inherited from her
mother’s side, she is very aware of. “Come here often?”
He shakes his head as he reaches into his pocket and retrieves a
pack of Marlboro Lights. He pulls one out and places it between his lips.
“First time.” The cigarette dances between his lips. He doesn’t light it.
He smiles again, perfectly deep dimples, on perfectly clear skin.
She smiles back.
He flicks a shiny Zippo several times and inhales. He sighs,
exhaling smoke rings. He does this smoothly. Smoke rings float and
expand until they disappear into nothing.
“Can I get one of those?” He shakes one out of the soft pack for
her and carefully lights her cigarette. She inhales slowly so she does not
cough. She has not had a cigarette since she was thirteen, behind a United
Dairy Farmers with Becky Moore. She feels cool again, smoking near the
NO SMOKING sign. Donna feels young.
She watches the smoke from her cigarette float and curl in the air.
She tries to be calm, even though her heart thumps harder in her chest and
the nicotine has made her dizzy. He opens a washer near hers and begins
to load some collared shirts, khakis, boxer shorts, some socks into the
machine. He doesn’t measure the soap powder as he pours it in.
“Would you like a tour?” She laughs.
He chuckles. “Should we start with the buckets?” He throws his
half-smoked cigarette into the closest one, it hisses as it fizzles out. He
drops his change in the slots, pulls the knob and they both listen to the
water pour in.
Donna takes a drag and folds the magazine up as he pulls the
plastic chair opposite her and sits down.
“This seat taken?” He beams. He is already sitting.
“No.”
“Those things will kill you.” He says as she taps the ashes from
her cigarette into the ashtray on the plastic table, the kind that belongs on
an apartment patio.
She smiles, trying not to look away. She wants to look at the
floor. She wants to look anywhere but into his eyes. It’s been so long
since anyone has looked her in the eyes.
“Many things can kill you.”
Hall / 79
He nods. “True enough.”

“I’m Donna.” She feels bold, excited.
“Funny. You look like a Donna.”
“What do Donna’s look like?”
“I’m not sure. You’re the best looking Donna I’ve ever met.”
Her lips spread into a smile. She tries not to show her bottom
teeth as he enjoys her discomfort. The whole thing is cliché to her,
something from her soap opera, but she feels like a movie star.
“Ken.” He offers his hand and she shakes it. His skin is soft. His
hands are the opposite of her husband’s. “It’s nice to meet you, Donna.”
He brushes his hands through his brown hair and Donna wonders if he
does this on purpose.
The band on his finger is platinum or white gold, thick and
expensive.
She thinks of the ring on her own finger. She’s never owned a
diamond like most women. John hadn’t even proposed, not really. They
had been sitting across from each other at a Waffle House, plates of
greasy bacon and eggs, overly buttered toast in front of them. It was late,
after a cheap horror flick at the local movie theatre. It was their typical
Friday night date: a cheap meal and sex in his car before dropping her off.
Donna was stirring a Sweet N Low in her coffee when he asked
her what she was going to be doing on Tuesday. He had bits of bacon
crumbs on his Led Zeppelin shirt. Robert Plant stared at her.
“Tuesday? Why? What’s Tuesday?” she had asked.
“Oh, nothing,” John had said, “Just the day I was going to marry
you.”
And because Donna had always settled in life, she settled on the
fact that Tuesday she would marry John at the courthouse in town.
Donna sighs and scoots the ashtray closer with her left hand so
Ken has an excuse to look at her dainty ring. He looks and nods.
Her clothes stop spinning and she butts her cigarette in the ash
tray. As she pulls her clothes from the washer and moves them to the
dryer, she is aware of his eyes on her. She wants to pull the skirt down as
it inches up her thigh, but she doesn’t. She bends down to remove the rest
of John’s work clothes.
She adds an extra dryer sheet to each load. She has always used
an extra sheet because she loves the smell of fresh clothes. At home she
tucks a single sheet in each dresser drawer to keep her clothes smelling
fresh. She does this for herself.
When she turns back around he is walking slowly toward her.
“Can you be sneaky? I can be sneaky,” He lets the words hang.

“Sometimes I see an opportunity and the moment is right. Ever felt that
way?”
“Not really,” she blushes. “Until now.”
He pushes his lips against hers. Soft and smooth, Donna thinks,
much smoother than John’s. But she has trouble really remembering. She
closes her eyes and enjoys the moment, inhaling the scent of sandalwood,
mint and tobacco that radiates from him. She thinks of a happy wife and a
husband who loves her. They exist somewhere and she wants to feel that
way.
When he picks her up she feels weightless. He places her gently
on a folding table and Donna wonders if they look like they’re actors in
her soap opera through the laundromat windows.
As his hands begin to move across her breasts she realizes how
she never even hesitated. She always knew it would come to this, her
being with another man. Donna doesn’t think of John, not one time does
he enter her mind while she is pressed against Ken, the folding table
jerking. She doesn’t think of the large windows, she doesn’t care about
the scene passing cars may see. She doesn’t think of the lack of birth
control. She doesn’t think.
When they are finished, he lights her a cigarette and hands it to
her. She smokes it in silence, running her hands through her hair to
smooth it back down. She does not watch the small television or pick up a
magazine. For the first time in years, Donna cannot predict what will
happen next. She smiles.
Ken says nothing as he moves his load of laundry to the dryer. He
smiles at her while she sucks on her cigarette. When she is done smoking,
she butts her cigarette in the ashtray and folds her clothes.
“Will I see you around here?” he asks, his cheeks still pink from
their encounter.
She folds the final towel and lays it on top. “I’m here every
Monday.”
“Monday?”
She nods and shifts, resting a basket on each of her hips. “My
apartment doesn’t have machines.”
“I don’t usually go to the laundromat, but my dryer is broke. I had
to swing by and pick up a load my wife dropped off. I figured I’d drop
another load off.”
Donna looks at him. “Oh. Your wife? She dropped a load off?”
“Yeah. It’s around here somewhere.”
Hall / 81
Donna knows where it is. Her eyes move slowly to the far corner
where the woman on the cell phone had stood an hour or so before. She
can’t help it. She smiles so big her face feels as though it may crack.
“Yeah.” She waits awkwardly for a moment, but he says nothing.
He didn’t even recognize his own wife’s clothing. A part of her wonders
if all men are as oblivious as John. “Well, Ken, I guess I’ll see you
around?”
He nods. “Sure.”
Donna loads the car and turns the engine, the belt screeching. She
wears a smile and her new blue sweater and denim skirt.
BRIAN C FELDER
HARD KNOCKS U
Few of us teach,
but all of us learn,
life being the mother of all classrooms.
We never stop going to that school,
though some of us do nod off
and still others drop out.
You see these people lying in gutters
or walking the corridors of power,
they being the ones who aren’t
smart enough to survive
or are too damned good at it.
Most of us wind up somewhere in between,
being people who use what we learn
to help ourselves get by in this world
without hurting others along the way.
NAP TIME
Quiet by request (command, actually),

the girls sotto voce their make-believe
around the dollhouse they’ve just made for
their Smurfette and her companions,
while yours truly catches a few winks
on the living room couch nearby.
With my wife close at hand, in case
one decides to scalp the other,
I fall into slumber with impunity,
the last sound I hear being that
happy burble of children at play.
PARTNERS IN CRIME
It is easy to blame
all that ails us on you know who
(too easy, if you ask me, as it frees
82
Felder / 83
the rest of us from taking any responsibility

for electing him in the first place),
but we drink from the well we dig, right!?!
Look in the mirror, people,
and you’ll see that same blind ambition,
that lack of basic decency,
that fear of aliens,
that racism.
Yeah, I know, you didn’t vote for him,
I didn’t either,
but we all contributed to his making,
to that America that puts money above morals.
We are the rock that was rolled over
to expose the likes of him and his
and there’s no not owning that.
THE DREAM LIVES YET
It is a street of brick houses

with slate roofs and ivy-clad chimneys,
each home, almost without exception,
filled with young professionals
and their school-age children.
The front yards, small as they are,
are neatly kept,
the rear ones not so much
being filled with wading pools
and trampolines, swings and slides.
It is, this quiet Saturday morning,
altogether idyllic,
the cloudless blue sky above
only adding to the sense of well-being.
It is all so American
but in the good way,
the way much of the world
would live their lives if they could.
It is why people run the risk
of crossing armed borders to get here,
though it will be a long time before
the successful ones achieve this.

That said, they will do what it takes,
as those before them have,
starting small and working up;
up to this street of brick houses
with slate roofs and ivy-clad chimneys.
/ 85
CAMERON MORSE
POEM WRITTEN DURING A FUNERAL SERVICE
Footsteps echo in Cockefair Hall

where for three years I have dallied, reading,
chatting, and snacking between classes.
Today the English Department’s wired-glass
window is dark, a note tacked to the door:
Closed for services of Michelle Boisseau.

Footsteps echo over the cracked and scuff-marked
granite in which fluorescents represent
themselves in watery rectangles
of light, their geometric perfection skewed,
a failed mimesis in the mausoleum of art.

The only sound is the whirr of the leaf-blower
a man is walking along the hedgerow. The wind
he carries is hard, an invisible shovel tossing
piles of leaves into the air, and the air erupts
with the lava of leaves, oceanic, an underwater

volcano. Elephant grass undulates like anemone
in the drowning sky. I hear a voice in the clouds,
kindergarteners or geese I cannot tell.
Classmates walk by with their heads down.
PURGATORY
Caught between automated menu

options and a line of unanswered calls
in which I am no longer allowed
to wait, I weary of eternal life. I know
the Muzak by heart. I know that calls

are answered in the order they are received
and the automated voice that tells me so
is more intimate to me now than my own.
85
How many times must I check on the status

of an application I completed
over the phone the day my boy came home?
Backlogged, you say. Nothing I can do.

Nothing I’ve done wrong. Yet for the sin
of being disabled, and the sin of being
diagnosed, and the sin of loving poems
more than money, I can only pray:

God, allow me but to wait
for some ragged, rundown human
voice to say hello.
/ 87
PAMELA CARTER
A BIPOLAR CHILD
I grew up in the 1950s in a small log cabin located in an

intermountain valley west of Denver. Our lives were primitive; all our
water had to be hauled in five-gallon cans from the community well three
miles away, and we bathed once a week in an aluminum tub filled with
water warmed atop the wood-burning stove that took up most of our
kitchen. We had no central heating, even though temperatures frequently
dropped below zero in the winter, so the house was drafty and cold much
of the year. Still, it was heaven to me. Ranches and open spaces
surrounded our cabin, and the natural beauty and abundant wildlife fired
my already active imagination.
In the summer I often rose in the dusky dawn light and climbed
out my bedroom window before anyone else in the household was awake.
I would catch my horse, Tammy, grab a hank of her mane, and swing
myself onto her bare back. Tammy had been badly abused as a filly, and it
left her more feral than tame—one of the reasons I loved her so much. But
she had come to trust me and, unencumbered by saddle or bridle, was
responsive and well-behaved. I could guide her by pressing my knees
against her sides, and together we would make our way in the hazy
morning light, the air filled with birdsong, to a saddle of land on the
Falcon Wing Ranch. The memory of the piercingly fresh air remains clear
even now, almost sixty years later. From the rise of the saddle, I’d watch
the sun rise over the sleeping city below.
When the air warmed up some, I’d ride Tammy to a small pond
on the ranch, strip off my clothes, and urge her into the still-cold water,
then hang onto her mane as she pulled me to the other side. Later, I’d
climb out into the high grass growing at the edge of the pond and let the
morning sun dry my naked body. I loved the sense of freedom I felt lying
naked in the grass. I loved being naked, period, and wore clothes as little
as possible. Other days I’d ride Tammy to an outcropping of rocks on the
Holland Ranch and lie shirtless (free as a boy) as I made nooses of grass
to try to catch the blue-tailed skinks that slithered across the rocks. I never
caught any, but I loved the feel of the sun-warmed roughness of the
sandstone against my chest and belly. Maybe my father’s worry over my
“wildness” was a reasonable thing after all.
The best days were those when I led Tammy around the edge of
the cattle guard on the Tall Timbers Ranch, where a herd of Black Angus
87
grazed in the woodland meadows. There was an old house built of sun-
dried mud bricks where I kept my Big Chief tablet and No. 2 pencils from
my mother’s prying eyes. She disapproved of my writing and would tear
up any story she found, so I wrote in secret here on the ranch. I loved
these days when I didn’t see or speak to another person.
***
I was born in 1948, half a century before Dmitri and Janice
Papolos published their seminal work on childhood-onset bipolar disorder,
The Bipolar Child, so I was seen as an exceptionally bright but difficult
child rather than one with a treatable mental illness. In our small
community I was known for my oppositional, defiant behavior, explosive
temper, and love of risky adventures. Many mothers felt I’d be a bad
influence on their daughters, and I received few invitations to birthday
parties or sleepovers. Luckily my mother’s best friend, Nigel, took me as I
was, and she had four sons who I counted as friends.
The year I was twelve, Nigel took me, her sons, and my two
younger brothers on a four-day camping trip that gave rise to the most
memorable escapade of my childhood. The last night of the trip, Guy—
Nigel’s eldest, who was my age and a good friend—and I were fishing in
the river that ran through the Black Canyon of the Gunnison when we saw
an enormous bird float through the air and disappear into a crack in the
cliff on the opposite side of the canyon.
“That’s a great horned owl, and I bet she’s got some owlets up
there,” Guy said. “You don’t see many of them.”
I knew immediately I had to have one of the owlets to rear; they
were uncommon and would grow to be so huge. It took me a while to talk
Guy into capturing one of the young birds, but I finally persuaded him.
The next morning we crawled out of our sleeping bags just after sunrise
and set off for the place we thought we’d seen the mother owl disappear
into the cliff. Guy handed me a large stick. “The mother’s going to attack
if we take one of her babies, so you beat her off me before she can tear me
to pieces.” Guy had a rope slung over one shoulder to use to capture the
young owl. We started climbing. It was hard going, having only one hand
to grasp the rock and pull ourselves upward. We finally reached the aerie
a hundred feet above the river. Inside were three fledgling owlets, but we
didn’t see the mother. It smelled musty inside, and the owlets backed
away from the opening when we stuck our heads inside. The young owls
were much bigger than I expected, maybe two feet tall. They clicked their
beaks at us but made no other noise. Guy was a ranch kid with excellent
roping skills. He unwound the rope and snaked it out over the branches
Carter / 89
and bones that filled the aerie and snagged the owlet nearest us around its
legs and dragged it to us. The owlet continued to click its beak as we
started back down the cliff. I watched out for the mother, but she floated
up silently behind us and grabbed Guy by the small of his back with her
talons before I had any idea she was close. I tried to hit her, but almost
knocked Guy off the cliff instead. Going down was much harder than
climbing up. I kept swinging my stick at the mother without much
success, and within minutes Guy’s shirt was blood-soaked and in tatters. I
began to wonder what I’d gotten us into. Finally the mother flew back into
the aerie, and we were free to climb down to the river, holding the owlet
upside down and trying to avoid his clicking beak. I began to worry about
what Nigel would say when she saw Guy’s back and shirt; she’d know the
idea to climb the cliff had been mine.
But all she said when we came into camp was “I don’t want to
hear one word about how you got that owl.” And she never did. We
named the owl Al and fed him ground beef and mashed bananas, a diet
that seemed to agree with him. Of course my mother wouldn’t let me keep
him, so Al went back to Nigel’s ranch when they left near the end of
summer. He never became fully wild. Guy told me in one of his rare
letters that every night Al flew to Guy’s bedroom window and sat on the
sill, clicking his beak.
I didn’t begin treatment for bipolar until the age of thirty, and as I
approach seventy, I realize I have never become fully “tame.”
I’m not sure I regret it.
JOHN T HITCHNER
SNOW UPON GREEN
1944
The siren wailed only once,

then fell silent.
The boy’s mother and father darkened
all lights,
closed curtains,
pulled down all window shades in the house.
“I’ll be back soon,” the father said,
as he left the house
and closed the door behind him.
The mother cuddled the boy.

in the living room
dark as the boy’s nightmares.
He did not cry as he asked,
“Why did Dad leave?”
“He has to check other houses
to be sure no lights are on.”
“Why?”
“So German planes won’t see us.”
1950
In a passenger train car

the boy sat beside his mother again.
In front of them a man held a newspaper:
The headline read,
TRUMAN SENDS TROOPS TO KOREA.
“Are we going to fight in Korea?” the boy asked.

“I’m afraid so,” his mother said.
“Will Dad have to go?”
“No.”
90
Hitchner / 91
1954
The boy, now 13, listened to morning news

on the radio.
A newscaster reported civil war
in French Indo-China and a long battle
at a place called Dien Bien Phu.
Many French soldiers were killed.
Will American soldiers have to fight
at Dien Bien Phu someday?
the boy wondered.
1964
On the beach that summer

the boy, now a young man,
wondered why Buddhist monks
intentionally immolated themselves.
A month later he read that U.S. naval vessels
were fired upon in the Gulf of Tonkin.
“It’s coming at us,” he said to no one.
1967
Visiting his parents one weekend,

the young man saw a black sedan stop
in front of the house next door.
Two soldiers and a minister got out of the car
and walked to the front door.
“It’s here,” the young man quietly said.
“What did you say?” his father asked.
“The war’s next door now.”
To himself, the young man said,
“But we knew that all along,
didn’t we.”
2005
In the fall, the man, now a father,

read his son’s e-mail from Iraq.
“Black smoke in the sky adds ambiance
to this place,” his son wrote.
That December the man’s son returned home.
Now
Memorial Day weekend

the man, his wife, and son visit Arlington.
They stand beneath a tree.
“The white crosses, so many. So, so many,
like rows of snow upon grass.
The rows end and begin again
like war always pursuing us. Always.
But we know that, don’t we.
We’ve always known that.
Or have we?
We still pack gear, mount up, ship out.
Some of us come home.
Some of us come here,
to another row and another cross.
Always.”
/ 93
DOUGLAS COLLURA
INSPIRING THE TROOPS
General Patton Struck a Soldier, 1943
Our best World War II field general fired

a slap into a shell-shocked soldier’s head
in a hospital tent. The man’s vulnerability
insulted the general’s sense of ennobling slaughter.
“Yellow belly! Coward!” the general yelled.
The soldier, who’d fought in many battles,
who’d refused to leave the front until a doctor
ordered, ran and hid. Begged a chaplain,
“Don’t tell my wife.” Our best field general
apologized to troops, doctors, staff. He who
wept in battle sometimes. Withheld by history,
the name of the nurse. Arms straight out, palms
flat, she charged the great general. Aimed
to topple him. She had a patient to protect.
93
JAMI MILLER
RELAPSE
The morning after,

she stays hidden under covers and
disconnects from the world
she cannot look in the eyes.
She lies nonresponsive,
knowing
there is no response that can excuse the night before.
She allows her apologies to bathe in leftover, alcoholic sweat
that stones her every morning she awakes
to find her mind that she left
at the bottom of an empty bottle
again.
But it is her tongue
that cannot handle the taste
of her own words,
so she silences herself,
until the next time.
79
Not everyone is meant to hold onto wrinkled palms,

and I don’t want to feel their souls crushing
under my feet
while I continuously fall through the cracks of the sidewalk
waiting for myself to catch up.
I’d rather climb
this elastic hillside
that blocks my view.
I’d rather drink alone,
with my demons,
than to share them with my heart.
I’d rather die without an audience
than to be a God who controls the rain.
94
Miller / 95
LOCKED UP
As time dies every night

when it is quiet enough to hear the walls talk in their sleep,
after the doors are sealed shut
and echoes are the only form of life I can hear
but cannot understand,
I plan my escape over and over again,
locked down to nothing but my mind
that lies awake every night
wandering along the pleas that I have already taken,
replaying the verdict,
imagining some other prison,
a better cellmate,
maybe a window with a view.
The clock slowly ticks away at my sentence,
and although I cannot see it,
I can count the sunrise every day,
and breathe each time I feel the moon.
I pace the white walls back and forth,
kneel to concrete every so often
while my palms remain clenched together
pointed to the ceiling.
I silently scream at myself
refusing to sympathize
with my heavy shoulders.
I drink from a metal trough
attached to where I piss,
behind a cement wall
where my eyes make constant contact
with the prison guards
but no words are ever exchanged
between them and me.
I remain locked behind Georgia State Lines
injected with Kryptonite
that even Superman couldn’t bend
soon enough to save me,
and I can’t stop thinking about filtered water,
fresh coffee,
that first drag off of a Marlboro Light,

a shower with a curtain and a private toilet with a door,
and as I indulge in my life’s outside pleasures,
I realize,
that is not so much to lose,
yet still I count down, plot,
and wish for a guacamole burger with a milkshake,
and maybe some silent walls where I can get some goddamn sleep.
/ 97
RYAN M MOSER
THE FARMER'S POND
I worked as a handyman on a dairy farm one summer as a kid in

Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The sprawling cow pastures and wooded
acres were owned by the Garges family—hardworking and honest
German farmers who had been tilling that land for over a century. The
farm was ran by Old Man Garges, a cantankerous, barrel-chested seventy-
year-old, and his oldest son, Farmer Bob. Farmer Bob had hired me to do
a little of everything and the workdays were long and tiresome, but I liked
the simple life and freedom of a farmhand, and thought it was a great
summer job.
One of my favorite things to do after work was go to a quiet little
fishing hole that was tucked away from everyone and everything; a round
pond hidden behind a group of hilly pumpkin patches, just next to one of
the many dirt country lanes on the vast farm. I passed it walking home
each day and would stop for an hour of peaceful fishing before the hot sun
went down below the horizon. I kept my rod and reel shoved beneath the
large limb of a fallen oak tree, which jutted out into the water half
submerged and bending like a natural bridge.
All I had to do was cast and I was set. I'd sit there on that rotting
log and throw my line without a care; curiously watching the critters of
the wild. Snapping turtles poked their slimy heads from the surface to get
a look at me while corn snakes and ruddy foxes burrowed in cool holes to
ward off the humid air of the summer haze. I’d light a cigarette, and hope
the smoke would discourage the stinging bites of pesky mosquitoes and
constant harassment of nagging gnats. After a while, a sunnie or a tiny
carp would bite my hook, and I'd toss them back into the brownish
water—always hoping for the next fat, big-mouthed bass or whiskered
catfish to come up from the depths and leap into my lunch cooler for
dinner on the grill later that night. And in the last light of day, I'd catch
glimpses of wandering fireflies; dancing and pulsing yellow-green neon in
the long twilight.
After working on the farm for a few weeks, Old Man Garges got
wind of me going to his prized pond to fish, and started to holler that if he
caught me there would be hell to pay. He didn't like anyone fishing
there—even catch and release—and he was an ornery son-of-a-bitch for
his age. The farmer was never happy with the work anyone did if it wasn't
97
his way, and he wasn't afraid to tell you loudly. Old Man Garges was the
kind of person who would never change.
At first, he would casually ride his candy-apple red tractor down
the trails and back lanes as I headed home each day, watching me to see if
I stopped at the pond. “No, sir...I won't be fishin' anymore,” I'd say as he
pulled up beside me. Then as soon as he drove off, I'd circle back, prop
my rod up, and put my bare feet in the cool water while I laid back on the
clay bank for a nap. I didn't have a care in the world; dragonflies buzzed
my head and a slight breeze swayed the cat-tails back and forth as I
relaxed after a hard day's work.
But soon, Old Man Garges got wise to my ruse and began to ride
down the trails and back lanes, past the backwoods pumpkin patches, and
all the way to the main road I traveled to get to my house every day. He
was practically following me home, and the tough-as-nails farmer
wouldn't give up. He would stubbornly spend the last hours of sunlight
guarding that murky pond like a mean German Shepherd. Eventually, I
gave up trying to sneak around and silently swore at the grump for
stealing my peaceful pastime.
Most days, working on a dairy farm is a back-breaking job, and I
had a lot of projects that kept me busy. Soon my workdays started to end
later and later; leaving me so tired at the end of the day that I didn't even
think about fishing or anything else except sleep. By mid-summer, I was
putting in fourteen-hour days and was exhausted to the point of breaking.
One sunny afternoon just before lunch, Farmer Bob found me pitching
hay and told me to take the rest of the day off. He said he was very happy
with how much I'd been getting done and wanted to give me a well-
deserved break. I whistled as I headed past the family house and down the
bumpy road from the dairy pens towards home; excited to have nothing to
do for the rest of the afternoon. As I passed the hidden pond, I
instinctively looked around but did not see anyone, so I walked over to the
fallen tree, grabbed my pole, and kicked back—readying for a lazy nap. I
cast far out into the center of the pond—sending slow ripples to the
muddy banks—and started to reel my line in; letting the bobber bounce
and wobble in the water. But minutes later, as my eyes began to droop and
my chin dropped to my bare chest. Old Man Garges came strutting out
from the grove of trees by the lane and hiked up his overalls—fuming
mad.
“How many times have I told you not to fish here, boy?” he
yelled as I quickly reeled the line in and lowered my head in shame. When
he reached me, the old coot grabbed my rod before I could react and
Moser / 99
started to walk away with it. “I'm not going to fire you because you work
for my son and you’re a hard worker, but if I see you here again I'm
docking your pay for one week!” he shouted behind him.
I stomped home that afternoon, spitting curses and vowing not to
go back to work for that crazy farmer anymore. The money and
experience were good, but my pride was stubbornly hurt.
The next morning, when my alarm clock buzzed me awake at the
usual time, I sat up in bed and looked out the window at the new dawn's
light with a pang of regret for my decision. I really did like my job. So I
got on my way and showed up for work—another day of fixing split-rail
fences, rustling heifers to the pens, and repairing machinery. And when I
was done work... I walked straight home, every day after that... l walked
straight home. But each time I walked past my special summer place, that
big kidney-shaped farm pond I loved so much, I wished that I was fishing
again.
One day near the end of the summer, I was replacing a flat tire on
a wagon trailer in the barn when I heard my name called out from the
nearby cow pasture. I left the barn and hopped a short fence, walked down
a gully through mint green grass, and came to where Old Man Garges and
Farmer Bob stood twisting wrenches on the engine of a rusting tractor.
“Make yourself useful and give us a hand, boy” the old man said
grumpily.
I shook my head and went over to where they were both hunkered
over the dirty engine—the seventy-year-old muttering incoherently as he
banged a bail peen hammer on the aging carburetor. The air smelled like
diesel fuel and manure as I watched the men work. The motor was
sputtering loudly and I noticed that the clutch and brake were held down
by a cinder-block; the gear was engaged in order to make the repair. As
Farmer Bob went to the toolbox for WD-40 spray, I followed the old man
under the chassis to look at the wires. We were both squeezed between the
gigantic back mud tires and the drivers step—practically underneath the
machine—when the cinder-block rolled off the brake and the three-
thousand-pound John Deer tractor lurched alive and started moving
forward. Without thinking, I grabbed Old Man Garges by his stained gray
t-shirt, ripped him backwards, and we both hit the ground hard. The
heavyset man landed awkwardly on top of me, and the force of the fall
stunned us as the heavy black tire rolled right over his ankle and foot—
crushing both. The farmer let out an awful cry and yelped in pain while
Farmer Bob jumped up on the runaway tractor and killed the engine.
We got to our knees and I put my hand on the wrinkled man's

arm. “Are you okay, Mr. Garges?” I asked.
He pushed my hand from his arm and grunted loudly, “Get off
me, boy!” His weathered face was snarled in agony, but he refused to
show any weakness as he limped towards his approaching son. “Get me to
a hospital.”
All three of us knew that if the ton-and-a-half machine had rolled
over the curmudgeon, he would be dead—flattened in two seconds. None
of us stated the obvious as they left for the emergency room, and I went
home for the rest of the day. I was relieved that no one was killed, but
furious at the farmer's insolence towards me.
The next morning, I woke up in a bad mood and trekked the
twenty minutes to the farm with a frustrated scowl. No one was around
when I arrived so I grabbed my tools and got to work—keeping my head
down all day. At lunch, I sat on a stump and threw bread to a scruffy
white goat which hung around the grain silo. I looked over at the
farmhouse and saw Old Man Garges hobble out onto the front porch on
crutches, and when our eyes met he hardly gave me a nod. I huffed,
grabbed my shovel, and went back to filling potholes up the lane; cursing
the ungrateful farmer for his meanness.
When my workday was done, I picked up my lunch-pail and my
few personal tools and started to head home—knowing in my mind that I
would not be back. I was bitter and alone as I walked down the dirt roads
past the pumpkin patch. As I passed the lonely, forbidden pond, I stood
gazing in the direction of my special spot for a couple seconds before
veering off the path towards the calm water. I touched the log that I had
sat on all summer long while I quietly contemplated life, and there, next to
the fallen tree, at my favorite fishing hole, was my rod with its red and
white bobber—propped up and waiting for me to return.
/ 101
JEFFREY ALFIER
THE CORNER OF MONMOUTH AND BROAD STREETS
Aunt Bernadette kept a newsagent store,

narrow-aisled and poorly lit,
full of what the world called sundries once,
and all those bright magazines
in opaque wraps she forbade me to touch.
I lingered there mornings before school

to watch the regulars who never varied
in their greetings or purchases.
They’d hurry off to double-parked cars,
buses, bosses rumored cruel —
all the world racing a stopwatch.

Even a classmate, who’d grab
the morning paper, rush back to his sick
mom, a brimming hot cup of my aunt’s
coffee sloshing over his fist.
SUMMER LANDSCAPE: GILDFORD, MONTANA
Today wind is calm

gone elsewhere
a Sunday kind of stillness
eight hours done
at the feed mill
greasing bearings
bagging feed
I hoof it ’cross town
toward my trailer on 6th
my woman wearing
our flag in the shape
of a halter more stars
on her breasts
than the Pleiades.
Barriers on side streets
insist block parties
101
run wild tonight.

Now the wind is back
flushing corners
of the mill
like an angry broom
and billowing the skirt
of a Jehovah’s Witness
on a neighbor’s porch.
Between slow sips
of Four Roses
he fends her gospel tract
like everyone today
She forgets him
and the way she stares past
me says she’s headed home
mission and faith
undiminished
already her hair
unpinned and falling.
SECOND STORY
Shelby, Montana
Locomotive. So close it could be an avalanche

pouring through the lobby of my motel
whose thin brown curtains flutter
in and out from a ceiling fan missing a blade.
What divides the rumbling tonnage
from other habits of this town is too fine
to measure. For now, I take myself down
to Alibi Lounge, the barmaid who reserves
the right to cut me off as I waste
time by the fistful. I keep a tab going.
Though I’m hardcore homely, I offer to pay
off my debt with love. But dim on romance,
I’ll never be taken serious. Four stools off,
there’s a lush beating me to the limit,
downing enough shots to burn the throat
of a dragon. She sits in a private boozy
Alfier / 103
Eden, gambling her ass off at video poker.

She claims all is well—won’t have to drive
since she lives upstairs, though the joint’s
got no second story. Exiting the bar behind me,
she pulls a bottle from somewhere, leans
the neck of a fifth my way, says Take a belt,
man, and I do, the effect immediate as flame.
Maybe we hadn’t sunk as much drink
as we’d thought. Maybe there was something
down inside us still left to be broken.
VICTORIA ANDERSON
SPOTTINGS
You spotted the Great Blue Heron and exclaimed it,

knew by its elegant neck folded for flight,
by its flattened, trailing legs.
You pointed, but I did not see its pale wing headlights.
You are a watcher.
Today a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, whose name makes him sound

like a clown bird, which he is not,
crashes into our front window.
You gently upright his stunned body.

At first he doesn’t move but then begins a wobbly, drunken
dance, which is almost comical, except it isn’t.
We believe he is concussed and you bring him a bottle cap filled with
a tiny dollop of cherry jam, a remedy that allows him
to hop and fly raggedly to the dogwood.
There he perches until he swings downward and clings with one claw
before falling. We bury him next to Chester, our much-loved cat,
and think, Odd bedfellows, those two.
This is our ordinary spring. Early April and White-throated Sparrows

appear singing their insistent song, “Oh Sweet Canada.”
But no human can transcribe birdsong—it was years before I understood

that the song Papa Abe whispered into his grandson’s ear,
“Bugee, bugee, bugee,”
was a Cardinal’s song, which I hear as “Sweetie, sweetie, sweetie.”
All this singing, all this watching. Tomorrow on schedule,

the neighbor’s cherry tree will silently explode into blossom.
104
/ 105
JOAN PRESLEY
GIRLS GONE SOBER, MONDAYS @ NOON
We sit in church basements

on metal chairs twisted
around plywood tables illuminated
by fluorescent lights that flicker
a steady Morse code signal of distress.
We arrive by foot or BMW

without men or cigarettes, carry babies
or backpacks, wallets half empty
or fine leather totes.
We drank young, early, late, often

straight from the bottle or softly
out of crystal. Stole Pabst Blue Ribbon
in tall boy cans, Johnnie Walker Red,
the pioneer blend, or anything Gallo—
those handy twist off caps—
from avuncular fellows we pretended
to adore.
We faked I.D.’s, forged checks

and signatures, awoke suddenly
to uncertainty. Wondering where,
asked, Have I called in sick yet?
We are pockmarked or pretty,

Meth-thin, beer-bloated
required by husbands or judges
to be here; the alternative
a jail cell, our mother’s
(if she’ll have us)
or a seedy apartment
we’ll undoubtedly lose, again,
if we don’t make it here
this time.
105
THE WHOLE FOODS EQUATION
1.
If a cowboy drives 63 miles
towards Reno
to purchase local, organic vegetables,
should the person behind him in line
point out
they were probably grown
in Fallon, where he lives?
2.
When red-faced flirtations
between said cowboy
and a flashy-haired cashier
heat up, is it okay
for the person behind him in line
to continue to eavesdrop?
3.
Calculate:
if gas is 25 cents cheaper
per gallon and two potential lovers—
say, the cowboy and the cashier,
drive 126 miles round-trip
five days a week,
will they save money
or lose interest?
4.
If the eavesdropper interrupted the love babble—
which is none of her business
to begin with—
to talk about ancient air quality violations,
government mandated additives and the long-term spike
in local fuel prices, would that change anything?
Presley / 107
5.
If that eavesdropper is still thinking
about environmental presumptive abuse
when she turns on the treadmill
three hours later
in her air-conditioned gym,
can this equation be solved?
JANICE E RODRÍGUEZ
BEST SERVED COLD
A year ago this July fourth, Pauline tossed the tub of bleach and
allowed her mustache to be itself. It was a personal independence day that
unleashed an exhilarating culling of the beauty products from her
vanity—bronzer, tweezers, foundation, gloss.
She opens the compact of the only product that remains, Tequila
Sunset powder blush, peers into the magnifying mirror, and stipples a
glorious spot on each cheek, blazes of color on a face fading into twilight.
One last look in her mirror, and she’s satisfied. She pulls on a pair
of green pants. There was a time when she considered elastic waistbands
to be the devil’s handiwork, one more temptation to stray from one’s diet.
Now she blesses the ease of dressing, the freedom to sit without tugging at
her clothes.
Feet slipped into sensible shoes, she makes for the kitchen.
Something draws her to his room. She turns the knob, inhales the scent of
him, and closes the door. Pauline checks on the salmon, which she set to
cool on the counter before showering. She covers and refrigerates the two
poached filets, one awaiting a dollop of her homemade green goddess
dressing, checks on the lettuce in the crisper and the bottle of rosé on the
counter. She revels in the preparations; she’s been planning for this dinner
guest for weeks.
As she passes through the dining room, she adjusts the container
with his ashes, a repurposed jar of the marshmallow creme he had loved
since childhood, nudging it a little closer to the center of the china
cupboard, his leather Dopp kit at an angle beside it. Last week her sister
Darlene phoned again and told her it was time to let go and find a
columbarium and a real urn, that it had been a year and a half now that
he’s gone, but Pauline said what she always did when Darlene nagged her
about it: “I’m not done yet.”
The last decade of their marriage was strained, ever since the day
he confessed to her that he had been unfaithful with their neighbor Holly.
On his knees before Pauline as she sat numb in a chair in this same dining
room, he blubbered the story of his adultery and begged forgiveness,
leaving her blouse damp with tears, snot, and saliva. He was wrung out,
emptied of guilt, on the road to recovery.
She was not; she would have preferred that he had never uttered a
word of it. She bought heavy curtains for the dining room and bedroom,
108
Rodríguez / 109
replacing the sheers that allowed a view of Holly’s house and yard, where
the hussy still scandalizes the neighborhood by digging and weeding in
clothing too perilously scanty for a woman of her years, her buttocks
straining thin fabric as they thrust skyward, her breasts visible in the
scoop of her sleeveless top, swinging low and loose like a sow’s.
Pauline told herself that day and for months after that she was
glad to be a career woman, glad to be a bookkeeper, in case Dutch left her
and she had to support herself. He never left her. She forgave him. It was
the Christian thing to do and practical, too, given their age and finances.
He accepted her request that he move to the spare bedroom as penance for
his sins.
“I’ll never see her again,” he said.
“She lives next door. You’ll see her all the time, curtains or not,”
she protested.
“Then I’ll never touch her again. I promise.”
She gathers her purse and keys and opens the front door to find
Holly’s black cat on the stoop. Pauline prepares herself for another visit to
the management office, the third this month. Unleashed pets are not
permitted at Goldendale Active Seniors Community. She reaches down
and rubs the cat’s fur, which bristles through the metal mesh of the screen,
and coos, “Did horny Holly lose track of you again?”
Pauline hears a door close with a thwap and knows what she’ll
hear next.
“Binky-kitty!” comes a warble from next door. “Yoo-hoo! Binky-
cat?”
The cat swivels one ear in the direction of home and then meows
at Pauline, who wards it away from the door with her foot as she exits,
locks the door, and begins the first of three laps of the block. The cat trots
after her for a minute before returning to the stoop. Pauline finishes her
walk inside the management office and waits for the receptionist to look
up at her.
“How are we today, Mrs. Heffelfinger?”
“We’re fine, Brittany,” Pauline says.
“And what can we do for you today?”
Pauline counts silently to six as Brittany finishes clicking her
acrylic extensions across the keyboard of her computer. She grunts softly
at the nails, which are as artificial as the tan, the hair color, and the smile.
“We can remind that horrible Holly West woman that unleashed
pets are not allowed at Goldendale,” Pauline says. “I reported it last week
and the week before.”
Brittany clicks to open a document. “What’s the nature of the

incident?”
“We filled this form out before. Twice,” Pauline says.
“Things aren’t always the way we want in life, now are they, Mrs.
Heffelfinger?” Brittany says, nodding in practiced sympathy. “Kind of
animal?”
“Black cat. Do you know how short the life expectancy is for a
cat who’s allowed to roam free?”
“Color?”
“Black.” Pauline bites off the word.
“Distinguishing features, Mrs. Heffelfinger?”
“It’s black. That woman has never followed the rules. Why do we
have them if she doesn’t need to follow them?”
“Are you sure it’s her cat?”
“It has a collar with its name on it: Binky.”
“Anything else, Mrs. Heffelfinger?”
“Don’t come looking for me if something happens to that cat.”
“You have a great day now.”
Pauline bustles back to her driveway, looks for the cat but doesn’t
see it. She drives a mile to the nursing home, signs in, and clips a
volunteer badge to her blouse. She finds the reading cart in its niche
beside the therapy suite and heads down shiny, antiseptic corridors,
orchestrating her twice-weekly exchange of newspapers, superannuated
magazines, and large print books. She intends to keep this program alive
as long as possible, for she never doubts that one day she will be on the
receiving end of it.
This is where Dutch spent his final year. After a decade railing
that old people took up too much space and too many resources, he went
like a lamb into a room with a view of the garden and patiently waited out
the accomplishment of his days. She never pointed out his inconsistency—
how many others had she tolerated in a lifetime together?—but instead
tended the brittle, attenuated husk he had become. She trimmed his
fingernails, adjusted the picture frames on the walls, and spooned
progressively softer food into his mouth until the end.
A quarter of eleven finds her at final stop on her route, Ida’s
room.
“How’s life treating you, Miss Ida?”
“You’ve brought books!”
“I have,” Pauline says. “And time enough to read a spell before
lunch. I have a new book about FDR I’ve kept tucked away for you.”
Rodríguez / 111
“I voted for him in his last election,” Ida says. “Mother was
furious. Went up to my room, packed a bag for me, and told me to get out
of her house and go live off Franklin the First’s gravy train.”
Pauline finds no signs of regret on Ida’s face.
“Let’s save him for another day,” Ida says. “Are there any
romances left on your cart?”
“There are.”
“Read me a smutty one, Pauline.”
Ida closes her eyes and smiles as Pauline reads, lost in the liaison
between a haughty countess and an impertinent blacksmith. Pauline feels
brittle sparks of jealousy all the way to her core. Ninety years old, and Ida
can still be stirred by tales of illicit adventures and true love’s redemption.
Pauline never once had an illicit adventure. From the time her
eyes met Dutch’s at cousin Dottie’s wedding, they had been together, and
she never strayed. When their affections waned, she filled her lonely
nights with a series of dream lovers—matinee idols and handsome heroes
from novels.
She always considered herself a romantic, and her dream lovers
seemed proof of that. But alone in the cottage she once shared with Dutch,
now when she needs them most, they are gone. Night after night she tries
and fails to conjure them, and she wonders what the alchemy was, how
youth, resentment, and loneliness were transmuted into a brilliant,
sustaining landscape.
“How about lunch?” Ida asks. “I’m hungry.”
Pauline wheels her to the nurses’ station, signs them both out, and
takes the ramp away from the framed landscapes and upholstered
furniture that don’t quite disguise the institutional grimness, away to the
cafeteria for staff and visitors.
“A BLT, extra crispy on the toast,” Ida says. “I'm tired of the limp
toast they bring me on my breakfast tray.”
The two women smile and say in unison, “Spineless toast.”
“What’s new in your life?” Ida asks.
“Nothing since last week. My peonies are about to bloom. I’ll
bring some next time. The pastor’s getting over his cold. That same cat is
skulking around the cottage.”
“I think he fancies you,” Ida says.
Pauline coughs iced tea up her nose. “Pastor Dan?”
“The cat. Do they have rice pudding today? Be a dear and fetch
me a bowl.”
Dutch always hated the rice pudding at the nursing home. Pauline
smuggled him in a serving of her own homemade rice pudding once a
week, even going so far as to filch a couple of bowls and covers from his
tray to transport the contraband dessert past the nurses’ station. Pauline
would pass, nodding and smiling, the subterfuge warming her heart in a
way she knew it shouldn't. Success with the rice pudding led to more
elaborate trafficking of his other favorite dishes—whoopie pies tucked
into her pockets, spirals of Lebanon bologna and cream cheese roll-ups
and Fluffernutter sandwiches secreted in her purse and, the most difficult
of all, layered jello salads packaged like Russian dolls inside larger
containers so an insulating layer of air could keep her body heat from
melting the goods.
Dutch said that her cooking was the best in the world and in that,
at least, he never betrayed her. She doesn’t make rice pudding or whoopie
pies or much of anything else anymore. The refrigerator is too big for her
needs, and her and Dutch’s favorite recipes yield far too much food for
one. Weeks go by when dinner consists of nothing more than crackers and
cheese eaten over the sink as she stares out the window. The dishwasher
sits empty. But tonight it’s cold poached salmon and her first dinner guest
since Dutch died.
When she returns to the table, Ida’s eyes are closed, her head
lowered. Pauline waits, watching, and feels a measure of relief to see that
Ida’s chest continues to rise and fall. Dutch scared her like that a few
times, sleeping as she entered his room, the rhythm of his breathing so
slow that panic would send her fingertips tingling.
She wheels Ida back to the room and tries to slip away without
waking her.
“My rice pudding?”
“In the fridge at the nurses’ station with your name on it.”
“Are you going now?” Ida asks.
“See you on Tuesday.”
“Maybe not,” Ida says with a rueful smile. “Maybe I’ll have
crossed the bar and met my Pilot face to face.”
“I’ll see you Tuesday, and I’ll bring you some peonies,” Pauline
says.
She passes Carmen on the way out of the nursing home, Carmen,
the one who knew, the one who answered her questions the Sunday when
the boiler broke down and services were cancelled. With nowhere else to
go, Pauline made an unscheduled trip to the nursing home. She rounded
the corner to see Holly in Dutch’s room, massaging his bare feet, his eyes
Rodríguez / 113
rolled back with pleasure. She retreated without saying a word and
bumped into Carmen.
“What is that woman doing here?” Pauline asked.
“Holly? She’s here every Wednesday evening and Sunday
morning.”
Pauline imagined herself bursting into Dutch’s room, grabbing
Holly by the hair and pulling her out of her chair. But the unseemliness of
such a scene galled her, and she slipped away.
Once at home, a memory began to needle her—a circular glint on
Holly’s wrist, something far too large to be a woman’s watch. Pauline
scoured Dutch’s dresser drawers for his watch without finding it. She dug
through jacket pockets in his closet and rifled his humidor. It wasn’t in his
Dopp kit, either, but wadded inside were dozens of hotel receipts paid in
cash, hotels that Pauline had never visited.
Her buzzing mind kept sleep away that night, and she rehearsed a
hundred ways she’d confront him with the evidence of his infidelity. But
she was cheated of it. Carmen called at four in the morning to say that
Dutch was unresponsive and asked if she wanted them to take him to the
emergency room. A nurse’s voice filtered over Carmen’s words, calling
Dutch’s name again and again, trying to rouse him.
“Don’t take him. He wouldn’t want it.” And she was very nearly
certain that it was true.
Pauline hardly registers the drive from the nursing home to her
cottage. Irritation at the impossibility of assigning a variable to Ida’s life
or Dutch’s or her own, which is simultaneously too short and too long,
lodges at the fringes of her consciousness. She can’t produce an equation,
can’t see an elegant solution. But at least she has dinner plans.
The cat sidles out from behind a bush as she approaches the front
door, key in hand. She meets its green-gold eyes.
“Would you like to come in?” Pauline asks.
She sets the table and pours a glass of wine for herself as the cat
reconnoiters the living room. It rubs against her legs and purrs. Pauline
unbuckles the collar with the name tag and tosses it in the trash.
“A cat like you is worthy of a more dignified name,” she says.
“Are you thirsty?”
She sets a dish of water on the floor.
“I’ll just wash up for supper,” she says. As she passes through the
dining room, she grabs the marshmallow creme jar with the acrid, ashy
smell clinging to it. In the powder room, she unscrews the lid and
retrieves the measuring spoon inside. She scoops a quarter teaspoon of

ashes and dumps them in the toilet.
“Take that, you bastard,” she says, flushing.
Back in the kitchen, she pours the wine, plates the salmon, and
ladles green goddess dressing on one of the fillets. She sets the unsauced
salmon on a plate on the kitchen floor and hears the cat trot in to join her
as she spreads a linen napkin over her thighs.
“Bon appétit, Archimedes. Tomorrow, I think we’ll have tuna.”
/ 115
MARGUERITE GUZMAN BOUVARD

THE LIGHT INSIDE AND OUTSIDE
Gerhard Ter Borch, The knife grinders family
Open windows and an open door

are filled with darkness, not like
the brick wall that is aged and in ruins
but pulsing with light, and the courtyard
is where life happens, the father

working in a corner sharpening knives
and the mother seated on a chair
with her daughter leaning her head
on her lap so she can remove

the lice from her hair, broken
chairs in full view—is where the poor
are celebrated by artists in past centuries,
but today there are no painters

who capture the light and color
of daily life in an inner city neighborhood,
on corners or on the sidewalks
or where the darkness spreads

its mantle while Eric Garner
is selling cigarettes to make a living
on a crowded city street
only to be ambushed by the police

and held in a chokehold until
he died. Today, the pieces of truth that
we live with are captured
by cell phones of passersby

and bystanders, by ordinary
people who can pierce the darkness
with the flick of a finger.
115
LAURA FALSETTI
LET’S ASSUME THIS DOESN’T WORK OUT
I
I live with keys, phone, your hand in my hand
books about mockingjays

yards filled with blue jays
hummingbirds that hover close and study my face.
At night coyotes serenade me

their singular voices united
in lethal harmony.
Sometimes I write poems about sex that are really just poems about dread.
II
If I’d had a daughter I might have named her Rose
or Peony or Chrysanthemum.
Once as a kid I cried

when I found a turtle crushed on the side of the road
his shell a sad mosaic.
I admit sometimes I miss

turntables and summer carnivals
and I’d love to have a conversation on a real phone
my eloquent mouth pressed against a lime green receiver.
III
You ask if I need your help.
All I really need is for you to tell me
where to find the bar soap in Walmart
because I can’t carry this steamer trunk

filled with today’s brutality any longer.
116
Falsetti / 117
I live in fear of losing my children to the music.

I live in a world governed by ignorance and fear.
I fear heights and losing sight of the trail.
Assuming this doesn’t work out

I hope we leave something worthwhile behind.
RHEMA SAYERS
TRANSIENT MAGIC
Leading out from the forest, where trees shine in the bright morning sun
Like multicolored jewels, ruby and citrine, carnelian and topaz,
Among the deep emerald and peridot and malachite of the conifers,
A rain soaked trail runs underneath the highway, where I,
Still half asleep, foggy with a deficiency of coffee,
Am driving to work on a mundane Tuesday morning.
I know that trail. We rode there once, long ago in the spring one year.
It leads under the highway, over a low hill to a lake
Where the trees grow down to the very edge and hang low,
As if to admire their lovely reflections in the still water.
The highway slips beneath the hood, the dotted white lines blurring together,
Feigning a relationship.
I'm listening to a song on the radio, an oldie that
I once knew by heart, but have lost the words over the years.
I am thinking about us.
“And you're looking for your freedom.....Nobody seems to care.....
And you can't find the door.....Can't find it anywhere.”
As a Hummer 2 blasts past me, I see a woman and her horse,

Cantering toward the highway through dark puddles reflecting the citrus
colors of fall.
Her long blonde hair flies out from under her helmet
As she presses her head against the bay's neck,
Gold hair mingling with black.
They flow together, seemingly in time to the music,
Moving lithely through the chill morning.
The bay's hooves churn through the puddles, breaking the perfect reflections,
His breath blowing puffs of white steam like a dragon..
She is dressed as an equestrian, boots so polished that I can see them sparkle,
Her dark brown jacket blending in with the bay's coat.
I have to brake as a minivan cuts in front of me and the magic bubble
bursts and is gone.
118
Sayers / 119
My car, uncaring, inanimate monster that it is, carries me past and

Throws me back into the real world where traffic slows to a crawl
To get past road work on an overpass.
The music fades to a commercial about shoe implants

That I terminate with the touch of a finger.
The only sounds now are those of the engine and tires.
And in my mind I ride a big bay horse through a magical morning
Down a muddy path in a forest where raindrops,
Still hanging on the gem-like leaves,
Throw rainbows through the air like fairies drunk on autumn wine.
RONALD MORAN
ON A NIGHT TWO MONTHS AGO
when I was in a hypnagogic state, I thought

a woman,
maybe my Jane (dead these nine years),
was reading
under a dull floor lamp in my living room,
or
watching TV with the sound turned down,
or
moving ever so gently in the cradled light.

I sat up
in the near dark of my bedroom and called
to her
three times, When are you coming to bed?
I woke
to silence and a solid black space that filled
the air.
120
/ 121
KIT-BACON GRESSITT
COCONUT BOY
Mr. Phan stands and faces the passengers, his small frame mostly
hidden by his seat back, a microphone in his hand. He blinks through
thick, round glasses. Nodding in one direction, his eyes grow large; in
another, bisected. On his periphery, rice fields blur by, water buffalo,
shrines sending the smoke of lemon grass incense to ancestors.
Mr. Phan responds to a question. “No, no wifi on bus. You no
need wifi. Wife you need. Without wife, you die. Without wifi, you live.
No need wifi.” He sits.
The U.S. war veterans chuckle. Their wives, too. They shuffle
their daypacks, water bottles, emergency TP, and cameras, ready to aim
and fire. The wives wonder quietly if this trip will quell their spouses’
nightmares. The vets don’t talk about why they have come.
The bus rolls on, its engine humming to memories. Battle maps
and stories meander from one seat to the next.
Mr. Phan stands again, says he will explain what happened to the
South Vietnamese after the U.S. left and the war against the communists
was lost. “There are three groups,” he says. “First group, ARVN soldiers,
they are ordered to report to local police stations. They are afraid to go,
but they go. They are sent to reeducation camps. Can you guess for how
long? One year, two years, five years, ten years, more. Depends on rank.
Officers spend many years. Some do not return, ever.”
The veterans, in their sixties and seventies, lean across the bus
aisle, laughing through their own stories. “It was Typhoon Con 1,” one of
them says. “That meant wearing a helmet at all times—even to the shitter.
I had a first lieutenant who didn’t want to wear his helmet. Refused to
wear it. I told him to keep that fucker on his head. So the next day he
strutted out for morning ablutions with nothing on but his goddamn
helmet.” “Yeh,” another says, “I hadn’t had R&R in months—one thing
or another. The colonel found out. Ordered me to meet my wife in
Hawaii. Then the typhoon hit and local travel was shutdown. The colonel
said, ‘You’re going anyway. Your wife is waiting for you,’ he said, ‘the
typhoon be damned.’ He even sent his own driver to get me to the
transport plane. Now, that’s a lesson in leadership.”
“Second group,” Mr. Phan continues, “wealthy people. What you
think happens to them? NVA goes through their houses, their businesses,
takes everything valuable. Takes their houses. Sends them to farms to
121
work for people they rob with their privilege. Man owns jewelry store.
Has black chain on door. Soldier scratches chain. Is gold. All man’s
jewelry made into chain. Soldier takes gold. Man goes to reeducation
camp.”
The veterans huddle closer now, standing in the aisle, half again
as tall as Mr. Phan and twice as loud. They support each other on the
rocking bus, swaying to the rhythm, one memory segueing to the next,
vying with Mr. Phan’s microphone. “That major,” one vet looks ready to
spit, “he was a jerk. He insisted on going on patrol. His gunny told him he
shouldn’t be doing that, but he wouldn’t listen. Some guys just hope
they’ll be heroic. He was one of those guys who wanted the glory. He
stood up at the wrong time and took one in the face. He had it coming.
Guy was a jerk.”
“Third group,” Mr. Phan says, “group three is regular people.
Like my family.” He pauses, looks for passenger eyes on him, nods at the
few he finds. “I tell you what happens to us. I am twelve. My father is
teacher. He and my brother stay in our house in Saigon. My mother and I
go to our coconut farm in Me Kong Delta. Small farm. We grow
coconuts, but we are not able to sell them. They go to government. We
cannot sell coconuts, we cannot buy rice. Government gives us too little.
We need rice to live. So we go at night, we take our coconuts and sell on
what you call ‘black market.’ Big risk. Very dangerous. We sell them so
we can eat. We are afraid. But we must eat. We are hungry always.”
The veterans shift. Some of their weary knees can’t take all the
bumping. Some have guts grown large with their accumulated years,
throwing them off balance. A few are slim, as upright as in their youth.
Their stories continue while they pass the Que Son Mountains and
Antenna Valley. “That’s where that SPIE went bad.” “What’s that?” a
wife asks. “SPIE, special purpose insertion and extraction. It was called
‘Thunder Chicken.’ Eighteen November 1970 at sixteen-thirty,” a vet
says. “It was a war cloud,” says another. “Two hundred feet visibility. The
helos came to extract a unit. The birds flew around the long way, fifty feet
above the river from the north and then up Antenna Valley. One bird flew
up the creek, and a team led them in by sound, by radio. Picked up seven
men, hanging on the rope, a cargo harness. The bird turned the wrong
way. We lost fourteen Marines and one Navy corpsman.”
Mr. Phan carries on. “My mother,” he says, “she takes me to visit
my aunt and my cousin, Hung. Hung is boy, my age. He wants to leave
Viet Nam, to escape. Says I come with him. I am not certain. I am afraid. I
do not want to leave my mother. She says I decide. I think I leave. I think
Gressitt / 123
I stay. Hung says, ‘Come with me.’ But I do not know what to do. I
worry. I decide no. Hung leaves, alone. Very, very dangerous.”
The veterans have faded to silence. Settled in their seats, they
look out the windows, retrace death on maps, nod off. The wives take
fuzzy photos of concrete homes guarded by ceramic dogs; sheets and
clothes drying on bushes; honking motorbikes loaded with pigs, building
materials, furniture, people—four on some bikes, even five; a cemetery
with no bodies. It honors the village’s MIAs.
Mr. Phan persists. “A month passes,” he says. “We visit my aunt.
She does not hear from Hung. We say she will hear soon. ‘He is probably
on boat. He writes when he lands,’ we say. Two months, six months. We
visit her again. She does not hear from Hung. She worries and worries. A
year passes. We visit her. My aunt is sick. No message from Hung. She
says he will return to her. More months. We visit. My aunt is dying. She
sees me and sits up. ‘Hung,’ she cries, ‘you are back, my son!’ We never
hear from Hung. He is gone. Maybe boat sinks. We never know. My aunt
dies. My mother says, ‘You must go back to Sai Gon. Get education.
Become man. You cannot be coconut boy forever,’ she says. I go, study to
be English teacher. Must learn communist slogans in English. Now,
today, I here with you.”
Mr. Phan bows his head.
A vet mumbles to a window, maybe to a dream, “They wouldn’t
have what they have today if we didn’t do what we did here.”
Mr. Phan removes his glasses. Wipes his eyes. Returns the
glasses. Smiles. “Now we go to Hoi An,” he says. “Town on coast. Very
nice. Old shipping port. Good shopping.”
MATTHEW LANDRUM
AT THE KALAHARI RESORT
Sandusky, Ohio
No desert here, from the turnpike to the lake, flat snowscape,

cornstalk stubble through drifts. Then the resort, suddenly,
in the fields of no-where. Folly in the architectural sense—false

rockfaces, an indoor ocean, jungle façades swathed in ice.
Though sunbound in this suburb of Sandusky, we nearly froze

waiting for the bellman to bring the luggage trolley. Our room had a view
and a balcony overlooking the paddock of the tourist zoo

where emus and zebra stamped and paced in the Ohio winter.
We swam in timed tides, tepid and chemic, full of children’s shouts

and slaps of hands. Chlorine sweat beaded great glass walls
which rose to vertiginous waterslides. We grew drunker

by subtraction, dehydrated, speech and stars slurring in the shift
of rising steam from the outdoor hot tub. Venus stood alone
beside a perfectly halved moon. Of bikini nights and great glass domes:
an impersistence of memory. But I woke to day through the curtains

which I pulled aside to let in the light. You stirred in your sleep.
In the paddock below, two zebra foals were frisking in the fresh snowfall.
This is all they have ever known; they must think it the natural world.
124
/ 125
RICHARD N BENTLEY
INLAND
Doubling daily
the symmetry shifts.
The surge flows up the beach
into the waterway,
then the stream runs out
into the bay.
Daily the birds
rise and settle,
the gulls ascend
on a swift wind.
Half asleep, I dream—
of water birds
who used to cruise in the salt grass
If time were like the tide,
we would surge into the future
then rush back into the past
Doubling daily
our dreams.
125
RICHARD LUFTIG
HOW AUTUMN PREVAILS
My confidence in
this summer erodes
day by foreshortened day.
But October knows how

to handle things. It sends
me off to do some chores,
anything really: seal windows,

rake the browning grass,
clean out mud-filled eaves.
The what doesn’t really

matter if the only thing
left is when. In the woods
beyond the barn, the first,

aged leaves have offered
their lives before
their time; brave scouts

for others soon to follow.
Who knows: perhaps
it a relief for them

to lay down their lives.
But still, the stubborn
birches remain clothed,

their limbs holding on
for dear life until a hawk
wind, a cold rain, hits

like a punch, telling
all of us we must awake
126
Luftig / 127
and learn that most simple

fact, the one about how, too
soon, this show will be complete.
PATRICK THERON ERICKSON

THE 1968 MEXICO CITY OLYMPICS
A RETROSPECTIVE
Two men
mounted on the medal podium
fists upraised
clenched, black-gloved
a black scarf
black socks
(and no shoes)
black power
black unity
black pride
and black poverty
in racist America
an historic moment
for the Olympics
for the U.S.A.
and for the Civil Rights Movement
iconic
for millions of viewers
this act of civil disobedience

tame by today’s standards
but for two Olympians

suspension and banishment
from the Olympics
and at home
death threats against them
and their families
128
Erickson / 129
lingering consequences
for two aging former sprinters
who now coach high school track
honored in 1998
to commemorate
the 30th anniversary
of their protest
now so much water

under the bridge
and the bridge burned

behind them.
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
Something
of the gray
of dawn
and the green wood
the gray fatigues

and the corpses
in them
the mud
and the blood spatter
something
in the explosion
of the unexposed roadside
improvised explosive device
something
in the destruction radius
at the point of detonation
the point
of greatest impact
that the remains

fit nicely
in the cardboard box

they are shipped home in
posthaste
parcel post.
/ 131
MATTHEW MENDOZA
SHORT PATH TO ECSTASY
I ignored the music of the delicate fingers

that danced across the hard pew
and found my heavy hands.
Instead, I focused on the gilded pain —
inflicted or self-induced —
that sluiced the saints
through the narrow paradise
of sunlight glinted glass
while the rest of us
mumbled in the shadows.
The same ache
inspired my custom St. Christopher —
a clumsy keychain
converted to heavy medallion.
The weight wore skin from flesh
and slapped my chest with every step.
Still stiff in church clothes,

she caressed the seeping scar
coiled around my neck
and indulged my stationary penance.
In the shade of a staid oak,
she spooned me pieces of cool melon
between sips of her warm mouth.
As cumbia filtered over the neighbor's fence,
temptation was too much to resist.
We moved.
Our shared sweat scalded my raw skin.
She gripped my St. Chris in her fist,
Pain and desire braided
like our twirling breath,
like the rope of my broken necklace,
like the golden weight
of our swaying bodies.
131
STEPHEN R ROBERTS
SENIOR CITIZEN RÉSUMÉ
For the past several years I’ve been a member

of an underground hippie commune of semi-retired
forklift drivers who spend time hoisting ideas into the air.
I’ve only recently started seeking job security again

after suffering a metallic-flavored vision, complete
with previews of upcoming features and a cartoon.
Up until now I’ve kept myself occupied and financed

in retirement by coasting through high-end neighborhoods
on my scooter with a placard that reads, Pay Up or Die.
The police recently endorsed a program specifically

aimed at my activities, placing stop-sticks along
the walks I use for general exercise and relaxation.
This curtails my income capabilities, resulting in an attempt

to enter the youth-contaminated job market head-on,
if I’m allowed to wear my reprogramed protective headgear.
The helmet ensures the wellbeing of my data, knowledge,

and overall general wisdom, including details of a time machine,
set on back-track, if the kids haven’t fiddled with the frequencies.
NATURE WITH MUD HENS
Sad, when getting close to nature means

staring at a half dozen mud hens floating
on a flooded field while broken cornstalks
jut out to snag empty plastic bags
that blow across the surface like wisps
of cloud over rippling, stressed-out waters.
132
Roberts / 133
It’s difficult to turn into part of it all,

as in, all of nature, while a two-tone,
tri-axle dump truck barrels up behind
and you see the distracted driver fiddling
with his smart phone, tapping another
message to some long-lost loved one.
Vultures still hang up here in the sky,

like parts of a primeval, cockeyed mobile.
They watch for fresh or rancid roadkill
on the exit ramp of a four lane interstate.
Reflections on the natural order of things
play over the crazed silver of our mirrors.
PHILIP ST. CLAIR

ASTRAL CIGARETTES
In the hours before sunrise, a cloying, acrid smell –

cotton candy under a circus tent,
shotgun smoke in a tangle of honeysuckle –
seeps into our upstairs bedroom.
At first I thought that a passing truck needed to be tuned,
or that someone across town
was burning garbage, but now I’m beginning to believe
it marked a visit from a spirit
who had the need, for reasons of its own, to show me
one of its earthly consolations
and have me remember one of mine.
Perhaps it was Eddie DeWeese, a janitor
with me on night shift, who littered our locker-room ashtray
with Pall Malls smoked down
to half-inch roaches, who was, as Lyndon Johnson said,
caught in the tentacles of poverty,
who developed emphysema and could no longer swing
his thirty-two-ounce mop,
who was forced to retire at sixty and died soon after,
whose wife couldn’t afford a casket
so the undertaker laid him out on an aluminum deck chair
and tucked a blanket around him;
perhaps it was Lula Mullins, who sold us her little house
in the hills of Carter County,
who smoked cowboy-killer Marlboros from the red box,
who would threaten lawsuits
on anyone who touched off her hair-trigger temper,
who would tell everyone who’d listen
that the doctors said she had a sooder-tumor in her brain
and a been-again tumor in her breast,
whose husband had her shipped from the hospital bed
to the local crematory
ten minutes after she died—no calling hours or funeral,
no obit in the paper;
134
St. Clair / 135
perhaps it was Old Man Allen, who lived three doors down
on the street where I grew up,
whose Jehovah’s Witness daughter made him an exile
in his own house
and had him spend all his waking hours on the steps
between kitchen and cellar
where he chain-smoked hand-rolled cigarettes that bronzed
two fingers of his right hand
up to the knuckle, where he wheezed with a rattle
laced with heavy phlegm,
where he chewed Luden’s Mentholated Cough Drops
for his angry throat.
I bought my first pack of smokes
just after I turned thirteen at Mac and Al’s gas station
on Parkman Road. I hung around
until Mac and Al went down in the oil-change pit
and then I slipped a quarter
into the chrome-plated slot, pulled out the red knob,
heard a soft thud
in the steel tray at my waist. I grabbed my Lucky Strikes
and ran, and when I stopped
I found three pennies change under the cellophane.
And forty years later,

soon after I was able to kick a two-pack-a-day habit,
I found a single cigarette,
king-sized and filter tipped, unlit and immaculate,
lying on the fresh black asphalt
right by the door of my car. I knew at once it was a test,
that whoever laid it there
would be watching from an invisible vantage,
waiting for me to snatch it up
and light it in the privacy of my car, but I did not:
I stepped over it and drove home,
hoping that someone in the legions of the dead
would rejoice in the victory.
STEVEN SHEFFIELD COOKE

BAIT AND SWITCH
He knew he shouldn’t be here again so soon, but it wasn’t going

to hurt anybody, so why not? He stayed in his quiet little eddy, a passive
observer in the midst of chaos. A cool stream of conditioned air blew the
whispers of his hair around, bringing with it the smell of cinnamon-spiced
baked goods from the food service area. He stepped aside as a trim young
mother clickatter-chattered past with her shopping basket. A wheel spun
around wildly as she fought to control the stubbornly vibrating vehicle. In
the child seat, a little girl wearing a short dress with bright yellow spots
staged a losing battle with her ice cream; trying to eat it before it dripped
down her arm.
Rigby waited for them to bluster on past, vainly trying to catch
the eye of the little one. He loved busy stores. He wished there were some
way he could stay here forever.
Off to the left, competing discords announced the location of the
electronic keyboard displays. On the right side, a mixed concert of music
blared from dozens of speakers as the wide variety of stereo systems was
put through their paces. Rigby stumbled through this audio obstacle
course, drawn forward by the flashing patterns on the video screens.
Rigby smoothed the waistband of his best pants, and then fiddled
with the ends of a narrow tie that was still too wide for his diminished
frame. Satisfied that he looked his best, Rigby shuffled forward, discreetly
avoiding the stacks of colorful merchandise. Old bones take a long time to
heal.
Rigby advanced past the accusing eyes of the camcorders,
dismissing their complicated mechanisms with a quick glance as he
moved deeper into the department. He ran a wrinkled finger over the
smooth black finish of a videocassette recorder. This area was a brick-
stack of the latest units. The winking numbers on their digital displays
called out to him in friendly greeting. He now knew most of the fancy
terminology. He wasn’t exactly sure what some of it meant, but he knew
how to work most of the words into a conversation to keep the clerks
talking longer. He stretched his neck to get a better look. Nope, it was not
going to happen today. Today he would look for something else. He
turned away.
Off in the corner, in the midst of a brightly lit swirl of activity,
was a huge service desk. Swarming from its jaws was a score of frenzied
136
Cooke / 137
clerks, buzzing back and forth like angry hornets. At one side of the
counter, a tall blonde-haired supervisor argued with a couple over some
kind of refund they wanted. Next to them, a squat redheaded saleslady
skillfully completed a credit deal for a young man and his very pregnant
wife. The counter was awash with busy salespeople convincing their
customers to part with their hard-earned cash.
Inching over to the number machine, Rigby snagged a ticket. He
hummed the music of Seventy-Six Trombones quietly to himself as he
leaned on the counter, content to just watch things for a while. All too
quickly, a clerk called out his number.
“Yes sir, what may I help you with today?”
Rigby squinted at the nametag. “Well, Kevin, I want to see if you
can set me up with a television set. What can you show me today? I want
something that’s big enough for these old eyes to see, but not so
complicated I can’t turn it on.”
Before they could move away from the counter, an agitated clerk
tapped Kevin on the shoulder and whispered in his ear. Kevin nodded to
the clerk, and then asked, “Would it be okay if I answer their question
first?”
“Sure, why not? I’m in no hurry.”
After solving the crisis, Kevin returned. “Now, where were we?
You wanted a television. What size were you interested in?” He led Rigby
through a question and answer ritual as they walked around the television
displays. Rigby enjoyed this stage of the process the best.
“This set here looks pretty good, what can you tell me about it?”
Kevin responded with a list of features as he pushed buttons on
the remote to show how Rigby could enjoy the thirty-two inch set at
home.
“Boy that looks really fancy. It reminds me of the first radio we
had in our house, way back during the Depression. I can still remember
that first show we listened to after supper. My father was so proud of the
reception. It had taken him most of the afternoon to rig the antenna. He
kept fiddling with the tuner that whole evening. That was some radio we
had. It was even bigger than this television is.”
Kevin nodded and smiled politely as Rigby rambled on. At first,
he had asked a few questions and seemed genuinely interested as Rigby
wandered off into anecdotes and past experiences. As the afternoon wore
on, Kevin started fighting to keep focused on the sale. Rigby was an
expert on these sidetracking intrusions.
All too quickly, they had reached the point where Rigby would be
forced to make a decision. They had looked at every set possible and
Kevin’s sales pitch was starting to run down. He was still having a hard
time dodging the detours Rigby was throwing out, but his patience was
starting to thin.
In the middle of a discussion about yet another large screen
television, Kevin interrupted himself to ask, “This one has a lot of great
features, but it’s not that much different than the last few we’ve looked at.
Have you at least thought about what you want?”
Rigby smiled, at least on the outside. He hated it when it came to
this point. The true give-away was the frequency with which the clerk
checked his watch. He let Kevin know he was ready to finally purchase
the large console unit they had looked at a few minutes ago. He knew
from experience that the store paid the clerks a better commission on the
larger sets. It was only fair they get some compensation for the time he
made them spend. That was one reason he sought out this type of store.
The personal touch had started to disappear from the Mal*Marts and
warehouse clubs.
Using every bit of skill he had, Rigby was able to drag it on for
only a few more minutes. Kevin’s responses were coming out flat. It was
time. Rigby pointed at the expensive set and said, “Well, you talked me
into it. I’ll take that one. Go ahead and write it up for me.”
The relief Kevin tried to hide hurt a bit. Was providing a little
entertainment for a lonely old man such a burden? They walked back to
the counter to finalize the sale.
“You remind me a lot of my brother.”
“Really?” Answered Kevin. He dug through the stacks of
paperwork and came up with a pad of sales slips. “How were you
planning to pay for this, sir?”
Rigby sorted through his plastic money. The wallet was stuffed
with membership cards and old pictures. He pulled out a shiny silver card
and handed it over. “This should cover it.”
“Platinum, huh? You don’t see many of these.”
“Well, I don’t have much family left, but I’ve still got my good
credit. Yep, you sure look like my brother Bobbie. I’d sure like to be
whupping him at checkers again. He was never any good, but still, up
until that last heart attack…”
Absorbed in the paperwork, Kevin looked up, “I’m sorry, I didn’t
quite catch that.”
“Never mind, it doesn’t matter. I was just talking about some of
the people I used to know. When you get to my age, most of your friends
Cooke / 139
exist only in your memory.”

Kevin finished the contract and rushed to finalize the sale. They
arranged for a delivery later that afternoon. “Thank you very much Mister
Rigby, give me a call if there is anything else I can help you with.”
“You just forget about that mister stuff. ‘Roy’ works just fine.
Thanks, I might just call you at that.” He took his receipt and shambled
off toward the exit.
Bright sunlight beat down. Roy flipped the shades down over his
tri-focals and stepped outdoors. He stayed at the store entrance for a
moment. He wished he had his cane, but he tended to forget where he left
it. He drew his shoulders back and started walking through the parking
lot, carefully placing his feet so the ridges on the soles of his shoes didn’t
catch in any cracks.
He should just about make it to the bus stop in time for the next
ride. He hoped there would be somebody nice waiting on the bench.
No such luck. He was alone at the curb. At least the bus was on
time. He squeezed past the hissing doors and flashed his bus pass at the
driver. “Hey-ya Gus, how’s it going? You run over any cranky old ladies
today?”
“Not yet, Mister Roy, but if you want to try me out, why don’t
you go ahead and step down in front of my bus? I gotta meet my quota
somehow.”
“No thanks, Gus. These old legs have moved me around enough
for today. Just take me home, please.”
“Sure thing, Mister Roy.”
The seat behind Gus was already taken by a shabbily dressed
lady, with her laundry stacked neatly in a basket beside her. She fussed
ineffectually with a constantly running nose. “What a waste,” thought
Rigby, the best seat on the bus, and it was taken by somebody that
wouldn’t even say two words to the driver. Conversations with Gus made
the trip seem quick.
Roy tottered on down the aisle, past the only other person on the
coach, a young girl with her face pasted into a dog-eared paperback book.
This was going to be a long ride.
Once nestled in his seat, Rigby watched the scenery blur on past.
He wished he could have timed the trip for later in the afternoon, when the
bus was crowded enough that someone would have been forced to sit
close enough to talk to, but he had to be home in time for the delivery van.
Up ahead, long fields of new and used cars lined up in dazzling displays.
Roy remembered many long hours spent in conversations with the
salespeople there. Nobody knew how to talk like a peddler of used cars.
Roy stood up, almost trancelike, reaching to pull the signal cord.
Then he remembered the cruel trick the government had pulled on him
last year. A faceless and nameless clerk in the Department of Motor
Vehicles had decided that Roy Rigby was too old to drive. Without so
much as an interview or skill test, they terminated his right to operate a
car, forever. More than fifty years of accident-free driving were flushed
down the tubes with one callous act. Without a license, he couldn’t very
well go out and buy a car. He knew; he had tried. A license was one of the
first things they asked for.
It wasn’t that he minded public transportation. At first, Roy had
forgotten how easy it was to meet people on crowded buses and at bus
stops. He fondly remembered the old red cars that used to buzz folks
around before those concrete freeway tapeworms infested the landscape.
He watched out the window as dozens and dozens of solitary drivers
cruised past the bus. They were alone because they wanted to be.
A small tear crept into Rigby’s eye as he watched the last of the
“Boulevard of Cars” slip on past. Standing in the midst of all that polished
metal were dozens of salespeople, all waiting for somebody to walk up
and talk with them.
The bus was now trudging its way past the long acres of carefully
tended grass in the Sleepy Forest Cemetery. Roy looked over the expanse
of grass and marble. Out there, by an old oak tree, was the final resting
place of his beloved Eleanor. Rigby mourned the fact that their union had
never produced any offspring, more than anything else. Once he passed
on, there would be no more branches left of the Rigby Family Tree.
Not that it really mattered. Grandparents and parents were long
gone. His only sibling, Robert Junior, had died unmarried years before.
Even the last of his friends were out there laying in the parallel rows with
his Eleanor. Rigby figured it wouldn’t be too much longer before he
joined them for a nice, long nap.
Roy glanced out the windows without seeing the scenery move
past. As the bus neared his street, he reached out and snagged the bell
cord. He fought through the doors as the bus swooshed to a halt. He
waved to Gus as the bus fumed away.
Walking down the tree-shrouded lane, saying a cheery hello to the
few he passed, Roy paid close attention to the cracks in the sidewalk. He
didn’t want to trip and fall on the same stretch of concrete he had once
skated on in his youth. He stopped frequently to inspect the flowers his
neighbors were cultivating in their gardens. He would offer some
Cooke / 141
gardening advice to the unhearing owners that were locked away in their
homes.
Roy watched as a pair of young men walked from house to house
along the other side of the street. Their well-groomed appearance and
quiet manners contrasted with their age. He hoped they had not already
tried his door. Religious people were always more than willing to spend
time with a dedicated listener; especially one they thought could be
converted before his last days were at hand.
Roy was almost to his own lawn before he noticed the traffic jam
of delivery vans in his driveway. He wrinkled his hands together. “No!
No! No! This is all wrong. Not all at once.”
He wobbled up to the house, only to be assaulted by an
assortment of clipboards. The next half hour was filled with frantic
activity as he supervised the unloading of a brand new washing machine,
console television, and convertible couch. The whole situation was tiring
and most unsatisfactory.
When they had all finished unloading, and the trucks were driving
off down the street, Rigby collapsed on his new couch to catch his breath.
“Now, why couldn’t they have all come at their proper times? That way
they would have had time to stop and share a cup of coffee. Now I have
all those extra donuts that are going to go stale.”
A long while later, Roy levered up from the couch and shuffled
off down the dark hallway. He stopped to open the door and look into the
vast expanse of his three-car garage. At one time, it had been the roosting
spot for his fleet of frequently purchased automobiles. Now it was stuffed
with boxes and packing crates that held dozens of appliances and furniture
he had little use for. The left side alone held dozens of television sets.
Behind the TV’s were stacks and stacks of unused VCR’s and other
electronic gadgets.
One of the benefits of a long and productive career in business
was his inflated bank balance. Since he had no one else to benefit from
this idle wealth, Roy used it to make himself happy in the best way he
could think of.
Roy turned off the light and closed the door. He was going to
have to get rid of all these things somehow. It was just getting too
cluttered. Maybe he should have a garage sale. The thought of dozens of
people driving up to see him wrinkled his face into a wide grin. As he
shuffled off to call the newspaper and set up the arrangement, his smile lit
up the whole room.
MICHAEL CERAOLO
FREE SPEECH CANTO XXXIII
April 26, 1983

Bethel High School in Pierce County, Washington
A school assembly where students spoke
in favor of candidates for student offices
Matthew Fraser,
a senior,
showed
even seniors could be sophomoric
by using some double entendres in his speech,
though
he used no profanity or sexual slang,
and
his candidate later won
The school's rule:

“Conduct
which materially and substantially
interferes with the educational process
is prohibited,
including the use
of obscene or profane language or gestures”
The day after Fraser's speech

some teachers complained of its content,
though
none alleged any disruption
The school suspended Fraser for three days,
though
they allowed him to return after two,
and
took his name off the ballot
as a candidate for commencement speaker,
though
his fellow students elected him anyway
Fraser sued,
and won in two lower courts
142
Ceraolo / 143
In the spring of 1986

the Supreme Court heard the case of
Bethel School District No. 403 v. Fraser,
and
on July 7, 1986 ruled against Fraser,
saying
“schools much teach by example
the shared values of a civilized order”
(whether or not the rule was reasonable,
whether or not Fraser actually violated the rule,
no longer mattered,
if it ever did,
when
weighed against the opinion
that someone was being uncivil
And
what students were allowed to say
was greatly diminished,
because
free speech
“must be balanced against
the society's countervailing interest
in teaching students the boundaries
of socially appropriate behavior”
FREE SPEECH CANTO XXXIV
May 1983
Hazelwood East High School
Hazelwood School District
St. Louis County, Missouri,
and
The Spectrum,
the student newspaper
has been read by Howard Emerson,
the paper's advisor and a journalism professor,
and submitted to principal Robert Reynolds
for final approval before printing
The principal nixes two stories:

one on teen pregnancy,
one on the effects of divorce,
that contain interviews with some
directly affected by those issues,
even though pseudonyms were used
School policy:
“school sponsored student publications
will not restrict free expression or diverse viewpoints
within the rules of responsible journalism”
and
Cathy Kuhlmeier, the paper's editor,
and
two reporters sued the school
They lost at trial,

won on appeal,
and
the best-of-three was settled
at the Supreme Court
(though,
as we have seen before
and will see again,
you can win one out of three
and still win the match,
if
that one win is the Supreme Court)
Whizzer White whizzed all over

the students’ rights,
saying
“A school need not tolerate
student speech that is inconsistent
with its basic educational mission,
even though
the government could not censor
similar speech outside the schools”
Ceraolo / 145
The dissent said it better:

“the case before us aptly illustrates
how readily school officials (and courts)
can camouflage viewpoint discrimination
as the ‘mere’ protection of students
from sensitive topics”
and
“The young men and women of Hazelwood East

expected a civics lesson,
but
not the one the Court teaches them today”
FREE SPEECH CANTO XXXV
January 24, 2002

Joe Frederick and some others
unfurl a banner saying
BONG HiTS 4 JESUS
(another instance
of sophomoric attempts at humor
even though Frederick is a senior)
This is done at a “school-authorized event” :
the watching of the Olympic torch relay
as it passes through town
(that this pseudo-event is far from
“education outside of the classroom”
is underscored by the missed opportunity
to educate the students and others
that the torch relay was a Nazi invention)
Frederick is suspended by principal Deborah Morse

and the suspension is upheld twice,
first by the school superintendent
and then by the full school board
A year later,
Frederick loses his suit at the trial level
Three years after losing at the trial level,

he wins at the appellate level,
unanimously
The next year he loses at the Supreme Court

by a five-to-four vote,
the statist majority
focusing more on the ‘drug reference’
than the issue of free speech,
again
genuflects to alleged order:
“authority to determine
what manner of speech in the classroom or in school assembly
is appropriate”
Sense from the dissent:
“This is a nonsense message,

not advocacy
The Court's feeble effort to divine its hidden meaning
is strong evidence of that”
and dangerous,
because
“the principle it articulates has no stopping point”
FREE SPEECH CANTO XXXVI
As the 1890s wound down,

and ground down those caught
in its economic depression,
the issue of bimetallism,
alternately hailed as savior
and reviled as demon,
was front and center in politics
And college professors, especially
those in political science,
could be expected to have and express
their opinions on the subject
James Allen Smith of Marietta College
was one of those professors,
Ceraolo / 147
and
he was fired at the end of the
1896-1897 term
for “anti-monopoly teachings,”
fired
along with some others as possible cover,
“all of whom happen to have voted against McKinley”
Smith blamed Charles G. Dawes,
current Comptroller of the Currency
(his reward for helping elect McKinley),
past president of two gas companies,
and
Marietta native and alum,
for his dismissal,
though,
of course,
absent an incriminating paper trail
it couldn't be proved conclusively
Smith remained an advocate of bimetallism,

and
began searching for his next professorship
The University of Missouri
was willing to open a position for him,
but
that position was going to be opened
by firing a current professor
who believed in monometallism,
and
Smith refused to do unto others
what had been done unto him
Rare indeed
MEREDITH HOLMES
WHAT IS ZEN?
I tell a friend that a local publisher

is considering poems for a Zen anthology.
I say I know next to nothing about Zen
so I won’t be submitting any poems.
“There are poets around here,” I say
“who have studied Zen for decades.
Some have even lived in monasteries.
Hair once dark is now white
and still they ponder the question,
What is Zen?”
“Oh, I know what Zen is,” says my friend.
“Zen is clean lines and no clutter.
Your living room is kind of Zen
because there’s no TV.
Remember those square black plates I have?
They’re Zen.
I’m sure I have a Zen poem around somewhere.”
This conversation irritates me
but I try to help my beginner’s mind
by standing on the edge
of a cliff above the ocean
where understanding arrives like a tide
surging forward, drawing back
my friend on the crest of one wave
me in the trough of another.
MIXED EMOTIONS
The tea ceremony was today;

I go back and forth.
It was hard to sit still, but at the end
we all got a tiny piece of candied ginger.
I did like the part about poets
whose job it was to name varieties of mist.
I remember only three:
148
Holmes / 149
The kind that rolls through the forest

like an occupying army.
The kind that darts from tree
to tree like a herd of white deer.
The kind that hangs over open fields
long sleeves barely moving.
ELECTION JOURNAL: NOVEMBER 9, 2016
EVEN THE TREES
I wake early to a strong, cold wind

and rain, which I love, but not this morning.
Today I hate everything–wind, roof, trees, rain
and my street and town, an enlightened
Arcadia, whose emblem is an upright tree.
Here, just yesterday I watched
oak leaves in a trance of sunlight, settle
to earth undisturbed, except by a faint
melody, which I could just make out:
the last days, the last days of the Republic.
SUELLEN WEDMORE
CARAVAN
─A cento
On April 29, a group of 50 people, most of them families from Honduras

and El Salvador, attempted to enter the United States across the US-
Mexico border from Tijuana. They were the first delegation from a
“caravan” of about 300 Central Americans who had traveled through
Mexico, organized by the humanitarian nonprofit Pueblos sin Fronteras.
We walked hundreds of miles

through pathways rough & muddy,
our shadows pounding

against the drumskin of hopelessness─
a young man was wearing a packboard to carry a baby:
the risks, though great, were not too great

to take for our families :
living is a taste we really want for them.
You have to understand home

was the mouth of a shark,
the barrel of a gun.
We took seven roads to get here
& almost died three times, dreaming

only of America.
Under all the speaking & crying,
do you understand what thirst is?
We arrived to meet ourselves at last,
150
Wedmore / 151
but when we met the man

whose face looked like the future,
snow fell inside us; we heard
the voice of young chickens all over our flesh.

What race will you speak, being American?
The dead are more dead each night;
what does it profit you to be cruel?
This poem is a collage of lines from the work of John Ashbury,

Charles Bukowski, Robbie Gamble, Muriel Rukeyser, Yosef
Komunyakaa, Debra Leipziger, Warsan Shire, Mark Strand, &
Tomas Transtromer.
MITCHELL UNTCH
IMMIGRATION
A man sits in front of a window, folds linen napkins,

takes the cloth and with the warm spade of his hand
and smooths the curled edges, the untamed wrinkles
spread out as if he were lying down
a meticulous rendering of a gentlemen’s evening wear—
cufflinks, tie, slacks across the warm,
unruffled silk surface of a bed,
a shirt freshly pressed for someone else to slip into,
someone other than him to wear,
a pair of shoes at the foot of the bed, twice polished.
With one hand he folds the napkin in half,
makes their corners flush, smooths the white
surface once more, lifts the napkin, sets it aside,
while the free hand retrieves the next,
a routine of hours, of years.
He yawns, re-enacts each step of his ambition
for guests who will arrive
in the evening, himself, a man in his fifties,
early sixties, dark hair, darker eyes
with something of a larger world inside them,
a waiter for the dinner crowd that will soon
wait to be served as he spreads plush white napkins
over their laps while their hands
undo what he has spent a lifetime of afternoons doing.
He will bend politely from his heels;
suggest Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs;
list evening specials with impeccable diction
having by the end of the evening
served everybody but himself.
You could look at it that way I suppose,
the exaggerated pleasure of those
waited on by those waited by.
Or you could look to notice the undisturbed smile
on his face, the silver rivers he swam in as a child,
the plates in his hands, moons
his mother gave him, a white tablecloth—
152
Untch / 153
tiny glass stars that long and silent

fell over a country he left for a better one,
the little money he makes to send back home
something of himself
falling through the dark round circles of his eyes.
ENCOUNTER
I wonder if he sees me from his balcony

where I am looking up at him though trying
not to, watching him from the street
as he contemplates the end of his cigarette,
perhaps remembering the arms of a lover
or rediscovering something about himself
that he remembered from childhood
and never entirely gave up on.
He has the look of entering into something—
a hop on a bicycle, ripping figure-eight’s in his driveway,
eight, nine years old sailing a kite
through an ocean of blue and white air.
A coffee cup broods near his mouth.
Sunlight slides down the roof of his balcony,
breaks over his shoulders like a waterfall.
No sound appears to squander
the morning’s thrift of silence,
no barking dogs, no songs from birds,
all the early morning traffic housed
and just the grass waking
and trees tuning their limbs.
His hair shines through the tips of his fingers,
flies open like curtains, apart, his hand through it,
the bright parting,
what wind does through an opening,
or how one might imagine rain sorts air. .
I envision him with a closet full
of shoes darkly smiling,
silk shirts he never wears around the house,
saves for afterhours, last calls.
That there’s an unmade bed
and a towel drying on a hook hung

near a shower door that still wears
his shape. That his breath
is a sphere of light
travelling up through his body,
spun out of the crown of his head.
TWIN
Not much has changed over the years

There’s the same tree in the yard
The wind blows through the same tire
The same rope we climbed
There’s the same field we ran in
Our map to our summer country
The same house, porch, the same steps
We leapt afterschool with our books
And our seasons of knowledge
There’s our father’s truck up on blocks
Sage and aster scaffold its rusted exterior
He tinkers with it like the weather
Tries to turn the engine over
The posts for the laundry line, the hive
of clothespins, a wire of Sunday
shirts, overalls, aprons, kitchen towels
Sheets snap and howl,
Wipe off the last hour of a late heat in May
In the garage, our bicycles
side by side like an old married couple
Something of ourselves in them
One doesn’t move without the other
The cat. The dog. The neighbor’s horses
Are all still shaking their heads
Not much has changed over the years
Looking up from my bed at the ceiling
A world I grow into at night when I can’t close my eyes
And I think I’ve forgotten something
Of who I was and where I came from
What brought me to think about you
Untch / 155
What day of the week it was

What hour you died
Every spring we ever knew
Rubbed off on our face
Spilled down the front of our clothes
TERRY SANVILLE
OLD DON QUIXOTES
After heart surgery and six days in the hospital, my wife entered
the rehab center where she joined a dozen patients, many recovering from
strokes. Most days, I ate communal meals with them in the stuffy dining
hall, a room congested with wheelchairs, walkers, and IV stands. Paul sat
at our table.
He looked like an old lithograph of Don Quixote, minus his trusty
sidekick, Sancho. While no windmills loomed on the rehab center’s
horizon, I suspected he tilted after plenty of them in his mind.
One day, he wore a T-shirt that had “Woodstock” printed across
his chest.
“Did you go to the music festival at Woodstock?” I asked.
He stared at me dully and shook his head.
“That’s cool. I read somewhere that millions have claimed to have
attended while the actual number was something like 400,000.”
He remained silent. A plastic tube snaked from his pajamas to a
urine bag attached to his wheelchair. His eyes absorbed light, like mini
black holes, staring out through two sets of glasses.
I’d brought a cheap classical guitar with me, figured I’d play
mellow music to sooth the minds of the patients…and my own. Being
near sick old people, even though I’m one of them, made me self-
conscious and I’ve always felt like an intruder in those places. But as I
played my version of flamenco, classical, and folk music, the room
quieted and I knew those old ears could still hear.
Without prompting, Paul said, “I owned a Goya once. But I
ruined it when I put steel strings on it.”
I nodded. “Yeah, a lot of people did that. I owned one of them
too, but mine was built to handle the tension.”
“I had a Harmony 12-string.”
“Me too.”
I’d discovered an ageing guitar guy. They’re everywhere. He
stared at my brown spotted hands as I played. The warm notes from the
nylon strings bounced around the dining room where conversations had
dropped to a low rumble.
At a pause in my impromptu recital, Paul murmured, “Best damn
concert I’ve ever heard.” He laid his forehead on the table, arms and
hands outstretched, palms down, like bowing before an unknown god. I
156
Sanville / 157
couldn’t tell if he still sucked in breaths. A nurse pushing a computer

stand brought him a tiny paper cup filled with pills.
I leaned forward and focused on my fingers hitting the right
chords and notes, shifted to playing jazz, standard ballads, and the blues.
My mind drifted back to 1963, to hot afternoons spent in a closet-

sized room at the back of Bonnie Langley’s Music Store on Santa
Barbara’s lower State Street. At 15, I had signed up to learn how to play
the guitar from Mr. Hall. He charged $4 per session, cash paid at the
beginning of each lesson.
Mr. Hall dressed in a dark suit, wrinkled white shirt and string tie,
sported wingtip shoes and a felt hat to hide his bald head. And he smelled
funny, from drinking bum wine, smoking Old Golds, and avoiding baths.
“So what kinda music do you wanna play?” he asked.
“I like the folk guitar players…like Peter, Paul and Mary, the
Kingston Trio.”
He groaned. “How long you been playin’?”
“My Dad bought me a guitar six months ago. I’ve been trying to
learn from Mel Bay books. But it’s going too slow.”
“Show me what you can do.”
I unpacked my nylon stringed guitar and fingered simple chords
clumsily while my right hand plucked the strings.
“So you like finger-style playin’?” he asked.
“I guess. I tried using a pick but I couldn’t make it work.”
Mr. Hall sighed. “You need to learn how to use one if you’re
gonna get anywhere.” He leaned down and opened his battered case and
took out a gigantic guitar. It had huge f-holes in its arched top, and a
fingerboard with lots of mother-of-pearl inlays. And it was an electric, an
Epiphone.
I guess he saw my open-mouthed stare because he grinned.
“Yeah, I bought the Emperor in the late ’30s. Installed the pickup myself.
Isn’t it a beauty?”
He handed it to me and I took it with great reverence. It felt heavy
and so large that it barely fit under my arm. I plucked its steel strings and
fingered its neck.
“I bought it when I worked in Kansas City, playing with a swing
band.” He rummaged around in a leather valise.
“So…so do you still play with a band?”
“Nah, most of the big bands went away and swing is pretty much
dead.”
He pulled a dog-eared manila folder out of the valise, opened it,

and handed me a black and white photograph. “That was me in the ’20s,
playin’ in New York City.”
The photo showed a slender man with dark hair, holding a banjo
and wearing a candy striped sport jacket and flat straw hat.
“Yeah, we used to play tenor banjos before the guitar took over.
That was before electrics came along.”
“So what do you do now?” I asked.
“You’re lookin’ at it, kid. I give lessons most afternoons and night
clerk at the California Hotel.”
“You don’t play anymore?”
“Oh, I’ve never stopped playin’. But it’s mostly for my own
pleasure. When I was young, I thought I could make my mark. I was
good, could read anything and play solos when called on. But after a
while…nobody called.”
“So, can you teach me, ah, finger-style playing?”
Mr. Hall chuckled. “Oh, I can fake it pretty good. Maybe you can
show me.”
My wife laid a hand on my forearm. I looked up from my reverie

and found a bevy of attendants ushering the patients out of the dining hall.
Paul gave no sign that we’d ever talked. A nurse pushed his wheelchair
out the door, leaving me to wonder where my own creative quest might
end…and where to find windmills to tilt after.
/ 159
RICHARD WIDERKEHR
LUCK AND SORROW, SHE SAID
As I walk past the gray inlet, I remember

the onions our mother diced to make pea soup
for you, Chloe, boulders she rolled from that well,
so you might drink. Please, see a doctor,
she kept asking you. They don’t know anything,
you always said.
This week we had what we call a Jane Doe patient

on the unit, wouldn’t tell us her name.
Found by the cops, dodging cars on a freeway off-ramp.
No money, no I.D. In the emergency room, she tried
to die, gulping water from the tap.
Got put in 4-point restraints. But when she came
to our unit on a gurney in 4-points, she wasn’t muttering
Luck and sorrow, over and over, like she’d been doing.
She completed the admit paperwork with me.
Stayed calm. I took off one restraint so she could sign
her name, but she wouldn’t sign. I wrote,
Patient refuses to sign. When we got done, our charge nurse,
Miss Dee, looked Jane in the eye, asked her, If we take the rest
of these things off, will ya just stay in your room, girl, tell us
when you need the bathroom? Jane said, Yeah, real clear.
I got her a sandwich and juice, left her door unlocked,
as per Miss Dee’s instructions. We got to watch you
when you use the can, you know, said Dee. Jane nodded.
Dee closed the door, didn’t lock it.
You never liked a door you didn’t close, Chloe.
Next evening when I came on shift, I checked the unit

for bottles, pop-top cans, what we call sharps,
played “Stand By Me” on the unit guitar.
Jane had been let out of seclusion. She gave Miss Dee and me
a big toothless grin, said, You can call me Janey, told us how
she likes to swim with orcas. Okay, I thought. Works for me.
Big as cabooses, she said, and she laughed. You know,
159
their fins are like these goddamn jib sails.

All those halos in the sun....
One evening, two days later,
Janey paced our halls, fists clenched. She kicked our double exit doors.
Miss Dee came down the hall, her eyes like two gray turrets,
asked, What wrong, girl? Face red, no answer. Luck and sorrow,
luck and sorrow, she muttered. We’re back to that, I thought,
put the guitar in our glowing nurse’s station, went down the hall.
Dee offered Ativan to help her calm down. No way. Nada.
In a point-blank way, Miss Dee told her, Girl, you’re working
yourself up to something, and it’s gonna get you in trouble,
you don’t pull it together. Dee’s face in the light by our nurse’s
station--I thought of Janey’s orcas, those halos.
Okay, Miss Dee, said Janey, sounded pissed,

held out her hand, took Dee’s plastic cup. The three of us
sat at our hall table. I strummed some chords,
sang “Landslide.” Janey, who’d already told me
I needed to play that song more slowly, well, she started to cry,
real quiet. Should I stop? I asked Miss Dee. No, said Dee.
Sometimes people need to cry.
When Janey went home
on meds after thirteen days, she hugged Miss Dee,
kissed her goodbye. Don’t come back here, said Dee.
Send us a card, tell us you’re doin’ okay.
Is this why I work here, Chloe? As I walk faster now,
the inlet widens—mudflats near a trestle
where two homeless kids have their burn barrel.
Remember, there didn’t use to be so many.
You asked did I ever call the cops,

try to get you detained like our mother did
when you threw dishes across the kitchen.
I just wanted her to get help, she said.
No, I never did, never drove your streets
as she did, so she might deliver bottled water,
baked fish, the wool socks you never wore.
/ 161
RUSS ALLISON LOAR

I KNEW A YOUNG MAN
I knew a young man

Who drank warm water
Right from the faucet,
From his cupped hand.
Everything he did,
An act of defiance,
An act of strength,
His way through the world.
They sent him to the war

And he didn’t last a week.
LEGIONS
At 12:18 in the smoggy afternoon air

Eating lunch in my car parked
In an abandoned parking lot
I suddenly realize:
This is the rest of my life.
Maybe in a different parking lot

On another day
With another dirty windshield sky
I will again forget
I am no one in particular,
Again dream of great honors
Awarded me for great things
I could never really do,
Not even in a hundred years.
I am out of the running.
161
My children are growing up poor

Without me
While I give little that matters to the world,
Working into the night,
Earning money
Which is not and never will be mine.
I am legions.
/ 163
NICOLE WALDNER
NIGHT SKIES
Part One—Kristallnacht (November 9-10, 1938)
Hansi König made the paintings on Kristallnacht, but before he

began he waited until Tünde, his wife, had gone to bed. Greta was in the
small cradle on the floor between them. Chamomiles, cornflowers and
forget-me-nots ran Fauvist riot over the unvarnished wood. Tünde rocked
the cradle with her foot. The baby had been crying all day and her arms
and shoulders ached. Her nerves were frayed like cheap ribbon. Hansi
turned the radio dial away from the official two minute silence for the
Nazi officer murdered by a Jew at the German embassy in Paris.
“Shhh! Greta’s just fallen asleep. I’m going to take her to bed,”
Tünde whispered. “Won’t you come too Hansi? You look exhausted. Why
don’t you take a little Veronal and sleep?”
He shook his head. It was pointless to insist. He said the sleeping
pills trampled his imagination. He preferred insomnia, from which he had
been suffering since 1933.
Hansi was only 34 years old, but his temples were white and his
cheeks were lined. He was tall and powerfully built. He sat perched on the
edge of the armchair like a great flightless bird who longs for the sky. He
didn’t know how to sit back comfortably into the upholstered city chairs.
He didn’t like the feeling of the fabric against his skin, nor the way the
soft cushions grasped his body. He missed the hard-backed wooden chairs
and benches of his childhood in Bavaria. He flicked off the radio and
stood up with sudden purpose, as if he were about to go somewhere, and
then, he stopped still in the middle of the room. His grey eyes were
hooded and bewildered. His arms hung long and limp by his sides. The
fifth finger of both his hands were bent out at unnatural angles. They
looked like drunken soldiers unable to stand at attention. He scanned the
small, orderly room until he found the pencil. It was on the coffee table
beside Tünde’s crossword. He went and picked it up, rolled it between his
fingers and sniffed the lead. Then he went over to the window and stood
behind the closed curtains. He closed his eyes and saw before him the
night sky as he wished it to be: pristine, vast, numinous. He parted the
curtains and looked up. He opened his eyes. It was cloudy again. From
deep within his throat came a long, low growl of frustration. “Night
163
clouds! What nonsense!” he muttered to himself as he turned on his heel.

“You can’t draw night clouds! They look like dirty ash! Like old boiled
potatoes! Like radio static!” He needed to move but he didn’t want to
wake his girls, so he sat on the lounge room floor, pulled off his boots and
tip-toed to his studio. It was a small room with poor light and poor
ventilation. There was a single window with a frosted glass pane. It gave
onto a narrow, blackened airshaft where washing lines criss-crossed
between the apartments like finely spun spider silk.
He began painting in the spare room a year ago when he’d been
removed from his teaching post and could no longer afford to rent a
studio. At first he could still get commissions. There were many
unfinished portraits, and still others that had been arranged months before
that. But in July 1937, when the Committee for the Assessment of Inferior
Works of Art decided to hang two of his paintings in the Degenerate Art
Exhibition, people got nervous. Hansi König had been publicly
humiliated. Then Tünde lost her job at the Leo Handlsmann Gallery when
it was forced to close down. The two had met there in 1935, shortly after
Tünde had arrived from Budapest. After the gallery was shut, Hansi could
no longer publicly sell his paintings. He had to look for other work. He
found he could make a little money painting signs and billboards, but
businesses were closing daily, failing, or else changing hands, usually not
by choice. So he got by painting houses.
He had not only been forbidden to exhibit and sell his art, but
forbidden to even make art. He was no longer able to buy paint or brushes
or canvas. But still it was difficult for Hansi to believe that the Nazis
really cared what some penniless artist painted in the privacy of his home.
“You must be careful Hansi,” his best friend Max Muller warned
him, “just the smell of turpentine is enough to get you arrested and you
know what turpentine’s like, it leaves a stink worse than sauerkraut. Even
wet brushes in a glass are dangerous.”
But Hansi didn’t believe Max. Max was afraid of cuckoo clocks
and shadows. He still lived with his mother and painted silk lilies in
Meissen vases for war widows. But Max was a loyal friend. He bought
supplies for Hansi, and Hansi continued to paint at night, while Berlin,
and his girls slept.
After the Degenerate Exhibition Hansi took to going deep into the
Tiergarten at night. “I can breathe again!” he would say, as he loosened
Waldner / 165
the scarf from around his neck and took long, strong strides across the
darkened green. In his rucksack he would carry a thermos of coffee and a
telescope. He wanted to study the stars so that he could paint the
unpeopled, borderless heavens. The park was mostly peaceful—just the
occasional prostitute looking for business—and Hansi was free to study
the night skies. In early January 1938, just after Tünde realised she was
pregnant, Hansi was out one night in the park. The moon and the stars
were effortlessly beautiful. Thought, motion and desire were one. The
silence was so complete that later Hansi would say that the policeman
must have tip-toed across the green in his socks. The policeman did not
know who Hansi was, but he thought that the telescope was suspicious, as
was the secret code in which he was scribbling.
At Gestapo headquarters they knew who Hansi König was. They

immediately searched his apartment. They found his wet black paintings
hanging in the hall closet behind the coats. They seized them. Evidence of
sedition. They broke his easels and his brushes, they tipped his paint out
onto the studio floor. They locked him up. They interrogated him. One of
the interrogators was so enraged by Hansi’s stubborn silences that he
broke two of his fingers, snapped them, one after the other, like dry
chicken bones. Hansi’s Night Skies were taken to the Reich Chamber of
Culture to be inspected. The following year in Lucerne they would be
auctioned off by the Nazis for hard currency.
It took months for Hansi’s fingers to heal. By then Tünde was

very pregnant and could no longer continue with the typing work she’d
found after Leo’s gallery had been closed down. They could not afford
any more trouble, so Hansi stayed in at nights. He drew with the pencils
that Tünde bought for him one at a time from the newsagent, but only
when they were no bigger than the stub of a cigarette. The pencils were
cheap, the kind used by waitresses and storekeepers. He called them the
Degenerate Pencils. They were rough and splintery, their leads broke
easily. “Their colour is worse than dirty dishwater!” he would rage. No
amount of build-up or smudging could produce depth. He dreamt of his
old Lyra pencils, of their thick creamy leads, “so dark, so metallic, so
expressive.” For paper he used an unlined message pad they kept by the
radio in the lounge, as if by separating pencil and paper, their subversive
alliance could remain hidden. Some nights when the sky was clear and so
was his mind, he would stand by the windows memorising all that he saw:
the street lights, the shadows, the rooftops, the trees, the stars, and the
moon, which continued to entrance him in its every incarnation. On those

nights his imagination was as undiminished as ever, and the belief that art
and nature could heal the world came to him once more. On other nights,
when he could not master his emotions, his thoughts would run riot like
weeds in an abandoned field.
On Kristallnacht, after midnight, when the first rocks shattered

glass, the baby woke screaming. Tünde ran out of the bedroom with Greta
in her arms. She sent Hansi to look out the windows and find out what
was going on. When he came back he said, “The madness has begun.”
Tünde would not go back to the bedroom because the windows were too
close to the street, so Hansi brought them some warm clothes and
fashioned a bed for them under the table in the kitchen which faced the
tiny air shaft. But they couldn’t sleep. Tünde paced with Greta. The baby
would not hear of being put down, nor would she feed. She howled so
fiercely that sometimes even the terror on the streets was drowned out.
When Tünde’s arms ached so that she was afraid she’d drop the baby,
when the sounds of shattering glass finally seemed to come from further
away, then Greta slept, tightly coiled against her mother’s body. Tünde
got Hansi to bring her some cotton wool and the bottle of Veronal. Then
she stuffed Greta’s ears and her own, took a double dose, and crawled
under the kitchen table with the baby. She pulled the blankets tightly
around them. She prayed for fatigue to overwhelm fear, for the tablets to
take affect, for the brief oblivion of sleep.
Hansi left Tünde and Greta in the kitchen and went back to his
studio. The sounds of destruction seemed to be coming from every
direction. He felt so restless, so helpless and powerless. He paced like a
caged animal. In his head words cracked like rifle fire and thunder. He
had to get them out! He grabbed the pencil and paper and fell to his knees.
He started to write. Over and over again he wrote those words, as lists and
then as sentences, forwards and backwards, scrambled and jumbled and
then BOOM! He ran to the lounge room windows. A nearby synagogue
had been set on fire. The crowd roared with joy, roared as if from a single
throat. Hansi watched the flames, momentarily entranced by their beauty.
Then he went back to his studio and got out his scalpel.
From every wall of their rented apartment hung mawkish still

lifes and moribund landscapes. They had been there when the Königs
moved in. Hansi had taken them down, and for a time their ordinary little
Waldner / 167
flat had been alive with his Utopian Gardens: with giant teal-petaled
flowers and ecstatic wingless air-borne creatures. After the Degenerate
Exhibition, Tünde had put the still lifes and landscapes back up. She’d
taken Hansi’s paintings over to Leo Handlsmann in the hope that he might
still be able to sell them. Now Hansi ripped the hated pictures from the
walls and piled them up in his studio. One by one he cut them out of their
flimsy frames, flipped them over and laid them across his studio floor.
From the bottom of the wooden crate he used as a table in his studio, he
took out his bread-and-butter brushes and a tin of black house paint. He
prised open the paint tin, took a deep, ragged breath and dipped the brush
in. Then suddenly he stopped, paintbrush poised mid-air and tip-toed next
door to the kitchen, dripping paint across the hall carpet as he went. He
held his breath and opened the door. The stove was on and it was warm in
there. Tünde and Greta were asleep under the table. As he watched them
sleeping, his breath slowed and his mind cleared. He smiled at his girls
and went back to his studio. The words that he had been struggling to
understand, to fit coherently one beside the other, now came out fully
formed and beautiful as a newborn baby. He whispered them to the night,
swaying as he said them. He whispered them until he could no longer hear
the shattering glass, until all the world was just four words: beneath fear
liberty awaits. Then he knelt down and painted them, on one canvas, and
then on another. The letters tumbled chaotically off his brush in their race
to the canvas. Each one came to him from their very own cosmos. The
rounded vowels arrived with elongated, cross-hatched wings; the ts and
the l with twitching probing antennae, the f with a foot that hung all the
way down the canvas like a great swinging vine. The feel of the brush in
his hand was so joyous, the smell of the paint so sweet that he laughed.
It was almost five. Hansi put his ear to the kitchen door. All was
quiet within. He pressed two kisses onto the door and then he slipped out
into the dark morning. Across his shoulders was a small canvas sack filled
with nails and a hammer. Under his arm he carried the roll of canvases.
Outside the air was thick with the grey choking stink of ash. It was bitter
cold, but Hansi, coatless and hatless, did not feel its sting. He stopped at
the corner and looked side-to-side, listening for the sounds of exploding
glass. Then he nodded, stepped out onto the road and walked into the jaws
of Gehenna.
To be continued in Evening Street Review #21

NEGLECTED HELP
NEEDING FREEDOM: PLATH, JEFFERS
You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time–
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic

Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town

Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.

So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,
–from “Daddy,” Sylvia Plath, 1962
168
Editor / 169
How many turn back toward dreams and magic, how many
children
Run home to Mother Church, Father State,
To find in their arms the delicious warmth and folding of souls.
The age weakens and settles home toward old ways.
An age of renascent faith: Christ said, Marx wrote, Hitler says,
And though it seems absurd we believe.
Sad children, yes. It is lonely to be adult, you need a father.
With a little practice you'll believe anything.
Faith returns, beautiful, terrible, ridiculous,

And men are willing to die and kill for their faith.
Soon come the wars of religion; centuries have passed
Since the air so trembled with intense faith and hatred.
Soon, perhaps, whoever wants to live harmlessly
Must find a cave in the mountain or build a cell
Of the red desert rock under dry junipers,
And avoid men, live with more kindly wolves
And luckier ravens, waiting for the end of the age.
–from “Thebaid,” Robinson Jeffers, 1938
G.G.
Reprinted from Evening Street Review #8

CONTRIBUTORS
JEFFREY ALFIER’s recent books include Fugue for a Desert Mountain,

Anthem for Pacific Avenue, and The Red Stag at Carrbridge: Scotland Poems.
His publication credits include Copper Nickel, Midwest Quarterly, The Carolina
Quarterly and The McNeese Review. He is founder and co-editor of Blue Horse
Press and San Pedro River Review.
VICTORIA ANDERSON lives and writes in Chicago. She has published three
books of poetry; most recently a chapbook The Hour Box. She has been a three-
time recipient of Illinois Art Council individual artist’s grants and has published
in numerous literary magazines, among them Gulf Coast, New South, Agni,
Mississippi Review, and American Short Fiction.
RICHARD N BENTLEY's books, Post-Freudian Dreaming, A General Theory

of Desire, and All Rise are available from Amazon. He served on the Board of the
Modern Poetry Association (now the Poetry Foundation.) and won the Paris
Review/Paris Writers Workshop International Fiction Award in 2002. His story
“Promised Land” was selected for Best Fiction & Nonfiction of 2012 in the
Lukather-Garson anthology. dickbentley.com
MARGUERITE GUZMAN BOUVARD is the author of 10 books of poetry

two of which have won awards. Her poetry has been widely published and was
featured along with two of her poetry books in Blue Heron Press. She has also
written non-fiction books on social justice, human rights, women's rights, grief
and illness.
PAMELA S CARTER studied with Joelle Fraser, and her work has appeared in
Midway and Pamplemousse. She graduated with honors from the University of
Denver's Sturm College of Law and practiced law briefly after graduation. She
now considers herself a full-time writer.
MICHAEL CERAOLO is a 60-year-old retired firefighter/paramedic and active

poet who has had two full-length books, Euclid Creek and 500 Cleveland Haiku,
and several shorter-length books published, and has a third full-length book,
Euclid Creek Book Two, forthcoming from unbound content press.
LESLIE G COHEN, MD is a retired physician who practiced Primary Care

Internal Medicine in and around Boston for a half-century. He has written short
fictional pieces for many national medical journals. “Sixty Four” represents one
of his very few attempts at poetry.
170
Contributors / 171
DOUGLAS COLLURA’s work includes the spoken-word CD, The Dare of the
Quick World and the book, Things I Can Fit My Whole Head Into. He was the
2008 First Prize Winner of the Missouri Review Audio/Video Competition in
Poetry and nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016. He is published in numerous
periodicals and webzines. He lives in Manhattan.
STEVEN SHEFFIELD COOKE has been writing short fiction and poetry for
more than 40 years and has been published more times than he can easily count.
He is on staff at the local community college where he teaches creative writing
and how to survive an interview. He manages a local thrift store to pay the bills.
GANNON DANIELS is currently a writing instructor at Glendale College.

Her poetry has appeared in several publications including, California
Quarterly, Cimarron Review and RATTLE. The Occupying Water is her
first book of poems and Paper Pencil is the name of her private creative
writing classes.
STEVE DENEHAN lives in Kildare, Ireland with his wife Eimear and daughter
Robin. He has been published in The First Literary Review, Poets And Poetry,
The Opiate, Medusa's Kitchen, Better Than Starbucks and The Poet Community.
His poems are to be published in upcoming issues of Sky Island Journal, Fowlpox
Press, The Folded Word and Third Wednesday.
PATRICK THERON ERICKSON, a resident of Garland, Texas, a Tree City,

just south of Duck Creek, is a retired parish pastor put out to pasture himself. His
work has appeared in Grey Sparrow Journal, Cobalt Review, Burningword
Literary Journal, The Main Street Rag, Wilderness House Literary Review,
Tipton Poetry Journal, Right Hand Pointing, and Danse Macabre.
LAURA FALSETTI is a dentist who lives and works south of Seattle, and an
emerging poet with work in WA129: Poets of Washington, Muse/A Journal, Cider
Press Review, and other literary journals. Her ideal life includes hiking a new
trail every weekend. And cats, of course.
BRIAN C FELDER is a 49-year veteran of the American poetry scene with

coast-to-coast publishing credits to show for it. His work has appeared in the
Atlanta Review, Big Muddy, Chiron Review, Connecticut River Review, WLA
Journal, Perfume River Poetry Review and Humanist Magazine. From the
Midwest originally, he now writes from his home in rural Delaware.
MICHAEL FRYD returned to his youth's passion; writing, after a successful

scientific career. His short stories were published in Easy Street, Intrinsick, and
Literary Yard. His memoir My Mother's War was a semifinalist in the Faulkner-
Wisdom competition for creative nonfiction, and he is looking for a publisher for
his novel, It's not easy being green.
LINDA FUCHS was born the fourth child of twelve in Northern Ohio. She
graduated with honors from Kent State University with a major in Computer
Science. She is ambidextrous and believes this helps her to be both technical and
creative. Her poetry books are The Midnight Ramblings of an Insane Woman,
Life's Complexities, and Healing Times. She has published more than 250 poems.
KIT-BACON GRESSITT was spawned by a Southern Baptist creationist and a

liberal social worker, thus inheriting the sense of humor to survive family debates
and the imagination to avoid them. She has an MFA in Creative Writing, with an
emphasis in narrative nonfiction, and taught Women’s Studies in the Cal State
University system. She has been published in feminist and progressive
publications, and she’s the publisher and a co-editor of Writers Resist.
SHAE M HALL is a freelance writer who lives in Lakeside Park, Kentucky. She
recently published in Waypoints and in Northern Kentucky University’s Alumni
Anthology. She's a member of Cincinnati Writer’s Project. She was previously a
fiction editor for The New Madrid and Licking River Review. She has a MFA in
Creative Writing from Murray State University. She is currently working on a
collection of short stories.
ALISON HICKS is the author of poetry collections You Who Took the Boat Out
and Kiss, a chapbook Falling Dreams, and a novella Love: A Story of Images.
Her work has appeared in Eclipse, Gargoyle, Permafrost, and Poet Lore, and has
been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Awards include two PA Council of the Arts
Fellowships. She is founder of Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which
offers community-based writing workshops.
JOHN T HITCHNER's poetry has appeared in many journals. His poetry

collections include Not Far From Here, Seasons and Shadows, and Pieces of Life
Between Latitudes. How Far Away, How Near, his short fiction can be found on
Kindle, and The Acolyte, a novel, is available through CreateSpace. He lives and
writes in Keene, New Hampshire.
MEREDITH HOLMES lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio and in 2005, served as

that city’s first poet laureate. Pond Road Press has published two collections of
her poems: Shubad’s Crown and Familiar at First, Then Strange. Her poems
have appeared in a handful of journals and in several anthologies. She is a
freelance writer, covering environmental issues and women in engineering,
science, and politics.
M T JAMIESON’s working in route sales allows him to meet many new people.
New people, new voices, new ideas. Sometimes he makes up rhymes, usually two
lines at a time/ while driving between accounts. These imaginings tend/ to
become stories, by end of day. He is twice a former university student, and a
proud Viet Nam Era Veteran (USAF). He and his wife live in northeast Ohio with
their (rescued) dog and two (rescued) kitten/cat sisters.
Contributors / 173
JUDITH JANOO received the Soul-Making Keats Award, the Vermont Award
for Continued Excellence in Writing, the Anita McAndrews Award for human
rights poetry, and Reader’s Choice in the Mountain Troubadour 2017. She was a
finalist for the Dana Award. Her poetry has appeared in Euphony, The Mountain
Troubadour, The Chronicle, Kind of a Hurricane Press, and Vermont Magazine.
She lives and writes in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.
MATTHEW LANDRUM holds an MFA from Bennington College. His poems

and translations have recently appeared in AGNI, Image, Clarion, and World
Literature Today.
RODGER LEGRAND studied writing at Sarah Lawrence College and the State
University of New York at Oswego. He is a lecturer in Writing, Rhetoric, and
Professional Communication at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has
five collections of poetry in print—Seeds, Millions of Ravenous Creatures, Hope
and Compulsion, Waking Up On a Sinking Boat, and Various Ways of Thinking
About the Universe. You can reach him at rodgerlegrand.com.
RUSS ALLISON LOAR began his professional life as a musician and

songwriter. After earning a degree in journalism, he spent the next 15 years as a
newspaper reporter. He is now retired after writing for the Los Angeles Times.
His poetry, prose and photography have appeared in journals, anthologies and
websites. He lives in Claremont, CA.
GEORGE LONGENECKER’s poems and book reviews have been published

in Atlanta Review, Comstock Review, Rain Taxi, Santa Fe Review, Saranac
Review and Whale Road Review. His book Star Route was recently published by
Main Street Rag Publishing. He lives in Middlesex, Vermont.
NAOMI RUTH LOWINSKY won the Blue Light Poetry Prize for her
chapbook, The Little House on Stilts Remembers. Her fourth full length
collection, The Faust Woman Poems, trace one woman’s Faustian adventures
through Women’s Liberation and the return of the Goddess. Her recently
published collection of essays is The Rabbi, the Goddess and Jung: Getting the
Word from Within.
RICHARD LUFTIG is a professor emeritus of educational psychology at

Miami University in Ohio who now resides in California. His poems have
appeared in numerous literary journals in the United States and
internationally in Europe, Asia and Australia. Two of his poems have
been included in The Ten Best Years of Dos Madres Press.
NAN LUNDEEN’s use of ancient goddess myths and Native American legends
enrich her vision of Earth’s startling beauty and vulnerability in Gaia’s Cry. Her
work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Illuminations, Yemassee, Connecticut River
Review, The Petigru Review, U.K.’s Writing Magazine, The Paddock Review, and
others. Her book, Moo of Writing: How to Milk Your Potential, has been a finalist
in two national indie awards. Visit her at nanlundeen.com.
DAMON MCLAUGHLIN lives in Tucson, where he helps undereducated adults

pursue their GEDs. He spends his free time with his family, working with horses,
and trail guiding around the sky islands of southeastern Arizona. His poetry
collections are Olduvai Theory and Exchanging Lives. His current musical project
is Breaking Trail, a progressive Americana duo.
MATTHEW MENDOZA has published fiction, non-fiction, and poetry—all

from prison. His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review; Big Muddy, and
Comstock Review. To learn more about mentoring a prison writer visit PEN.org.
JAMI MILLER is a poet, writer and traveler who lives in Atlanta, GA and
writes under the penname Jai K. Her work has appeared in Pennsylvania English,
Where the Mind Dwells, The Penman Review, Literary Yard, Georgia’s Best
Emerging Poets and was recently accepted for publication in The Sandy River
Review. She is currently working on self-publishing her first poetry collection
Just a Fly on the Wall Inside My Mind expected to be out in the fall of 2018.
RONALD MORAN's poems have appeared in Commonweal, Mature Years,

North American Review, Evening Street Review, Northwest Review, Southern
Poetry Review, Southern Review, and The Wallace Stevens Journal, among
others. Clemson University Press has published his last six books of poetry. He
was inducted into Clemson University's inaugural CAAH Hall of Fame. His work
is archived at two universities.
CAMERON MORSE taught and studied in China. Diagnosed with a

glioblastoma in 2014, he is currently a third-year MFA candidate at the
University of Missouri-Kansas City and lives with his wife Lili and son Theodore
in Blue Springs, MO. His poems have been published in over 100 magazines,
including New Letters, Bridge Eight, South Dakota Review and TYPO. His first
collection is Fall Risk.
REJAN M MOSER is a native Philadelphian serving time in the Florida

Department of Corrections for property crimes, and is a recovering addict. A
lifelong writer, he has several modest publications with the Sierra Club, the
Buddhist Association of the United States, Toastmasters International, and
www.dhinitiative.org. He enjoys playing chess, Krav Maga, music and skiing,
and is a proud father of two sons.
Contributors / 175
STEVEN PELCMAN has published three books of poetry: American Voices,

like water to STONE, Where the Leaves Darken. He has been published in
numerous magazines and in many countries: Tulane Review, The Greensboro
Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, etc. He was nominated for the 2012 and 2017
Pushcart Prize. He has resided for the last twenty years in Germany where he
teaches in academia and is a language communications trainer and consultant.
stevenpelcman.blogspot.de
DAVID PLIMPTON has written a novel about the Teamsters, the Genovese
crime family and college-age vigilantes in 1960 New Jersey. His work has
appeared in Alternatives, including an essay on the Court decision upholding the
suspension of Tom Brady, New England Patriots quarterback. His story,
“Lessons from a Horseplayer,” about his mother, appears in Canyon Voices
Literary Magazine.
EVE POWERS’ poetry has appeared in California Quarterly, Rockhurst Review,

Third Wednesday Journal, Lalitamba, Flowers and Vortexes, Hawai’i Pacific
Review, Atlanta Review, Archyopteryx, City Works Literary Journal, Muse
Literary Journal, and Whirlwind Review. She was a winner in Atlanta Review’s
2013 International Poetry Competition and the featured poet in Sufi Journal's
2017 summer edition. She lives and works on the island of Kaua’i, Hawai’i.
JOAN PRESLEY was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and has lived in
Reno, Nevada for the past thirty years. She is a veteran and retired public servant
who now studies creative writing. Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction have
appeared in The Meadow, The Brushfire and Painted Cave. She is thrilled to have
been included in this publication.
STEPHEN R ROBERTS has had poems published in Rain City Review, Sulfur
River Review, Blackwater, Talking River, WaterStone, Big Muddy, Naugatuck
River Review, Concho River Review, Riverrun, Connecticut River Review, and, to
get away from all the moisture, Dry Creek Review. His full length work is Almost
Music From Between Places.
JANICE E RODRÍGUEZ inhabits two realities—the rolling hills and broad

valleys of her native southeastern Pennsylvania, and the high, arid plains of her
adopted land of Castilla-León in Spain. When she’s not writing, she’s in the
garden, where she moves her perennials around as if they were furniture, or in the
kitchen working her way through a stack of cookbooks. janiceerodriguez.com
TERRY SANVILLE lives in San Luis Obispo, California with his artist-poet
wife (his in-house editor) and two plump cats (his in-house critics). His short
stories have been accepted by more than 280 publications including The Potomac
Review, The Bitter Oleander, Shenandoah, and The Saturday Evening Post. He is
a retired urban planner and an accomplished jazz and blues guitarist who once
played with a symphony orchestra backing up jazz legend George Shearing.
RHEMA SAYERS is a retired physician who spent thirty odd years working as a
family physician first and then an ER doc. When she retired, she finally found
time to write and is starting a second career. She lives in the Arizona desert with
her husband and three dogs.
PHILIP ST. CLAIR is the author of six collections of poetry and has received
fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kentucky Arts
Council. He has loaded aircraft in the Military Air Transport Service, mopped
floors in a student union, tended bar in an Elks club, worked at the editor's trade,
and is Emeritus Professor at Ashland Community and Technical College. He
lives in Ashland, KY.
GEORGE STALEY is retired from 25 years of teaching writing and literature at

Portland Community College. He previously taught in New England, Appalachia,
and on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation. His poetry has appeared in Chest,
Four Quarters, Loonfeather, RE:AL Artes Liberales, New Mexico Humanities
Review, Fireweed, Oregon East, Evening Street Review, Cafe Review, and many
others. Arc of the Ear, his third chapbook, was released in July 2015.
WILLIAM SWARTS is the author of Harmonies Unheard, Strickland Plains

and Other Poems and Treehouse of the Mind. He won First Prize in the Litchfield
Review‘s annual Poetry Contest. He received his B.A. in English Literature from
Brown University, his J.D. from University of Pennsylvania and practiced law in
New York City and Paris, France. He studied with Bolligen Prize-winner David
Ignatow. He lives in western North Carolina.
MITCHELL UNTCH is a two time Pushcart Nominee and lives and works in
Los Angeles, CA. His work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Poet Lore,
North American Review, Natural Bridge, Confrontation, Nimrod Intl, Solo Novo,
Knockout, Baltimore Review, Grey Sparrow, Illuminations, Tusculum Review,
Painted Bride Quarterly, Meridian, Chattahoochee Review, Tule Review, Tar
River Poetry, Crab Creek Review, and Badlands among others.
JULIE WAKEMAN-LINN edited the Potomac Review for a dozen years. Her
short stories have appeared in over twenty literary magazines including The
MacGuffin, Rosebud, and Gargoyle. Her novel, Chasing the Leopard, Finding the
Lion, a finalist for Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize, was published by
Mkuki Na Nyota in 2012. Her short story collection was a finalist for the WWPH
2014 Fiction prize.
NICOLE WALDNER’s work is forthcoming in Evening Street Review and The

Chaffin Journal. Her short stories have also been published in Australia,
Germany and Hungary. She is at work on a novel set in Budapest during the fall
of Communism and the present day. She also writes a quarterly blog called Poetic
Boost about art and writing. More about her writing at www.nicolewaldner.com
/ 177
Contributors
SUELLEN WEDMORE, is Poet Laureate emerita for the seaside town of

Rockport, MA. A retired speech and language therapist, she won first place in the
Writer’s Digest’s Rhyming and Non-Rhyming Poem contests. Her chapbooks
include Deployed, which won the Grayson Press contest; On Marriage and Other
Parallel Universes; and Mind the Light, which recently won the Quill’s Edge
Press “Women on the Edge” contest.
ELIZABETH WEIR lives in Minnesota. Her book of poetry, High on Table

Mountain, was published by North Star Press in March 2016 and was nominated
for the 2016 Midwest Book Award. Publications include Evening Street Review,
Comstock Review, Talking Stick, The Kerf, Water ~ Stone Review, and Holy
Cow! Press anthologies. She has received four SASE/Jerome Awards.
RICHARD WIDERKEHR’s second book of poems is In The Presence Of

Absence. One poem was read on Writer’s Almanac, and one was posted on Verse
Daily. He earned his M.A. from Columbia University and won two Hopwood
first prizes for poetry at the University of Michigan. His novel is Sedimental
Journey. Recent work has appeared in Rattle, New Plains Review, Arts & Letters,
Bellevue Literary Review, and Measure. He reads poems for Shark Reef Review.
HOWARD WINN's work, both short fiction and poetry, has been published in
such journals as Dalhousie Review, The Long Story, Galway Review, Antigonish
Review, and MacGuffin. His novel, Acropolis, has just been published. His B.A.
is from Vassar College, M.A. from Stanford University, doctorial work at N.Y.U.
He is Professor of English at SUNY.
HOWARD R WOLF is Emeritus Professor of English (SUNY-Buffalo). A

Hopwood winner (The University of Michigan), twice a Fulbright Scholar
(Turkey and South Africa), a member of PEN America, he has published two
short volumes of short fiction (Of the Bronx and Manhattan a Son and The
Education of Ludwig Fried), a novel, Broadway Serenade, and a play: HOME AT
THE END OF THE DAY: An American Family Drama in Three Acts.
Murders of Transgender Persons in the US
(as of Oct. 2018)
https://www.hrc.org/resources/a-national-epidemic-
fatal-anti-transgender-violence-in-america-in-2018
Evening Street Press
Sacramento, CA

Evening Street Review Number 20, Spring 2019

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Evening Street Review Number 20, Spring 2019

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Number 20 Spring, 2019

EVENING STREET REVIEW

Published by Evening Street Press

Rainbow: all colors one whole

Cover image: 45711494 from 123RF

NUMBER 20, SPRING 2019

. . .all men and women are created equal

PUBLISHED TWICE A YEAR

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957300

For submission guidelines, subscription information, published

© Copyright 2019 by Evening Street Press

NUMBER 20, SPRING 2019

BY THE F OUNDING EDITOR Occasional Notes:

GANNON DANIELS My Mother’s Skin 12

M T JAMIESON The Big Guy Swept The Dust 72

MEREDITH H OLMES What is Zen? 148

JULIE W AKEMAN-LINN A Rocket V-8 8

PAMELA C ARTER A Bipolar Child 87

BY THE F OUNDING EDITOR Neglected Help:

I think all the great religions of the world–Buddhism, Hinduism,

Religion is based primarily upon fear . . . fear of the mysterious,

–Bertrand Russell, Why I am Not

In my extensive travels on lecturing tours, in after years, I had

–Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More, 1897

Now seeing a chance

What joy to live in,

–from Dawn Night Fall, 2012

Reprinted from Evening Street Review #8

My mother’s skin after a day in the sun

When she had agreed to Hospice instead of continuing

From the patio (I was 10)

If we had just let him rest

Then again maybe

Bonsai means a tree

NEW ORLEANS BRONZE

Jean Baptist le Moyne de Bienville stands wigged and tall,

Behind the honored founder, a priest in sack-cloth robe,

Seated below them both, a Chickasaw chief,

watches over bodies more fragile than itself

accepting all bags hung on it.

to a number that commands

It has danced with every partner it’s hooked up with.

the closer the end approaches

then a friend reminds me

I try to forgive myself

shadowy lens of Prague’s Franz Kafka than the Brooklyn bifocals of

said, voice lowered.

Lighthouse sweep across the shoreline below his house.

At some point last night

NAOMI RUTH LOWINSKY

Irony gleams in your eyes Africa glows

Destruction Yours the wise crack wit Yours

that few on either side of the divide

strong minded loud mouthed a bitch

Once I heard you on the radio

of bleeding heart Jews But now

had a loft, a swallow perch, and if we rushed in

parting the peace we came for, into the old barn

for the local summer camp. No hay even.

in the high beams, thick oak shoulders etched in red

to reveal their exact purpose—

younger, stronger, more tender inside. You, the hand-hewn

with song. I saw in you the oak that grew

wanted carving, that would give us shelter when the anger,

the lingering scent of hay and pine shavings, distant scent

Broad and strong, I thought you’d hold up,