Evening Street Review Number 39, Autumn 2023

Number 39 Autumn, 2023
EVENING STREET REVIEW
Published by Evening Street Press

Oakland, CA

DENNIS MINTUN
MAKING PRISON LIFE A LITTLE EASIER
Having been in the Idaho prison system for over 20 years, and having done time in
California and Colorado, I have learned a few things about making prison living just
a little easier. Here are a few tips:
1) The first thing you have to deal with is getting used to new surroundings. There
can be a lot of fear involved, since you don’t really know what to expect. Once
you move in, be friendly and courteous to those around you. Try not to be a
loner. A loner can be an easy target. Find people you can hang out with. I’m not
talking about gangs or things like that. Just find people with similar interests
(sports, religion, etc.). On the other side of this, though, don’t be too “needy.”
That is, don’t force yourself on people. Just let them know your interests, and let
them invite you to join them. This could take a little time, so be patient.
2) If you happen to have an “undesirable” crime (such as a sex offense), don’t
volunteer information about why you are in prison. However, you should be
honest if pressed about it. In this day and age, it is very easy to find out pretty
much anything about anyone. If you are caught lying, there are a lot of people
who will make a bigger issue out of it. “Own” the reason you are in prison. But,
you should not brag about it OR minimize what you did. Make sure people
know you are not proud of your crime, and are working to become a better
person. In most cases, you should be fine. However, if you really feel you will
be unable to function in “general population,” let staff know. Almost every state
nowadays has a unit or area for those who need protective custody (PC). Not
long ago, people in PC would be completely segregated. Now, most facilities
will try to put people in similar situations together in one area. On the same
note... try not to judge others for their past. What matters is what they are like
now, and if they are trying to be a better person.
3) Be careful not to get caught up in borrowing or getting into debt. If you must
gamble (which I don’t recommend), don’t gamble more than you have on hand
at the time. Another bad habit people get in to is “going to the store.” That is,
buying stuff on credit from another inmate—often at a large interest rate—to be
paid back on the next payday... only to borrow again a few days later. It becomes
an endless cycle. Also, if someone gives you something “out of the blue,” use
caution. There are very likely strings attached. It could just be someone wanting
to be friendly, but it’s best to find out before accepting. It’s often better to say, “I
appreciate it, but no thanks.” On that note, if you want to give someone a cup of
coffee or something, that shouldn’t be a problem. Just be careful not to expect
them to return the favor. I’ve seen friends lost—even fights—over something as
small as a cup of coffee.
NUMBER 39, AUTUMN 2023
…all men and women are created equal in rights to life,

liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, revision of the

American Declaration of Independence, 1848
Evening Street Press recognizes that all people are created

equal in rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
PUBLISHED
BY
EVENING STREET PRESS
Editor & Managing Editor: Barbara Bergmann
Associate Editors: Donna Spector, Kailen Nourse-Driscoll, Patti Sullivan,
Anthony Mohr, L D Zane, Stacia Levy, Jeffrey Davis, Clela Reed,
Matthew Mendoza, Matthew Spireng, Ace Boggess, Kristin Laurel,
Jan Bowman, Joanne Durham, Maple Davis
Founding Editor: Gordon Grigsby
Evening Street Review is published in the spring and fall of every year
(with additional issues as needed) by Evening Street Press. United States
subscription rates are $32 for two issues and $62 for four issues
(individuals), and $38 for two issues and $68 for four issues (institutions).
Cover photos: Front cover, Barbara Bergmann, Lake Merritt

Back cover: Andrena Zawinski, Waterfall, Golden Gate Park, SF
ISBN: 978-1-937347-80-2
Evening Street Review is centered on the belief that all people are created
equal, that they have a natural claim to certain inalienable rights, and that
among these are the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
With this center, and an emphasis on writing that has both clarity and
depth, it practices the widest eclecticism.
Evening Street Review will no longer be published after issue #40, winter
2023. Hard copies are available for purchase through the website and as
Kindle editions on Amazon. Evening Street Press will continue to accept,
vet, and publish online works from incarcerated people.
All published work, chapbooks, short novels, prose collections, Sinclair

poetry books, DIY Prison Project works, and all issues of Evening Street
Review, can be read on the press’ website as well as on Google Books and
Scribd.
www.eveningstreetpress.com.
© Copyright 2023 by Evening Street Press

415 Lagunitas Ave #306
Oakland, CA 94610
All rights revert to the author upon publication.
PUBLISHED BY EVENING STREET PRESS
NUMBER 39, AUTUMN 2023
CONTENTS
POETRY
EMILY BUTLER #relationshipgoals 14
Meaningless 16
DUANE ANDERSON In the Eyes of the Wind 17
In the Eyes of a Window Shade 17
CHRISTOPHER RUBIO-GOLDSMITH Blues Riffs 27
ARNIE YASINSKI How Well Did I Know Him? 28
NAOMI COOPER Ruby 31
Wild Animals 34
ALYSE SAMMARCO Tuesday Night Bingo at St. Andrew’s 35
ROXANNE CARDONA The Season of the English Language
Arts Exams 46
What Happened When I Called Trina
to the School Office 47
J E BENNETT Sonnet to Rain 48
MORGAN BOYER I’m giving up on New Year’s Eve 49
WADE FOX Shore Leave 54
LOUISE ROBERTSON Recycling 55
It’s Like Watching Someone Drinking
Themselves to Death 56
Benediction for a Cup of Coffee 56
LESLIE G COHEN Amyloid and Tau 62
Compassion Fatigue 63
DANIEL GENE BARLEKAMP For J.L. 69
RONALD MORAN Yard Sale in July 70
JACALYN SHELLEY Why Does My Son Call Me? 75
Blue For Sky, Green For Trees 76
Dateline April 30th 1975 77
VIRGINIA WATTS Pickled Eggs 78
Mouse 79
Dead Body 80
POETRY (CONT)
JENNIFER M PHILLIPS Woman Troubles in the Bed of Iris 94

ANDREW VOGEL Doubt 96
Last Peach 97
WILLIAM GREENWAY The Memories of Mirrors 106
Aeolus 107
EMILY M GREEN The Housewife Waits 107
Happy Is the One Who 109
DANIELLE WOLFFE Visiting Privilege 117
ALEXANDER PAYNE MORGAN Bread 121
A Veteran's Daughter Walks Alone
At Night 122
Voyage 123
Coming Home 123
PETER DAVID GOODWIN The Broken Plate 127
Bird Watcher 129
SHANNON MARZELLA Genetic Counseling 130
The Only Time We Met 131
NANCY MCCABE Multiflora Rose 136
Bat Season 137
Not That Kind of Crown 138
STEVE ORMISTON When Footholds Vanish 139
RICHARD WEAVER A Cartographer Etches Maps 158
NICHOLAS KRIEFALL Rush Hour 159
Paradise Blvd 160
PHILIP WEXLER Settling 165
CHARLES RAMMELKAMP Psychedelic Toad 167
KATHY O’FALLON The Golden Gate 177
BIBHU PADHI Total Solar Eclipse, Cuttack 177
BETH BROWN PRESTON Eye of the Storm:
Ocala, Florida, 1914 186
An All-American Girl:
for Gwendolyn Brooks 187
At the Library: Montreal,
Quebec circa 1950 188
A Dream 188
POETRY (CONT)
EMILY-SUE SLOANE The Last Gas Station 194

A Moment of Grace 195
Morning Walk 196
A Nickel Apiece 197
ROBERT L PENICK Beating Back the Night 198
DIANA DONOVAN Self-Help 206
CAROLYN JABS Chemistry 207
Shadow 207
Tech Support 208
Week End 209
B MISTY WYCOFF Cottage Loaf 217
JESSE BRYANT WILDER Lacoste 218
Dark Water 219
Splendour at Sea—for Natalie 219
Halloween Masc 220
Pancakes or Waffles 224
ARTHUR RUSSELL The Car Wash 230
Checkout Man 231
The Men’s Lunch Table 231
How To Replace A Toilet 232
Summer Afternoon 234
Plant Life 235
BILL GARTEN Starving 253
JOHN S EUSTIS Obtuse, Jerry Orbach, and Kwanzaa 253
MATTHEW MENDOZA I Am Five 255
MICHAEL ESTABROOK Sleep 260
GANNON DANIELS My Mother’s Voice 261
Paying Attention 262
JILL RUSCOLL Paperwhites 262
The Day the Boats Go in 263
EVALYN LEE I Have…Seeds in Me 266
The Next Generation of Stars 267
If You Learn Something
You should not Know 267
A Concustador Kadiddled
the Last Crumplecack 268
POETRY (CONT)
PATRICK KELLING things I almost remember 268

LINDA LERNER Random 269
BILL BAYNES A Freshening 282
WILL KIRKLAND A Certain Elderly Frenchman,
Eighty-three 282
What I have Heard about
Blue Angels 283
It’s Hard to Make Small Talk Today 285
Let Us Praise this Man 286
A Murder of Crows 287
JUDITH CODY Man of 99 Years Looks out
the Nursing Home Window 288
WILLIAM NUNEZ Untitled for Now 299
JIM TILLEY Stalking Prey 299
WARREN WOESSNER Spring Is not Early this Year 300
JOHN RAFFETTO Chaos Theory 301
Nevada Neon 301
Nocturnal Fever 302
NATANIA ROSENFELD Visiting My Sick Friend 315
After Quarantine 315
CHARLES SPRINGER Sprees 316
Bobbing Dead 316
KIMBERLY NUNES Double Helix 317
LYNN GLICKLICH COHEN Your 1:00 331
MIRIAM SAGAN In the Old Albertsons 332
DIANA COLE Tense on the Taconic 334
Massacre of Innocents 335
Forced Kiss 336
JAMES P COOPER That Hour 336
WILLIAM MILLER Handcarved Coffins 337
When I Take Out the Garbage 337
BILL GRIFFIN Every Spring the Trees Fill
with Songbirds 338
Love Song 339
NONFICTION
DENNIS MINTUN Making Prison Life a Little Easier inside cover

JOHN BALLANTINE America Was Great Until It Wasn’t 49
GILLIAN HAINES What Moms Do 131
JUHEE LEE-HARTFORD Grandmother’s House 168
FICTION
MONICA L BELLON-HARN Hurricane Laura 8

JOE BAUMANN Holey Moley 18
VIVIAN LAWRY Running on about Aunt Genevieve 29
MARK RUSSO A Special Bridge 97
LESLIE G COHEN Medicine’s Last Rites 57
ROB ARMSTRONG Cul-de-Sac Séance 64
TIMOTHY REILLY Old Light 71
MEIKA MACRAE The Dictionary of Dads 82
AMELIA COULON Charlotte 98
MICHAEL LLOYD GRAY A Small Window of Opportunity 110
SHARI LANE Legacy 124
FERNANDO RIVAS MARTINEZ Contraband 140
CLEM VAHE Two Couples 160
WILLIAM E BURLESON Schubert 179
GERALD PATRICK Do You Remember? 189
MARY LEWIS Stays on the River 199
JANICE E RODRÍGUEZ Go West 210
VICTOR OKECHUKWU Dying to Tell the Tale 224
ELEANOR LERMAN The Alcoholic Mariannes 239
KRISTEN OTT HOGAN The Legend of Scarface 256
R MULLIN Maria Sin 264
TERRY SANVILLE Quiet Canyon 269
ARTHUR ALLEN MIDWINTER Sell the Kids for Food 289
CHRISTOPHER CERVELLONI Sinking Ships 302
DENNIS MCFADDEN O’Hanlon’s Last Stand 318
CONTRIBUTORS 340
8 / Evening Street Review 39
MONICA L BELLON-HARN
HURRICANE LAURA
Decades of hurricanes have pulled small communities into the

Gulf of Mexico, but people in South Louisiana still startle each year when
storms bear down. Hushed tones carry the words ‘climate change’ while
loud prayers for divine intervention resound. “Our Beloved Mother, plead
with your Son, so that we are spared,” they pray. Waiting for a hurricane
is to be in limbo, a purgatory of sorts. People in South Louisiana believe
they are all sinners, so they live in a state of atonement, anticipating
deliverance from the flood. If the hurricane moves elsewhere, they know
God loves them most; and for good reason, they work for the Lord.
Hurricanes are a test and the people of South Louisiana pass some of the
time. It was one of the Thibeaux’s daughters, the oldest Ruth, who once
asked her parents what it meant when the hurricanes target their Louisiana
border. “It means you got to find what is deep in your heart that God
doesn’t love and root it out,” they told her.
Ruth’s daughter, Cecilia, remembers everything her mother said
about hurricanes as she waits with her father, Jimmy, for Hurricane Laura
to come knocking. They watch the spaghetti lines the weatherman draws;
they listen to the announcement of potential evacuation. Cecilia and
Jimmy weigh the odds that Laura might come for them and blow them off
the map.
Jimmy says, “I guess we better hang the plywood on the
windows.” His slight body reaches for Cecilia’s steady hand and they rise
from the couch. When the sun is still shining it feels like there are choices
to be made, action to mitigate the risk, but deciding whether to stay or go
is a fool’s errand.
Cecilia and Jimmy lift pre-cut plywood pieces from the shed in
the backyard and secure them on hooks around windows. One large pane
overlooks a row of azaleas and Cecilia feels loss even before the wind
arrives and the sky darkens. Their neighbor, burly in coveralls, walks over
and asks them why they bother.
“The good Lord will do what the good Lord will do,” he says.
It is the same conversation they have every year.
“The devil gave us insurance, tempted us with security” the
neighbor continues. “Fuck those parasites. They abandon us. I abandon
them.”
2023, Autumn / 9
“That’ll teach them,” Cecilia laughs and rolls her eyes, even
though she agrees with her neighbor on this point.
Jimmy responds with silence. He is accustomed to Cecilia’s need
to challenge their kinsmen, a game to which he had long ago grown weary.
Jimmy had been, while full of work ethic, conspicuous by the books
strewn through every room of his house. He spent two years in Austin
studying biology and when he returned home to South Louisiana to rescue
the family’s faltering shrimping business, he was an oddity. He married
Ruth, and she worked as his bookkeeper. She watched him go out on the
shrimping boats and waited for his return with Cecilia in her lap.
Jimmy waves at his neighbor, “Holler if you need something.”
The neighbor claps him on the back, “Same here, you know my
generator is brand new, got a good deal on it.”
Inside Cecilia and Jimmy move furniture toward the center of the
house. Doing something is better than doing nothing even when you know
the rising water can’t be stopped. There isn’t a lot of furniture, most of it
was tossed sixteen years ago, after their home was destroyed during
Hurricane Rita. Cecilia turned thirteen by the time the house was rebuilt.
“Rita wasn’t the last one to come and wash us away,” said Ruth. So, Jimmy
and Ruth chose tile over carpet or hardwood, hung cabinets from the
ceiling, and lifted the back porch on piers even higher than before. They
filled the house with only what they needed to live. “Less is more,” Ruth
said. After Rita, Jimmy took the insurance money for the shrimping
business, restored the boats, and promptly sold everything. Rebuilding is
an act of faith, belief you may be spared, a belief hard to abandon for many,
but not Ruth. Belief in acts of faith left her in 1957 when Hurricane
Audrey’s winds began.
Ruth and her little sister, Georgette, were picking okra, a chore
given to them by their mother before she went to work at the local grocery
store.
“This okra ain’t gonna pick itself,” Ruth hollered to Georgette.
Georgette listlessly stood up from a cool spot under a magnolia
tree where she had been sitting.
“It’s hairy and itchy,” Georgette said as she fingered a pod.
Children, even Georgette, who had not experienced playtime ease,
yearned for lightness, so she pulled a pod and ran to tickle her sister. But
Ruth, who had discovered virtue of work, turned and slapped Georgette’s
hand.
“Get to work,” Ruth said as she stepped over a short fence and
walked toward their house.
“Hey, Daddy Purple,” she called to her father on the couch. It was
her nickname for him since his lips were purple, a consequence of his
congestive heart disease.
“Princess,” he said as she kissed his cheek.
She moved the antenna on the radio, working to tune in a static-
free ball game for him. Then she brought him a fresh cup of coffee and she
placed it on the side table as she watched him breathe. She walked back
outside, pushing against wind at the back door. Georgette was standing in
the middle of the yard with outstretched arms, greeting the gusts with
laughter.
“Get inside,” Ruth yelled.
Georgette, taking advantage of her reprieve, ran through the back
door leaving her doll under the magnolia tree. Ruth, in her anger that her
virtue and knowledge had come to her at such a young age, took advantage
of her opportunity and hid the doll behind the back shed. That evening
when the family sat for their meal, a stew of random, wilted vegetables
from the refrigerator along with fresh cut okra, thunder sounded, and
pellets of rain hit the roof.
After the dishes were done, Georgette went to get her doll. When
she couldn’t find her in the house, she wanted to go outside to look for her.
“Stay put,” their mother ordered.
Ruth whispered in Georgette’s ear, “Next time you should do your
chores.” When Ruth registered the horror in Georgette’s face, Ruth felt a
lesson had been learned, her work was done.
That night the weather swelled, and Georgette rose to find her doll.
She waded through high water in the backyard, and then she and her doll
were washed away with the surge, consumed in Audrey’s wrath. In the
aftermath, new knowledge had found Ruth, knowledge that grew each day
in her narrow bones, some actions cannot be atoned. Over years, Ruth
settled in her belief that her black heart would never be abated, but with
Jimmy and then Cecilia, she allowed herself to be loved and to love. They
spent their days, a trio, until Cecilia retraced her father’s steps and left to
study public policy in Austin. That was when Hurricane Harvey came.
He struck the southeast Texas border and after he peaked, he faded
back into the Gulf. Harvey teased the communities who breathed a sigh of
relief, but he was just waiting, gathering strength, preparing a second blow.
He neared the Louisiana border, but decided he wasn’t finished with Texas
and for four days he drenched the landscape and turned cities into islands.
Cecilia waited in her dorm with two other students who listened to her on
the phone as she talked to her parents. The powerlessness Cecilia felt
2023, Autumn / 11
during Harvey’s reign halted her ideas of creating a life someplace other
than South Louisiana. Not everyone is born to flee the burdens of their
childhood, not everyone needs to.
By the time Laura emerged, Cecilia made her way back home. She
finished her degree at the same time Ruth had been diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s. In Cecilia’s absence her mother covered up the disease, and
her father covered more.
“Your father thinks I’m cuckoo,” Ruth said when Cecilia arrived
with her luggage in hand. As Cecilia walked through the house, she
encountered the smell of must and saw plastic bags lining the walls. She
picked one up, unknotted the plastic ties, and pulled out an ice cream
scoop, a washcloth, five dimes, and a red pen.
Ruth whispered to her daughter, “I have my things together
because they said they would come get me, but don’t tell your father.”
When Ruth wouldn’t keep her clothes on and kept trying to leave
the house in search of someone who loved her, Cecilia and Jimmy put Ruth
in Brookhaven memory care. It was a passage to another life for the three
of them, one from which none would remain the same.
A large and vivacious woman, named Grace, hugged Ruth when
they brought her to the facility, “Girlfriend, you finally made it to the
party.” Ruth walked in without question, leaving Cecilia and Jimmy
watching and wondering from a distance. They were freed from a burden
they did not want to relinquish and found their life unnatural in her
absence. They visited her daily and worked to call her back to them with
photographs, books, and songs, but she was gone.
Near evening, Jimmy steps outside, the sweet smell of
honeysuckle, the flowering trumpets hanging onto the vine, and he thinks
of Ruth. Their young life with Cecilia running underfoot, proud and
anticipatory. Their later life, too soon arrived, faded and illusory. Inside
the house, the call to evacuate comes from the authorities. When they
moved Ruth into Brookhaven, the facility gave them a piece of paper
outlining their disaster plan. Jimmy and Cecilia put the paperwork in a
drawer, avoiding the inevitable. Denial, an act of desperation, until avowal
walks up and slaps you in the face.
Cecilia walks outside.
“Brookhaven called because they are evacuating the residents to a
sister campus in Pharr, Texas, by noon tomorrow,” she says.
“Where the hell is that?” he asks.
“The valley of Texas,” she says.
“Not with my wife,” he says, and he walks to the car. Cecilia

follows and they drive to fetch Ruth.
“It is the only thing I know to do,” says Jimmy.
Their action, a risk in the absence of a plan, leads them in pursuit
of an uncertain consequence. Jimmy developed a tendency toward
objective logic when he came back home as a young adult, but today, it is
his recklessness that defines him. Cecilia is in motion for his purpose, a
fulcrum of his agency.
They pull the car under the portico and observe a circus of aids
ushering people in different directions. Cecilia is relieved at the site of
Grace in the center.
“Come with me,” Grace says. She wraps her arm around Cecilia’s
shoulder, and they walk to Ruth’s room.
Ruth stands in front of her bed. The pictures Cecilia and Jimmy
carefully placed are not anywhere to be seen. Her clothes that were neatly
organized in her closet are strewn and Ruth wears a plaid button-down
shirt with flower capris. In her hands she holds a baby doll. Jimmy reaches
to touch Ruth and she shrinks away.
“I thought you were bringing Georgette,” she says. Her skin is
transparent, her face stricken.
“Come on Mom,” says Cecilia. “Let’s go home.”
“That’s not Georgette,” Ruth tells Jimmy.
Grace looks at Cecilia and Jimmy. She tells them that she knows
they don’t want Ruth to go on the bus, that they want Ruth to be with them,
that they want Ruth to be their mother and wife. “But the Ruth you knew
is gone,” she says. “If you take her, she will not do well.”
“Ruth, it is time to go,” says Jimmy. He takes her arm, passes
Grace, and walks with Ruth out the door. Jimmy takes her through the
cacophony in the front of the building, to the car, and opens the car door.
Ruth climbs in the front seat and never turns around to look at Cecilia who
sits in the back seat.
“We are going home and in the morning, we will take a trip,” says
Jimmy.
But Ruth is agitated and she rocks fiercely in her seat, throws the
doll to the floor, hits the car door window, and reaches for the door handle.
Cecilia’s body cranes into the front seat and she grabs her mother’s arm.
“Lock the door,” she yells. Jimmy pushes the electric lock and
Cecilia lets go of her mother’s arm. Ruth puts her forehead on the window
and cries.
“Take me home, take me home,” she says. “I need to go home.”
2023, Autumn / 13
“That is what we are doing, Mama,” says Cecilia.

Ruth begins to pray the Hail Mary while she reaches for the baby
doll on the floorboard. The driveway is up ahead and Jimmy accelerates.
“Once she sees the house, maybe it will get better,” he says.
Cecilia is erect on the backseat with her hand on her mother’s
shoulder.
“At least we are together,” says Jimmy.
They arrive at their house, but Ruth refuses to get out of the car,
so they stay idling on the driveway. Ruth’s fingernails, uncharacteristic
with bright blue nail polish applied by Brookhaven staff, push into her skin
and when Cecilia tries to hold her mother’s hand, to stop the puncture,
Ruth pushes harder. Cecilia looks at her mother’s hands, battered and
bulging with veins, then she looks at her own strong nails, her smooth skin.
Cecilia and Ruth both have long tapered fingers but that is all that remains
the same. Jimmy used to joke that one of them should play the piano, but
neither could detect pitch. When Cecilia was small Ruth sang at the top of
her lungs and Cecilia would join in; their voices harmonized in ways only
they understood.
The three of them breathe in unison and Jimmy begins to talk. He
tells Ruth about the door they will walk through, the one they picked out
together because Ruth loved the way the sun shone in a prism through the
beveled glass. Jimmy tells her they will walk down the hallway leading to
their bedroom. He describes the pictures that hang on the wall, the one
they took of a great egret, a chance encounter when they went hiking in
the Carolina mountains, a morning benediction so far from their bayou
home. He tells her how they will sleep in fresh ironed sheets, just like she
likes.
“I am keeping up with your house rules,” he says. Cecilia emits a
choked laugh and Ruth begins to rub Cecilia’s hands.
Jimmy tells Ruth that he will wipe her face and hands and feet and
she will smell the lavender of the soap. He tells her that he will put his
arms around her, lay her in bed, and pull the sheet up to her chin with the
fan lightly blowing. He tells her that Cecilia will come and kiss her cheek
and tell her good-night. Jimmy tells Ruth she will dream of the three of
them on the back porch with their night vision binoculars and birding
books in search of the elusive Black Rail, a red-eyed sparrow-like bird
who only comes out at night.
Ruth is still and she smiles. Jimmy’s voice calms her like it had
all their years together. The three of them sit in the car on the driveway
and Cecilia feels like they are on their last trip together, their westward
road trip they took before Cecilia went to college. Cecilia envisions the
bridge over the Sabine into Texas, the looming skyscrapers of Houston
replacing the marsh, then rolling hills replacing rice fields, cattle replacing
crawfish farms, and brush trees replacing tall pines.
“Let’s keep driving,” Ruth said when they reached west Texas.
And Cecilia wishes they had never stopped.
“We have to take her back,” Jimmy says and Cecilia nods. And so
they turn the car around and drop Ruth off to a waiting Grace, who holds
Ruth in her arms. Jimmy and Cecilia do not wave as they pull toward the
street leading home, to pack their bags and their cooler of cokes and
sandwiches. It is just the two of them fleeing Laura, unable to predict what
is to come. The eye of the hurricane is a point in your life before everything
changes. You know you can’t stay there, you can’t shrink from the winds
and rain to come, from the onset of destruction so devastating that nothing
can be fully rebuilt. It is a truth Ruth knew long ago, it is a truth that Jimmy
and Cecilia are only now discovering.
EMILY BUTLER
#RELATIONSHIPGOALS
Love is distracting.
Love makes it difficult to get work done.
People sometimes say that relationships are work.
They say not to date anyone you work with.
This rule can be “spoken” (as in the employee handbook) or “unspoken”

(as in whispering which
stops when you enter the room.)
I made a New Year’s Resolution to accomplish less this year.
I’m not sure yet if I will accomplish this.

(cont)
2023, Autumn / 15
It is best to set goals which are small and objectively measurable.

There is an internet hashtag, “#relationshipgoals,” often accompanied by
images which are not objectively measurable.
In relationships, I make plans instead of goals—camping, museums,
movies, the beach.
Relationships can feel as if they are progressing or devolving- mostly
due to the passage of time.
The passage of time can feel fast or slow, although its true rate is
objective.
The passage of time is often used as a means of measuring a relationship.
People sometimes ask if a relationship is serious or casual.
Serious and casual are otherwise rarely juxtaposed as mutually exclusive
categories.
Jobs are sometimes called casual positions, but they are not called
serious positions.
Many professions strike me as quite serious.
I am serious about both love and work.
I am sometimes praised for being a funny person.
A sense of humor is cited as a desirable quality in relationships, though it
is not objectively measurable.
Employers sometimes say they want someone with a sense of humor.
A sense of humor could be measured in the number of jokes one makes,
or the number of times one laughs.
A man’s sense of humor tends to be measured in the number of jokes he
makes.
A woman’s sense of humor tends to be measured in the number of times
she laughs.
Butler
MEANINGLESS
I open my mouth to speak

and a bluejay flies out instead.
All eyes turn to look at it.
It’s like I’m not even here.
I don’t want to hunt or farm
but I’d rather not take so many photographs either,
rather not have to demonstrate my value every quarter,
gather reports, track my moods, exercise, cycle,
diet, water, sleep, and shits.
It doesn’t solve anything.
The doctors find nothing on their tests.
It's hard not to hate my body—
the colonies it houses without permission,
our bacterial codependency.
It’s hard not to imagine my intestines
as out to get me, hard not to interpret pain
as violence. Writing about pain
lends it significance
which is a kind of lie.
It hurts to create (just ask your mother).
I’m dirty with chalk and blood,
exhausted from whittling the world down
to its most salient components:
sandstone, rosewood, calcium,
canvas. My hands reach out to yours,
sticky with paint. Together we make
a brand-new color, one which
only birds can see.
Butler
2023, Autumn / 17
DUANE ANDERSON
IN THE EYES OF THE WIND
I am the wind, watch out

when I get angry,
hear me roar,
see me knock down trees,
tear roofs off houses,
knock garbage cans down
with my one-two punch,
then watch me when I am friendly,
lifting kites high in the skies,
powering the turbines in wind farms,
raising flags high,
seeing them wave
as they say hello to the world,
then at times,
I can hold my breath
and you would never know
I even existed,
but none of these options
are yours to choose from.
You will see one of my multiple personalities
depending on how I feel that day,
but this is to let you know,
I have been seeing a psychiatrist,
working on eliminating
the more brutal version of me.
Anderson
IN THE EYES OF A WINDOW SHADE
If you want to see out the window,

go ahead and pull on my cord.
It will raise up my covering that
blocks out your view to the outside world. (cont)
Maybe you want to see a morning sunrise,

an evening sunset,
the moon and stars at night,
or just to find out who’s making all that
noise outside keeping you awake at night?

By doing so, you give up some of your privacy,
but I am also doing you a favor,
hiding the dirty windows from your view,
and then a favor to your neighbors,

them not having to see you in your underwear.
Maybe it’s best you keep me closed,
at least until you get dressed for the day.
Anderson
JOE BAUMANN
HOLEY MOLEY
The cheerleaders arrive first.

Bryson is in the kitchen, measuring out baker’s yeast for the donut
of the day, which he has decided to call Over the Raindough, a multi-
colored glazed topped with rainbow sprinkles, when he hears the door
open and multiple—too many—voices: high dithers of laughter mixed
with whispers of uncertainty as if to say, Is this place open?
It is. Holey Moley is a twenty-four-hour establishment, but things
are usually slow from two to five, when he gets most of his baking done
before his one employee comes in to help with the breakfast rush and then
sticks around while Bryson goes home to his tiny apartment for a quick
bout of sleep before he returns to wait on the swing shift doctors and EMTs
from the hospital down the street who are in desperate need of coffee and
excess glucose. He only keeps the place open through the quietest part of
night on the off-chance of bringing in night owls and the kids who stumble
2023, Autumn / 19
out of the downtown bars and want something sweet instead of salty or
savory (though he does occasionally manage to come up with a maple-
bacon donut or something covered in pink sea salt).
The cheerleaders are all bubbly blonde, the golden wheat of their
hair and the spangly blue of their outfits jarring against the brown of the
leatherette booths and the off-white cream color of the counter and
tabletops. A dozen of them have made themselves comfortable in the
booths, and three of them are sitting down at the counter, spinning
themselves on the backless stools that squeal as they turn.
“Hello,” Bryson says, wiping his hands on his floor-length black
apron, leaving yeasty streaks in the fabric.
“We are famished,” one of the cheerleaders says with a southern
accent. She smiles, her lipstick pristine, teeth glaring white, putting the
color of the countertop to shame. “We would like donuts.”
They point at the case, the cheerleaders in the booth coming up
one at a time. They take all of the glazed donuts and crullers. A few ask
for jelly. Bryson hands them out, presented on paper plates. They ask if he
has coffee and he nods. They clap when he brings out the first pot; they’ve
found the mugs on their own, someone slipping around behind the counter
to dole them out while he was in the back brewing, plunging the
Raindoughs into the fryer.
“This place smells great,” the southern cheerleader says. He thinks
of her as the squad captain. “Delicious. You can practically taste the fat.”
“Thanks,” Bryson says.
“Are you all by yourself?”
“For now.”
“Bless your heart,” she says, aiming her mug at his chest for a
refill.
The bell affixed to the door jangles: lawyers. Bryson can’t tell at
first that they’re lawyers, but their bespoke suits and wool skirts scream
some kind of professional, and they’re harried, all of them looking tired
and red-eyed and wrinkled from staring at documents. When Bryson
emerges from the back with a fresh pot of coffee, having pulled his
Raindoughs out of the fryer to cool, he hears one of the cheerleaders asking
for advice about divorce. It’s like a mixer, the well-dressed, white-collar
attorneys schmoozing with the cheerleaders, taking periodic bites out of
their long johns and chocolate glazed. Bryson has a hard time keeping up
with who owes what, and then, thankfully, one of the attorneys, with salt-
and-pepper hair and crinkly eyes, a tight but nice smile and a tie the color
of the deepest ocean, holds out two one-hundred-dollar bills and says,
“Will this cover everyone?”
“More than,” Bryson says.
“Keep the change. Good service. More coffee?”
The money rattles into the cash register. Bryson can practically
feel the bills pulsing, can smell their leathery odor from living in a damp
wallet jammed with Amex Black cards. He finishes up the Raindoughs and
sets them out on a large rack to cool. When he returns to the front with a
full pot of Colombian, the bell over the door jangles again: a coterie of
circus performers. They are led by a lion tamer, who has to lean down as
he enters so his gargantuan top hat doesn’t clip the door frame. His red
blazer is covered in glimmering sequins like thousands of tiny fires.
Bryson can’t stop staring at the shoulders of the trapeze artists, three men,
one in his forties and the others in their late teens or early twenties, all
wearing matching green and white leotards that make their tanned skin
glow like the cheerleaders. They are accompanied by four clowns in full
makeup, a pair of sideshow freaks—a bearded lady and an Elephant
Man—and a snake charmer with a yellow boa slung over her shoulders,
which is probably a health code violation.
Bryson is sure there isn’t room for everyone, but it is as if the
clowns cast a spell on the shop, treating it like one of the cars they manage
to spill out of by the dozen. The lawyers make space for the lion tamer;
cheerleaders squash into their booth with the Bearded Lady,
complimenting the glow of her facial hair. The trapeze artists treat the
empty stools at the counter like pommel horses, mounting them at the wrist
and dangling there as if bored.
Bryson fills mugs and then returns to the kitchen to make more
coffee.
The shop's normal aromas of rich, fried dough and snowy
powdered sugar are overwhelmed by the sweet-sour smell of human
bodies, percolating with sweat and excitement. Bryson can hear the din of
talk through the kitchen's swinging door; it sounds like a waterfall. He
spends so little time among the masses, and the wash of noise makes the
tiny hairs on the back of his neck tingle. Running a donut shop is solitary,
tiring work. He can’t remember the last time he was in a bar, on the lookout
for some other lonely heart drinking a wheat beer on his own, eyes equally
peeled for someone to share a moment—or, if luck would have it, a
night—with.
He is running out of donuts. The jellies have been decimated, the
chocolates drilled down to nothing but a sweep of crumbs. Bryson watches
2023, Autumn / 21
a cheerleader bite into the last of the blueberries. The Bostons and sour
creams are still holding strong, but he can see how the clowns are eyeing
them.
As Bryson finishes topping off coffees—as many as he can before
this, his fourth or fifth pot, is emptied—the lion tamer steps up to the
counter, muscling his way between the trapeze artists, who have finally sat
down to enjoy their apple cider donuts. The tamer has a bristly mustache
and tan skin, just enough lines for him to be handsome. He resembles a
young Tom Selleck. Bryson gives him a tired half-smile. The lion tamer
reaches into his blazer and removes a simple black wallet, which seems
out of place. Like the attorney, he peels several bills from inside and holds
them out, wordless, eyes sparkling. Bryson takes them in his free hand
without a word, nodding. The lion tamer nods back, shoves the wallet back
into his inner breast pocket, and vanishes into the crowd. Bryson makes
for the kitchen.
When he returns, Raindoughs ready on their tray, the firefighters
have arrived. They are bulky and loom large, the smell of ash and smoke
clinging to their skin, which is mostly covered by Nomex hoods and
reflective pants that flash under the shop’s fluorescent lights. The
cheerleaders and attorneys make space for them; they jostle past the
clowns, who feign courtly deference. Six of them squeeze into the shop,
everyone standing shoulder-to-shoulder, their voices a carom of noise that
blasts at Bryson’s ears. He doesn’t bother sliding the Raindoughs into the
case and instead starts doling them out without a word; more money
appears before him, from whose gloved or manicured or hairy hand he has
no clue. The firefighters are desperate for their own cups of coffee, but
Bryson is out of mugs. The fawning cheerleaders, and one of the trapeze
artists, offer to share theirs, which seems to make everyone happy. One of
the attorneys asks the firefighters where they’ve come from, and they
mention a fire in an apartment building not far from the shop; Bryson
recognizes the name.
When he returns to the kitchen for yet another pot of coffee—he’s
running out of filters and grounds both—he hears footsteps behind him.
He turns: the lion tamer. Bryson is caught off-guard; everything in the
kitchen is stainless steel deck ovens and skimmers and off-white paint, and
the tamer’s raging red blazer is like a sun. He stands framed by the
swinging door, which threatens to slam right into him as it sways but stops
just short of his broad back. Bryson gives him a long once-over: his cream-
colored pants—nearly matching the walls—are tight in the thighs,
showing off the musculature of his legs. His black boots shimmer under
the harsh lights as if freshly polished.
“You could use some help.” It isn’t a question, but it’s not
judgment either. The tamer’s voice is softer than Bryson expects, pillowy
and kind. When he speaks, the lines around his eyes crinkle.
“Is it that bad out there?”
“It’s a happy enough crowd.”
“I guess you’ve seen them turn?”
“Sometimes.”
Without Bryson asking, the tamer removes his coat and sets it
down in the empty space on the cooling table the Raindoughs recently
occupied. He peels off his top hat, nestling it gently atop the heap of his
blazer, revealing a thick mop of black, wavy hair. His white shirt is tight
across the chest and arms, tapered as if sewn specifically for his body.
Bryson can see the twitch and ripple of every muscle as if it is mimicked
by the fabric. The lion tamer claps his hands together.
“Please,” he says. “Tell me what I can do.” His voice is deep like
an echoing well, and it clangs in Bryson’s ears. The tamer makes a
bombastic sweep of the prep station, where the ingredients for the
Raindoughs are still spread out in a messy line: granulated sugar, eggs,
butter, flour, mace, neon gel food coloring. Bryson sets down his coffee
pot at the same time the tamer picks up a sheet of paper: Bryson’s scribbled
recipe.
“Oh,” Bryson says. “That’s just an experiment.”
The tamer raises an eyebrow. “You’re a scientist? Or an artist?”
“I’m a baker.”
“Both, then.” The tamer rolls up his sleeves, revealing a colorful
tattoo along the tender, pale side of his left forearm: a single long red line,
plus several shorter yellow ones beneath, interrupted by a few dashes of
blue and pink. The tamer sees him staring and points, pressing a finger into
his flesh. “People and animals I’ve lost,” he says, offering no further
explanation.
The tamer is quick, nodding and grabbing, measuring, adding; he
knows how to switch on the sheeter without Bryson having to say
anything, and when he catches Bryson staring, he says, “I started doing
this in another life.”
“Really?”
The tamer nods. “My mother was a baker.”
“Was?”
“Was.”
2023, Autumn / 23
“I’m sorry.”
“Like I said, another life.” He waves Bryson away with a gloved
hand; he’s swapped out his leathers for blue latex. “Go. I can do this. Make
more coffee.”
Bryson feels the hot slap of dismissal. His fingers shake as he
places the emptied coffee pot back into its cradle, fills a fresh filter with
grounds. He wants to turn around and watch the lion tamer as he mixes
and beats and the stretches the dough before sending it through the sheeter,
to stare at the twitch of muscles in his forearms, the shift of those colored
lines demarking tragedy. But instead, Bryson stares at the drip of black as
it fills the pot. He shakes himself loose and tries, unsuccessfully, to find
more mugs. Bryson returns to the front of the shop and plucks up the used
cups discarded by the attorneys that have had their fill. No one has left,
but no one new has arrived. The trapeze artists are now doing handstands
on the backs of the booths, their legs splayed in bendy shapes. The clowns
appear to be playing charades, or else performing some kind of theatrical
display that is generating laughs from two of the firefighters, the rest of
whom are crammed in with cheerleaders, telling stories of their bravery
and the ravages of housefires. The snake charmer is dancing in a small
clearing between counter and booths. Two of the attorneys sit at the
counter, paperwork spread out before them, whispering about liabilities
and torts and other things Bryson doesn’t understand. When he hears the
bell above the door jangle, he wants to yell out that they’re at max capacity.
Shouldn’t one of the firefighters see the hazard?
A gaggle of school children enters.
They wear bright school uniforms, the boys in vibrant sunrise
yellows and starched navy-blue shorts. The girls—three of them
accompany the three boys, each somewhere between eight and twelve
years old; Bryson is terrible at aging children—wear swishy pleated skirts
the same near-midnight color with clean white blouses. Bryson wonders
what kids are doing out at this hour, but then he realizes he could wonder
the same thing about just about everyone else in the shop, too.
The Raindoughs have already run out, the only remnants on the
tray a vibrant array of scattershot crumbs that remind Bryson of space,
nebulas and galaxies swirling in the black. He presses a finger into a trough
of dough flakes and sticks it in his mouth. Though tiny, they exude fat and
sugar and butter. His mouth waters. Bryson stares down at the tray,
imagining the clean rows of donuts being plucked up one by one, gnashed
against the cheerleaders’ white teeth, swallowed down the firefighters’
grizzled throats, washed with coffee by the harried attorneys and the
flexible circus freaks. Every donut, every ingredient, is a little piece of him
traveling through their bodies, providing nourishment and expanding
waistlines, sending tastebuds into pleasured orbit. And all that he is left
with after that is a tray full of crumbs and, at least tonight, a full cash
register.
One of the boys manages to muscle his way to the counter and
hold out a five-dollar bill. Bryson takes it, and the boy, without a word,
shoves his way to the donut case and examines its remaining offerings.
Unlike the rest of his current clientele, the boy waits for Bryson to come
over with napkins and slick wax sheets rather than helping himself by
going around the back of the case to self-serve. He points to the last three
Boston creams as well as two bear claws hiding on the bottom shelf where
the adults must not have been able to see them. A single chocolate brownie
crumble donut is also hidden in a low corner, and the boy taps the glass
with excited vehemence. His five dollars won’t cover the cost of all six
donuts, but Bryson decides it doesn’t matter. He boxes the donuts in a pink
Holey Moley box and hands it to the boy, who threads his way back to the
other children huddled near the door. Bryson watches them eat, their
fingers going gluey with glaze, mouths ringed with cream and chocolate.
The boy who bought the donuts is the tallest, clearly the leader of their
pack, and he gives the rich crumble to the smallest girl, who looks like
she’s barely old enough for school anyway. Her eyes are ringed with dark
circles, her hair pulled up into pigtails held fast by pink ribbon. Bryson
squints out into the night, expecting, dubiously, a school bus or a car with
a harried mother, someone who must pull her weight in carpool at the
egregiously early hour of—he checks the clock affixed above the kitchen
door—four-fifteen. But the night is empty, the streets scattered only with
trash and parking meters. Storefronts across the street—a bodega at the
corner, a boutique clothing store, a Qdoba—are dark and unmoving.
Everywhere except Holey Moley is dead and silent.
Bryson returns to the kitchen, where he can hear and smell the
fryers. The lion tamer appears happy with himself, prepping a second
batch of dough. When Bryson enters, the tamer smiles. His forearms are
dusted in flour and some has made its way into his mustache. He crinkles
his eyes in Bryson’s direction.
“Smells good,” Bryson says.
“I adapted your recipe a bit.”
“How?”
The tamer shrugs. “Added some of this, subtracted some of that.
It’s not an exact science.”
2023, Autumn / 25
Bryson’s feet and hands hurt. He’s not used to moving around this
much at this time of night. He can feel burning behind his eyeballs. He
rubs them and lets out a breath.
“You are running out of sugar,” the lion tamer says.
“I am?”
The tamer shrugs. Bryson wants to rip him open. To stuff his
fingers down the man’s throat, wriggle them along his tongue and the soft
tissue inside. He doesn’t want to make more coffee or serve more donuts
or brush them with glaze or take inventory of dry storage or the walk-in
refrigerator. He wants to call his assistant and tell her that he’s closing
Holey Moley for good, that he can’t stand the smell of butter and flour and
fryer oil anymore.
The lion tamer is watching him.
“I guess I’ll call my supplier.”
A small office sits off the side of the kitchen, a windowless room
that has barely enough space for a single filing cabinet and a built-in desk
with three shelves that are stuffed with paperwork. The little wall space is
papered with articles about Holey Moley, good reviews, a feature in the
Post-Dispatch from a few years ago, a picture of a smiling Bryson leaning
in the store’s open doorway, arms crossed over his chest. Sometimes
Bryson looks at that image of himself, his eyes uncrowded by lines, his
back betraying no constant ache, his hands not pulsing with the exhaustion
that comes from kneading dough and burning his fingers on hot metal
every day. He tries to remember being that version of himself.
Before he can sift through the paperwork on his desk—bills,
invoices, a schedule of which hotels and doctors’ offices and bookstores
have standing orders on file for what days and how many of which
donuts—the lion tamer is suddenly behind him, rapping on the door frame.
When Bryson turns, the lion tamer stares down at him, an angle that makes
him even more handsome. Bryson feels his stomach tense and clench. He
tries not to stare at the tattoo, wonder at the weight of loss in his broad
shoulders. Bryson half expects the lion tamer to move into the office, to
pull Bryson from his chair, to cup his chin with his dough-wet hands and
kiss him on the mouth, shut the door and pry off Bryson’s clothes, slam
him against the filing cabinet, bruise his back and leave him spent. Bryson
sees then that he’s donned his raging red blazer and top hat again, the brim
dusted with a faint white outline of his hand.
The lion tamer says, “My people will go soon.”
“Go?”
“We can’t stay in your donut shop forever.”
“I guess not.”
“You will be alright without us.”
“I—yes?”
“Yes.” The lion tamer nods and backs away. Suddenly, Bryson is
alone in the kitchen, the only sound the gurgle of donuts frying, the only
smell their warm, fat aroma. Bryson’s mouth waters, but he isn’t hungry.
He picks up the full coffee pot and pushes through the swinging
door, leading with his hip. The sight of the shop is jarring. The children
are already gone, the only evidence of their presence the empty donut box
sitting atop the trash can by the door, bent open to reveal a mound of used
napkins and a smear of chocolate on the interior of the lid. The firefighters
are on the way out, their Nomex hoods shining like they, too, are glazed.
One of them waves a gloved hand toward the cheerleaders, who wave
back, mouths stretched in the kind of grin that can only mean sudden,
quick, hard love. He watches one sigh like a princess in a Disney film, the
cheerleaders around her tittering like a supporting cast of woodland
critters.
Things are happening in reverse. When the firefighters depart,
their ashy smell that had undergirded the fat and sugar dispersed into the
dark, the snake charmer and bearded lady slither away. The trapeze artists
leave with a flurry of handstands. When the lion tamer reaches the door,
he barely looks back.
The attorneys begin packing up. Bryson offers more coffee, but
they all decline, pressing their down-turned palms over the mouths of their
mugs. The one who paid him offers up another pair of hundred-dollar bills,
and even though Bryson’s sure they haven’t taken that much from him, he
accepts the money without complaint. The attorney nods as if they’ve just
settled a case, and then he departs, snapping up his briefcase with a swish
as it slides across the counter. His colleagues follow suit, one woman
wiping off her mouth with a napkin that she leaves balled on the
countertop. Bryson stares at it and the smear of what is either jelly or
lipstick.
The cheerleaders rise, their smooth quads flexing as they stand.
They thank him for the coffee in hushed tones. He waves, saying nothing.
When they’re gone, the bell jangling, he stares at the empty store, which
seems to pulse as if it is a pair of lungs breathing, expanding. The booths
are a mess of crumbs and abandoned coffee mugs; suddenly there are too
many of them. He can’t imagine cleaning up, even though the trash is
hardly anything more than usual, all things considered. Bryson rubs his
face and goes around past the counter. He glances at the empty case, a
2023, Autumn / 27
ravaged desolation of crumbs and crinkled wax paper. Bryson pokes his
finger into the empty tray on the counter, but the crumbled refuse has gone
stale and hard and, when he pops it in his mouth, tasteless. He looks around
the emptied store, glances at the sun starting to break through between the
high-rising buildings, a few early pedestrians finally occupying the
sidewalk. Bryson swallows the crumbs down, hard and grating against the
back of his throat, and wonders if, should he make more donuts, anyone
would really, truly, care for them. In the kitchen, a timer buzzes: the
Raindoughs are ready, again.
CHRISTOPHER RUBIO-GOLDSMITH
BLUES RIFFS
I do not know why this is

but every time I visit my tio Ariel
the next day I find myself listening to
Credence Clearwater Revival’s
“Cosmos Factory.”
It’s like his wild grey hair
releases a blues crescendo
that hovers just above my reach.
Growing up along the border in Douglas, Arizona

he spoke only Spanish until he
attended first grade. As if his early
English lessons came out of John Fogerty’s
blues’ riffs, the guitar sounding the past,
daring the future to exceed expectations.
When Ariel was maybe 18 he visited his older brother, Ricardo,

his apartment near a college campus. Ariel went to use the bathroom,
opened the door, discovered two large eagles nesting there.
The tiny room covered in eagle architecture supplies:
branches, fabrics, leaves, a big bowl full of water and chicken parts on the tiles.
(cont)
Ricardo just laughed. He forgot

to mention them, had a couple
of guys who wanted to buy the eagles.
Ariel later went to Los Angeles earning his MFA from Cal Arts. I wonder
if when he looked out the window at night, did the moon look
like a mistake? Migrating from Douglas to Los Angeles
in 1980 must have created an imagination beyond an imagination
the smelter becoming freeways, the border evolving into horizons of shore,
tides, the quiet nights transforming into raptures of staggering bankrupt dreams.
But what
he must have understood

a desire to belong was as strong as loneliness.
Rubio-Goldsmith
ARNIE YASINSKI
HOW WELL DID I KNOW HIM?
From a distance, it’s him in the garden,

left hand low on his tined hoe, right hand
on top of the handle. Identical, short strokes.
His gait is familiar in the long view

of him coming up the road toward home.
On car trips, he stretches his tired fingers
against the top of the steering wheel one

by one, as I do now too. The turquoise parka
he wears starts as mine, but embarrasses me.
Not to be wasted, it’s worn, perhaps, to jolt me

out of self-consciousness. All of his kids can
sing the tuneless lullaby he made of “Long,
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 29
Long Trail A Winding.” We find Playboys in

the closet after he dies. My mother leaves them
for years. There’s a photo from his youth of him
riding with a woman, both in jodhpurs and boots.

He deflects questions about her. Just as he does
when we ask about the war.
Yasinski
VIVIAN LAWRY
RUNNING ON ABOUT AUNT GENEVIEVE
Aunt Gen is a living legend in our family, given all the firsts and
onlys she’s racked up—like being the only one to graduate valedictorian
of her high school class and first to go to college, the only one to become
a college professor, and the first in the entire family (all ninety-two of us)
to get a divorce—which she did without any real explanation, denying that
he was a drunkard or a wifebeater or caroused around, saying that nothing
was so bad but nothing was so good either, and there were no kids to keep
them together for another twenty years, so better end it sooner rather than
later—which was so Aunt Gen—and to this day she’s the only female to
beat the uncles and male cousins target shooting with pistol, rifle, and
shotgun, which she did when just a slip of a girl, not even in school yet,
and everyone said she must’ve inherited her daddy’s good eye, the proof
of that being that even though she stopped target shooting in her early
twenties, when she traveled down the Amazon in her mid-fifties, she was
the only tourist in her group to shoot a blowgun and hit the target, not to
mention being the only one to let an anaconda be draped over her
shoulders—a little one, to be sure, but still, an anaconda—and that’s just
one bit of evidence that she was fearless, along with learning to water ski
on a Florida river with alligators sunning themselves on the banks and then
going down the Olympic bobsled run in Lake Placid (after the Olympics,
of course), and through the years with parasailing, zip-lining, petting
dolphins, and bow-riding a raft over whitewater rapids on the Colorado
River, and during a recent visit, when I asked if she regretted anything in
her life, she shrugged, said that whether she ends up in heaven or in hell,
she wants to be there because of things she’s done, not things she didn’t
do—although, she said, thinking about not going for a college presidency,
she sometimes had a niggling feeling that she’d stopped short of real
success—stopping being so counter to always going as far as she could as
fast as she could—and I just rolled my eyes, saying that lots of people
would think that being a college vice president for academic affairs and
dean of the faculty and retiring at fifty-two was plenty of success, not to
mention the satisfaction of having great relationships with her adult
daughters and grandchildren, but she just shrugged and flashed that
infectious smile that lights up her eyes, and it was easy to see why she
never wanted for male companionship, most obviously between the
divorce and her remarriage two years later, but Aunt Gen insisted she had
standards—never more than one husband and one lover at a time—even
though men seemed to be drawn to her like filings to a magnet, a prime
example being the rug salesman she met in Turkey who said she had the
neck of a swan and tried to put the moves on her in a taxi on the way to
dinner, and when she told him she was old enough to be his mother, he
said that he loved his mother, and then a few weeks later, he showed up at
her office back home, bearing gifts, to renew his suit, and it took her a
week to convince him that they had no future together—and at that point,
when I asked her why she was telling me all this private stuff the rest of
the family didn’t know or even suspect, she said it was because I am the
one most like her and wouldn’t judge—but according to Aunt Gen,
whether it was a week or twenty years, none of the men in her life ever
seemed to turn against her or bad-mouth her—or quite get over her either,
it seemed to me—though only one other was as persistent (or maybe as
patient) as her high-school classmate who had had a crush on her back in
their teens and launched his seduction nearly thirty years later when she
attended a professional meeting in his state, and that other one was the
man who’d been her lover while she was divorced and sought her out more
than forty years later, but even though she had lots of opportunities for all
sorts of flings during the eleven years when she and her second husband
had a commuter marriage and their three daughters lived with him, her
friendships with men remained both restrained and discreet, like her
tattoos—though, actually, those are more discreet than restrained—
beginning when she got breast cancer at sixty-nine, and after a year and a
half that included two surgeries, radiation, multiple infections, and
hyperbaric oxygen treatments for a persistent nonhealing wound, she
decided to redecorate rather than repair her body, starting with tattoos to
her scarred breast and ending up with her entire torso forming one intricate
2023, Autumn / 31
tapestry of color and symbolism, later adding wraparound designs on each

thigh, so all her tattoos are hidden when she wears street clothes—more
discreet than restrained, like I said—and even as she and her second
husband approach their fiftieth anniversary, no one who knows Aunt Gen
says, “What a sweet little old lady.” They say, “What the hell is she up to
now?”
NAOMI COOPER
RUBY
At the age of sixteen, my father’s younger sister, Ruby

eloped with her boyfriend, that wild Irishman, Declan Deering.
She and her child husband stayed married five years,
and always they gave off a tender fishy-smelling glow of sex,
even after it became apparent they’d ceased to like each other.
I believe Mary Magdalene, patron saint of wayward girls,
protected my aunt, who managed to avoid pregnancy.
After divorce, Declan went back to Ireland;

as far as I know, Aunt Ruby lost touch with him.
For a while lived with my grandparents,
and when she earned her GED, they felt so proud,
they bought her a Studebaker,
and paid tuition for a major in Humanities
at a Florida college Aunt Ruby chose.
My father wondered why she needed to leave us, to have a degree
for understanding humans. But the grandparents
said nobody in our family had ever lived out of state, or gone further
than high school before, so we shouldn’t question
matters beyond our experience.
While she pursued higher education, Aunt Ruby kept company
with a slew of boys,
but none of them quite took root in her heart,
where Declan maybe still resided.
(cont)
It was a short Greyhound Bus ride to her tiny apartment,

where I made week-end visits,
pleased that she had stated an intention to become the niece mentor.
Aunt Ruby opined that these trips were very necessary, since
I’d been living in the same place too long,
required exposure to a different atmosphere.
Often she expressed regret for how I was too Christian,
overly influenced by my cautious father and his timid wife.
When my aunt explained things, she took long pauses.
Watched me, until I nodded in agreement.
Privately I thought my parents were very nice,
and that should count for something.
But I kept silent, wanting my aunt
to continue with instructive monologues.
Aunt Ruby allowed me to sleep with her

in an ancient sloshy water bed,
eat as many Cheez-Its as I desired,
and enjoy an afternoon glass of Creme de Cocoa,
while she sipped Rebel Yell Bourbon,
her favorite beverage,
in contrast to my mother and father,
who always favored sweet tea.
Aunt Ruby believed I should become
acquainted with alcohol in childhood,
build skills for drinking gracefully
in immanent adolescent years.
I daydreamed that someday, somehow when I got older,
Ruby and I might be roommates, and I’d
bloom into a Florida kind of person,
instead of my accustomed Georgia self.
She loved the ocean,

which flowed warmer around Florida than at Georgia’s coast.
At night, she’d drive us to the beach,
and charge her Studebaker straight into the low surf’s edge.
Then at the last minute,
just as big waves came breaking,
she’d make a wolf howl, and back up
fast toward dry land.
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 33
Attempting to howl with her, I

could only scratch out a faint meow,
like a frightened, excited barn kitten.
She called her car Sandpiper,
often talked to it like a friend.
Aunt Ruby maintained good ideas
about fashion and beauty.
Always she wore a big red ring, and
even in college, she still
liked to dress up and go to church.
For winter services, she nestled into a
brownish orange set of foxtails.
The fox, with sharp pretty faces,
made her look like a hunter.
In her twenty-third year, she rammed
her Studebaker into a palm tree and instantly died.
My dad claimed the coroner
pronounced Aunt Ruby not drunk, just slightly tipsy,
when she hit that tall skinny tree so hard,
it fell all the way down across the road.
Nobody much attended her funeral. Just me, my parents.
And grandparents, who cried so much,
I got scared by their frailty.
Dad tried to reassure us about Aunt Ruby,
saying she probably went around
with a crowd of interesting friends, but the problem was
how people in college cogitated excessively, which could lead to
fear of mortality and not showing up for burials.
I inherited her namesake ring, which she had once told me
was very valuable, although my father
deemed it suspiciously bright and big,
more likely colored glass than a ruby,
and I rolled my eyes, while secretly agreeing with his assessment.
Every day I wore the ring, sometimes biting it
when I got nervous, until a girl at school,
noticing this habit, said I looked like a nincompoop.
Then I hung the red pretend jewel
on a strand of yarn underneath my clothes.
I liked to feel the glass next to my heart. (cont)
Also, I came into possession of Aunt Ruby’s fox furs.

which carried her sweet reassuring scent,
like peaches slightly overripe.
Although my mother said I was too young
for going outdoors draped in these dead alluring creatures,
I needed the fox’s softness,
slept with them,
on many nights, when I wanted to remember
sharing my aunt’s ripply bed.
Whenever moonlight slid through the window,
those fox eyes glinted, darkly animated,
even though they were
almost certainly plastic inserts,
instead of real wild animal parts.
The darkness resembled
Aunt Ruby’s brown gaze, which seemed fathomless,
especially when she gave opinions
about right ways to live in the world.
She did not blink as much as a regular person,
differed greatly from my father,
with his quick glances, indirect and shy.
I missed receiving Aunt Ruby’s stare.
After her death, I wondered
how I’d truly looked to her,
and if anyone would ever again regard me
with such bewitching scrutiny.
Cooper
WILD ANIMALS
In a veil of high grass, the fox crouches,
his body the color of flame.
He possesses a funny kind of mystery,
grace of a beast that resembles both cat and dog,
slinking along together in one sleek body,
nearing the woman who has entered his territory.
The woman loves a forest,
its shallow amber ponds,
crooked big rocks and scattered pebbles,
patches of sunlight gentling her,
like warm bright hands. (cont)
2023, Autumn / 35
She loves her husband also,

but sometimes feels hemmed in
by his clattering ideas and passions.
And then she needs to disappear
into sheltering trees.
Her wood is full of rustlings and squeaks and birdsongs,
hushed friction of an unseen snake,
swiveling, swirling, curling into itself.
She hears a slight breeze, like a muffled question.
She sits so quietly, the fox is emboldened.
Comes close.
Pricks his ears to listen for her breath.
Stretches out his snout,
drawn to her rosy smell.
Yellow hair and softness.
Perhaps he perceives the woman as a giant flower.
She admires the white fur on his chest,
how he’s managed to keep it so clean.
She watches him only from the corners of her eyes,
for fear that he will be startled away by any direct gaze.
Many times she has been
called a fox by her husband,
and she will always smile
in grateful acceptance of such admiration,
not revealing the impossibility of imagining
her beauty equal to this red animal,
who takes her in
so wildly, deeply,
through a veil of tall green grass.
Cooper
ALISSA SAMMARCO
TUESDAY NIGHT BINGO AT ST. ANDREW’S
4:00–She packs her bag with daubers, green haired trolls

and one special bingo babe bobble head.
(cont)
4:30–She walks to the bus stop

through her hash marked neighborhood
past corners with stop signs,
dogs with curled tails, sharp ears and noses.
5:03—The bus costs $1.50 without a pass.

It’s a twenty minute ride in the blue seat behind the driver,
watching store fronts and bistro umbrellas slide by.
There’s tape on the tip of her left shoe.

The neighbor boy brought duct tape to fix her window
where the glass was cracked from corner to corner.
Perhaps he dropped a piece when he taped it
inside and out, perhaps saving her from certain death
freefall from window to her foot.
In the winter, the wind creeps around the pane,

ignoring the duct tape, cutting with its chill.
5:12–School girls with braids and backpacks

dressed in green and blue plaid skirts,
white socks and loafers,
skipped on the bus, telling secrets and laughing
louder than the nuns allowed.
Louder than she remembered

with their white teeth, untarnished
by years of Eucharist and wine.
5:23–At the corner by St. Andrew’s,

she gets off the bus. Bingo is in the basement
and on winter nights like this,
when breath hangs in front of her face
and her joints betray her age,
shrinking with the mercury in the thermometer,
5:24—She might go through the nave,

past the Holy Mother Mary and the 12 stages of the cross,
past the holy water, its oily anointment of ash in the vestibule,
past the alcove where once on bended knees
she plunked coins in the box and lit candles. (cont)
2023, Autumn / 37
5:25–Instead she walks around

to the unadorned portal. Now she has her own
rituals and dance to sacred rhythms.
She marches downstairs under flickering florescent lights,

down linoleum hallways to the women and puffy haired trolls
lined up on banquet tables and folding chairs,
daubers in hand, waiting for their number to be called.
Sammarco
MARK RUSSO
A SPECIAL BRIDGE
The idea was to build a bridge. A bridge in the woods. It was

Baldur’s idea. Everyone thought it was a great idea, all six of them. They
celebrated. Tiptoes danced on the balls of his feet thudding the fleshy
bulge of his palms against each other. Carrottop and Pepper with banana
smiles jumped up and down in sync. And they brayed, “Haaa-o, haaa-o,”
like donkeys. Then there were Jimmy and Tallboy. They stood off in a
corner, eyes like camera lenses with shutters at full aperture. Jimmy
twirled two plastic straws about his fingers like propellers while Tallboy
shouted, “Zoooom, zoooom.” So it was decided. They’d build a bridge. A
bridge in the woods.
They belonged to Oak Leaf, one of four pavilions. The other three
were Maple, Elk, and Ivy. The pavilions spotted the wooded hill that
seemed to hang from the sky behind the administration building. This
morning a mist spiraled the hill like a concrete drive. It gave the illusion
of terraces. Like one of those shan shui paintings you’d see in a Chinese
art exhibit. But by the time the campers got off the Blue Bird bus and
joined their groups at the assembly building, it had unwound like a
gossamer ribbon. And, as it floated off and disappeared, one by one, here
and there, you could make out the cedar frames of the four pavilions. If
you drew a line from one to the other, it would zigzag upward across the
face of the hill.
It’s quite a hike to reach the pavilions from the assembly building.
It’s all uphill. Steeper than a par three fairway in Japan. And there’s just
one rest stop, a kind of plateau, between the drop-off site and the pavilions.
That’s where the administration building is. From there, if you look down,
you can see the assembly pavilion to the East and the swimming facility
in an open field to the West. This is also where the groups split up and take
different gravel paths to their pavilions. From below the campers look like
the round segments of centipedes snaking along the four forest paths.
It was June. The air was warm. The leaves were damp. Camp
season had just begun.
Once at the pavilion, the campers of Oak Leaf threw their
backpacks onto the picnic tables, sat, and waited for something to happen.
“Okay, Tallboy, you’ll be the color bearer. Stand over there by the
railing.” Gerry said.
Gerry was the group leader for Oak Leaf. At the center of the
pavilion in baggy jeans and a loose t-shirt, he called the boys and their
counselors over.
“The rest of you gather ’round and face the flag, hands over your
hearts.”
They formed a semi-circle around Tallboy who, now stiff as a
post, gripped a flag pole that pivoted forward at a slight angle. His eyes
were wired to the tip of the flag and, every now and then, if the flag drifted
too close to the floor, he’d give it a quick jerk.
Baldur, a short roly-poly boy of fourteen, stepped out in front of
the group and looked up at Gerry. He had that look of a person who has a
request that should be granted without asking.
“Sure Baldur, you can stand by me. Hand over your heart.”
Gerry placed his right hand over his heart and waited. Baldur
stood next to Gerry, faced the others, and narrowed his eyes. He cupped
his right palm and slapped it against the left side of his chest making a
hollow, popping noise. The others imitated him. With that, Gerry began
the Pledge of Allegiance, pausing after every few words to wait for the
others to repeat them.
“I pledge allegiance...,”
“I pledge a legion...,”
“To the flag...,”
“To the flag...,”
“I like this next part,” Carrottop shouted.
“One Nation indivisible...,”
“One nation invisible...,”
“…justice for all.”
“…just for us all.”
2023, Autumn / 39
Baldur turned, looked up and buried his fist into Gerry’s belly. He
let go a laugh, winked, and then hugged Gerry about his waist.
“Bu-bu-buddy.”
It was a ritual Baldur went through for all of his friends. Gerry
knew this.
“Tough love. Right, Baldur?”
As explained, the Oak Leaf pavilion decided to build a bridge in
the woods for its Summer Project. Baldur suggested that it cross over the
shallow ravine that separated Oak Leaf from Maple Leaf. They thought it
would be great fun. Gerry thought so too, but doubted the director would
buy into it.
It’s a summer camp: a special camp. The campers are special
campers. Each one has a special physical or emotional quality. The
director even has a list of the campers’ medical conditions and hands it out
to the counselors every season. The title at the top of the list reads,
“Perceived Limitations and Liabilities.”
***
Chloe, looking over her balcony, saw Baldur hit Gerry. That’s all
she could see. She couldn’t see the entire pavilion, just the upper half. The
bottom part was buried below the crest of a ravine like the sunken hull of
a ship. You’d even think you could reach out and touch Oak Leaf. But you
couldn’t. To get there you’d have to go beyond the crest, down into the
ravine and up the other side. She curled her hands about her mouth and
called out,
“I saw that, Baldur.”
But no one heard her. There was just too much clanging and
banging from the construction going on at the cafeteria building.
Chloe was Maple Leaf’s group leader. A starched white cotton blouse
tucked into a pair of denim shorts made everything about her seem crisp.
“Listen up, campers. Oak Leaf is being naughty again,” she said,
“Maple Leaf is not Oak Leaf. Always remember that. Maple Leaf is
respectful, proud. We are the protectors of the wood.”
“Yes Miss Chloe.”
There were five Maple Leaf campers: Nanna, Casey, Evelyn,
Prudence, and Harriet. Of the five, Nanna was the most resolute. She’s the
one who stomped the foot-rest of her wheel chair with her crutch when,
with the others, she cried out, “Yes Miss Chloe.” She was thirteen, with
blond hair, smooth skin and just a bit of Lucifer’s spark in her blue eyes.
In her chair, she felt like a goddess in a horseless chariot, the queen of the
“slow” races. She always felt comfortable nestled between the wheels of
her chair but sometimes, just to shake it up a bit, she’d grab a pair of
crutches, cuff them about her forearms and drag her out-turned feet where
she wanted to go. Nanna was the girl Baldur wanted to marry.
That morning, the director had sent Gerry a note. It said that they
should meet. So, Gerry handed his group over to Amy of the pool staff and
headed off to Mr. Stein’s office.
Mr. Stein is a rotund man with a bald head, who, when he sits
behind the desk, fills the room blotting out the books on the shelves, world
globe on the floor and armchairs. Entering the room, a person feels much
like a matador must feel during the suerte de matar.
Gerry knocked on the door..., No response. Not sure if it was
heard, he knocked again. Then came the response, like a cherry bomb
explosion.
“Gerry, come in. Nice to see you again this summer. How’s
school?”
“Just one more year to go.”
“Decided on a career?”
“Leaning towards occupational therapy.”
“That’s great! For me, it was physical or occupational. I opted for
physical. More money in it.”
Facing Mr. Stein’s rifling stare, Gerry shifted his weight from one
foot to the other. He studied the wall paneling and ceiling planks.
Everything seemed so square and plumb, fresh with the scent of cedar.
“How about the summer project? Decided on that yet?” Mr. Stein
asked.
There was a pause.
“This is it,” Gerry thought.
Mr. Stein continued, “Maple Leaf will be making paper flower
arrangements to decorate the assembly pavilion for Game Day. Game
Day’s their day, you know, their thing. They never fail to take first prize
at the slow wheel races. That Nanna is something else, isn’t she? And Elk
and Ivy have decided to do a skit about the taming of the wood trolls and
the founding of the camp.”
Gerry took a deep breath. He stared at the dark mahogany-framed
portraits of the camp founders that hung on the wall behind the director.
They were staring back.
“The guys want to build a bridge.”
“A bridge?”
“Yeah, a bridge. They’re really excited about it.”
2023, Autumn / 41
“So that I’ve got this straight: Tiptoes has muscular dystrophy,
doesn’t he? Jimmy and Tallboy are autistic?”
“Sir, the counselors’ll help. I’ll supervise everything.”
“And wasn’t it Pepper who nearly drowned when he dove
prematurely into the pool during the swim freestyle races last year?”
Yes, Gerry did remember how Pepper almost bit the big one that
day. He’d never forget it. All the boys had stood there at the edge of the
pool, like slats in a fence, waiting for the starter’s signal. Then Pepper did
it. He broke out. Just up and dove in. Flailing his arms and legs the second
he hit the water. Then he started to breathe in when he should have
breathed out. Oh, it was a mess.
“Yes, I remember. But in the end, it turned out okay. Pepper still
loves the water.”
Mr. Stein arched his right eyebrow.
“Well, Pepper may have survived, but some of us are still feeling
the sting.”
Gerry continued, “It’ll be a small bridge. Out of logs. We’ll make
sure the wood’s bound solid. It’ll be...,” Gerry’s voice cracked, “fun.”
“I don’t know. Besides, isn’t Maple Leaf on the other side of that
ravine? Wouldn’t want wheel chairs tipping over or a girl slipping off into
that gully.”
“The liability thing,” Gerry thought.
“Something like that could put us out of business.”
“The lawsuit thing,” Gerry thought.
“No one will get near it unsupervised. We’ll take it down the last
day of camp.”
Another pause.
“Well, Gerry, I’m afraid not. I can’t put the camp in jeopardy. The
board of Camp Tree Leaves would never understand. If they were normal
kids, perhaps. But things as they are…. No, I won’t permit it. Find
something else.”
It did not go over well when Gerry explained to the boys that
there’d be no bridge. Wet towels draped over their heads and shoulders
slumped they watched the puddles forming at their feet. There was a lot of
mumbled grumbling.
“It’s out of my hands, guys. How about a parade with floats
instead? Maple Leaf can help with the flowers….”
The bell for the departing bus sounded. Gerry raised his eyes to
the ceiling and mouthed, “Thanks.”
The next day Baldur was not on the bus.
“Anyone know where Baldur is?” Gerry asked.

“His dad brought him,” said Pepper.
When the group arrived at the Oak Leaf entrance, they found a
twenty-four by thirty-six-inch drawing of a bridge tacked to the cork notice
board. It showed an arched walkway of wooden planks held together by
thick cording. Stakes on both sides of the ravine anchored the braided
ropes that wove the floor boards together. Another set of ropes suspended
from trees at either end were connected vertically at three-foot intervals to
the planks below. The rope railing and log flooring formed a pair of
concentric arcs. There were upper left-hand views, lower right-hand
views; there were floating side-view details of planks, knots and what have
you. Baldur stood next to the blueprint. His mouth resembled a yawning
cave lined with jagged stalagmites and stalactites. That was his smile, his
charm. He was charming when happy and he was happy a lot.
“Wow, cool!” Carrottop said. “That’s our bridge.”
Gerry turned to Baldur.
“Did you do this?”
“Da-da-dad helped. “
Baldur rocked side to side, reeled around and sunk his fist into
Gerry’s stomach.
“My bu-bu-buddy,” said Baldur his arms wrapped, like a band aid,
about Gerry’s waist.
Gerry caught his breath. “Okay, I’ll talk to the director again, after
crafts. But don’t get your hopes up.”
At crafts, the campers held their hands on colored paper, traced
them and cut out the tracings.
Gerry and Chloe stood next to each other.
“Seriously though, why not let them do it?” he said.
“Well, I agree with the director,” she said. “It’s a foolish idea. We
don’t need a bridge. I’d never let my girls near it.”
“Come on. It’s not that deep.”
Chloe crossed her arms over her chest and shook her head.
Gerry practiced his argument.
“It’s an adventure. Kids need adventure.”
Chloe stared through the porch screen at the swimming pool
below as if she had stopped paying attention.
“Have ’em read a book. Have ’em read Pop’s Bridge.”
The second meeting with the director didn’t go any better than the
first. When he got back, Gerry began to explain how to make floats. He
rotated an opened book above his head for everyone to see. On the page
2023, Autumn / 43
was a metal wagon covered with paper flowers being pulled by some child
straddling the handle arm. No one looked up to see that the handle was
shaped like a horse’s head. They just watched their feet make swirls on the
floor.
That afternoon Baldur’s father showed up at the pavilion to get
Baldur.
“Baldur won’t be using the bus this summer. I’ll take care of it.
I’m here every day anyway working on the cafeteria.”
Gerry opened his mouth but nothing came out.
“Didn’t want you to think there was a problem,” Baldur’s father
said.
Gerry found his voice. “Sir, that’s a great bridge layout you guys
made. But I’m afraid it’s not going to happen.”
“Hmmm. Too bad. Baldur was looking forward to it. I was too.”
***
That night Baldur sat at the kitchen table while his father stood at
the stove in their small fifties-styled split level. Just the two of them. It’d
been just the two of them for so many years that it seemed it had always
been that way.
Baldur sat with his elbows spread across the table hunched over a
piece of paper. His father wiped his hands and put the dish towel in his
back pocket. He looked over Baldur’s shoulder and saw the word “bridge”
printed on the paper. Some of the letters of the word were underlined,
others had circles around them. He watched as Baldur printed “ridge,”
“bride,” “ride,” “gird,” “grid,” “bid,” and “bird” in a column below the
word “bridge.” After Baldur finished the column, below it he arranged the
words into a single row, “gird bird bid bride ride ridge grid.”
“Wait, here’s another one,” he said and added “dirge.”
“What’s up champ?” his father asked.
“Da-da-dad, it’s not fair.”
“The bridge?”
“Ya-ya-yeah, the bridge.”
“Okay, but what’s with these words?”
“Jimmy says words have secrets inside them. The secrets are in
the letters. The letters make other words. Once you know the words inside,
you’ll learn the secret. I want to learn the secret of the bridge.”
Baldur’s father ruffled his son’s hair, went to the disk-player, and
put on some cello music. Baldur’s muscles loosened. He rested his chin on
the table and sighed. Baldur’s eyes had a wet sheen. Dad was who he
wanted to be like. He could do everything. He was a licensed carpenter.
He could draw. Baldur had once said “tree house” and his father drew it.
Then, together, they built it.
“Son, I agree with Jimmy. Everything has its charm. But no
abracadabra is going to build your bridge.”
“How can I build it then?”
“Like the tree house, we’ll do it together.”
***
The next day the two of them, father and son, met at the ravine.
They were to meet every day to build the bridge. His father would work
through lunch then get Baldur during the pavilion’s rest hour. Together,
they braided cords, wove them over and under the logs, stretched them taut
and drove stakes into the ground. They knotted ropes about the stakes.
They wrapped the ends of each railing around a tree, pulled them tight and
tied them. Hidden by the crests of the ravine, no one saw them; drowned
out by the pounding and banging in the cafeteria, no one heard them.
It took two weeks.
“Good job, son. What are you going to do now that it’s done? You
know, you can’t tell anyone that it’s here.”
But Nanna already knew. For two weeks, Nanna had sat on the
crest and watched the two of them assemble the bridge. She hadn’t
intended to spy. She had told Chloe that she just wanted to be alone.
“I won’t go far. Don’t worry. I’ll stay within hearing distance and
holler if there’s a problem,” she said.
Every day she’d lean against a tree at the crest and watch them.
Then one day there was just Baldur. That day, she moved to the front of
the tree. Baldur saw her. He smiled and waved. At first, he waved his hand
side to side in greeting, then back and forth in invitation. Nanna smiled
and nodded. Baldur crossed the bridge, walked up to Nanna, and led her
below.
“Want to try?”
Nanna crunched up her left cheek partially closing her eye.
“Not sure.”
“Why’s that?”
“I’m not too steady on my feet.”
Baldur lifted his arms.
“I’ll help. Here, stand behind me. Put your arms around my neck.
That’s it. Hold tight.”
Baldur cuffed the crutches around his arms. At each step, he dug
the crutches into the gap between the logs directly in front of him and used
them as levers to pull him and Nanna forward.
2023, Autumn / 45
The bridge wasn’t very long, maybe ten feet. But, by the time
they’d reached the middle, Baldur started to bend at the knees and shift his
weight from side to side causing the bridge to sway.
“Hold on tighter, Nanna,” he said. He extended the crutches as far
as he could across the logs, wedged them into the seam, then lunged ahead,
again and again, until they reached the other side.
Once there, Baldur propped Nanna against a tree, then sat crossed-
legged in front of her. Together, they watched the ground and quietly
threw leaves into the ravine. They didn’t notice Chloe looking at them.
***
Maple Leaf was finishing up its decorations for the festival and
Chloe wanted Nanna to be there. So, she went to find her. At the crest of
the ravine, she saw Baldur and Nanna sitting on the far side of the bridge.
A prickly wave coursed through her cheeks. Her first instinct was to
scream that they had no right to be there. But she didn’t. Instead, she
brushed the hair from her face and marched to the office of the director.
When she got there, she opened the door without announcement and shut
it behind her.
Within an hour, the director’s assistant showed up at Oak Leaf
with Nanna’s wheelchair and a message from Mr. Stein. Gerry was to go
to the ravine and take care of it.
“Nanna, I’ve come to help you to your chair,” the assistant said as
he approached her.
“Why?”
“You’re not supposed to be here. This bridge is not supposed to
be here.”
“But, it’s a special bridge.”
Baldur smiled at Nanna.
The assistant reached his arm about Nanna’s waist and led her up
the hill, one crutch at a time, to her chair. When she sat down, she jabbed
the foot rest with her crutch and called to Baldur.
“See you tomorrow, Baldur.”
Gerry, with his hands in his pockets, looked at the bridge, at
Baldur, then, after a minute, shook his head and returned to the pavilion.
Neither Baldur or his father showed up at camp again.
The morning of the festival, Nanna asked Chloe to take her to the
bridge. Chloe refused. But Nanna insisted and threatened to boycott the
festival unless she could go to the bridge. So, Chloe caved.
Where the bridge had been, frayed cords lay on the ground above
the ravine. The logs, their bindings loose, lined the bottom of the ravine
and dark green weeds had already begun to climb out through the joints.
ROXANNE CARDONA
THE SEASON OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS EXAMS
The pavement swells with movement

as earthworms tunnel below
frozen ground. The season of state testing
rises, the Bronx can barely breathe.
Produce trucks muffle through our avenues.
I pull up work’s windows, circle
my office three times for good luck.
Pop into every classroom that takes the ELA
exam. This year twenty-three classrooms.
I am a horse running the Belmont. Gallop up
five flights, trot my bones into rooms.
I shout, Are we smarter than the test? Yes, they say.
Don’t let them trick you.
My right hand touches my left shoulder. Left hand
right shoulder. To connect the two sides of the brain.
Let’s sync our brains. Kids stand up and leave
their worried faces on their desk. Surprised,
as I lead them through cross-body movements.
A brown box centers each teacher’s desk. It looms,
as if a large rooted bulb scarred from sharpened
shoots. Inside the ELA stirs, pushing
at the cardboard walls. A leviathan, impatient
for release. Wants to devour us all.
Trample our summer with remedial classes
for failed scores. Children doomed to repeat grades.
Teachers down rated. School doors will stay open
or close shut. Some say prison builders use the 4th grade ELA to
predict the number of prison beds. cont)
2023, Autumn / 47
I move into the hallway, the cool air bursts

with the smell of donuts and sugar. I turn
the brass knob of the next fourth grade classroom.
Cardona
WHAT HAPPENED WHEN I CALLED TRINA TO THE SCHOOL

OFFICE
I knew it was urgent. Trina, mother of a nine-year-old special needs

child, ran over from the nail salon, one nail not fully dry. She applied her
angry face, painted lashes that took aim. What did he do now? Her voice,
a Mack truck stuck in traffic. The air scalded with the sound of her
throat. This school sucks. Stop calling me for every little thing, she railed.
Her son Fidel left his classroom to hide behind the auditorium stage.
Broke several cardboard swords, tore a hole in the new scrim, turned on
the mic, sang a capella to the empty seats. I could smell her nail polish
as small crowds gathered in the main office. You fool. You don’t know
who you’re messing with. I’ll see you outside. Her words, rocks against
sand, bashed me again, and again. Josiah, delivering a note from his
teacher, cried. When I asked her to leave, her arms leapt across the
counter. Officer Ryan, the first to answer 911, demanded she leave the
building.
Once, in Cape May,

I dove beneath
the breakers. Felt the power
of my body.
Those lean muscles that enabled
me to jump
each new wave.
A wave so tall,
so blue, swallowed me whole,
hurled me half-naked
into the underwater, around
and down into the sandy
bottom six feet
below, marked my cheek, twisted
my neck, my lungs grabbing for air
at the mercy of something
bigger than myself. (cont)
Most times I liked Trina, her spirit, the tender way she cared for Fidel,
how she waded through single parenthood. Caught in something bigger,
she could not retreat. Her voice finally heard, could not surrender.
Officer Ryan asked again, before he slammed her large body onto the
green tiled floor, handcuffed her pretty red nails, now smudged and
broken. Then, I thought of him as a hero. Now, I think of Trina, with all
her wounds and the bully disguised as a hero.
Cardona
J E BENNETT
SONNET TO RAIN
Whoever has walked out into the night

With his pain, hearing thunder rumble
Knows the loneliness of city light
Whoever has felt the hard pelting rain

Its rhythmic downbeat, its sudden chill
Knows only what the heart can explain
Whoever has lived through a night’s ache

The soul's malaise, its sickly pangs
Knows what suffering is, without slake
Whoever can recall a final farewell

Causing the night to seem the blacker
Knows, in his misery, that now is hell
Whoever has stared into the rainy night

Knows the soulful pain, a thankless light.
Bennett
2023, Autumn / 49
MORGAN BOYER
I’M GIVING UP ON NEW YEAR’S EVE
I’m giving up on flimsy-plastic star-shaped glasses.

I’m giving up on glitter pouring down on red-tip eared crowds.
I’m giving up on overpriced holiday parking.
I’m giving up banging pots and pans in the backyard.
I’m giving up on fireworks in the dead of winter. Fireworks are for
summer only.
I’m giving up staring at the clock with droopy, exhausted eyelids.
I’m giving up on watching Jenny MacCarthy, a dangerous conspiracy
theorist who should be in prison, kiss a stranger on national television
with her plastic lips.
I’m giving up on broken promises to lose weight or gain a new skill.
I’m giving up on watching my childhood friend’s gay uncles get sloshed.
And my sister. And my mom. And my mom’s former co-workers.
And my friend’s fiancé. And my other friend’s husband.
Basically everyone.
I’m giving up on New Year’s Eve; after all,

why would I be willing to make a string of mistakes
In the urban tundra filled with drunk strangers
when I can just stay home in my warm house?
Boyer
JOHN BALLANTINE
AMERICA WAS GREAT UNTIL IT WASN’T
America was great back then IF you were White, male, and played
baseball. Of course, Mickey Mantle could drink a pitcher of beer before
the game and hit the ball a mile; Willie Mays could disappear into deepest
center at the Polo Grounds with his back to the plate—some 420 feet
away—and catch the ball over his shoulder. We all remember being there.
Pivot on one leg and throw a bullet to second base, stopping the runners
from scoring. And Bob Gibson would brush you back with his wicked
fastball—and I swear there was a smirk on his face as he struck you out
again with the cut fastball right down the middle of the plate.
Beach Boys–“I wish they all could be California Girls”
America was great back then, as Brown v. Board of Education

began desegregating schools over the shouts of many. And then the shit
hit the fan, and we never recovered, did we?
April 1968, MLK, two months later June, RFK; both shot dead by
some lone gunman. August 1968, Russian tanks roll into Prague, and
Daley’s police beat many of us back right in front of the Chicago
Democratic Convention. Hippies, Yippies, and Black Panthers protest as
Nixon squeaks by the happy warrior in November 1968. Herbert
Humphrey’s ebullient smile is gone. The dream that carried me forward to
my eighteenth birthday and draft registration was deeply scared as the
wounded and dead in Vietnam filled the TV screen. Walter Cronkite could
not reassure us that all was okay.
America was great back then as Neil Armstrong took his step on
the moon when the USA won the space race, the Voting Rights Act passed
in 1964 with Southern democratic support thanks to the magic of LBJ’s
skullduggery. America was great as the Beatles reminded us that “all you
need is love.” Yes, I bounded into the 1960s full of the promises ahead.
We were great until we weren’t….
I swayed to the rhythms of the greatest hits late into the night—
”Hey Jude,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Sad-Eyed Lady,” “Sittin’ on the
Dock of the Bay,” “Rainy Day Woman,” “Born to Be Wild”—from dorm
windows before we cooled down with Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue.
The Mamas & the Papas–“California Dreaming on such winter’s

day’”
Back when America was great, the Mamas and the Papas took me
on a jet plane, and the Beach Boys serenaded all to the delights of
California girls. It worked like a charm. Aretha turned respect upside
down, reminding Otis of a thing or two, and we were dancing in the street.
Big Sur and Haight-Ashbury were the happenin’ places, full of dreamers.
Back when America was great, we could beat back the struggles
staring us in the face and not see the terrors to come. I still believed that
running fast, good schools, working hard, and playing by the rules would
get me and you where we wanted—even if the road forward was not clear.
2023, Autumn / 51
Baseball player, astronaut, fireman, president…and family.

Maybe even a good job, a chicken in every pot, and the picket
fence home of Leave It to Beaver. FDR’s fireside chats resonated in the
America that raised me.
Simon & Garfunkel–“Like a Bridge Over Troubled Waters, I

will lay me down”
Back then, the shooting galleries of Harlem basements were dark

with Laura Nyro’s plunge into smack. An eerie, not quite real world that I
visited—black-and-white Madonna with child. I still believed that
protests—opposition to war, yes that C of O essay drafted in the UU
Church in Cambridge—was my patriotic right. No more war, no more
poverty. Yes, LBJ’s scar curved like Vietnam—the guns and butter
economy came crashing down.
I did not know the America that raised me. I did not know the hurts
of my fellow students, soldiers, protestors, women, parents, or those
caught in poverty’s grip.
The Beatles–“When I find myself in times of trouble..., Let It Be”
Back then when America was great for some of us, I really
believed that all we need is love and that some pretty girl—like Baby
Jane—would warm my bed with sweet songs. Love was the antidote. I
really believed if we could stop war, then we could change the world. Sex,
drugs, and rock and roll were just the beginning.
I had no idea that hate and bile were waiting, ready to stop us,
precinct by precinct. Back then democrats were on a roll, even as the
wheels on our car fell off. Back then, when they, the National Guard, shot
the antiwar protestors at Kent State, I did not know that this was just the
beginning. I did not know America needed more than soft dreams to
navigate the roads ahead.
Aretha Franklin–“Say a Little Prayer”
If I only knew back then what was coming.

In the summer of 1968, I sat in front of the TV, watching day and
night the chaos at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Something
turned when others applauded as Daley’s police crossed the street with
billy clubs and tear gas to protect democracy. Bull Connor was hero to
many voting for George Wallace—the South was heard—and Nixon won
with 43.4 percent of the vote. The realigned Republican party was centered
in the South after LBJ’s supposed missteps. Humphrey could not say “No
More Vietnam War” loud enough or why civil rights was a right. Many of
my young compatriots did not vote.
I watched the TV screen flicker. Back then music turned before
we did….
Jefferson Airplane–Surrealistic Pillow–White Rabbit, “One pill

makes you larger, one pill makes you small…. Go ask Alice”
When America was great, we believed—I believed—all was

possible for anyone who sat down at the lunch counter. Black, White,
Brown. When America was great, I saw prison farms turn the profits back
to chain gangs sleeping three deep in the sweltering dorms. Three full
meals a day, prison libraries full of books, and no rats in the kitchens. I
believed Cool Hand Luke’s smile when he said we had a failure to
communicate as he escaped. Back when America was great, I believed
there was a fair chance for all, for most, for some. But now I ain’t so sure.
Bob Dylan–A complete unknown…. “Like a Rolling Stone”
Back when America was great, I was not dancing in tear-gas

streets, but swaying with the soft melodies of Hare Krishna chanting peace
in orange robes. Back then Love was everywhere and then it wasn’t.
Nineteen sixty-eight was bad, but we had hope in 1974 as Richard
M. Nixon stepped on the White House helicopter for his final journey,
waving his V hands in disgrace. I still held the promise of the American
Dream, and the laws that govern the land. Silly me,
Grateful Dead–“Truckin’,” “…what a long, strange trip.”
But today, we are not so great, except for the mobsters who hustle
us with lies as gangs storm the Capitol. Armed and ready to search out
congressional halls to hang and kill the infidels. This cannot be, I say, as
January Sixth hearings play on TV.
America is no longer great because piles of books are burning,
ideas are banned, and our bodies are not our own. People cannot breathe
as police skip their beats. I do not stand in the bodies of those beaten down,
but the system is rigged in so many ways. I stand silent more than I like to
2023, Autumn / 53
admit. I order my cappuccino, and mutter, “Oh no, this cannot be.” This is
my America today.
Bruce Springsteen–“Baby we were Born to Run”
Our dream of greatness stumbled along the way.

Today, the ugly face of complicity stares at us on the screen—how
could this be happening? Getting along, looking the other way, pretending
that law-abiding, patriotic citizens would not go this far. My conscience
does not sit with the treason of January Sixth, the tyranny staring at us. My
eyes are open wide. I watch the dream of greatness fade. I stumble like
Hamlet when words fail. I know not what to do.
My dream of America does not lift me when I wake.
Meditation and Buddha bowls calm me, but that is not the way out
of here. I must learn to fight like the gallant knight guided by a golden star
and lovely Guinevere. Valiantly slaying the dragons like St. George,
staring down the mendacity that snarls so many. The rainbow of hope
should guide me through the storm, yet the sea is high and the winds fierce.
America’s soul—its promise of better days—is not great today.
The caws of crows fill the morning air.
How do I rekindle the flames of hope, the sparkle in the eye, forge
the steel sword, build windmills good enough, and find a way out of the
valley of death? We have danced these steps before.
Back when America was great, I knew that my country would take
us to the moon as I listened to the Japanese radio on the playground, and
that Luke Skywalker would beat back Darth Vader. I knew the stories I
recited were not quite true, yet I believed we could do great things back
then. Today, I am not sure.
I do not fall into dystopian tales that my students recite, but the
joy that wakes with me does not stay.
Back when American was great, I brushed aside Bruegel’s visions
of the Valley of Death when one-third of Europe perished in the plague.
Back then the Black Death or Spanish flu were footnotes to the progress
we made. Back then the Catholic Church and Martin Luther’s
proclamations were premonitions of the fierce battles to come. Beheading,
inquisitions, and excommunications ushered in the great years that fill
history books.
Today the age of greatness that they write about—after all the
troubles—does not hold when we scratch the surface.
Back then, I believed the Enlightenment, I took the light from
Dickens’ tales of darkness, and the coal-fired furnaces of the Industrial

Revolution gave us steel, tall buildings, and the war machines to destroy.
Presidents promised a chicken in every pot, as so many stood in food lines
with one worn wool suit. The vote to all—women, Blacks, and new
citizens—was the way forward, until it wasn’t.
Today the tyranny of the mob is in front of us. Jesse Owens may
run past the Aryan stormtroopers in 1936, but not in 2022. Today the
propaganda is part of what we read, say, and do. Today the TV stories are
dismal. What to do, where to march, how to weave a happier tale? Today
Noah’s floods are near.
Katherine L. Bates–”America the Beautiful”
O beautiful for spacious skies,

For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
I hope it will be so.

Bates
WADE FOX
SHORE LEAVE
He bought it on shore leave in fifty-six, a nut-brown ukulele—

cheap tourist crap with a sweet voice—and kept it all his life
in memory of a moment on a dark Hawaiian beach, watching
the waves crash upon the shore, the endless night, and, in
drunken exultation, singing in his ragged voice as he struggled
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 55
to place his thick fingers on tiny frets. A girl he had met that night
and never saw again sat beside him in the sand and laughed so
hard that she fell on her back and laughed at the darkness. Those
eyes shining back at the stars—defiant of infinite—and the possibility
of music, how they made him believe he was at the beginning of a
progressively more beautiful life. Later, in barracks and camps, he
strummed the ukulele and listened for that music in its plinking voice,
tried to hear it again, the song of that night, carried in the ukulele’s
strings, the warm smell of her skin and the laughter, the sound
of the surf, all lost in a haze of other memories, of the hot wire of fear
and danger, blood and flame, broken bodies, the rain that never would
end, and the thrill of being permitted the impermissible, memories that
snuffed out the music he once believed would forever accompany his life.
When he came home, he hung the uke on the wall, silenced, as he raged
and cried and heard the echo of rain, as he drank himself through two
marriages. In his later years, when thin and tired, an old man coughing
into his nicotine fist, alone in an old house, all that was left was this small
and useless toy, hung on the wall next to tokens of war, and the dimming
memory of music and stars and the feel of life playing under his fingers.
Fox
LOUISE ROBERTSON
RECYCLING
All month long I have been thinking about the woman

in the blue vest at checkout. Her blackeye billowed across
the left side of her face. I tried to say something comforting. I said,
“You can always tell yourself, ‘I’ll never do that again.’”
She recoiled from me, “You never know.”
Was she one drunk night away from it? One swallowed bottle
of cold medicine? One cool morning wrapped in a sheet
re-watching that episode when the TV couple first kissed?
I’ll never know. I’m the neighbor who picks up the five Miller Lite cans
left in the alley every weekend and moves them to the recycling bin
while the empty trees lean and the air
runs in circles above my head, whistling, whistling.
Robertson
IT’S LIKE WATCHING SOMEONE DRINKING THEMSELVES

TO DEATH
The first day, the whole bird lay

on the road, eyes fixed, beak and
his robin’s red breast thrust forward,
wings back. A lurch, a dive, a head first
to hell. The next day, his eyes
were duller, body flattened.
So it went,
the grime covered his barbs,
the color grayed,
the vanes clumped, quills
shattered. For a whole,
month, I was his audience:
the splays, the twining, the small
scatter of his body.
Even late in April,
pieces of him lay in the grass
and put me in mind of my classmate
at college who instead took
a gun to his mouth
and swallowed.
Robertson
BENEDICTION FOR A CUP OF COFFEE
First, open the mouth

of the kettle so it can swallow
a belly of tap water. Put that on
the warming stove, then salt
the French press
with a thick tablespoon of
ground coffee, but sift a flat
tablespoon of sugar into a mug.
Spill boiling water into the French press,
and milk into the cup. Then,
you pray. Or rather, don’t pray,
study the backyard, simmering
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 57
under a fresh snow–its duvet,

its compress, its damp sweater.
Or maybe, in the dark kitchen,
use your feet to accept the cold floor.
If only church had this kind of
eucharist, a sensation I could think
about and hate and love,
and feel thankful for. Oh my god,
chill on the skin, on the distal phalanges,
the proximal metatarsals and what
is that vibration coming from the house,
its foundation, and
the earth beneath like yet another
burning sunrise?
Robertson
LESLIE G COHEN
MEDICINE’S LAST RITES
I mean however and wherever we are
We must live as if we will never die.
Nazim Hikmet, Opinions
Who the hell’s calling at this goddamn hour? It’s at least 2...maybe
3A.M. Some idiot, a wrong number, or a mumbling drugged-up teenager
looking for a prescription? Naomi or Eli only call at a decent hour on my
birthday. That’s how they are. I still call on theirs. If it’s one of them
calling at this hour...it must be serious. I’d better answer.
“Jacob, this is Sarah. I’m sorry to call so late, but....” She sounds
tremulous. “It’s Milton. Something awful happened...I know I should have
called you then…but I’ve been going crazy. Several weeks ago he had a
heart attack. ‘Massive’ was the doctor’s word for it. He was shoveling
snow! He’s 82! On top of that, he’s not been well at all. Can you imagine
Milton, an old rabbi, in that blizzard, shoveling out our driveway? I was at
our granddaughter Lynn’s house babysitting, and didn’t know anything
until the hospital called. They must’ve got my number from Marge, our
next-door neighbor, who looked out her living room window saw him
lying face-down in a snow drift, and called 911. He must’ve been frozen.”
“Frozen!” I gasped. Sarah had been Ruth’s closest friend, Milt
mine.
“Marge said the EMTs worked on him a long time, then took him
to the hospital in Plymouth. It’s so horrible. I thought I’d lost him...he’s
been unconscious with all kinds of tubes and machines running in. He
doesn’t talk or move, or respond to anyone...even to me!” She began to
sob.
Oh no! Experience has shown that Milt is probably brain dead.
Brain dead!
“I don’t know what to do. After a week the hospital transferred
him to an expensive nursing home–not even a nice one. I’m afraid it’ll eat
up all our savings. Maybe our temple can help us out. Jacob...I know
you’ve been retired for a while, but maybe you, a doctor, one of his closest
friends, can help. Please Jacob, please,” she begged, “can you go and see
if anything more can be done.”
More! I’d better keep my thoughts to myself. What can I or anyone
possibly do? Nothing. Poor Sarah. A quick death may be a blessing. If
anything, I can offer words of comfort to his family. That’s all.
“I’ll go tomorrow, Sarah. I promise I’ll call you after.”
I wrote down the directions and tried to get back to sleep.
I’d known Milt most of my life. We’d been friends since we were
together in grade school, high school, and were even bunk-mates two
summers in a Berkshire camp. I remember him studying for the rabbinate
when I began med school. He was best man at my wedding soon after,
and...it was almost fifty years later, he presided over Ruth’s funeral and
burial. I still recall parts of his touching eulogy, and how Eli and Naomi
offered to help. Eli, a prosperous Miami stockbroker too smooth and self-
satisfied for my liking, and his smug socialite wife Tiffany had a big new
house and wanted to show it off. “C’mon down, we’ve plenty of room, ‘n
the kids will love to see you.” I didn’t want to live in Florida and be
dependent on his largesse. I always looked upon Florida as a geriatric
ghetto, a cemetery for the living.
Naomi, of late a yoga instructor, always intent on helping me to
“self-improve,” had years ago sent me a surprise birthday present—a
computer and printer that remained boxed on the floor. “My hand is still
steady, I can write on my own,” I explained over the phone, “and besides,
I don’t want to learn anything new. It’s hard enough holding on to what I
know.” Naomi knew me well enough not to argue the point. Going home
from the funeral she beseeched me to sell the old house and move to
Dayton with her family. I never felt comfortable with her brash auto-
salesman husband and boisterous kids. Living in Ohio held no interest for
2023, Autumn / 59
me. I decided to stay where I was and make do on my own. Ruth never
spoke of whatever disappointment she felt about how the kids turned out.
Milt gone! Can I survive yet another grievous loss? I need a big
glass of schnapps to calm down and try to get back to sleep.
I awoke early, turned on the bedside lamp. I reached for my frayed
bathrobe on the chair, carefully balanced myself against the bed waiting a
few seconds for my leg muscles to awaken, then stood and managed to put
on my slippers. My tattered gray sweatshirt and long johns needed
washing, and my spectacles needed another piece of tape. It really doesn’t
matter. Stepping gingerly over piles of newspapers, books, magazines,
medical journals and dirty clothes, I moved past my small Philco TV,
nowadays an antique, which had two pairs of socks drying on its rabbit
ears.
Most mornings I’d read the Globe: the front page, the editorials
and the obituaries. I’d look for familiar names though I knew that most
relatives, friends, medical colleagues and former patients had either died
or moved far away. A few were in nursing homes or chronic disease
hospitals. Now Milt.
Nah, no newspaper this morning. I have to ready myself. Is it time
for my weekly shower? No, that would be Friday. I swallowed my
morning pills, then took my eye drops. I set out the bedtime doses in a
paper cup: two small yellows, a blue, a green capsule and a large pink oval.
Brushing my remaining teeth, I spat into the sink, then splashed cold water
on my face to wake up. Most days I didn’t need to bother with my hair or
beard, but today I want to look clean and dignified. Once tall and thin, over
the years my body had taken the shape of an elongated question mark.
Now balding, I had gray tufts of eyebrows, a long leathery nose and pale
skin etched with deep wrinkles. My white beard needs untangling. I
chuckle recalling young Naomi laughingly likening it to an Old Testament
prophet’s beard like a painting we viewed at the MFA. “A prophet, eh?
I’m just an old medical geezer soon to be a fossil, a relic.”
I put on a clean shirt, pressed pants, warm socks, and my best
leather shoes, quickly glanced at the mirror, brushed the few wispy hairs
on top, the bushy growths on the sides and placed my black beret at an
angle. Now for my heavy coat, ear muffs, galoshes, and gloves. I need to
hurry, walk through the slush to the subway, take the T to South Station,
then rush to make the 11A.M. bus to Plymouth. It’s freezing. It might be
an hour and a half bus trip, then I had to find a taxi to take me to the nursing
home.
I feel both annoyed and saddened. Making this trip is so futile. I
promised to go. Sarah and Milt were old trusted friends. I owe it to them.
On the bus I realized I’d forgotten to take a magazine to pass the
time. I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to nap. The snow-covered
villages, large discount warehouses, fast food outlets, and numerous malls
along Route 93 held no interest for me. My mind buzzed with memories.
How long have I known Milt? I must’ve been 10 or 11, fifth grade, I think.
He was a likeable, spindly kid, mischievous and more adventurous than
me. He once led a few of us kids shoplifting! Just candy bars and comic
books. We never were caught. We had fun. I never told Ruth, and would
never tell Sarah. We were best friends, sharing secrets, crushes, and
troubles. Even our parents were good friends. I think it was Milt who
introduced me to Ruth long ago.... Yeah, it was him. Nobody would ever
have guessed he’d become a rabbi, a serious scholar, an esteemed leader
in his community. I remember marching together to Boston Common in
many 60s demonstrations. We stayed close, though I hadn’t talked with
him since the funeral. Was it two or three years ago? Maybe more? I
wasn’t sure.
Sarah’s call brought back painful memories of Ruth. I don’t like
to think about it. Several years ago, after meeting with my lawyer and my
doctor, I tried to convince her that we needed to sign Advanced Directives.
She could, at times, be as stubborn as I am and adamantly refused. Just
two years later she suffered a major cerebral hemorrhage dying in two
days! The directives wouldn’t have mattered. I miss her terribly. I knew I
had to keep busy, stay occupied or sadness would overcome me. I was
devastated, unable to continue teaching, and retired soon after, alone and
lost.
BOUNTIFUL GARDENS, a grouping of one-story white-brick
modern buildings, must have been beautiful in other seasons. Now
snowdrifts covered its vast landscape. There were few cars in the plowed
parking lot. Though freezing, the sun shone. The unsalted front walk is
icy. Be careful.
A plain young woman at the front desk greeted me and took down
my name and address. “Oh, so you’re a doctor,” she said, now smiling.
“Rabbi Levinson is in the day room. Please keep your visit short, he’ll be
taken for dialysis in a half hour.” She pointed the way.
What! Hemodialysis on an 82-year-old brain-dead man! This
can’t be. Who’s making these decisions? It’s outrageous! Will they also
be sending him for a coronary bypass? Let the poor man be.
In a large pastel colored room with floor-to-ceiling windows, a
semi-circle of elders, three men and two women, were in wheel chairs.
2023, Autumn / 61
Immobile, facing a large screen TV showing an I Love Lucy rerun, no one

laughing. Their eyes didn’t follow the action on the TV. I spotted Milt,
much thinner than I remembered, his gray beard trimmed neatly, a
yarmulke from Sarah placed on his head.
Long ago, at the old Boston City Hospital, like all medical interns,
I heroically resuscitated dying patients. None of us realized that some
families may have hoped we might not have been so successful. We did
what we’d been taught and expected to do, and felt a surge of triumph
resuscitating near-dead patients, bringing many back to a persistent
vegetative state. It took years for me to realize that invariably resuscitation
was not resurrection.
These poor inanimate souls in the day room had been kept barely
alive, if one called it living. No doubt they’d probably undergone
medicine’s last rites: the desperate mouth-to-mouth breathing, the
foredoomed rib-cracking chest poundings, skin-blistering electric shocks,
poisonous resurrection cocktails of IV medications, emergency
tracheostomies, and having every orifice and vein drained or infused via a
plastic tube.
They seemed preserved like statues in Madame Tussaud’s
museum. Wrapped in diapers, few breathed on their own, unable to
recognize any human presence nearby. Their mute placid faces, empty
stares, waxy edematous skin, feeding tubes, nasal O2 cannulas, feculent
odors of incontinence, and likely bed sores and infected skin grafts was
horrifying. Is this life?
I pulled over a small chair, held Milt’s cold hand, careful to not
dislodge his IV. His expressionless face, eyes vacant, facing a window. I
feel I have to say something meaningful, but what can I say? “Milt, this is
me, Jakie, your buddy. Do you recognize me? Tell me you do.” I sat silent
for what must’ve been twenty minutes trying to recall shared memories.
Tears began to form. I can’t take this any longer. “Good-bye, dear friend,”
I whispered, then slowly walked to the front desk and asked the young
lady to call me a cab.
What can I say to Sarah? She asked me what more can be done.
More? I’ll try to be honest and explain why she should call the
BOUNTIFUL doctor and tell him to stop the dialysis, and call their lawyer
to institute DNR orders for both Milt and her—as soon as possible. I hope
she’ll do it.
I’ve always feared my fate would be like this. Tomorrow I’ll call
Krumholz, my lawyer, and Denton, my doctor, to double check my
Advanced Directive forms.
LESLIE G COHEN
AMYLOID AND TAU
It’s 7AM there.

Saying the first line of the Serenity Prayer
helps me to “accept things I cannot change.”
Now I’m ready to call her.
Oh hi . . . so good to hear your voice.

I want to ask you something. OK?
I saw the words amyloid and tau somewhere on a wall here
Who are they?
Are they my doctors?
No they’re not. They’re just medical terms.

(Why did they do that?)
Please don’t worry about it.
Do you know the sun always shines here?

It’s so different from Boston.
There are no winters. No snow. Isn’t that great?
Why don’t you come over? I’ll take you out to dinner.
Sweetie, I’m 3000 miles away, back here in Boston.
Really? I must’ve forgot.

Well, why don’t you move here?
What are you going to have for breakfast today? I ask.

(The only subject we can talk about).
What should I have?
Why not try some honey-dew melon or cantaloupe?

You haven’t had any scrambled eggs for a few days.
Okay, I’ll write it down. How do you spell them?
I slowly spelled the words.

(cont)
2023, Autumn / 63
During the past six years I’ve frequently talked with her family.
Now they know everything there is to know.
There’s no hope. They suffer, almost grieve, like me.
and recently made the best decision,
moving her to this California facility.
We’ve had seventeen years together.

When will she forget who I am?
It may be years.
When, if ever, will I forget her?
I’m past tears. At least I hope so.
And what kind of juice? she asks.

Are you still there?
Yeah, orange with cranberry.

Okay, I’ll write it down.
Over the years she told her family that

I’m her memory.
It’s embarrassing, but that’s the way it’s been.
I’m old, but still have most of our memories.
What’s going to happen to me?
Maybe the same thing. Nobody knows.
It’s the lady at the door with my pills.

I’ll call back later.
Remember, it’s 3 hours later here and....
Click.
Cohen
COMPASSION FATIGUE
She says I’m her memory,

telling it to all of her family
and few remaining friends.
(cont)
Though older, my memory is intact.

Our shared memories inhabit me.
I try, if I can, to hold onto them.
When will she forget who I am?

Will it be before I lose my memory?
Years ago, (was it that long?) the neurologist

termed it
“Cognitive decline.”
As a doctor, I knew what he meant,
and that medicines would have little or no effect.
In the beginning
I’d be annoyed or even angry
at her forgetfulness.
My compassion was ebbing.
I was blaming a victim.
I’m alone
even when alongside her.
She’d meant so much to me for many years,
my closest friend and confidant…and much more
Like a death,
I’ve lost her.
Cohen
ROB ARMSTRONG
CUL-DE-SAC SÉANCE
Madame Dvořák felt she was losing the room.

Bill and Hal checked their watches, not wanting to miss their tee
time. Mary whispered to Vera about cheese as her fingers hovered above
2023, Autumn / 65
a coffee table filled with epicurean delights. Other homeowners, whom

Madame Dvořák didn’t know by name, fidgeted, and cast dubious glances
at each other beneath the high-ceilinged family room decorated in Crate &
Barrel chic.
Only Helen, the homeowners association’s president and host,
paid full attention. The mother of three nodded approval at pretty much
everything the medium said. Thank goodness for rubes. Rubes paid
Madame Dvořák’s rent.
Madame Dvořák’s proclamation that evil spirits were responsible
for the mass of dead flies in the McMansions of the cul-de-sac drew eye
rolls and a few muttered curses. It used to be easier for her to convince
folk about the existence of devilry before iPhones. She guessed that most
of the group stayed to be polite neighbors for Helen.
Bob Morgan, the builder of the nouveau riche development,
breathed a sigh of relief from his vantage point next to a potted ficus plant
that could have been made of plastic. Nobody as yet was blaming his
company for the weird stuff that was happening. Occasionally he got into
legal tussles with homeowners a few years after completion by some
things, such as leaking roofs and windows, shoddy plumbing, or an
occasional small electrical fire. Cutting corners was where profit was
made. After listening to the kooky medium, Bob did not think he had to
worry about paying any damages.
“Helen,” Madame Dvořák said, “when you first called me, didn’t
you say many of your friends also reported an abundance of dead mice?
They were desiccated, unusually preserved.”
Helen rose to her feet and nodded emphatically, hoping to
convince those who did not believe in the supernatural to give Madame
Dvořák more time to make her case.
Claire, Helen’s closest neighbor and a fellow believer of the cul-
de-sac haunting, said, “I found three dead mice in the back of our master
closet that were not there weeks ago. Can you explain how mummified
mice mean there are ghosts in all our houses?”
Claire’s husband, Bill, interjected, “As I said earlier, this is a new
housing development—nobody has died on this land yet; it isn’t old
enough to be haunted. Ghosts are mostly in Europe.”
“How about the Native Americans who died here, you know, the
ones our ancestors stole the land from?” Taylor asked. “Maybe they are
haunting us as retribution for our cruel and inhumane treatment of them.”
He was the “enlightened” neighbor most people didn’t talk with for very
long.
Bob Morgan cringed at the thought of potentially being in a

lawsuit with a Native American tribe who would claim his development
was on sacred land. He hoped this event would not make the news and stir
up a manufactured local brouhaha. It appeared lucky that nobody seemed
to be writing or recording.
Hal said, “Let’s not turn a neighborly discussion about ghosts into
some far-left agenda item. The Indian dead can’t be haunting our homes
because they lived in tepees; they were nomads. Real ghosts are connected
to the places they inhabited in life, in substantial dwellings—like castles,
mansions, old inns, and the like. I’ve never heard a story of an Indian ghost
haunting an old cow field.”
Helen projected a plastered smile even though most of what Bill
and Hal often said were echoes of beliefs whose currency was on the wane.
She hoped to avoid another political shouting match like the one that
occurred the prior July Fourth holiday over letting the kids play with
fireworks unsupervised.
Madame Dvořák cleared her throat with a theatrical flair. “I’ve
been feeling a powerful stirring of spectral energy from this cul-de-sac
ever since I arrived. Something evil happened here a long time ago—
perhaps an unrecorded massacre early in Virginia’s history. With such
energy, the evil spirits seek to inhabit living flesh again. It’s clear they
tried to enter the mice but failed. The bodies of mice are not strong enough
to host them.”
“Do you think these evil spirits will try to possess us like they do
in places like Louisiana and Alabama?” Vera said as she surreptitiously
put down her Roquefort cheese wedge on the coffee table to avoid
judgment over her eating habits.
“Perhaps,” Madame Dvořák said mysteriously. “It would not be
the first time I’ve seen rampant possessions in multiple homes at once. It
can happen fast.”
Helen gasped audibly. “Are we in immediate danger?”
Taylor and his wife took that moment to leave the gathering in a
silent protest. Taylor would not tolerate the denigration of non-European
ghosts. A few others joined them.
Inwardly Madame Dvořák glowed from the panic that Vera and
Helen displayed. Perhaps she could stir the pot of hysteria some more and
turn this situation into multiple paid interventions that led to the cul-de-sac
paying for a costly séance to cast the spirits out. All it took was a dedicated
core of people to turn things around to make the nonbelievers go with the
flow. Most people found it easier just to pay her fees and move on.
2023, Autumn / 67
Hal chuckled. “I believe ghosts are real but not here. Something
else is causing the flies and mice. But, to play along, assuming Indian
ghosts can enter our homes despite having not lived in them, what would
be the signs of their so-called possession of us?”
Madame Dvořák always found at least one person in a group had
to be the “pisser in the punch bowl.” She would win if she could outdo his
cynicism in front of the group.
“It always starts with simple body changes before it gets worse,”
Madame Dvořák said. “Has anybody had unusual hair loss in the past
couple of months?”
Sheepishly, a few hands went up. Hair loss was a high-probability
item with a crowd in their mid-to-late fifties. Madame Dvořák used that
symptom often—a fish-in-the-barrel guess.
Hal frowned at Bill and mouthed the words “big deal.”
“Please forgive the crudeness of this next one,” Madame Dvořák
smiled. “Have people been more frequently incontinent with bouts of
diarrhea?”
A few people looked at each other and groaned.
“You sure it wasn’t related to our Cinco de Mayo block party?
That Mexican food ran through me like Sherman through Atlanta,” Hal
snarked as he rubbed his belly.
The room erupted in laughter.
Helen looked to Madame Dvořák, hoping the medium would
make a stronger case. She sensed that most of the cul-de-sac wasn’t buying
into her idea that they were all being haunted. Helen worried that her
family wouldn’t get invited to barbecues or that her kids would be shunned
from playdates. She didn’t want to be known as the crazy lady of the
neighborhood; after all, she was the one who contacted Madame Dvořák
and called for the public meeting.
Madame Dvořák went for the big guns—Hal, the alpha male
golfer, was a Mr. Funny; humor was a deadly tonic to a medium. It was
time for her Hail Mary pass. She called out a litany of physical ailments to
the group.
“Fevers?
Nausea?
Vomiting?
Rotting teeth?”
The volley of ailment questions raised a surprising number of
positive responses. Even Madame Dvořák was shocked that three people
raised their hands for rotting teeth.
Nobody was laughing anymore.

In a faint voice Mary said, “Mr. Littles at 432 suffered a seizure
day before last; his wife said he’s in the ICU in a coma. Last week he
jogged through the neighborhood and all seemed well.” A hush fell over
the room.
“What do you suggest we should do now?” Helen asked Madame
Dvořák.
Madame Dvořák spoke triumphantly, “I will conduct a thorough
review of all your homes over multiple visits for the presence and
identification of the types of spirits you have in this haunting. At the end
of the week, when the moon will be in half-phase, we will conduct a
séance. It will not be a cheap process, but in the end, we will exorcise these
evil spirits from your homes.”
There was an awkward silence as everyone calculated their public
position on whether to be honest about their belief in a neighborhood
haunting.
A skinny, dark-haired man from the back of the room set down
his plate of vegetable crudité and said, “I think we need to look to more
scientific reasons as to why we have experienced all these things.”
His wife replied, louder than she intended, “Honey, we are just
guests—we haven’t even closed on the house yet; let’s not be
unneighborly.”
Ignoring her, the man continued, “All the physical symptoms
experienced, including those of the flies and mice, lead me to conclude
that this cul-de-sac has, for whatever reason, a very high level of radiation
present.”
Another sampling of muttered curses filled the room. Helen put
her head in her hands. Bill tightened his fists and clenched his jaw. Hal
placed his hands over his balls as he did during dental x-rays.
Madame Dvořák was defiant; she would slay the interloper. “I am
a world-class spiritualist and clairvoyant—I’ve been on The Wendy
Williams Show. By what authority or experience do you dare contradict
my professional opinion?”
“I’m a board-certified radiation oncologist, and all these
symptoms are textbook signs of acute radiation syndrome.”
Bob Morgan retreated from the house via the garage entrance. It
would take several years and a civil trial to determine that the marble he
had used in all the cul-de-sac homes was purchased at a meager price from
an Eastern European dealer who surreptitiously traded in radioactive
marble mined from the Ural Mountains of Russia. The mine was located
2023, Autumn / 69
at Lake Karachay, a site known to be the depository of nuclear waste since

at least 1951. Bob thought he had found a good deal. It was not his intent
to harm people.
As Bob climbed into his four-door pickup truck, and after saying
a hurried goodbye to Helen, Madame Dvořák took a moment to catch her
breath in her car. She hastily tried to clear her mind as she had learned in
her mediation class. Still, she could not erase the visual of the Wicked
Witch of the West melting from the bucket of water thrown over her. Any
doctor in a group was bad for business.
The business of being a medium seemed too difficult lately;
perhaps she would utilize her persuasive skills as a life coach.
DANIEL GENE BARLEKAMP

FOR J.L.
When I hear them talk about

the way this town used to be,
all Eastern European,
all Catholic,
all Good People—
the First Slavic Bank
on the corner,
the kielbasa
strung up in the window
of Adam’s Food Market,
the Hungarian hymns
pouring from the cathedrals
up and down Paulison Avenue—
I remember sitting side by side
on the tatami in your living room,
playing Mortal Kombat 4
while your grandmother
served us yakuruto,
and it makes me wonder
what town they’re talking about,
and why anyone
would want to go back there.
Barlekamp
RONALD MORAN
YARD SALE IN JULY
What do you make of your yard sale

when the only interest
is shown by an elderly man
walking a shih tzu.
He asks you, How much for the yard?
Rearrange your stuff.

Line the street side
with only attractive items,
like your prized collection
of stuffed lizards,
and the cast iron trophy

your great uncle won at a county fair
for being the dirtiest
in a mud slinging contest
in the last century.
Add two things from the study

of your last lover,
the room you never go in
unless you've had four martinis,
light on vermouth.
Before you turn in for the day,

Turn the sprinkler on
and take a long shower
along with what's left over.
Accept the first offer for your yard.
Moran
“Yard Sale in July” was first published in Poem issue 129, May 2023
2023, Autumn / 71
TIMOTHY REILLY
OLD LIGHT
For Jo-Anne
In 1956 I fell hopelessly in love with Darla Hood: the girl in The
Little Rascals series on TV. I was only six years old, but I was smart
enough to realize it was a long shot. Nevertheless, I asked my mother to
help me get Darla’s address so I could write her a letter. My mother must
have known the kind of letter I wanted to write, because she couldn’t hold
back her laughter when she told me Darla Hood was almost as old as
herself. She said The Little Rascals and Laurel and Hardy were both
filmed in the 1930s, and that she had seen them in the movie theaters when
she was a little girl. Although heartbroken, and put off by the laughter at
my expense, I was mostly intrigued. It was the first time I became aware
of the fact that most of the television programs I watched were old movies
and Hal Roach comedy shorts—filmed years before I was born. I had been
taking for granted the marvels of Edison’s invention. I had also short-
changed the mahogany cabinet in our living room that magically plucked
invisible waves from the air and translated them into living images from
the past, present, and—in the case of the old Flash Gordan serials—a
comic book rendition of a grab-bag future.
Flash Gordan aside, I now realized I was viewing The Little
Rascals and Laurel and Hardy in the light from another time. I noticed the
stoves in Laurel and Hardy films were small and stood on metal legs;
kitchen sinks were plain and had no garbage disposals; refrigerators were
ice boxes. There were no television sets. I was unaware of the term Art
Deco, but I recognized in these old films the unique designs of cabinets,
lamps, and knickknacks that still adorned my grandparents’ home. As luck
would have it, I was invited to spend the weekend with my grandparents.
On Saturday morning my grandmother made Cream of Wheat for

breakfast and told me fascinating stories about growing up in a house
without electricity. She said she read books by the light of a kerosene lamp
and would listen to her grandmother play old-time tunes on a small organ
that worked by pushing pedals—a “pump organ” it was called. “We had a
Gramophone record player,” she said, “but you had to wind it up like a
clock.”
After breakfast I went outside to watch my grandfather change the
sparkplugs in his 1949 mustard-colored Chevy. He was a retired high
school science teacher and was meticulous with everything he did. But no
matter how involved he was, he would always take the time to answer my
questions. I got the feeling he missed being asked questions.
“How does a television make it in color?” I asked.
“The television broadcaster transmits the pictures through the air,”
my grandfather said. “Just like the regular television and radio waves I told
you about. Remember? But for color TVs, they transmit the same picture
three times—once in red, once in blue, and once in green. Then the color
TV mixes it altogether—like mixing paint—and it comes out just like
you’d see it in the movie theater.”
We had been talking about the rare and expensive color television
set he and Grandma received as a fortieth wedding anniversary gift. Their
three adult children chipped in for the extravagance. That evening my
grandparents and I would watch the first televised broadcast of The Wizard
of OZ—in color!
Earlier in the week, my mother described to me her experience of
seeing The Wizard of OZ at a movie theater, in 1939. She said: “A girl
named Dorothy is in a house that gets lifted up by a tornado and then
dropped into a magical land. Everything inside her house is dark and
drab—no colors. But when Dorothy opens the door, the world outside is
bright and colorful and beautiful . . . and strange.” I noticed the look on
my mother’s face when she landed on the word “strange.” It was as if she
was looking out from darkness into the jolting light of Fairyland.
Having completed changing the Chevy’s sparkplugs, my
grandfather led me to his workshop to show me the basics of how a camera
works. (The teacher surfaced in him at the slightest opportunity.) His
workshop had dozens of jars and beakers and other scientific apparatus
stored neatly on shelves or tucked inside cupboards and drawers. His
garden tools were likewise kept. He pulled from a shelve what appeared
to be a shoebox.
“This is called a camera obscura.” he said, handing me the
shoebox. “It means Dark Room, in Latin. Latin is a very old language we
still use for some things. Camera means the same thing as chamber. A
chamber is a room. The first camera obscuras were actual rooms you could
walk into. This box is like a model of that kind of room. Go ahead. Open
it up and see what’s inside.”
I opened the shoebox. “There’s nothing inside of it,” I said.
He drew my attention to opposing sides of the box. One side had
a two-inch square cut out that was covered over with translucent wax
paper—like a frosted windowpane. The other side had a pinhole. “The
light comes in through this tiny hole and projects—like a movie
2023, Autumn / 73
projector—an image on the wax paper screen. I’ll show you how it works.”
He placed a lamp with a bare lightbulb on a bench and then demonstrated
how to hold the camera obscura while peering into the wax paper window
like the viewfinder on a Kodak Brownie. He then closed the door to his
shop and switched off the overhead light. “Point the box at the light on the
bench,” he said. “You can focus by moving the box forward or backward
a few inches from you face.”
I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was like a magic trick from a novelty
shop.
“Is it a magic trick?” I asked.
“Nope. It’s not a trick.”
“Why is the lamp upside-down?”
“The camera obscura works just like our eyes. The tiny opening
in the front of an eye—called the pupil—is like the tiny opening on the
camera obscura—or even a Kodak Brownie, for that matter. Light enters
through the pupil and projects an upside-down image on the back of the
eyeball. The difference is our brain turns it around so we can see the image
as it really is. That’s God’s invention. With a modern camera, we can look
at the developed film to see the picture right-side-up. Get the picture?” He
pulled his earlobe and winked like a camera shutter.
My grandfather loved to give me things to think about. On a
previous visit, he set up at night his homemade telescope—a Newtonian
reflector, he called it—and aimed it at something called the Andromeda
Galaxy. I looked through the eyepiece and saw what I thought was a wispy
little cloud. Gramps explained that a galaxy is like a huge island of stars.
“It looks small because it’s very, very far away,” he said. “Our Sun, which
is also a star, is a tiny speck of light on the edge of a galaxy that’s just like
Andromeda. Our galaxy is called the Milky Way.” Before I could begin to
grasp any of this, he pushed me out even further. “The light from the
Andromeda Galaxy takes two million years to reach us here on Earth. Two
million years is a very long time. That’s about as old as the fish fossil I
gave you. It’s long before there were even people on the Earth. Think
about it. You are looking at light that is two…million…years…old.”
“Is the old light a fossil?” I asked.
It was one of the rare occasions my grandfather seemed a little
stumped. He always narrowed his eyes and rubbed his mustache when he
was thinking deeply. He did this when I once asked him to explain the
meaning of “time.” On that occasion he fumbled for a while—muttering
about Einstein and Aristotle—until he had to admit he really didn’t have
an answer for that one. When he had an answer for something, his eyes
would widen, and he would raise an index finger in triumph.
“No,” he said with his triumphant gesture. “Light doesn’t die. So
it can’t become a fossil. Light is an energy wave. The light from stars is a
visible light—you can see it—and if nothing gets in its way, that light can
travel through space forever.”
Forty-seven years ago, I met and fell in love with a beautiful and
intelligent woman my own age. We were married a few years later, and to
this day, we still hold hands in public—a trait that encourages patronizing
comments such as: “You two are just adorable.” Invariably we respond
with the rhythmic chant: Children and seniors and pets—oh my! The irony
always goes unnoticed.
Sadly, our own adult children consider us stuck in the past. They
claim to “live in the moment” but seem anxious to escape “the moment”
whenever they visit us. Acting as if we’re unaware, they look at one
another and mouth the words “okay, Boomer.” Instead of engaging in a
conversation, they push Smartphones in our faces and speak in captions:
“Here we are in Cabo;” “Here’s the Ram’s Cheerleaders;” “Here’s our dog
dressed as a zombie.” They never ask us questions.
For my first-ever viewing of The Wizard of OZ, I sat between my

grandparents on their hunter green, leaf-embossed couch. Grandma had
reduced the lighting to a single floor lamp (“So we won’t ruin our eyes”).
I can remember next to nothing of the program that introduced the feature
movie, but as soon as a six-note motif chimed, and the credits began to
roll, I became a willing traveler to wherever this film would lead me.
Grandma helped me out in reading the prologue, which emphasized the
phrase “Young in Heart.” I immediately understood the prologue to be
addressing both myself and my grandparents. A little later, when I heard
Dorothy sing about her longing for a “place where there is no trouble,” I
experienced a deep emotion I’d not felt before. It was a mysterious blend
of comfort and sadness. There was something about Dorothy I recognized
in myself; I easily identified with her (I still do). When she made her way
to Professor Marvel’s campsite, I couldn’t help but notice a resemblance
between the kindly mustached showman and my kindly mustached
grandfather. When she landed in Technicolor Munchkinland, I thought of
my mother’s description—especially when the Lollipop Guild made their
entrance. Their “strange” appearance gave me an instant case of the
willies. They were like Gerber Babies from outer space.
2023, Autumn / 75
The movie worked on me like any true fairytale. The Wicked

Witch is EVIL INCARNATE—not some unfortunate human gone awry
after a bad childhood. Dorothy (“the small and meek”) represents an
Every[person], gathering her intelligence, compassion, and courage to
defeat EVIL by the power of GOODNESS.
The annual Wizard of OZ broadcasts continued up until the 1970s.
With the advent of VHS, and, later, DVDs, my wife and I have been able
to continue our own tradition of an annual viewing. We share our
respective childhood memories about the TV broadcasts (e.g. the
commercial breaks always came after the Cowardly Lion ran from the
Wizard’s throne room and dove out a window). As “senior citizens” (and
former children) we can relate to the way Dorothy is not taken seriously—
both before and after her journey.
We plan to watch The Wizard of OZ, this Saturday. We’ll have no
worries about the movie being interrupted by phone calls from our
offspring. We’ll have an early dinner (we usually do), clear the dishes, and
cue up the DVD player (which, as I understand it, is already deemed “old
school”). Before watching the movie, I’ll switch on the art deco floor lamp
inherited from my grandparents. Being young in heart, we’ll sit on our
couch holding hands, waiting for the familiar six-note motif and the female
choir’s eerie wind vocalizations: heralding the start of a soul’s journey
towards wholeness.
JACALYN SHELLEY
WHY DOES MY SON CALL ME?
My son asks, How’s your other son?

which means, How’s Boris?
my pet cockatoo, a dinosaur born
out of the oldness of the world.
Who understands what caring for

another creature fully entails?
(cont)
I pour water into a stainless bowl,

drop almonds in another. He toddles
up to me, mirrors my swaying back
and forth before he lowers his head
for me to tousle his yellow crown.
My son’s ear presses against his phone,

listens as I speak of long days filled
with daily chores, going to stores,
teaching Boris how to speak English,
how to whistle Beethoven’s Fifth
and Hava Nagila. After Boris shreds
pages from the New York Times
that line his cage, he translates
my deep evening sighs into
a low growl.
Boris asks in a voice identical

to mine, How ya doin’? then
answers, All right, Mr. Bird,
as if to reassure us that someday
my son will treasure the oldness
of our world–Tolstoy, Mussorgsky,
and Boris–maybe out of fondness

for the resonance of my voice.
But one day my little dinosaur
may echo my son’s speech,
whistle his songs. If my son
listens to his own voice
will he know his inheritance?
Shelley
BLUE FOR SKY, GREEN FOR TREES
for the people of Vietnam

and Ukraine
I am told clouds are the most difficult objects in a

landscape to paint. Once it was so easy to crayon a (cont)
2023, Autumn / 77
blue sky around the outline of white billowy clouds.

Today my grandson tells me rain clouds are green,
yellow, orange, and red swirls drifting over the blue
dot of his home on the weather app. When he first
learned to play chess, he wanted to capture the warrior
pieces, take out the queen, leave the king with his
pawns, so easily wiped out, so we could play his
favorite part of the game–king battle. But now, at age
eleven he studies The Clone Wars, asks me if I know
that Palpatine is based on Julius Caesar and
Napoleon. At his age, I read about the Civil War. How
Stonewall Jackson’s men held off Union troops;
Robert E. Lee rode on a gray steed; McClellan, a
coward. The soldiers on Gallant Men, my brother’s
favorite TV show, wore the dark helmets, sturdy
boots, and olive drab uniform my father wore in a
photograph. He served in France. It was strange when
Dad said something about a guerilla war when a man
wrapped in a yellow-orange robe—a Buddhist monk,
Mom said—appeared on the Nightly News. Dad said
not to worry; the man was in a city far, far away.
Flames encircling his body, billowing out in front of
him, his shaven head, arms in prayer pose. Behind
him a plastic gas container, behind a car, low
buildings, a patch of green for trees, blue for a
cloudless sky.
Shelley
DATELINE APRIL 30TH 1975

for the people of Vietnam
and Afghanistan
In a cinder block apartment for married students, I sat

alone patting my still-flat stomach–nothing moving
yet–and faced our black and white TV. On the screen
a crowd’s fingers cling to the railings of a flimsy
stairway as the crush hunches forward, braces against
the downdraft of helicopter blades. What of life’s
treasures do they cradle in one arm, carry on one
shoulder? Who calculated their collective weight (cont)
before they could enter the chopper’s belly? By

evening the names will be known of the last two men
to die–from rocket fire at Tan Son Nhut airport.
America had grown weary of the faraway language
that rolled off its tongue. On that particular day I
thought no son of mine, whose tummy would taste
like raspberries, will ever go to war, although one day
my father will say, “The military would be good for
your sons.” For America perhaps it was the final
move in a poorly played game of dominos, but for me
it was just another day in the long unfurling of
consequences.
Shelley
VIRGINIA WATTS
PICKLED EGGS
Don’t ask me
to explain it.
Mason jar,
magenta liquid,
run-of-the-mill
chicken eggs
white and naked
as bare shoulders
against glass.
For days I
swing open
refrigerator door,
Good morning, Eggies!
Eggies that swap
colors, mood rings,
fortune telling
crystal balls,
from alabaster
to eraser pink
to violet
to beet juice fuchsia. (cont)
2023, Autumn / 79
My older brothers
refuse to eat them,
too much
like the eyeballs
of Uncle Gilbert’s
prize-winning,
nostril-pierced,
Angus bull.
But not me.

Deep purple
all the way
to their yolken core,
I raise one
to my nose,
whiff vinegarish proof,
savor the tang
of Transylvanian
transformation,
how legends must
taste on the tongue.
Watts
MOUSE
It is possible the mouse

had made a cozy, little house
in our box of Christmas tree lights.
An old Gimbels box shoved into
the attic for most of the year,
so why not. Inside, multicolored orbs
as big as apples in my six-year-old hands,
covered in white, puffy stuff,
like jackets of snow or endless hugs.
Though enchanting, those decorations
did turn lava hot quick, Dad’s refrain,
Don’t touch the tree lights, kids.
You’ll singe your fingertips.
(cont)
My mother acted quickly

when the dehoused mouse
came tumbling out along with
the lights she dumped
onto living room carpet.
The creature stood frozen,
blinking, until Mom upturned
a basket used for fireplace logs
and trapped his fawn brown body.
Sit on that basket until your
father comes home.
Oh, I made suggestions,
believe me I did.
Make a narrow trail with boxes.
Prop the front door wide open.
I’ll nudge him along with the broom!
She wouldn’t listen.
Mice jump, Virginia.
The poor mouse did jump,
and run around and around,
and whimper piteously until
suddenly I could have heard
a pin drop. By the time Dad
got home, I was all cried out.
I stood beside Dad as he tossed
a limp body into waiting woods,
his arm leaden around my shoulders.
It was probably his heart, he told me,
I am sure he was a very, very old mouse.
Watts
DEAD BODY
After Dad died
I kicked myself.
Of course he
prepaid the
cheapest
crematorium
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 81
he could find.
Bunch of con artists.
Weeks went by.
No return calls.
When they finally
answered the phone,
proclaimed the job
complete, I knew
it was a lie,
a sham in an urn.
After that hoodwinking

I researched options for
my someday dead body.
Maybe human composting.
Very Green Movement.
Thirty days, aerated chamber.
Dad would have said
that is a ridiculous
price to shell out
to turn a dead body
into a shoebox of soil.
Once he attended
the viewing of
an employee’s wife
at the wrong
funeral home,
bowed his head
over the wrong
dead body.
Later demonstrated
the bow to me,
explained,
It was too late.
I was already in line.
The woman had a very
pleasant face, made me
think of dear Aunt Bee
from Mayberry R.F.D.
Watts
MEIKA MACRAE
THE DICTIONARY OF DADS
Did you ever have that day where, when you look back in the rear-
view mirror of your life, you realize, a-ha, that’s it! That’s the problem.
That’s where the ruinous chain of events started. An egg is cracked, you
drop it into a poacher, you look the other way for ten years, and voilà—
it’s rubber (not to mention the house is burnt down).
This journal entry was written over a decade ago, the day the egg
cracked. I can’t change the fact Dad broke the shell. Ever. All I can try to
discover is where I found the hollow before I separated the halves. Because
I’m heartbroken over my sour relationship with him. All this time has
passed, and we still never sweetened into something solid and real. What’s
sensible and easy is to just write him off as being too different, like I’ve
grown accustomed, and let my thoughts stop there. When I stumbled upon
what I wrote as a girl, I can’t help thinking: by God, aside from a minor
vocabulary issue, I was smarter then than I am now.
--
Date: Friday, May 4
Time of writing: Midnight (holed up in closet with the door closed
after bedtime—honestly, do grown-ups just think kids will do what they
say all the time? What are we, robots without a soul? There are three things
most important in life after being a good person: Free speech! Free will!
Midnight snacks!)
Age: 12, I guess, but I can’t even get excited for my birthday six
months from now all of a sudden (and why did I have to start kindergarten
a year before everyone else did??? I’m the youngest one in my class!! So
embarrassing always)
Weather Report: Horrible! Hurricanes over my family! Tornados!
Dramatic global climate shifts that involved French chefs and sudden
volcanic explosions and my dad turning into what might as well be an
alien!
Times I Went Speechless 1,0000000000000000, Times I Almost
Had a Heart Attack 1,0000000000000000, Crimes Committed by Dad 2,
Crimes Rectified 2 (if a crime even can be rectified), Social Disasters
0?1?10? (can’t remember due to distractions from the day’s events and
thus barely present in spirit at Amanda’s party), Cute-or-Smart Boy
Interactions (can’t remember for same reason - a moral infringement in
itself - one who can’t remember cute-or-smart guys will never stay true to
2023, Autumn / 83
one’s own life ethics when things get hard), Cosmetic Success -0 on scale
of 1 to 10, Autographs Signed 0 (it must be a dry spell, it always starts off
that way, they say)
My dad rolled up in a 900 series BMW. Black, shiny hubcaps,

tinted windows, fresh off the lot. Some of my friends giggled and waved
shyly. He was the stylish father who never wore ties or socks and was
always vanishing for weeks at a time to exotic destinations in Europe. To
me, he was just my dad. He oversalted his homemade hamburgers, was
obsessed with dead bolts, and wasn’t around much.
Today, travel brochures to England huddled mysteriously in the
console between us. He said it was London this time because our fish and
chips weren’t quite up to snuff out here. It made sense to me. Of course
people smart enough not to wear ties or socks knew how to identify
superior fried foods.
As we slid away from the curb, I waved good-bye to a cluster of
sweaty, leggy girls in running shorts who resembled a convention of
exhausted sea spiders that had recently discovered a Nike outlet.
“See you tonight!” my best friend Amanda called out, waving.
I blew a kiss and settled into the soft, leather seat. I’d trained
myself not to love Dad’s cars. In three months, he’d just sell it and get a
different one. I didn’t want to torment myself by falling for some disloyal
car like that.
“Varsity track and you’re still just in 8th grade?” Dad sounded a
bit annoyed. He was never thrilled about the concept of varsity, for some
reason.
We slipped up the hill toward the highway. (I’ve got this great new
dictionary and thesaurus. It turns out the word “slip” isn’t only that thing
Mom wears or the upsetting crisis that happens when there’s a banana peel
on the floor!)
A meadow flicked by (thesaurus!) that burst with sunset-colored
orange-yellow poppies just coming into spring bloom. It felt like they were
blooming especially for me. Flowers could feel a great day when they saw
one. Because today, I, Lausanne Skylar, realized I was about to be famous.
“I’m the first person to letter in three sports in my grade. They
announced it today.”
“Boy or girl even?”
I nodded and dug in my book bag to make sure I didn’t forget my
mom’s ancient, battered Nancy Drew Files novel in my locker. Nancy and
Ned were in a fight and it had been impossible to concentrate all day
knowing they hadn’t made up yet. He was being a jerk, she was being an
idiot, and I couldn’t figure out if I wanted them to break up or get back
together. This series had inspired me to write my own crime play and let
me tell you, it didn’t have some wet blanket like Ned attached.
Dad whistled. “Peer counselor too. And now this writing thing….”
His face darkened.
I don’t mean to brag or anything, but that’s what I was really
excited about. My very first play, Death by Scotch Tape Dispenser, had
gotten chosen as one of the talent acts for the End of Year Arts for Parents
Performances. It was one of those really dark, hard-core crime/detective
things along the lines of Meet the Parents or Night at the Museum. Not
only had I written it, but I was going to direct and have my own cast and
everything!
I knew I shouldn’t, but I had to ask. “Did you like my story?” Then
held my breath.
He gritted his teeth. “No.”
Somehow, I knew he wouldn’t. My cheeks flushed, and I felt my
ribs squeeze from a lemon-to-lemon juice. Was it really that bad? Oh God.
But wait a second. Dad didn’t read books, much less go with
Mom to anything artsy-fartsy (his word!! Not mine!!). Would he even
know a good play from a good day? I felt minorly consoled from his
scathing theatrical review already.
“I don’t know where you get all this ambition from, Lasi. I mean,
I was in football, but….” He shook his head as he bolted for his ringing
cell phone. “Yeah?... So what? We still have to….” He glanced at me and
broke into rapid French.
I hated what I felt right now. His accent always impressed me,
even the simple words. “Paris” wasn’t “Paris” it was “Pah-ree.” It’s like
they served you that accent when you spent about a billion Euros with Air
France. The truth was, I wished I could impress him right back.
When he clicked off the phone, he glanced at me again, his eyes
softening. “So tonight’s the big party at Amanda’s?”
My dad drove like a slowpoke. Why couldn’t he just hit the gas?
I debated this. Wait a second, I had it! Maybe it’s because he was an old
goat (39!), he was deathly afraid of getting pulled over (for some reason),
and he had no valid opinions about theatre whatsoever. That’s why he
didn’t hit the gas. It all made perfect sense.
But why was he afraid? Mom never got scared when she got
caught speeding, and she was normally scared of most harmless things, for
example Daddy Long Legs spiders. Maybe Dad valued that vague and
2023, Autumn / 85
murky concept called insurance rates…. Yes, that must be it. It all came
down to insurance.
So could I, in good faith, fault him for being born before ice cream
was invented, obeying traffic laws for insurance reasons, and having
horribly poor artistic taste in anything but cars and no socks? I felt all my
shame and anger slide permanently away.
Besides, I realized right then, there’d be no stopping me now. The
fact I was going to direct made me feel simply elastic.
(Elastic, for those who might need to improve their own
vocabulary, meant something that was even better than happy. I just lost
my dictionary and thesaurus, so I’m forced to go on memory. Luckily, my
memory is outstanding and being reduced to the Jedi Force can only make
one smarter if you fight off the dark side of too many adverbs and
semicolons.)
At least I had Mom to support me. She said she was positively
gripped by my story. She even told me I was going places. I explained with
an exceptional degree of patience that, yes, I was going to one place in
particular, obviously - the De Morgaine Middle School auditorium stage.
(Grown-ups are soooo dense.) Anyhow, I couldn’t wait to write Mr. or Ms.
Broadway to see if they’d want to show my play next.
“Yes! I’m going to get my hair done at Millie’s—”
“Your hair done? For a party? I don’t think that’s in the budget.”
“It’s free. Mom bribed her with lemon scones.”
A sly smile crept out of his lips. “Oh. Okay.”
“And I’m going to wear a new pair of jeans from Bloomie’s mom
just bought! Sale, don’t worry. Do you think I should go with my pink t-
shirt or step it up a notch with a silk blouse?”
“I don’t fuckin’ know, hon.”
Dad sailed through a red light after scanning the street for cops (I
knew what he was looking for, he didn’t have to tell me). But he didn’t
turn up the street to our middle-class-but-lots-of-older-trees-and-pretty-
flowers neighborhood that we locals called SE. Instead, he continued for
a few rock-ribbed, ocean-front miles until we entered the ultra-exclusive,
palm-lined enclave of Mae (found the thesaurus again, this thing rocks!
I’m expanding my vocabulary like nobody’s business and I’m simply
elastic about it! I don’t even need to look up all the words anymore!)
Anyhow, Mae’s on the northwest side of our little Southern
California island of De Morgaine and it always feels empty. It’s stuffed
with people who barely live there—it’s all just their second or third
mansions. Mae is also where Dad’s from but now hates to go ever since
his dad wrote him out of something called a William, Bill or Will, I can
never remember.
I longed to smell the salty sea air, but Dad always drove with the
black-tinted windows cinched up to the last centimeter. Privacy and
security reasons, he always said. All I could figure is that he was secretly
afraid of getting stung by a bee and didn’t want to admit it. Bees are very
good at disturbing privacy and security, you see.
“Are we going to Grandma and Grandpa Number Two’s?”
“Not today.”
So then it must be Dunkin’ Donuts. He was sneaking a trip into
Dunkin’ Donuts behind Mom’s back. It was all totally clear.
Only the donut shop was in the other direction.
After weaving through a series of steep, narrow streets
commandeered (new word!) by sprawling, gated estates, he glided to a
stop in front of a vast adobe wall. It was blanketed in ivy so shiny it looked
hand polished. Two gardener’s trucks were parked out front, straddling the
street and sidewalk, Beverly Hills-north-of-Sunset-style.
The typical transportation in the Mae region, for example
helicopters, limos, and various models of luxury vehicles with
complicated names that belonged on an Italian dinner menu—Maseroli,
Alfalfa Romeo & Juliet, Lam-burger-ini—had to be able to slink through
without scratching neither passenger nor car paint. Unwritten etiquette that
gardeners knew they had to follow, otherwise they’d be canned faster than
a tomato. Trust me, I know. It was Grandpa Number Two’s favorite hobby,
sacking domestic staff.
“I think I’ll go with the silk blouse. There’s gonna be a lot of cute-
or-smart guys there. Mom says I’m boy-crazy right now. I swear I’m not.
My silver sandals will—”
“Christ, forget the party for a second!”
I opened my eyes wide. “Okay….”
“This errand won’t take long. I’ll keep the engine running. Come
on.”
He motioned to follow, so I slid out the door, wanting to please
him and, well, I was also very curious at the same time. This place wasn’t
Dunkin’ Donuts, that’s for sure. But what was it?
Dad broke into a slight jog and shadowed the lengthy perimeter of
the wall to a side pedestrian gate. My legs were so tired from track practice,
but I pushed dreams aside of a crème brûlée-scented bubble bath and
managed to keep up pretty well. (Dad was slow about everything.)
He typed in a code and the wrought iron door clanked open.
2023, Autumn / 87
I wondered if Dad had gone mental. “What are we doing?!”

He grinned, his eyes stirring with fire, a fire I’d never seen. “We’re
just two kids in a candy store. It’ll be fun.”
I may have been all grown up by the age of 12, but the word
“candy” hadn’t lost its appeal.
A crescent-shaped mansion loomed far ahead like a bulbous pastry
big enough to feed an entire race of Spanish colonial giants. (God, don’t
you love that word, bulbous??? It actually sounds like what it means
because the letters nearly bulged right out of its own seams! If only all
words could be so honest.)
Carved from sun-bleached stone the color of toasty custard, it was
framed by two thick, fairytale-like towers that stuck out from the main
structure. There were manifold layers of princess balconies jam-packed
with thick layers of grape leaves that snaked their way up at every
opportunity. Then I almost lost my breath when I saw how delicate the
paper-thin red tiles were layered on top. And the layers were generous,
stacked high up on each other, almost ten feet deep. The roof almost
seemed edible it was so flaky.
By God. This was a live-in croissant for immortals.
A large pond lapped lazily out front, big enough to fit all those
Spanish giants if they were inclined to a rustic bath, as giants must be
forced to do. (Let’s face it, the poor little oversized abnormalities couldn’t
fit in a bathtub, could they?) A ten-car garage and a guest house more
luxurious than an average five-star resort flanked either side. I smelled
miles of fresh-cut grass and could hear the grandeur of their multi-tiered
fountain bubbling away from here. It was either that or Niagara Falls.
I couldn’t close my mouth, I felt so in awe. “Wow.”
Dad shrugged. “Our house is better.”
Our house was a tenth the size of this. To be more precise, it was
a zillionth the size. But I thought of all Mom’s flowers and fruit trees, our
warm kitchen buzzing away with fresh baked bread, and the prolonged
network of colorful, worn-in throw rugs that felt like downy slippers under
my feet. I had enough business sense to know that a house had something
to do with hazy notions of property value and devious real estate agents.
(Mmmm. Hazy. It sounded, well, hazy.) A home did not. It was simpler
and didn’t require a calculator or a lawyer. All that was vital was
homemade mashed potatoes with chimneys of butter on top.
My heart then stirred with something I hadn’t ever felt with Dad
before. Camaraderie. (Do you know how hard that word is to spell??)
Maybe it was because whatever was happening was exciting. Mom always
said I was one of those people that functioned well in a crisis, just like
Dad. But I think it was more than that. It was about the beauty of our
simple home that nothing, even this kingly trophy estate, could ever match
it in our hearts.
I smiled at Dad. “Yeah.”
(Why didn’t people use “kingly” and “queenly” more? “Palatial”
was brilliant, but the word was everywhere, and there was nothing
common about a palace. Then again, if “kingly” and “queenly” got
popular, they’d become “palatial,” too.)
A polished stone walkway promising a tour of tennis courts
appeared on the horizon. I assumed we’d take the path, like normal human
beings tended to do, but Dad grabbed my hand and steered me behind a
perfectly clipped stream of bright green hedges that ran along side of it.
“Stick with me like glue. And keep quiet!”
“Got it. Is this some kinda surprise birthday party?” I whispered,
feeling a rush of exhilaration.
(New word, but it sort of bugged me. Who got “exhilarated” about
going into “exile”? The words were too similar and I was going to write
the Oxford English Dictionary about it right away.)
“No, it’s not a damned party.”
Great, no surprise party. That meant no chocolate cake with
double chocolate frosting and little flower swirls on top created by
someone who could actually operate a piping tool (which I was trying to
learn but I must admit, its IQ requirements were right up there with science
and the pole vault).
He paused as a lawn mower the size of a garbage truck growled to
life in the distance.
“The gardeners just finished this half of the five acres,” he
whispered. “They’ll be busy on the other for a few hours. Maids are off
today. The family’s at a film premiere. Only a chef to worry about. We’re
home free.”
I felt confused. It was like he was speaking some obscure foreign
language. Up to now, I’d always assumed he spoke only English and
French.
A sheared clip of bush with no leaf brushed against my shoulder
and I felt a sting of pain. I noticed the blood, but then the edge of the tennis
courts butted up against us, bursting with a carpet of twinkling emerald-
green.
“The courts….” I cried. “Have real grass!”
2023, Autumn / 89
Visions of me going to Wimbledon sprung in my head. I’d play

doubles in one of those British streamlined sunhats all the women wore. I
don’t think it mattered that I didn’t know how to play tennis. There were
naturals born every day.
“Shhhh!”
Dad grabbed my hand as thoughts of a new tennis racket decorated
in little pink ladybugs came to an abrupt halt. God, Dad was being so
bossy. Did he forget to take his vitamin B or something? We shuffled down
until a discreet side door to the mansion appeared. He procured a funny-
looking metal tool from his pocket. After jiggling it around for a few
seconds, the lock on the doorknob snapped and popped.
I gasped. Okay, he’d officially lost his mind. “What are you
doing? Are you…breaking in?”
“Come on, Las. The apple never falls far from the tree.” He
winked at me, tiptoeing into a vast chef’s kitchen that glowed like the
moon with all its fancy silver appliances.
I’d watched a ton of cooking shows with my mom, and, even from
the doorway, I knew what greatness I was witnessing. Wolf ranges, four
ovens, dual dishwashers, custom walnut cabinets that gleamed and
smelled of wood polish, and a marble island large enough to host holiday
dinner for the entire neighborhood and any oversized, invisible friends like
Snuffleupagus while they were at it. It was a kitchen my mother could turn
into an opera of culinary delight.
Yet here Dad was, poking his head down a silent hallway.
I stood outside, staring at him, shock starting to give way to anger.
This couldn’t be right. Didn’t he want me to be a good person?
“Come on!” he whispered.
My chest crumpled in extreme discomfort. This was not our
house. What he was doing was officially wrong! I wouldn’t want our
kitchen invaded. Why would he do such a thing to someone else’s?
“No,” I managed weakly.
The scents of garlic and butter from the kitchen distracted me, but
I was more worried about Dad’s temper. He’d gotten really mad the other
night when he found me in my closet at midnight munching on one of
Mom’s peanut butter cookies and reading a detective fiction book. He
punched a hole in the closet door. I didn’t understand what made him that
mad about a peanut butter cookie. Early-onset high cholesterol?
A portly woman in an apron and heels walked in humming to
herself, carrying a glossy tray with a half-finished stack of crab cakes. Her
expression wore a hint of pride as she gazed down at her golden creation.
When she saw me in the doorway, her lips parted in surprise. Those proud
eyes quickly turned to suspicious slits.
“Qui êtes-vous?” she demanded.
My heart dropped to what felt like the polished floor.
“I’m…I’m…my name is La—”
Dad reappeared. “What are you doing?” he cried at me, panic in
his voice.
The woman blinked in shock as she turned and saw my dad.
“Her name is Bonnie Parker, okay?” He yanked a gun from the
small of his back and pointed it at her face.
I clutched my chest. My dad had a gun?! This wasn’t happening.
This wasn’t happening….
“Sit down. Now!”
A monsoon of tears heaved down her face. “Merde!”
Horror surged my veins as the tray smacked onto the island and
down to the floor, beating my ear drums with a riot of all sorts of clangs.
Golden crusts of crab cake flew through the air, and, despite the ruinous
circumstances, my mouth watered for a fleeting moment. Okay, not just a
moment. Like three moments, but that’s it, I swear.
(Ruinous. Now there’s a word and a half….)
But God. Dad—my own dad—steered her to a kitchen bar stool
and wrapped her up in a bungee cord.
“A bungee cord!” I choked on the words.
“Don’t worry, there’s no one else here.”
As if this were some vital tidbit of information?
“Good Lord! Dad???”
The chef shrieked, “Ne me faites pas de mal!”
I still stood outside, unmoving.
“Get in here!” Dad’s whisper sounded so mad! Honestly, the man
looked like he was going to explode into a fireball. How could someone
go from being sane to completely insane so fast?
Then it dawned on me. He wasn’t sane in the first place. Great.
Just great. Now I had insanity running in the family gene pool along with
arthritis.
“We don’t have masks but they don’t have cameras. She’s the only
problem ’til I scope the scene. Get the hell inside!”
We stared each other down like starving bulls in a ring, but I didn’t
like the looks of that gun. Maybe he’d even point it at me? My heart
pounded as I finally took a step inside.
Dad nodded in impatient approval. “Wait here!”
2023, Autumn / 91
When he vanished into the house, the woman began to sob again.
As her sobs grew louder, the feeling that something was very, very wrong
stirred inside me further. I didn’t want Dad to get mad at me again. But I
didn’t want this darling woman tied up either.
“C’est un voleur!” the woman cried.
Voleur…the noun rang a bell from French class…. The word for
“thief.” But my father wasn’t…he couldn’t be! Then, I considered my
current situation. Would I ever want to know what my father really was if
he wasn’t something good?
I glanced down the hallway. Nothing but an ornate, curved marble
staircase in view. No Dad in sight. Through shaking hands, I unhooked the
bungee cord.
“Run!” I whispered.
She looked at me in confusion. I squeezed my eyes shut and
scanned my brain for any trace of a French lesson.
“Run!” I motioned to the door. “Um…Cours!”
She kissed both of my cheeks, but her face was streaked with
concern. “Mais…c’est ton père….”
“I’ll deal with him. Pas de problème! Just…allez!”
“Oui? Bon.”
She kissed me again twice and sprinted out the door. I admired
how she ran in heels. It must be a French thing—maybe they buttered their
soles to give them an extra smooth glide.
But what was my father going to say? I’d play dumb, I decided
right there. Pretend like my back was turned and she’d gotten a pair of
scissors and snipped the cord….
As an accomplished playwright, I knew how crucial it was to keep
the story believable. I reached for the scissors and cut the cord in half.
There. That’s what happened and now there’s proof.
(It seemed it was crucial for the word “crucial” to remain
mysterious to all, both in spelling and what it sounded like it should mean.
It wasn’t exactly an overpriced spa treatment for the face that you could
only purchase on cruise ships, now was it?)
A new fear surfaced. What if she called the police? What if the
cops were already on their way? When Dad got back, he’d figure out what
to do…. Maybe I should run, too?
I stole a stray bite of crab cake that had taken up court on the
countertop, contemplating. I couldn’t run. I couldn’t leave him here to
just…get caught. The creamy shrimp and crab with buttery scallions
pricking out tasted good for a second but then—
My gut reeled into stormy weather. I spit it into the sink and felt
so sick to my stomach, I couldn’t even reach for another bite.
At this moment, I thought of Dad’s car. He’d mentioned once any
good thief, regardless of industry, could change a VIN number. Car thieves
did it all the time, to wash away the true origins of vehicle ownership. He’d
told it to me almost as a boast. I thought it was just a fun hoodlum fact
he’d gotten from a film or something. But dread washed through me. I
suddenly suspected the VIN number of my dad’s new Beemer, all his cars,
ever, were flat out lies.
My conclusion about today’s events made me want to curl up into
a ball under my bed.
Dad really was a thief.
“Where are we going?” Amanda’s sister cried, when I’d sweet-

talked her into driving back to Mae before the party. “You know we live
in SE. This is, like, soooo out of the way.”
Our island, De Morgaine, took twenty minutes to traverse in
traffic, if that. But our neighborhood of SE seemed like a lifetime away
from Mae. And maybe it was.
“Just a little errand up on Sensey Road. It won’t take long, I
promise!”
“Sensey Road? What, do you know Hollywood royalty or
something?”
I clenched my jaw and remembered my Anne of Green Gables.
Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it. It was clear that
sometimes, you had to make sure those mistakes didn’t happen tomorrow.
I think Anne-with-an-”e” might have approved of what I was about to do,
but I’m not sure.
Amanda’s car was a convertible red Mustang, and, once we were
zooming along the Crusade Highway, she slid the top down. The car
hugged our twisty, ocean-front cliffs and I got caught in its beauty. A
warm, early summer breeze whipped through our hair and I felt so grown-
up. Not only was I going to be a director, but I was wearing make-up and
flitting around in a convertible on the prettiest road in the world!
(For those uninitiated in the perplexing and intricate world of
cosmetics application, beware. I accidentally stuck a bunch of red rouge
on my eyelids instead of my cheeks and glops of green eyeshadow on my
cheeks instead of my eyelids. The upshot was, I was still, undeniably,
wearing make-up. And, by the way, “flitting?” It’s perfectly suited for
convertibles. It’s like the word was designed for them.)
2023, Autumn / 93
“What’s with the gloves?” she asked.

I blinked. The road suddenly looked average at best. Cliffs? What
cliffs? And who liked convertibles anyway.
“Oh. Er.” My heart pounded in my chest. I longed to tell her the
truth. It’s what I always really liked to say. Mark Twain said it was easier
to remember and it really was.
But something inside of me zipped closed right then. I never fully
understood the word “secret” until this very moment. It should have been
spelled with a thousand letters, it felt so heavy. Worse, it was forcing me
to lie.
“My hands are cold,” I said. Lie number one that I now had to
remember for the rest of my life. Wait a second. There was that bungee
cord incident. A dark thunderstorm inside my soul started to brew. So two
lies now. As if I didn’t have enough homework already!
“But Lasi, it’s, like, practically summer!”
Clutching a lumpy, sealed, and exceptionally heavy envelope, I
instructed Amanda’s sister where to park.
“I’ll be right back.” I remembered a line I’d heard from a true
criminal just that day and added, “Keep the car running.”
Hunting along the tall ivied wall, I finally found the mailbox, big
enough to fit a roasted chicken. I stuffed the envelope with the words
“Sorry!” written in cursive on front.
Please, take your ruby back and lock it up with a hundred dead
bolts, I thought to myself, jogging back to the car. And I truly was sorry.
On the drive to the party, I couldn’t manage a conversation and,
luckily, Amanda’s sister didn’t need one anyway. I peeled off my gloves
and weighed my feelings.
What was Dad going to say if he ever found out the jewel he’d
stolen today was now back in the rightful owner’s hands? Not to sound
like a baby, but I felt like that guy Pelops from my Greek mythology book
Mom gave me on my birthday last year. It’s like Dad wanted to cut me up
and boil me and feed me to all the nefarious gods of the world. (Amazing
how “nefarious” took the rough and tumble feeling out of crime and
tricked us into thinking it was something elegant and sophisticated. But it
just sounded elegant and sophisticated, didn’t it? It still meant what it
meant.)
That ruby necklace he gave me? It was like some kind of
gruesome rite-of-passage present. It felt too cold against my skin to wear,
much less take for keeps.
I shuddered at the memory of him clasping it around my neck, that

cocky grin of his looking so satisfied. Hopefully, Dad would never find
out what I just did. I had my story ready. Let’s face it. He had a writer on
his hands. There would be no limits to the fibs I’d come up with about this
one.
As I stared out at the ocean sparkling sapphire blue, all I felt was
sad. Not even fear, really. Just utter sadness. I blinked to hide the water in
my eyes.
There was this whimpering pang starting in my heart right then, a
pang that I suspected I could never, ever fix. I think it might spend the rest
of my life just whining away inside me, like if Amanda’s dog was stuck
with a bunch of kitchen smells and no one ever gave him a bite of what
was cooking.
Dad would always be Dad, drumming up some concoction in our
own kitchen, and I didn’t want to even taste his recipe. But he’d keep on
cooking, I was sure of it. And he’d want me to eat it all, every teeny tiny
bite.
The truth is, I just wish I could understand him. I wish there could
be a dictionary about fathers. Because if this wasn’t the beginning of a
long slugging match between us, then my name wasn’t Lausanne Skylar.
If I had a dictionary of Dads, I could look up his name and not only get the
definition, but the history of how he got to be. Then I might rustle up some
empathy (which, as far as meanings go, is one of the best words ever, if
you ask me).
After today, forging a good relationship with my father seemed
impossible. But if I could figure out how, that would make me elastic!
JENNIFER M PHILLIPS
WOMAN TROUBLES IN THE BED OF IRIS
I'm tearing the dark red iris out of my garden

by the roots, the crepey cups
just the color of linen after blood-stained leakage,
the falls, dark clots, collapsing on the soil,
a whole mound with the hippy spread of fanned foliage
from the corms, moist and expiring
under the searchlight June sun.
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 95
Althea, it is you I see, heaped and still

where you hemorrhaged and died on your green carpet
alone, just back from your errand
at the backstreet butcher's.
None of us knew it at the time or saw you
dropped off at the curb sometime before midnight
by your bank president, rushing
to ferry his excuses home to the wife
and a daughter, nineteen, just like you.
These were matters even we young ones
only whispered of: the failure of precautions,
of care, of trust; the skills of never speaking up,
taking up too much space, being seen, being bloody,
being inconvenient. Fabrication,
a covering for those of us
made naked and ashamed.
Every June., I remember you, Althea,
the nightgown's blue elastic concertinaed
around wrists I could encircle with thumb and index finger
sitting beside you on the floor
trying for a breath,
the puddle already rusting over
underneath your knees.
We all did the best we could,
risk-shrouded, paying the woman's price.
And now we will again,
hostages to accident,
to error, to poverty,
to necessity, to fear, to guilt,
to innocence.
we begin again
to redress truth in truth,
correct its course.
Today, I bend with fury and with grief
to rip these iris out.
I open the old ground again
because life should not resemble death.
Phillips
ANDREW VOGEL
DOUBT
You know,
the way the highway’s thrum

weaves itself into our fiber,
the way winter lets us see what all’s

been tossed in the one woodlot,
the way you’re sure even in the rushing

wake of the fall that you’re not hurt,
the way the things you can’t do

spill into all the things you can,
just like,
the way we give so little consideration

to these parched December rooms,
the way crossing the bridge on foot

always feels like a story but hardly is,
the way the train rumbles underfoot

as the freight trucks thunder overhead,
the way clumsy street-corner partings

unfold with a fresh-cut flower backdrop,
same as,
the way a child’s hand invents

the strange mechanics of leverage,
the way the globed orange gasps

and spits across your thumbnail,
the way we work verse against

traffic onto paper bags over lunch,
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 97
the way the brightest thing in our

neighborhood today are the plaits of oil
uncoiling on the sludgy water
of the defunct canal out back.
Vogel
LAST PEACH
Forsaken on the kitchen
table, shamed by new apples,
fuzzed as the humblebee
that blundered its pistil,
I had supposed I was
leaving it for you until
it became obvious that
it had been left to me,
the bruised, collapsing
body beckoning flies,
its golden yolk bursting,
a nova in the afternoon,
its gush dowsing my lips,
spilling down my chin,
the rugous pit and skin
slipping from its pulp,
the nectar pooling in my
hand, souring my mouth,
popping sweat on my
brow, my cheeks, my lip.
I want you to know that
with every bite and slurp,
the whole sloppy mess
of the last peach this summer,
you are not off on some job,
you are laughing here with me,
and we are browsing again the
rucked markets of old Palermo. Vogel
AMELIA COULON
CHARLOTTE
“Where do you draw the line in the sand?”

“What?”
“There’s a point where you say, ‘this is enough, no more.’
Everyone has a threshold. What’s yours?”
Charlotte tipped her head to the side and considered her therapist.
She recognized the question had much to do with her inability to stop
allowing people to use her as a doormat. But she felt uncertain she knew
of an actually answer.
“Murder,” she threw out. “That’s a definite ‘no.’ I couldn’t be
convinced to kill someone.”
“Are you certain? What if the murder was of an abuser or a rapist?
If the justice system failed to work? What then?”
“I suppose, maybe,” she backtracked reluctantly. “Under very
specific circumstances, I might consider it to save a victim.”
She thought again for a certainty. “Abuse! I couldn’t be talked into
hurting anyone.”
“So, you couldn’t repay an abuser with a taste of their own
medicine? Again, under the supposition of failure of the system? A little
tit for tat to teach a creep a lesson?”
Charlotte sighed. “I guess, I could possibly. I really don’t know
where the line is. I think maybe I don’t have one.”
“And there we have the problem,” her therapist concluded.
“Morality isn’t a switch turned on and off for circumstance’s sake. It’s
imperative you begin to recognize and take hard stances on what you will
or will not do if you want to get to the point where you can keep people
from using you.”
“I wouldn’t whore myself out,” she stated firmly, racking her brain
for anything on which to lay claim. “That’s something I couldn’t do even
if the situation demanded it.”
“If there was no food to eat and no money to buy what you needed
to fill your children’s bellies? If your landlord offered a trade of your body
for the home you lived in?”
“Oh god,” Charlotte lamented, distressed. “I have no boundaries.”
“Charlotte, pause. Let’s focus on what we’re talking about here.
Real things, not what ifs. Could you actually murder a person? Take their
life because you wanted them dead? Is that something you’re realistically
2023, Autumn / 99
capable of doing?”
She heard what he was saying. Not emotion driven answers, but
real possibilities. “No. I might want an evil person to pay for their crimes,
but I couldn’t be the one to hand down a sentence. I get sick at the sight of
blood. I couldn’t physically do it.”
“There’s line one.”
“And I couldn’t torture or abuse someone. It would make me sick
to my stomach. I couldn’t even pay someone else to do it. Any involvement
in something so sadistic would destroy my peace of mind.”
“Go on,” he encouraged.
“I’d never steal, because I’d be too afraid to get caught. And even
if I had the perfect opportunity, I’d be thinking of who I was ultimately
stealing from. Did you know at some restaurants, when people skip out on
a bill, the management makes their server pay for the meal? Can you
imagine? These jerks think they’re stealing from a faceless corporation
and they’re really taking from the single mom with a twelve-year-old who
needs braces.”
“That sounds like a moral barometer,” he told her, his cool voice
supportive.
“I don’t like doing it, but I can lie,” she confessed. “If I feel like I
need to spare someone’s feelings. Or if I want to get out of doing
something without being made to feel guilty. Or if I did something and I
don’t want to admit to it.
“I watched a movie where everyone only knew how to tell the
truth. This one man just started to lie. And he didn’t just lie sometimes, he
told these outrageous horrible lies. The kind of fallacies professional
conmen use to fleece billionaires long term. He got everything he wanted,
but it was awful for everyone else. But telling the truth all the time was
horrible, too. There were tons of miserable people. I have no idea if it was
supposed to be a comedy or a life lesson. I try to stick to lies that won’t
come back to bite me in the butt.”
“There’s your threshold. So, speaking of lies, when people try to
use you for their own purposes, you use lies to avoid doing things which
step over your boundaries.”
“I do do that, don’t I?” Charlotte murmured, admitting it
reluctantly.
“That’s worked for you, so you keep doing it. But it’s not a
solution, it’s a compromise,” her therapist pointed out. “Don’t you think
you would benefit from simply saying ‘no’ to things you don’t wish to
do?”
“I try, but people know how to wheedle their way under my skin,”
she complained.
“No, Charlotte. You cave. Because you don’t want anyone to be
disappointed in you. But guess what? Having a set of standards means
people who don’t have the same standards will be disappointed. That’s a
good thing.”
“Is me not wanting to pick up my neighbor’s kid from band
practice a standard?” she suggested wryly.
“If it’s a frequent request, you’re not getting paid and it’s not your
responsibility? Well, you believe parents should take care of their children,
right? And it’s okay to ask for the help of friends and family when in need
or even pay someone else to help out? But, do you think it’s okay to expect
someone else to parent for them, to neglect their duties out of selfishness
or laziness?”
“No. I agree with the first things you said, but yeah, definitely not
that last part,” Charlotte replied. “But—”
“Are you erasing your line and drawing a new one because it’s
what you stand for? Or because someone else is pressuring you into it,
Charlotte?”
She looked guilty.
“You don’t need to look at me that way. You’re not answerable to
me. You answer to yourself. You don’t want people to be disappointed, but
you’re the one who feels like you’re getting the short straw. You’re doing
this to yourself.”
“How do I change it?” she asked. “How do I say ‘no?’”
“Well, you can think about this conversation every time someone
asks for a favor,” he outlined patiently. “Then, you weigh your threshold
against the request. If it doesn’t conflict with what’s being asked, next you
decide if agreeing to it will make you happy. If the answer is ‘yes,’ then
you might want to do it. But if the answer is ‘no,’ it’s okay to say ‘no.’”
“What if I can’t do that?”
“If you fail the first time, you can try again a second time. You can
try until you finally say it. Then you’ll probably have to start all over again.
Because it won’t come easily and it takes time to stick with it. But if it’s
something you recognize you deserve, you will get there.”
Charlotte became pensive.
“I heard something in a movie once, but the words are true,” her
therapist offered. “It goes something like this, ‘If you don't stand up for
something, you end up falling for everything.’”
“That’s clever. I like it.”
2023, Autumn / 101
“Enough to make it your motto?” he prompted with

encouragement.
“I’ll try.”
“Good. No how about your issues with your sister-in-law? How’s
that going?”
###
“Charlotte, hi. I’m so glad I caught you. I was wondering if you’d
pick Jack up from practice after school today?”
“Well, uh...,”
“Thanks so much. You’re a doll.”
“Actually, Stephanie—uh, I—I have—um, plans.”
Stephanie stopped her trek back toward her own house and turned
to face Charlotte. “What sort of plans?” she pressed.
“I’m—I’m taking Nathan to—ah, Fun-a-torium,” Charlotte
decided abruptly.
“Just take Jack along. He won’t mind. I’m sure the two of them
will have a blast together. See you.” Stephanie waved and began to trot
away.
“That—that doesn’t work for me, Stephanie,” Charlotte
maintained firmly, running through her new mantra in her head.
Stephanie stopped again, this time halfway up her path. “If it’s
money, don’t worry,” she said dismissively. “I’ll pay you back. It’s all
good.” This time when she turned, Charlotte began to get upset.
“No, Stephanie. It’s not—all good. I’m not picking up Jack. My
son and I—we’re going out together. By ourselves. You’ll have to find—
you’ll have to find someone else.” She had nearly said, ‘I’m sorry, but...’
and was so glad she caught herself. Though polite, it wasn’t true. She was
not sorry. She was tired of being used.
“Really, Char,” Stephanie said, as if concerned. “Where’s this all
coming from? Did Jack and Nathan get in a fight? I’m okay with it if you
just tell me. I understand. Boys will be boys.”
“Stephanie, there is no ‘all this.’ I am not picking up Jack. I have
other plans. Find another ride for him.” She was so proud that she didn’t
engage in a defensive mode about the kids though that had been her
instinct. Stephanie would have turned it into, ‘well, if the boys are getting
along so great...yada, yada.’ Charlotte might have been dumb, but she
wasn't stupid.
“Wow, Char. You’re being really aggressive right now,” Stephanie
asserted with an affronted attitude. “Did you stop seeing your therapist?
Maybe you should give him a call. It sounds like you have some issues
you need to work on.”

Charlotte gave up. She got into her car and shut the door. She left
Stephanie still talking, probably trying to convince her or reason with her.
Charlotte ignored the stubbornly manipulative next-door neighbor and
backed out of her driveway. As she stopped to put the car in drive,
Stephanie was suddenly at her passenger side window, knocking on the
glass. Charlotte gave a bright smile and waved, then gently pulled away,
so she wasn’t accused of trying to hurt the lunatic witch.
She did it. She said her first “no” and it felt—well, it felt horrible.
She was angry and confused and guilt-ridden. She worried about Jack
being left after practice, even if it wasn’t her responsibility to care for him.
She knew she had ruined neighbor-relations with Stephanie after thirteen
years of being next door to one another. She dreaded how that would pan
out. The boys liked to hang out together and she imagined it would now
be a problem, just because she didn’t cave to Stephanie’s whims. She
would have definitely been unhappy giving into the woman’s request, but
she might have found herself just as unhappy not giving into it. She already
had a boatload of things to discuss with her therapist on Tuesday, just from
that one conversation.
Charlotte kept her plans with Nathan to avoid being a liar. The
entire time at the arcade/play place, she struggled to focus on making sure
her son was having a good time. Her mind kept drifting back to the vile
exchange with Stephanie. She wanted to tuck it away in a corner of her
brain, but was uncertain how it could be done. She thought maybe she
should have asked her therapist a few more questions before she blindly
followed his core advice. Or maybe it was simply her and other people
didn’t experience anything but relief when taking these steps to freedom.
She wouldn’t be surprised to learn she was more aggressively messed-up
than the common crazy person.
When she and her son arrived back home, Charlotte was tempted
to go by Stephanie’s or even send Nathan by, just to be certain Jack made
it safely home. She realized how utterly insane her concerns were and
barely controlled the impulse. She didn’t actually relax until, through the
side window of his house, she caught sight of the boy-next-door trudging
up the stairs. She was relieved to find she hadn’t caused a problem for the
child.
Going to sleep that night, Charlotte reaffirmed to herself that she
had stood up for something so she wouldn’t be the sucker who fell for
everyone’s coercion. She told herself she didn’t need to own the feelings
other people tried to put on her. Her priority was to herself and her family
2023, Autumn / 103
and she would meet their needs before anyone else’s. Besides, if Stephanie
was a true friend, she wouldn’t hold something like today against
Charlotte. Charlotte didn’t need false people in her life.
All the positive reinforcement in the world couldn’t keep her from
dreaming about the incident. But in dreams, Stephanie became violent and
chased Charlotte down. In dreams, Jack was lost and everyone looked for
him, silently blaming her for the boy being missing. A crazed killer had
stolen Jack and they weren’t in time to save him. It was all Charlotte’s
fault.
She woke in a sweat, shivering and sick to her stomach. She
stumbled to the bathroom and threw up in the sink. Looking at her wan
face in the mirror as she rinsed her mouth, she wondered what the hell she
had gotten herself into.
###
“You’re awfully quiet today.”
Her therapist leaned forward and picked up his cup, then took a
long pull on his coffee. He set the cup back down and looked at Charlotte
speculatively. “You seem to be struggling with something. You know,
that’s what I’m here for, to talk to when you’re struggling.” He paused
significantly. “Even if that something you’re struggling with is me.”
“You told me to stand up for myself,” she blurted out.
“Well, let’s clear something up first. I never tell you to do
anything, Charlotte. I suggest, and I may ask you to think about doing
things, but telling isn’t my job. So, whatever happened, it was a choice that
was made, hopefully after it had some consideration. You need to make
sure responsibility is laying with the correct person.”
“You suggested I stand up for myself and it was horrible,” she
threw out, unwilling to relinquish her blame.
“Alright. Why don’t you tell me what happened.”
“I just did.”
“Come on now, Charlotte. You know how this works. No risk, no
reward. Do you want to get all those icky feelings out of you? If you just
spill them all over the carpet, we’ll sort through them. We’ll shred them
and dispose of them. You don’t have to bring any of it home with you.”
She stubbornly held her tongue. For nearly a minute. He was
always extremely patient no matter the situation.
“I told my neighbor I wouldn’t pick up her son. She had a fit. She
won’t speak to me and she won’t let the kids play together. Nathan doesn’t
deserve this.”
“You’re right,” he agreed. “Your son doesn’t deserve to be dragged
into this. But you weren’t the one who made that choice. And you didn’t
force anyone to choose it either.” He gave her a second to process that and
then asked, “How did telling her make you feel?”
“Guilty, worried, frustrated. I have to live next door to this
woman.”
“That’s how you felt about the situation. That’s completely
normal. It’s not going to be easy the first time you try it. But how did you
feel actually telling her ‘no’?” her therapist prompted.
“Wretched, I—” Charlotte stopped and reacted to the honesty
barometer he wore in his eyes. “I felt empowered, finally. I’m not her little
bitch. She tries to walk all over me and manipulate me even when she
knows I don't want to do things. She’s a selfish troll of a woman who
needed to be set down a peg.”
“Why did you feel the guilt and such afterward?”
“I guess I felt guilty because she made it out to be as if I was doing
something selfish. I also felt sort of worried about Jack not being taken
care of. And I was frustrated because I know she’ll make my neighborhood
living difficult. Case in point, the situation with our children.”
“Okay. You just said she’s a selfish troll. Why would you care
about the opinion of such a person when their own motives are so
obviously self-serving?”
“I don’t know,” Charlotte muttered. “She doesn’t deserve my help.
I don’t want to do it. I shouldn’t feel anything but justified.”
“And the boy. It’s nice you care about him. Do you worry about
everyone’s children this way?”
“No.”
“Is it because you don’t trust her to parent?” he asked.
“Of course I don’t. She’s all about herself.”
“Is it a safety issue? Did the child get home alright?”
“Yes,” she admitted.
“Good. You don’t feel any reason to contact Social Services, do
you?”
“I know what you’re getting at,” she grouched. “He’s not my
responsibility.”
“I believe you’ve allowed yourself to be manipulated into making
him your responsibility. That’s something you’re going to have to work on
letting go.”
“How do I do that?” Charlotte nearly wailed. “He’s my son’s age.
I feel for him.”
“Charlotte, take a breath,” her therapist counseled. “Your feelings
2023, Autumn / 105
are your responsibility. You are the one in charge of managing them. So,
if this boy’s well-being makes you feel overwhelmed, what do you think
you should do?”
“Recognize he’s not mine to worry about. Acknowledge he has
parents who can care for him. Accept I don’t need to manage his safety.”
“Why do I feel as if you read that off a brochure in my sitting
room?” he asked her wryly.
“I can’t control my emotions,” she objected on a bit of a wail.
“They’re emotions.”
“Yes, you can,” he stated firmly. “Children don’t have control of
their emotions. Adulthood and maturity is about learning that control. That
isn’t to say you shouldn’t feel your emotions or express them at appropriate
times in a healthy way. For example, the safety of this room which allows
you to emote in whatever fashion necessary to communicate your true
anxieties and insecurities. But relinquishing responsibility for your
feelings is reverting to childlike behavior. Now, don’t you want to keep
control?”
“I don't know.”
“Ah,” he said. “There's some honesty. Why do you think you
might not want to?”
“Because I don’t want to be a person who only cares about my
insular world. I want to be someone who thinks about other people’s
needs.”
“That’s very commendable, Charlotte. So, is this child really in
need? Won’t his parents care for him? They aren’t neglectful or abusive
are they? Because that’s a problem you’d report to the state authorities, not
one you’d try to fix on your own.”
“I’ve never seen mistreatment,” she admitted. “He seems well-
adjusted enough. Other than his mom being lazy and pushy.”
“So, you’re adopting a child to hero who doesn’t need you to
champion him.”
“Maybe,” she hedged.
“Let’s talk about your frustration. Why such a high level?” he
questioned.
“I have to live in this neighborhood with all these tight-knit moms
and Stephanie is just going to gossip and say hateful things about me. I’m
going to have everyone judging me for standing up to her.”
“Wow. That’s a lot.” He paused and tilted his head, considering
her. “Do you like these moms?”
“Most of them, yes.”
“So, I take it they aren’t like Stephanie?”

“No, they’re mostly nice.”
He pressed his lips into a tight line and then said, “Charlotte, what
do you imagine these women think of Stephanie? Really?”
She found herself caught off-guard. “I guess—they wouldn’t like
the way she tries to manipulate people.”
“So, whose side do you think they’d favor in a rumor Stephanie
spread about you?”
“I guess—mine,” Charlotte replied, recognition dawning.
“So, how do you feel about standing up to Stephanie in the future
if she tries to talk you into something?”
Charlotte snorted, boasting, “She better hope she doesn’t. I’ll give
her a piece of my mind. I’ve been saving up my comments for years now.”
“Baby steps are fine, too, Charlotte,” he assured her with a smile.
He tipped his head to the side and asked, “Now, tell me, did you work out
the situation with your husband throwing his dirty socks on the floor?”
WILLIAM GREENWAY
THE MEMORIES OF MIRRORS
How could mine have forgotten that day,

After the navy, when i looked at myself
In my graduate student tenement apartment
On my way to my first class and a first date,
How my hair, then jet, coal, or something else
Black, ringleted down
To my shoulders, matching my errol flynn
Goatee, sky-blue contacts, and….
Where was i going with this?
Oh, i thought, this is the best i will ever look,
And always, (i think i even said
Out loud) though the fake
Gold framed mirror, sharp of eye
But deaf as the dead
Had already begun
The long course of erasure.
Greenway
2023, Autumn / 107
AEOLUS
The wind never stops, comes straight here

from Nome, not a tree in the way,
just cornfields, though it once
was called Penn’s Woods.
It will blow all year, that is
until August, when not a leaf
will stir to cool the sweat.
In Georgia as a boy
the only wind I saw
blew in the corners of old maps,
the face of Aeolus, curly clouds for hair
puffing his cheeks and huffing
galleons (I thought) to better places,
even into the coils of sea serpents
or whirlpools, then bringing rain
to rinse away the red dirt
and remind me of the sea
somewhere far off, its salt
like poison to the corn.
Greenway
EMILY M GREEN
THE HOUSEWIFE WAITS
Across the hall, your daughter offers

her body to sleep. Her Lego house
waits at the bottom of the stairs.
Without doors or windows,

the house resembles a bomb shelter.
No one can exit. Your screen door hangs
(cont)
off its hinges, broken by your husband

just last week, as he exploded from your life.
You imagined his blonde bombshell sparking
in the car. He liked to make love to REM,

“Everybody Hurts.” You turned the music down
afraid it would wake your daughter, sweating
between her blue sheets. This afternoon,

as you weeded, she sang, Rabbits love
the garden. Bunnies had come during the night,
left with their bellies full. You wondered why

all songs celebrate loss. You’d planted mostly squash
and cucumbers, which your husband wouldn’t go near.
The rabbits worked noiselessly to take them away.

Your husband left loud as a raccoon tipping
a garbage can. You remember his greedy paws
cupping your ass, your breast. Through the noise,

your daughter slept. She wants to give him
the house, the roof stacked with several layers,
yellow and red blocks built up to a point. You wait

for the gentle cacophony of her snore
to build the walls of sleep. In your bed, you ache,
as one hung upside down. All that blood rushing

pulls hard from the feet. Somewhere,
rabbits gorge on summer’s end.
Somewhere, your husband—
Somewhere in the neighborhood,

a woman yells. The current of her voice
lilts almost like song.
Green
2023, Autumn / 109
HAPPY IS THE ONE WHO
is surprised in the morning by coffee and surprises the morning with

calm, slow wakening
lifts a log to find insects and watches their small progresses
has children live into adulthood and long after their own death
respects their child’s choices and affirms their progress
does not face employment descrimination
does work that pays for rent, food, health care, child care, clothing, and
occasional heat and air
quits their day job
works for love (take that how you will)
is prohibited by no walls
runs miles on strong legs with strong joints
keeps their own skin
is never raped or murdered, beaten or tortured
consistently gets carried away from injustice
gets on meds and turns around
flies when they want, sails when they want, paints the ceiling when necessary
carries a rainbow across their chest and fears not any sun
eats only when necessary
carries new life, the life before life, the child before the curtain comes up
raises and lowers curtains, knows when the lights will dim, fade, come back up
lives below the clouds and above the water
does not mistake another tube for the toothpaste
has words and ink
peels the orange cleanly
leaves prison with a job
has shelter from the sun
trusts their leader
relives their days in satellite beams
loves the way their brain works
eats candy as they wish
creates ends to hassled time
ends time with barely a frown
(cont)
gives time to those harassed by others’ businesses

gripes only to the tune of laughter
tunes their laughter to happy (hapless) intervals
makes a burger just to eat it
contributes to the cause without guile
drives the force as a comet to a timid child
gardens for food that fills their tables
wastes only what they can afford
sleeps when their body tires
retires when their body sleeps
Green
MICHAEL LLOYD GRAY

A SMALL WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY
Dace called late that night to say he and the crew were staying a
few extra days in Chi-town. But Alice was coming back by train the next
day. She’d quit Lee and it was too awkward to just ride it out. It was a
mess, really. Dace wanted to know if Dalton would go get her off the train
when it reached Kalamazoo. Dalton was on the road before dawn and
standing on the AMTRAK platform in Kalamazoo just as her train came
down the track out of the fog.
People slowly poured off the train. She was one of the last and
stood uncertain a moment, on the steps of the car, suitcase in hand. She
scanned the crowd and saw him and smiled. He waved and went to her.
He was there because he had his hopes up.
A porter offered a hand and helped her down the stairs. A breeze
came up suddenly and whipped her blond hair across her face. Dalton
thought she looked tired, but she managed another smile. He took her
suitcase and neither said anything as they walked to the truck parked on
Rose Street. He opened her door for her, and she smiled at the courtesy.
Scoring points already, he figured. But he knew not to ask about Lee. She
would bring it up—or not at all—when she was ready.
2023, Autumn / 111
He could imagine Lee was probably fit to be tied. Dace would

have to manage him. He was the only one who could. Lee might be trouble
when he got back. That was a possibility Dalton had to keep track of. Lee
was a self-medicated child who didn’t like his toys taken away.
The morning was still fresh and cool, and they left the windows
down. She let an arm dangle out her window. The breeze stirred her hair.
“How was the train?” he said.
“Packed.”
“But on time.”
“There’s that.”
“And how are you?”
“Tired,” she said, shrugging. “I didn’t sleep last night.”
“Did you nap on the train?”
“I tried.”
“Maybe you can on the way up.”
“Maybe.” She pivoted toward him. “Thanks for coming to get
me.”
“Did you think I wouldn’t?”
“I didn’t know. You don’t know me.”
He thought about it a moment.
“Well, we have a few days to get acquainted.”
She squeezed his elbow.
“Then what?”
“You can’t stay at the trailer when they come back.”
“I know,” she said.
“You can’t be around Lee anymore,” he said, more plea than fact,
his voice rising.
“I know,” she said, “Believe me, I know that.”
“Do you?”
“I’m here now, aren’t I?”
He nodded.
“Well, it was the right thing to do.”
“I don’t need to be convinced, Dalton.”
He shook his head, realizing he’d pushed too hard.
“No, of course not. That’s not what I meant.”
“Then, what did you mean?”
“The trailer’s no place for us,” he said. “Too many people, too
much weed.”
He almost said, too much Lee.
“But it’s your trailer,” she said. “Your land.”
He glanced at her and nodded.

“And Dace has been a good tenant.”
“He’s a weed dealer.”
“I’m not a cop,” Dalton said. “Besides, his rent is income.”
“Makes you a landlord.”
“I suppose.”
“How do you like that?”
“I’m not lord of anything,” he said, perhaps a bit too bluntly. He
regretted his tone. “Sorry—I’ve known a few landlords.”
After a few miles, she said, “So, do you have money, Dalton?”
He shrugged and grinned. Dalton didn’t think of her as nosy or
rude, but she sometimes seemed to lack a filter for what was in her head
and what she let out of it. He glanced at her. He couldn’t decide what sort
of look was on her face.
“Well, I’ve got a few bucks in my pocket for gas. How about
that?”
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”
“Yeah? So, what do you mean?”
“I mean, do you have serious money?”
He wondered what she considered serious money to be. He wasn’t
sure what he thought it would be, either.
“Some. Enough for a while.”
“From those oil rigs.”
“That’s right.”
“So, define a while?” she said.
He shrugged again and kept his eyes on the road.
“Enough—for now.”
“And how long does now last?”
“For a little while longer, I reckon.”
He grinned and felt clever.
“Well, that’s clear as mud,” she said, looking in her side mirror
for a moment, to check her face. “So, are you going back to those oil rigs?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can afford not to.”
“How mysterious.”
“Really?”
“It’s mysterious enough,” she said. “Is that the only reason?”
“No real mystery. It’s a hard life out there, isolated in the Gulf.”
“But it pays good?” she said.
2023, Autumn / 113
“Yeah, it does. But it’s still hard. I’ve just had enough of it.”
“And where was it again you were at on those rigs?”
“Louisiana. Way out off the coast from New Orleans. Nothing but
blue water everywhere. But like I said, I’ve had enough of it.”
“I’ve had enough of a lot of things,” she said abruptly, but Dalton
understood that she was just thinking out loud.
Alice managed to nap for an hour or so, her head tucked against
her shoulder and her arms across her chest. They were north of Grand
Rapids, heading on toward Big Rapids. He glanced at her again. Her face
was peaceful, angelic.
He was thinking maybe he had never really seen her before until
now. Had never truly seen how she looked stripped of the weed and trailer
drama. He wondered who she really was. She was right—he didn’t yet
know her. But she was pretty. And kind of a mystery. He liked mystery.
He had a feeling about her. He’d gotten it into his head that that was
enough.
She woke with a start and looked out the window and then at him,
raising up and wiping her eyes.
“How long was I out?”
“Just an hour.”
“Where are we?” she said, scooping up her hair with both hands
and letting it fall on her shoulders.
“We’ll be at Big Rapids soon.”
“I’ve never been there,” she said.
“You didn’t miss anything.”
“I heard you went to school there.”
“Yeah? How’d you know that?”
“Dace told me.”
“Dace likes to talk. It was just a year, at Ferris.”
“Just a year? What happened?”
He briefly considered making up a story but figured honesty was
best. He’d never been any good at concocting cover stories. They always
fell apart too easily, too quickly.
“I flunked out. End of story.”
“Why?”
“Too many parties, I guess. I didn’t crack the books.”
He glanced at her and she nodded and looked out her window at
thick forest.
“It all looks the same. It goes on forever.”
“Yeah, but we’re making good time,” he said. “It’s not a bad trip
at all.”
“I might nap on you again.” She yawned and stretched her arms,
arching her back. Like a cat waking up, he thought.
“Plenty of time left for a nap,” he said. “Have you eaten?”
“I had an apple and some juice at Union Station. I’m not really
hungry.” After a moment she said, “Do you want to stop?”
He shook his head.
“I’m okay if you are.”
“I hate trips,” she said. “I always want to just get there.”
“Yeah, but the journey’s part of the fun.”
“If you say so.”
Dalton decided to keep her talking while she still seemed willing.
“So, what was Chicago like, Alice?”
“Loud.”
“That’s it—just loud? I mean—it was Chicago. The Windy City
and all that.”
She shrugged.
“It was okay. A little overwhelming.”
“So, did the Cubs win?”
She looked at him, unsure.
“I don’t remember. Lee ate too many hot dogs and puked.”
“Good old Lee,” Dalton said.
“Yes. Good old Lee, for sure.”
After a few more miles, he impulsively said, “Do you get along
with Dace?”
She pulled a strand of hair away from her mouth and looked at
him.
“He’s sort of like a big brother, I guess. I knew him in high
school.”
“You knew Lee in high school, too—right?”
She hesitated.
“Not until after.”
He thought it a little odd she claimed she didn’t know Lee until
after school. It was a small school. He figured perhaps she implied she
didn’t know him other than as Dace’s tag along kid brother while they
were in school. Then he told himself he was putting too much thought into
that. It didn’t seem like relevant information.
She pulled her legs up, knees under her chin, and stared ahead. He
knew the opening to probe about Lee had closed. He would wait and listen
2023, Autumn / 115
for another. It would surely come. He believed she would need to

unburden herself with Lee. It was a process. Dribs and drabs, he expected.
Before there was any chance for him, and maybe there wasn’t, she’d have
to flush Lee away. But he had a couple days to change that. To show he
was nothing like Lee. Coming to get her, that was huge, he figured. She’d
take note of that. That was a door opening just a crack. Now it was up to
him to push it open wide, like a white knight galloping up to the rescue.
It was also a waiting game. It required patience. But a couple days
wasn’t a long time. A small window of opportunity. And Dace had told
him that she tended to favor the bad boy types, the outliers, the boys with
sharp elbows and rough edges.
Like Lee.
Good old asshole Lee.
She’d had enough of Lee, so she’d said. Lee was old news. Maybe
she’d finally got her fill of the retard. That was surely why she bailed, why
she skedaddled for home. To Dalton, that was maybe change. That spoke
to him and gave him—hope. It was maybe Alice moving in another
direction, a better direction.
But some “edge” wouldn’t hurt, Dace had said: “Seriously,
Dalton, find some edge—edge always catches her eye.”
Dalton didn’t know if he had edge. Edge was one of the
mysterious unknowns. He wasn’t sure what it was, how to get it—how to
use it. It was not something he could put into words. He wondered if edge
was one of those deals where either you had it or you didn’t, but you
couldn’t just go find it somewhere. Nobody could tell you how to tap into
edge. He knew there was maybe a fine line between edge and full-blown
asshole. He was pretty sure he was on this side of the line and Lee had
long ago shattered the barrier.
They were just north of Mancelona now, not far from the trailer,
and Alice abruptly said maybe she should use the trailer phone and call
Chicago. To sort of check in. Dalton let that sink in and it didn’t go down
well.
“To call Lee?” he finally said, feeling like he’d been sucker
punched in the gut, everything sinking inside him.
“I can call Dace,” she said.
“Why call at all?” he said. “What’s the ever-loving point of it?”
“It’s not about a point, Dalton. It’s just checking in with people.”
“But why?”
“Dace will tell me how the crew’s doing.”
She looked away, out the window at passing, endless trees.
He glanced at her several times. He felt like he’d suddenly

stumbled into quicksand and was slowly sinking with nothing to grab onto
to pull himself out. Nobody tossing him a line.
“And what good would that do?” he said, hearing the exasperation
in his voice.
“I’d just be checking in, you see.”
“But why?”
“To get an update.”
“Is that wise?” Dalton said.
“Well, it’s just a phone call,” she said.
“Is it?”
“Are you okay, Dalton?” Her voice dripped with skepticism.
“Just a phone call,” Dalton said. “Is that really all it is?”
She turned back toward her window.
“I don’t know,” she said. “You tell me what it is.”
“Don’t you know?”
“It’s just a phone call for fuck’s sake, Dalton. A fucking update.”
“Yeah? Just who do you want an update on, Alice?”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” she said after a lengthy
moment, her arms crossed across her chest. “Just drop it—okay?”
“I see,” he said, not seeing at all, resignation in his voice. “Just
like that?”
“Like what, Dalton?”
“Never mind,” he said after a long moment. His gut was queasy.
He felt quite undone. The quicksand pulled him deeper. He gripped the
steering wheel and avoided glancing at her.
When they reached the trailer, he pulled up the lane and under a
tree. He switched off the engine and turned toward her, but Alice got out
quickly and shoved her door closed with both hands. It banged hard. She
leaned against it, her head peeking inside the cab at him, a curious look on
her face.
“What are you doing, Dalton?”
He was glancing at himself in the rearview mirror, remembering
Dace’s advice, and wondering whether shaving less often would give him
some edge.
2023, Autumn / 117
DANIELLE WOLFFE
VISITING PRIVILEGE
I.
Of course, there are more brown skinned people than white skinned
people
standing here
waiting to be let in
but glancing
at everyone
touching their empty pockets
The lolling-headed kid with the crutches

The mother rock hopping her baby
The toddler who fusses with her newly loosed hair
you notice more white bodies

encircled by brown
than you had expected
And it is clear that you are no longer immune

to captivity,
that privilege
doesn’t always extend this far
Off road
That once you have driven past the named streets
And mailboxes,
the hulls of paper mills

and bread factories
When your GPS bottoms out

and your tires pucker in dirt, and you roll in
alongside those empty cornfields

(cont)
under that greasy, birdless sky;

where the stench of cow shit
seeps through rolled windows.

And you just keep driving
Because there is no other way until
you finally reach it,
that invisible place that now feeds the town,

Your knees under the steering wheel are bent in prayer
For that sweet moment
when you will be allowed to go home.
II.
Of course, there are more visitors here descended

from slaves, who inherited, along with the bone pain
of standing beside Constantine wire
for generations, along with the
dull indignation, the revulsion
from history—recipes for courage.
In this dank place visitors wear the colors of butterflies

And stand in front of gray buildings
Beside parched yellow grass.
During those elongated moments
Before they step through that cold door
With lifted chests, they practice,
building a high frequency
Heart-bound
Cheeriness. They touch each other’s shoulders, share mundane
Daily stories, pinch the children’s cheeks, summon laughter.
Confide.
Normalizing it as much as it can be. Sharing
reassurance,
So that once she finally sits down
at that metal table—
They can be of use.
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 119
III.
The saddest was the old woman in Pennsylvania
Who had washed and ironed her best clothes,
set her hair, saved up her money for the six-hour drive.
Who sat in the heated glass booth outside
with her hands folded in her lap, crying,
after the ion scan machine that they ran over her palm picked up
false traces of drugs.
She kept reciting the names of her medications
Coumadin, Zocor, Prilosec
As if she had done something wrong.
IV.
The things that are now contraband
that you must leave
In the glove compartment, the
lockers
Your cell phone, your earrings, your

keys,
your barrettes,
your quarters,
your underwire,
your belt
your pen
everything
except your identification
V.
Hollering the number
that has replaced the name of a daughter,
aunt, cousin,
mother, grandmother
through plate glass,
placing motionless jaws
into space aged contraptions, long streams of sallow light,
scanning around heads
creeping like radiation,
(cont)
And sometimes you are made to sit down on chairs

take off socks, holding up the bottoms of bare feet, pulling back ears,
opening mouths, enduring the Draconian sneers
or the dry finger pat down,
This should be an antiquated humiliation by now,
Visitors—practically naked,
are measured, scrutinized, recorded, rubbed.
Every time that it happens a piece
is notched off,
But the way each person endures
scratching scars
that go back generations
Is a testament
only to love.
VI.
It is like visiting the dead, the mother said
you grieve like they are gone
All those unspoken words
Continue to fester
It is not a place that you can explain.
VII.
Everyone who lives in this country might visit
a prison, at least once.
If you are lucky enough to never have been
erased,
or watched while someone you love disappeared,
someone who is shown they no longer
have the right to a home,

you, might try, to be, there
just to witness
Because they exist,

everywhere that we live
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 121
And it is impossible to stand at a prison

without having your body
recoil, without having some shadowy
visceral memory return
something faint and unnatural
like the scent of burning ivory

the aftertaste of metal
A dampness of bone
Something hardwired in our DNA
That knows, but can’t articulate,
This place it should not be.

Wolffe
ALEXANDER PAYNE MORGAN

BREAD
The smell was unworldly wonderful.

A smell unknown before,
at least to me,
only a few weeks wed.
My new wife, Ann, a farmer’s granddaughter,

I should have known,
could cook, but
believe me
it was as out of my experience as alchemy.

My grandmother hated to cook,
savored her memories of plantation life,
dark-skinned servants for all her labor.
(cont)
So, my mother’s mother did not deign

to pass any culinary art
to her daughter,
whose girl-in-the-big-city youth fed itself
on cafes and diners and automats and

(when necessary) beans forked right out of the jagged-cut-lid can.
We opened at lot of cans when I was a kid. Have you ever eaten
canned asparagus? But that’s another story.
Ann could bake bread,

could summon like a barefoot sorcerous
rich earth essences
sanctified over 80 centuries.
She consecrated
from her bread kneading board
our new home.
I had even more to learn.

Morgan
A VETERAN’S DAUGHTER WALKS ALONE AT NIGHT
Julie thinks nothing of walking alone

through dark blocks for hours. I'm glad she is spoiled
not to know horrors. I want her safe,
innocent of what might be there.
She should not learn my fear, my shivering
crouch, post traumatic in any darkness.
I’ve known what she cannot imagine, glee

at cutting a stray dog up alive or
once with grenades, a water buffalo.
Could it really once have been a child?
What the dark covers and uncovers, I’m
glad she cannot imagine me out there.
Morgan
2023, Autumn / 123
VOYAGE
That day, the weather came out calm.

Our single day of sun. After
three weeks of storm,
our sunny day
but still October raw.
Luscious bare
I worried
for your shoulders. The photographer,
oblivious fiddler,
kept us on that lawn so long.
Back inside, the dancing, joyous klezmer clarinet,

the jokey chiding…
all to distract us from our leap, defying
the terror
of an oath of long-term love,
and the cake’s melting icing

that fed your sister’s disapproval
we kissed off each other’s faces.
What sweet imperfection

could stop our fall into the sea?
Morgan
COMING HOME
After “I Come Home Wanting to Touch Everyone” by Stephen Dunn
Most days
my family’s dug in with
TV and headsets and homework. The goldfish
is busy patrolling his perimeter.
I move like him:
scout the periphery,
shuffle papers, probe the Internet,
scrounge for leftovers. But tonight
(cont)
we all who are not fish

crawl out of our bunkers.
Love, a prisoner of circumstance,
has been set free.
My wife’s smile offers me an unexpected grace.

My hands reach for her flanks, and suddenly
we cling as if I’d come again from war, the sand
still settling off my uniform.
The children break us up
shouting “Shabbat Shalom” and “Group Hug”
jostling and giggling.
Weary of the week

our separate skirmishes suspended,
we face each other across the dinner table,
grinning despite what’s past,
for no reason laughing.
Morgan
SHARI LANE
LEGACY
The room was windowless, with a single low-wattage bulb in the

exact center of the ceiling. Oscar felt bad that the two animals only saw
the light of day when they were trotted out for a sporting event or a photo.
But his was not to question why. He left that thought unfinished—he’d
never bought into the do or die thing. To be clear, no one had ever asked
him to sacrifice so much as a toe for his job, much less his life. But he was
pretty sure he’d reject the demand, if it ever came his way.
Every morning, Oscar brought the wildcats a dish of raw meat, a
bowl of kibble for large cats, and a bucket of water. Then he went about
his other tasks around the university grounds. In the evening, he removed
the dirty dishes from the cage, washed them and set them carefully upside
down to drip dry, and filled the bucket with fresh water.
There was a tray that sat on two rails under the cage, to catch the
urine and feces. Cleaning this tray was another end of day task. Just before
2023, Autumn / 125
leaving, Oscar slid the tray out, hosed off the slurry, and pushed the tray
back into its slot.
In the morning, he started in again, performing the same tasks, in
the same order.
As he moved about the room, Oscar talked to the animals. He had
a soft, melodic voice, and they responded, rubbing now one speckled flank
against the bars of the cage, now the other, turning one hundred eighty
degrees at the corner, keeping at least one eye on him. They didn’t exactly
purr, but then, they weren’t exactly housecats. The message came through.
It might be because he was all they had, but they made it clear they
appreciated his attention.
Every Sunday, he opened the small hatch in the back of the cage,
the one he used to get fresh food and water to the cats, pulled out as much
of the dirty straw as he could reach with a tool he had constructed for the
purpose—a sort of giant salad tongs—and shoved fresh straw through the
opening. Then he closed the hatch, with a gentle clunk of finality that
signaled the end of his workweek.
#
The university’s Vice provost had purchased the cats, on a whim,
twenty-seven years ago. Back when such things were legal. The school
had adopted Wildcats as its mascot in 1910, but in the succeeding decades
the students had shown no real enthusiasm for the icon. The Vice provost,
a man of little imagination and even less compassion, thought he could
make his mark on the institution by being the first to provide a live
rendition of the mascot.
There was a flea market of sorts, and the Vice provost had stopped
to find a gift for his niece, whom he loathed. Threading his way through
the stalls, he came upon a man in a shabby pinstriped suit selling animals.
A handmade sign hanging from a corner of one of the cages said Frankie
and Millie. Frankie and Millie were a matched set, he was told, and
couldn’t be sold separately.
“For you?” the man in the shabby suit said. “I bring the price down
to twenty-five bucks. Special, today only.”
Frankie was obviously older, an adult. The animal-seller told the
Vice provost Frankie was about three years old. Millie was a kitten, though
already she was twice the size of a full-grown cat. Both were missing tufts
of fur, and their sunken eyes and the putrid stench from their cage made it
obvious they were malnourished and possibly ill. No matter, the Vice
provost thought. He didn’t need them to survive long, just long enough to
bring accolades, and possibly a promotion.
He bought the two animals, shoved their wretched, filthy cage into
the back of his station wagon, and drove them to the campus Maintenance
Building. After he arrived, he got Oscar to help unload the cage and move
it to the basement.
“New assignment,” he said to Oscar, after the cage was installed
in its new home and Oscar had followed him back upstairs and out of the
building. He sniffed slightly at the musky smell still wafting from his
station wagon. “Make sure those animals get food and water every day.”
Oscar, a young man then, newly married, pointed out he only
worked Monday through Friday, and wanted to know who would feed the
wildcats on Saturdays and Sundays, but by that time the Vice provost had
lost interest in the conversation.
#
Oscar’s young bride was far from pleased that he would now be
making the trek to the school seven days a week. After about a year of
gentle nagging that turned to outright grumbling, Oscar dropped the paper
he was reading at the breakfast table, extended his hand, and said, “Luisa,
come with me today.”
They arrived on campus just as the bustle of students heading into
their first round of classes was subsiding. Oscar took Luisa to the
basement, and she watched in silence as he performed the daily rituals. He
left the room briefly to refill the water bucket, and when he came back,
Luisa was kneeling in front of the cage, apparently oblivious to the cold
cement floor. She reached her fingers up to, but not through, the bars of
the cage, curling them over her palm the way she had been taught to
approach a dog. Frankie sniffed at Luisa’s hand, and backed away. Millie
sidled up, then pressed herself so firmly against the bars that her fur,
simultaneously soft and rough, actually brushed against Luisa’s knuckles.
Luisa sighed, and Millie turned her head at the sound, and a look
passed between them.
#
Once Oscar tried to arrange a substitute, so he and Luisa could get
away to celebrate their tenth anniversary. The substitute backed out, but
Luisa said it was okay, maybe next year. They took a bottle of wine and
an old blanket to the room where Frankie and Millie sat in their cage,
staring curiously at the humans. When the campus was truly quiet, Oscar
and Luisa made love on the blanket. Afterward, the wildcats made a sound
that might have been panting or might have been a feline imitation of the
sounds humans make in coitus.
#
2023, Autumn / 127
Wildcats can live to be fifty years old, in captivity. When Millie

was about twenty-seven, and Frankie was about thirty, a tiny
administrative assistant with wizened skin like a golden raisin noticed the
line-item in the college budget: Wildcat Maintenance $50/month. She
studied the records, and tracked down the original authorization, but it
turned out the Vice provost had never been promoted or recognized in any
way for his decision to bring live mascots to the college, so it was hard to
find any trace of him in the archives. Eventually, she found a note about
his early retirement, and a subsequent failed attempt at a bequest to the
school. The raisin-skinned woman discovered the former Vice provost had
died a few years ago, possibly in prison due to embezzlement, possibly of
a broken heart on a poverty-stricken island in Greece. It wasn’t clear.
An animal welfare society got wind of the animals’ situation, and
rescued Frankie and Millie, and took them to a wildlife preserve several
states away to live out the rest of their lives in peace.
Just before dawn, Oscar had a dream. It was dark, and he could
feel the familiar bars of the cage, but there were strange and foreign sounds
and vibrations, and the air felt close and stifling. Then the sounds and
vibrations stopped, and sunlight streamed across his nose, his ears, his
neck, his flank, his tail, warming his fur and the fur of the wildcat who
cowered nearby. And then with a mighty clanging the bars of the cage
simply disappeared. He took a tentative step forward, and then another,
and then another. Odors assailed his sensitive nose, odors he hadn’t
smelled in such a long time: sharp pine sap, warm earth, wet grass,
decaying leaves. Insect carcasses. Rotting wild plums.
Oscar told no one about the dream.
Not even Luisa.
PETER DAVID GOODWIN

THE BROKEN PLATE
I could have used a better glue, I guess

something thin and transparent and unobtrusive
not that thick black epoxy, so obtrusive
but when I repair something with that black
epoxy it stays repaired and useful, if ugly.
(cont)
She clucks her tongue whenever that plate

is placed on the table, mutters something
about chemicals leaching into the food
but mostly that repaired plate with its jagged
black lines crisscrossing offends her sense
of order, aesthetics, and prosperity.
Just chuck it! she exclaims, acting

as if she was born with a silver spoon
in her mouth, acting as if there is no
value in frugality, acting as if we can
continue to fritter away our resources,
acting as if there is no point holding
on to our past, our family heirlooms.
That repaired plate is my favorite plate.

It is unique
It is not bland
It has character
It has history written all over it.
The hours we spent wandering through
a showroom, comparing styles and prices,
sorting through our tastes and preferences,
deciding on a French theme and now
that plate has the patina of old Paris,
the Paris of cafes, leisurely discussions
on sunny afternoons, now
cracked and repaired like those old
buildings on a Left Bank alley.
Chuck it? Did my parents chuck a dish

that was chipped or cracked? Or did they
make whole what was damaged, and if the parts
wouldn’t stay glued together, use a drill
and hand fabricated staples to join the parts
together, repairing their crockery as they repaired
their lives; preparing their children while repairing
socks and souls, restoring their communities
when dislocated or damaged.
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 129
Even if there is not a lot I can do to repair

this world, which seems to be hurtling
towards one or many disasters, with only
a few Cassandras screaming into the rushing
wind, and if I can only imperfectly repair
my own life, I can at least repair a plate.
Goodwin
BIRD WATCHER
Small and precise, like the birds she loves

to watch, she is bemused and frustrated
with the infirmities of old age
as she struggles to stand by her walker
as she tentatively sits on her chair, lowering
herself onto her “squishy cushion,” as she calls it
smiling, while shaking her head.
She looks with disdain at the pills
she needs to take, “I live on these” she complains
though she does eat three small meals a day
often capped with ice cream, something she used
to refuse, proud of her slender figure.
She picks at the smallest pill, “What good
can that do me?” she asks sitting it on the tip
of her tongue swallowing it with water.
She leaves the largest pill to last
“I hate this one,” as it too gets swallowed
and she pushes the pill box away
with a decisive push, all the time keeping
a sharp eye on the bird feeders
joy filling her frail frame
when she sees a favored visitor
though if her hearing aid is working well
she will hear them before she sees them
and even if sometimes her mind wanders
her bird eyes and bird ears remain sharp.
Goodwin
SHANNON MARZELLA
GENETIC COUNSELING
Courage is not afraid to weep

And she is not afraid to pray, even when
She is not sure who she is
Praying to.
-“Courage” by Ruth Ghendler
The adoption papers were likely typed

with the clacking buttons of a typewriter,
invisibly edged with the fingerprints of a tired social worker
prone to giving too much to mothers
and the babies they didn’t keep.
The sentences are cut and the punctuation slashed

just the facts—
Great-Grandmother, maternal, 49, died, ovarian cancer

Aunt, paternal, sixties, died, colon cancer
Uncle, paternal, sixties, died, intestinal, pancreatic cancer
These papers hid in a folder for 34 years

before I had the courage to meet them, truly,
to hold them to the light and digest their truth
(in a body that I thought belonged to me, but

actually belongs to these papers)
and then share them with a doctor who said test
so I did, and now I wait for the paper guillotine,

and I pray to trees (they have roots)
and hold the warm hand of a man who tries,
but couldn’t ever know
what it’s like to have a body with
a history reduced
to ink on paper.
Marzella
2023, Autumn / 131
THE ONLY TIME WE MET
Mother, you first held me in the hushed tones of a morning

with rain in a room that never slept: lights blinking in tandem
with alarms beeping reminding you that my heart was beating, so was yours.
Maybe your hospital gown was the color of crushed bluebird shells
frayed a bit or torn at the edges, like you—I think your eyes (the papers say
they’re
blue like mine) were edged with regret or something bigger than sadness and,
if I could have, I’d have wished you would turn into a bear
when they took me from you, stood up on sleek brown haunches and opened
your wet jaws to bite every last hand that touched me. Or
turned into a turtle, swam out the window and floated on the flooding rain with me
riding on your ridged back. But, more likely, you were unable to bear it,
you turned into a mouse that curled into its tail as gloved hands
stamped with the word forever grabbed the life you made.
Marzella
GILLIAN HAINES
WHAT MOMS DO
All my life, whenever I’d glanced in mirrors, I’d searched for

flaws—a habit I objected to but couldn’t quit. But I went cold turkey for
my daughter, Delia. At seven months, she thought she looked fantastic and
I wanted to keep it that way. I never again criticized anybody’s shape or
size. TV didn’t infect her because we didn’t own one. When she climbed
an eight-foot-tall bookshelf in monkey pajamas at ten months, rather than
chide, I anchored it to the wall with heavy gauge wire and D-hooks. When
a robber snuck up our staircase and swung open a door between me and
Delia sleeping in the bedroom, I ran at him, roaring, before Jon even
managed to get off the sofa. In middle school I gave our daughter free rein
over her finances. She made a budget, negotiated a bigger allowance,
spurned Reeboks and Levi’s for Target, and put the savings in a bank
account. The bright ribbon of my daughter’s life linked the talents of my
forebears to all the people in the future who would share my DNA.
And now, Wulf, a twenty-nine-year-old combat veteran I

volunteered to visit in maximum-security prison, leaned toward me and
asked me to be his mom.
He dragged two hands from the stubble on his head to the tip of a
stiff red beard. “I spent weeks trying to call my mom but she never picked
up. When I speak my mind, she flakes out and disappears. Not to mention
she couldn’t manage getting a Google phone number that works. It’s not a
coincidence but a convenient way to avoid uncomfortable conversations.”
I’d been visiting Wulf for six years and had learned to ignore
bursts of static over the loudspeaker, the ping of microwaves, and the smell
of heated hamburgers. But I was dismayed by the perfume of a woman
sitting two seats down on our bank of plastic, airport-style seats; dismayed
by the thought that Wulf might ditch one of his few remaining
relationships.
“She told my cousin it must be God’s will we don’t have contact.
If I don’t mean that much to her, what’s the fucking point? I’m done.
That’s it for me.”
His blue eyes closed for a long while. “Truth is, I come from a
group of selfish, messed up people. I always knew I was on my own, even
as a small kid when I saw how mom abandoned her first two children.
What’s worse, I didn’t know how fucked up that was until I realized that
some parents aren’t like that. I wrote to her a long time ago, wanting to
know why I was never worth the effort or sacrifice. She never even tried
to get me out of here. She of course denies it all and is the victim of the
situation.” He snorted. “Maybe where you end up depends on where you
started in life.”
I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to help but I was Delia’s mom.
When she was eight, a stroke shuffled the roles in our family, and
her position at the center was usurped. She lost the father she’d known and
tried to parent him. After he freed her blue and yellow parakeets from their
cage before opening the front door, she came to me, frowning. “I don’t
understand why Dad’s being like that. He won’t get up in the morning. He
does dangerous things—he’s behaving badly. Grownups aren’t supposed
to do that.”
She didn’t care when her friends stared at the helmet her dad wore
in the car, or when I yelled to stop him inadvertently throwing her into the
whirring blades of a ceiling fan. She loved the dad who could still catch
horny toads, and tell her amazing animal facts, like the male fish that carry
eggs in their mouths until they hatch.
2023, Autumn / 133
Every time her dad washed the dishes, Delia read him Harry
Potter. He’d loved Dumbledore in the movies and she knew he had no
time to read the books himself. She pulled a chair behind and to Jon’s right
and opened a bookmarked page. Voice animated, she raised blue eyes from
the page to beam at him. “Ron was leaning out of the back window of an
old turquoise car that was parked in midair….” Her dad’s soapy hands
reached for the radio and the color drained from Delia’s face. For a while,
she sat quietly as Jon swayed to Bob Marley. Then, without a word, she
carried away her chair.
Jon and I had been together for ten years when a clot travelled
through a previously undetected hole in his heart, and was shot to his brain.
He still scored in the ninety-ninth percentile for some cognitive tasks but
he scored in the first for quite a few others. He was part Einstein, part idiot,
and it made him hard to predict or understand. But sometimes, his insights
floored me. After I’d returned from a day spent visiting men in prison, he
sat beside me in the living room on the green corduroy sofa. “I’m
imprisoned too, you know.”
I turned to face him.
“There are lots of parallels, not even counting when I was in a
caged bed. I’ve been stripped of dignity. Overnight, I lost liberty, self-
determination, and every way I’d known of building and maintaining self-
esteem. I’m imprisoned like them, but I’m imprisoned within my own
body.”
I immediately hated myself for every time I’d scolded or nagged
whenever he’d turned on the gas stove and walked away without lighting
it, lit a bonfire at the base of our neighbor’s wooden fence, or thumped the
keyboard when his laptop wouldn’t accept his passwords. Jon chafed at
my mothering but I didn’t know how else to keep him safe.
Wulf cracked knuckles reddened by countless knuckle push-ups.

“You’ve done more than anyone related by blood. You give a fuck. You
come every month without fail and listen to my frustrations.”
Such a low bar.
Wulf hadn’t lost his soldier’s body. Before he had access to a
barbell, he cut up his pants and sewed sand into the legs to use in lieu of
weights. Later, he turned his freckled face to mine. “You haven’t
commented on my progress. Pretend this is a piece of string. Stretch it to
17 inches and make it into a loop, and that’s my arm, but I’m aiming for
twenty. My legs are 27, my chest is 43, and waist, 41. But I want a 50-inch
chest and my goal is to lift 400 pounds by my 30th birthday.”
Brawn didn’t interest me, it was bad for your blood pressure, and
his existing muscles could already knock me unconscious with one punch.
I was still wondering why an alpha-male, a sergeant who’d led men into
battle wanted to adopt me as his mom.
He stared into my eyes without blinking. “My first memory is of
being beaten. The second was eating pussy when I was three or four. Sorry,
I usually tone down my language when we talk”
I lowered my voice for a word I’d never uttered in my life. “Whose
pussy?”
“For my brothers, it was our aunts. For me, it was a lot closer.”
Wulf always answered questions. It was odd for him to be coy.
The only person I could think of closer than an aunt was a mother. His
aunts and mother—surely repeating abuse inflicted on them.
I felt like a hothouse epiphyte cultivated on a tree branch. My
mind buzzed with words like criminal, betrayal, manipulation. I tried hard
not to imagine Wulf as a four-year-old on his hands and knees pleasing his
mother. When Delia was four, she pranced through the house on her hands
and knees commanding her parents to call her Affa the red dog.
I couldn’t comprehend what his experience would do to a child,
and to the man he became. My understanding was limited to imagination
and conjecture but in no way captured the lived ordeal. But it felt important
to try, even if all I could come up with was, “My God...,”
“My brothers and I talked about it before I was sent to Iraq. It was
just a thing that happened, not some life-altering event. I knew from early
on it was happening to my brothers. I saw it so often, I thought it was what
we were there to do.”
Pepsis and frozen enchiladas thudded down the chutes of seven
vending machines. My head pounded. Wulf had never had a mom worth
the name.
He eyed the prisoner across the aisle, a man munching a
microwaved hot-dog. The guy had lined up Doritos and Kit Kats on the
seat beside him.
I half-stood. The room was nowhere near full but it sounded like
a gang of pre-war motorbikes. “You’re hungry, I’ll get you something.”
“S’alright. It’s chicken patties for lunch today and I already
bought my cellie’s.” I sat down and he shook his head. “It’s weird how of
all the people I used to know, it’s you who proved to be the true family.
We work because you’re like me.”
My eyes must have widened at the thought because we didn’t even
share the same values.
2023, Autumn / 135
Wulf pursed his lips. “We’re polar opposites but we both do what
we think is right. I just have no fear of the consequences and you’re
overwhelmed by them.” He eyed me thoughtfully. “I think I’ve taught you
that we can differ because our core is essentially the same.”
My jaw slackened at the power of his insight. My idealism was
obvious, but I’d never told him how easily I was overwhelmed. Nor had I
thought to dig beneath our differences to that core similarity. Recently, I’d
realized how comfortable I’d become disagreeing with him. It was just as
well because all our opinions clashed.
“Before I met you, I’d never had a political argument without
getting angry or defensive,” I said. “With you, it was more like each trying
to explain and understand the different sides. It was you who set that tone
and it was liberating.”
“Yeah?” His smile was as bright as the copper hair on his
forearms.
When I described details from my ordinary month—Delia and I
had attended a poetry slam at a café, a restorative justice hearing at the
Pima County Teen Court, and the book I was reading to her at bedtime—
he held up a freckled hand. “You still read to Delia? She’s twelve now,
right?”
“It’s a shared pleasure. She reads to me, too.”
Wulf’s eyes rolled back and I saw the whites before he closed
them. He often joked about having a Palm Pilot—reminders of things to
tell me he’d written on his hand. But in my mind, the real digital notepad
was displayed on the insides of his eyelids. So often, his eyes opened in
slow motion to reveal an insight. “I like to hear about your relationship
with Delia. It shows me it’s real for some people in the world. I can’t
change the past but I deal with what I have. I tried real hard to create a
family of my own. That’s why it hit me so hard when my wife, Hannah,
threw it out the window for dope when I was in Iraq.”
First his mother, and then the mother of his children had let him
down.
When I became a mom, my heart doubled. Not just for Delia. I
realized all babies are wonderful.
I gazed back at Wulf. One breath, two breaths. I saw the damage
but there was no self-pity.
During my six annual volunteer trainings, prison officers
emphasized that prisoners are manipulators. But Wulf never asked for
anything, and I wanted him to hold on to any tenderness that survived a
warzone and then prison.
Wulf, the man with PTSD, who woke some mornings to find
himself punching the cell wall, the man who believed in violence called
me mom for two years. He never noticed when he stopped, and when I
asked, couldn’t say why. I hoped some need had been satisfied.
My grown daughter phoned me recently. She asked how Wulf was
doing. She knew he was important to me but also, she knew what it was to
yearn for a parent who was in the room but absent.
My grip on the phone tightened. “I never said because I thought it
would hurt you. But years ago, Wulf called me mom for a long time. The
dad you knew had left you and I didn’t want you to feel like you also had
to share me.”
“I think it’s beautiful, Mum.”
NANCY MCCABE
MULTIFLORA ROSE
Watch out for the multiflora rose,

he says, and I hear not the warning,
but the words multiflora and rose,
and imagine alighting from the 4-wheeler
into pink and yellow and white and red
velvet and damask, a field blooming
in my imagination despite allegations
that scent has been bred from the modern rose,
despite my knowledge of thorns,
which is all I find after all:

networks of barbs in a barren field,
snagging my pants, razoring my skin,
scrawling their crisscrosses of scratches
that well up with blood the color of roses.
Oh, romance, it has turned often enough
to a noxious weed like these, once planted
to conserve soil, hedge pastures,
now running rampant, digging in like cats’ claws.
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 137
I think of beautiful things turned to nuisances,

lotus blossoms that take over lakes,
kudzu spreading its stealthy green blankets
across the ground as if for a picnic,
wrapping itself like wind-blown laundry
around power lines, sleeving utility poles,
cramming road signs into its leafy green outfits,
benign and cheerfully smothering, the way a lover
overtakes your life, his Tupperware
in your cabinet, his slippers in the den,
shaved whiskers drifting behind the door.
We wade through these biting vines

talking, unromantically, about multiflora rose,
kudzu, and lotus, then asbestos and lead,
affordable, indestructible, double-edged swords like
these thorns that stab and grab me
through this unbeautiful field of betrayed promises
where the dream of love still proliferates.
McCabe
BAT SEASON
I’d like to say that, after all these years,

I have come to terms with the bats.
At first after they invaded,
roosting in the attic, banking through the hall,
I was jumpy, too alert,
as if claimed by a grief so deep
I could no longer live in my skin.
Today, up near the ceiling, a small furry body,

gargoyle-faced, tiny-toothed,
fingers extending past its elbows,
clung, feet performing their Exorcist rotation,
such a small creature to bear the weight
of my fear and existential dread.
(cont)
If a bat sleeps in the attic above me,

but I don’t see or hear it, does it really exist?
Does it really exist unless, lifting toward currents,
promise of dark skies and flittering insects,
it skitters instead through a gap in the tile,
disoriented by the shock of light?
Shadows still cross my heart,

wings stirring up a chill as they blot out light.
I still cast my eyes toward heaven
every morning, not contemplating the divine
but scanning the crown molding
for lost bats at rest.
Gradually, I accept the inevitable,

maybe, unimaginably, will someday welcome it.
Today I only screamed once,
the moment I flung the net over the fencepost
and the bat flapped up and out,
a lesson in perspective as it veered toward me,
wide-winged condor, then hang glided away,
in the distance shrinking, harmless, moth-like.
McCabe
NOT THAT KIND OF CROWN

For a 6-year-old daughter
No, I am not being fitted for a jeweled tiara,

but I’d prefer that you picture that than how I am
flattened in this chair, blinded by light,
sweating it out for my bad deeds
like a soul cast into a fiery lake of burning sulfur
while the drill shrieks and shards fly.
No need for numbing, he says,
the all-powerful guardian of my records
who has all he needs to identify bodies.
You’ve already had a root canal.
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 139
The drill edges from high-pitched whine

to shattering screech, angry bees swarming,
rabbits ripped, screaming in the night,
through cage wires by dogs.
It weeps and gnashes its teeth
while he trims mine to a nub.
You wait expectantly to inherit

a gem-studded, sparkling headdress
that will complement your princess gown.
I bring home instead a mold of my mouth.
It’s hinged at the end, a creepy stapler
and in that instant before you,
my future replacement in the world,
convert that piece of my skull to a toy,
clicking and snapping it like the jaws of a crocodile
trolling for rats, buzzing like an airplane
splitting open to reveal rows of worn-down passengers
clinging to their seats before they spill into the sea—
just before it goes roaring along in your hands,
I catch, in your eyes, a glitter of speculation,
a faint demotion of me from royalty to future corpse,
as you wonder what else you stand to inherit.
McCabe
STEVE ORMISTON
WHEN FOOTHOLDS VANISH
This morning a centipede

trapped in my bathtub,
a tricky spot for her species.
She tries but cannot climb
from this slippery daylight hell.
I find a piece of paper,

gently scoop till she's
on it, sprinting,
then quickly lift the paper
outside the tub. (cont)
She charges ahead,

plops to the floor,
and blazes along the wall
till she finds a seam
and disappears back into her life.
I turn to the tub and

reach for the hot,
but stop at the sight of
another centipede, a youngster.
I offer him my magic carpet, too.
Inside such moments,
it's all I know to do.
Ormiston
FERNANDO RIVAS MARTINEZ

CONTRABAND
...I am an artist. I trade in uncertainty and superstition and cant.

I invent dark visions of impossible situations that can never be
resolved. My thoughts are only suffered but they are never
resolved. (The Joke’s Over: Ralph Steadman: Harcourt, 2006; a
biography of Hunter Thompson)
When Officer Dinkens did not reply to messages from central

control, Styxville Federal Prison command sent two COs to investigate.
Upon arrival at Dinkens’ post in Unit L the officers discovered Dinkens
dead, his mutilated body in the unit office still warm. Immediate
lockdowns were mandated prison-wide. A squad of COs and SIS staffers
descended on Unit L like hungry crows and after the inmates were made
to 'rack up' and remain in their cells a thorough Shakedown of 'L' was
undertaken followed by intense individual interrogations. Parenthetically,
Unit L cells had no doors. Styxville was a low security FCI and violence
of the kind unleashed in the killing of Officer Dinkens was unheard of.
Twenty minutes into the search, Officer Torres, an SIS staffer,
made a gruesome discovery. In the cell occupied by inmates Paulsen and
Kraft; in the ice cooler belonging to Jay Paulsen, Torres found damning
and conclusive evidence.
2023, Autumn / 141
Kraft and Paulsen, neither of whom had a history of violence, who

were serving short five-year bids on drug charges, seemed capable of the
grisly murder. But Paulsen immediately fessed up. “Kraft had nothing to
do with it,” he said when officers hauled him into SIS offices for
questioning. “I had to do it. Argus said I HAD to.”
“Argus?” Torres said. “Who the fuck is Argus?”
Paulsen bit his lip. “I…I can't say.”
“What you mean you can’t say? You’re up for a murder charge
here, Paulsen. And killing a GUARD? You’re gonna spend the rest of your
natural life in solitary. Every CO in the system’s gonna be gunning for
your ass.”
“I can’t say. It’s…not allowed.”
Paulsen clamed up, said he had nothing else to offer. When
pressed (and you can bet he was pressed hard) he took the fifth.
When Paulsen’s cellie, Kraft, was interrogated he claimed he had
no clue about his cellie’s behavior or what could have possibly made him
attack and kill Dinkens.
But SIS officers felt Kraft was holding something back. In fact,
after they concluded their first round of interrogations in the unit, they felt
the same way about fifty-seven of the two hundred and fifty-six inmates
in Unit L.
“Something’s not right,” one of the SIS cops said. He met with his
team in the unit office where floors and walls still bore bloodstains from
the killing.
“Motherfuckers are hiding something,” Torres said. “Maybe
somebody’ll talk.”
“Don’t count on it.”
It was no secret on the compound that Dinkens was despised. He
was a loud, officious bully, as were several other officers at Styxville. No
one would be grieved to see him go.
With grim determination, SIS ordered another shakedown; more
and harder interrogations with special attention to the fifty-seven non-
cooperative inmates. Nothing came to light. Kraft and Paulsen were placed
in segregated housing in separate cells.
Two days later Paulsen was found dead. He’d hung himself from
the top bunk using a boot shoelace. There had been no one else in the cell
with him and security video of the hallway in segregation revealed nothing
unusual.
Paulsen had left something, a scribble scratched with a golf pencil
on the wall next to the toilet:
ILN
“What the hell is I L N?” Torres said.
His partner, a thick-necked smart-ass ex-Marine from Alabama,
replied with a cynical sneer. “It’s like one-a them a-cronyms mebbe.”
“Acronym for what?”
“I don’t know. International League of Nutbags?”
“Very funny.”
There were more interrogations and more shakedowns. Unit L was
in lockdown for almost three months.
No answers were forthcoming. The killing of CO Dinkens and the
suicide of inmate Paulsen remained a mystery. The paperwork on the case
explained it away as a disciplinary incident gone wrong. No details were
spelled out for Region. No one, least of all Styxville's warden Meadows,
who was a year away from retirement and a hefty pension, wanted a
regional investigation into the matter. That would have brought media
attention. Best to let sleeping dogs lie.
Three months later, Kraft limped out of segregation, returned to
Unit L bearded and twenty-five pounds lighter.
The new CO greeted him at Unit L’s entryway. “We’re gonna
keep an eye on you, fuckface,” he growled.
Kraft grinned. “Knock yourselves out.”
The CO opened the heavy metal door and Kraft limped into the
common area.
The other inmates watched. They pretended to keep their eyes on
the TV screens bolted to the unit wall.
“Fuckin’ guy,” one inmate whispered to the other sitting next to
him.
“Think he’ll get rid of Argus now?” the other whispered back.
The first inmate chuckled. “Dude...no one gets rid of Argus,
awright?”
On the TV screens there were-game shows, cartoons, movies, and
news reports about the progress of the pandemic.
I am the story. I am the narrative.
There’s no suspension of disbelief here. Such would imply an
apriori belief in some shared reality. But no such thing exists. Not at
Styxville. Not anywhere.
The prison has been infiltrated by I L N. It came in on the wind
one day or maybe it was always there. With it came Argus.
Unit L was built in 1958. Maybe Argus was in the foundations
then or in the ground, maybe in some parallel quantum structure.
2023, Autumn / 143
Kraft found him (him, he, it, whatever) Argus, in a produce box
in an access compartment behind a toilet stall. This was a plumbing access
space behind a small rusty trapdoor with a latch that was supposed to be
secured with a lock. But for some time it had been left unsecured and
inmates had over the years used it to store contraband: drugs, tobacco,
hooch. Now and then the guards would raid the spot, but nothing would
ever be found. Such raids were always anticipated. There were always tip-
offs, bribes, etc. The space had gone unused for months before the day
Kraft sat on the toilet to take a dump. That day Kraft noticed the trap door
was partly open.
“Je-sus KARRIST!” a voice (or what Kraft perceived as a voice)
said from inside the crawlspace. “Flush that, will ya? How am I s’posed to
breathe in here!”
One can assume (as I will here) that Kraft, startled, jumped up and
hurriedly wiped himself, at least one hopes he did, before pulling the
trapdoor all the way open and looking into the dark dank space.
All he could see was the produce box: WEINSTOCK FARM
PRODUCTS - FRESH APPLES, tucked into the shadows. Then we can
assume he was also pulling up his pants.
Kraft had a deformed foot and had to wear a special boot provided
by the BOP medical department. His limb was grotesque: a lump of pale
shapeless flesh with four toes on the end randomly covered with tufts of
what looked like pubic hair. Kraft had been born with the misshapen limb
and he'd long accustomed himself to it. Sometimes he even enjoyed the
shock effect, the way people reacted to it when he removed his shoes and
socks, especially at the beach or the public swimming pool where children
and demonstrative teen girls shrieked in horror and stared. But other than
the weird limb, Kraft was a decent looking guy and had no trouble securing
the attentions (even if briefly short-lived) of the opposite sex.
Kraft was a bad boy shaped into a life of delinquency by a brutal
father and a submissive mother (the same sad ever-repeating story). His
dad, a hyper-religious evangelical (who was, incidentally, bald and fat)
often told his son that the boy’s limb was the work of Satan. “You’re
damned for eternity, boy. Lucifer’s put his hand on you. Don’t expect no
salvation.” He beat Kraft unmercifully for any and every perceived
infraction but, to this eternal disappointment, he never broke the boy’s
somewhat feral and tormented spirit.
When Kraft was sixteen, his dad and mom were driving to Bible
study and church service when a Fed-Ex eighteen-wheeler jumped the
oncoming lane and plowed into them, killing them instantly. Kraft was at
a friend’s house when it happened.
After the long-winded and well-attended funeral, already headed
into a life of crime, Kraft took the final plunge and ended up in prison after
a spate of armed convenience store robberies and one vicious rape. He
figured he was well on his way to hell as his father had predicted, even if
he had to limp all the way there. His folks, on the other hand, had been
Fed-Exed right up into Elysium.
People want stories that make sense. I don’t see why. As the
senseless narrative here, I can only point the way toward absurdity, the
absurdity of all human existence, the absurdity of Argus, a two-foot-high
lizard-like creature found in a produce box behind a prison toilet. Had he
(he, it, whatever) always lived there? The operative term is “always,” a
word essentially meaningless to humans, less meaningful yet to Ilnians
like Argus who, by some fluke of physics (or fiction), made his appearance
in this dimension at Styxville FCI.
Kraft took the box from the bathroom crawlspace to his cell in the
middle of the night then his cellie Paulsen and most of the other inmates
(except the usual insomniac weirdos) were asleep.
“You better hide me from the damn guards,” Argus told him
before Kraft removed him, box and all, from the unit bathroom. Kraft
“heard” Argus as an old man voice.
To Kraft, the creature sounded like the late Burgess Meredith, the
actor who’d played the boxing trainer in the first Rocky movies. Kraft had
the distinct impression that only he, Kraft, could hear Argus this way. And,
truth be told, Argus didn’t really need to be hidden to be truly invisible.
When allowing himself (itself) to be seen (or imagined) multicolored was
Argus: mostly iridescent reds and yellows, tropical colors. He resembled
an iguana or a Komodo dragon, was bipedal and stood on his hind legs,
had a tail, dorsal spiked horns, sharp alligator-like teeth and mandibles, a
snub-shaped snout, and reptilian eyes, gold-hued, with slitted pupils and
opaque-membraned lids. And as Kraft spirited Argus away in his produce
box, the creature seemed unnaturally lightweight, almost as if he (it) added
no weight to the box.
As a fleet-footed narrative, I can hardly take the time and space
here to inform you of the events that evolved over the next two years. By
the time of COVID, Argus had become a secret but integral part of the
lives of many Unit L inmates, fifty-seven of them to be exact. The essence
of his attraction to the inmates was his magical ability to foretell each
man’s future, to offer them “advice,” often to secure them gambling
2023, Autumn / 145
victories or information that was useful to reducing their sentences. His

legal know-how easily outstripped that of most jailhouse lawyers. Then
again, his advice (more like mind-control) wasn’t always of a positive
nature. For Argus the inmates were playthings, pawns for his amusement.
For their one-on-one “advice” sessions, the inmates would visit
Kraft’s cell and sit in Kraft’s plastic chair. Kraft would sit on the edge of
his bunk, facing them, the produce box on the floor between his feet,
Argus’ head sticking up over the box’s rim (like a weird penis some
thought). The visits were set up by Kraft at Argus’ suggestion, spaced
hours apart so as not to draw undue suspicion from other inmates or
guards. Since Styxville was low security, inmates could move freely about
the unit and appointments with Argus rarely had to be postponed or
canceled.
Kraft was under the illusion that it was he introducing inmates to
Argus, choosing those inmates he was sure would not reveal the Ilnian’s
presence. Kraft thought of the creature as his special pet. That was only an
illusion, mostly fostered and allowed by Argus. It soon became evident (if
not to Kraft) that Kraft was Angus’ pet. It was Argus who was in charge,
Argus that telepathically chose the favored inmates, Argus that called the
shots. This development may not have been noticed by Kraft, who
continued to believe in his personal sense of agency and his illusive reality
for some time. As with most humans, Kraft’s sense of agency had long
ago been warped and weakened, first by his crude upbringing, his father’s
beatings, and later by a prison system that thoroughly institutionalized
him.
Kraft’s sense of self was a laundry list, if you will, hardly
necessary to enter into here by way of character development, of every
issue affecting a seriously maladapted young lower-class male in America.
Neither will this narrative enter into the dysfunctional relationship
between Kraft and his doomed cellie: Paulsen. This relationship, fraught
with macho posturing, racial animus, and disgust on both sides, had lasted
barely three months before the grisly murder of CO Dinkens.
“What does it eat?” Marco, a young inmate, had once asked Kraft,
wide-eyed, fawning over the dragon in the box.
Kraft had chuckled and said: “Nothin. Nothin at all.”
He remembered he’d once offered Argus some of his chow. The
Ilnian had spit it out. “Ughh!” Argus had growled. “What is that garbage?
Are you serious? I wouldn’t touch that slop with a ten-foot pole.”
Maybe Argus ate small insects or the occasional mouse that might
have wandered into the unit, Kraft thought at first. But with time, as Kraft
noticed that Argus never appeared to leave his produce box tucked under
Kraft’s bunk behind his laundry bag, it became obvious that the Ilnian’s
metabolism did not depend on physical nourishment and produced no
waste, no feces, or urine. Argus appeared to be self-contained and lethargic
and the source of his biological energy was not evident.
Kraft was not aware of Argus’ occasional nightly forays through
the unit.
Mostly, what Argus consumed were the artificial sweetener packs
inmates were given daily at breakfast. He pilfered those from cells and
lockers with unusual speed and tenacity, invisible to human eyes. He
needed little else. As to how or why he was never spotted by guards or
inmates not chosen for “communication,” Argus was able to plant
subliminal, subconscious memes in humans so that if they did
inadvertently catch a glimpse of him during his nightly excursions (say,
while on a drowsy trip to the restroom) their memories would be wiped
clean, though their dreams might be tinged with reptilian creatures. Often
these inmates looked right at the Ilnian and failed to register his presence.
As a result, Argus had the lay of the land in Unit L, so to speak. It
became his domain and even when he decided to get rid of Paulsen and
CO Dinkens, a well premeditated decision, two humans who profoundly
annoyed him philosophically and drove him to distraction, he planned it
in such a way that he would never be discovered as the motivator.
For Argus it was all great fun, sheer entertainment.
Humans were a joke, playthings for him (it, whatever). In his
Ilnian world, Argus had been a misfit, a pariah. In this dimension he was
royalty. His ego soared.
What he most enjoyed was manipulating inmates’ lives,
sometimes for their good, more often to their detriment. Each inmate heard
Argus differently. They heard a jaded old prophet; a homeless vagrant; a
has-been, hard-boiled, flim-flam con artist; a politician; a priest.
To Doc, an 80-year-old diabetic who had received a thirty-year
sentence for taking inappropriate pictures of his naked granddaughter,
Argus offered this (telepathically of course). Doc was one of the inmates
that would visit Kraft periodically in order to access the “dragon in the
box.” For Doc, Argus’ voice was that of his Vietnam war buddy Leo
who’d been blown to smithereens by a boobytrap mine laid on a jungle
path.
“Listen, Doc. Fuck the BOP’s medical advice. Go ahead and eat
all the goddamn Snickers bars, the carrot cakes, the Jolly Ranchers,
chocolate chip cookies, brownies, whatever goodies you can get your
2023, Autumn / 147
hands on. And drink lots of soda. Sure. Why hold back, ey? Dude, this is
the last pleasure you’ve got left. There’s no more naked kiddie pics for
you. I know there’s pictures floating around the unit but seriously, why
risk ending up in psych and in the SHU for that? You’re way too old.
Listen to me. What’s better? Sugar and chocolate and strawberry jam or
some two-dimensional jerk-off thrill? Stop tormenting yourself. Eat up
those treats. It’s the best choice for you. Trust me.”
Doc died two months later in a blissfully peaceful diabetic coma.
To inmate Ty Johnson (Doobie) serving seven years on a drug-
trafficking charge: (Argus here sounded distinctly like actor Samuel
Jackson.) “My. man, Ty! The thing to do is this: go ahead and drop that
drug program you’re in. You’re no junkie! You’re a pleasure service
provider. Your homies look up to you. Watcha takin’ that plumbing
apprenticeship shit for? Man, you ain’t gonna be wantin’ to unclog no dirty
toilets! Anyway, they don’t teach you anything you can really use out there
in the world. And, besides, nobody’s gonna hire no FELON. Best thing
you could do is stick with what you already know, champ. When you get
out there there’s a spot in the world waitin’ for you. Your peeps are waitin’
on what you provide, dig? It’s what they need. It’s what makes the hood—
the whole WORLD—go around. Am I right or am I right? Fuck all this
do-gooder shit, my nigga. There ain’t no future in it.... Trust me.”
To 52-year-old inmate Corman who was near the end a of 20-year
bid for robbing banks and partially crippled, in a wheelchair, Argus was
the voice of the dead 1973 actor, Steve McQueen: “Abe, all that religious
mumbo-jumbo you’ve been getting ate up with, it don’t mean squat. We
can sit here and debate whether there’s a God or whether there isn’t. But,
hey, what flippin’ difference does it make in the long run? Look at you.
You’re a. sorry, convict cripple in prison prayin’ to Jesus. Man, my advice
to you is to pick up another charge just as soon as you get out of here,
something that’ll keep you in here until you die. Just think of this place as
an assisted living facility. You’ll never be able to make it out in the world
on your own and in that wheelchair. Jesus ain’t gonna work no miracles
for you. Your family’s left you for dead, guy. Screw them, right? Abe
needs to take care of Abe. And where else are you gonna get three squares
and a cot for nothing? If I was you, I’d get out there and pull another job—
nothing big now. Nothing serious. You don’t wanna get yourself shot up.
Just drop the teller a note telling them you’ll blow up the place if they
don’t cough up the cash. And you walk in there with like an empty box or
a bag or something like you got something deadly, like you mean business.
Then just hang around ’til the heat shows up. You’ll get ten to life. You'll
be sitting pretty. Trust me....”
But don't jump to conclusions. Argus wasn't always blatantly
negative. Sometimes he offered legal advice—far-fetched motions and
appeals that surprisingly worked.
He enjoyed it when the legal system fell on its face. A hater of
authority was Argus, a true maverick. Sometimes, too, he'd offer a winning
football or basketball team in an upcoming match to an inmate—gambling
big—arguably, though, his intention was that the inmate spend his
winnings on drugs to further his addiction. or he’d tell an inmate if his wife
or baby-mama was cheating on him. He enjoyed hearing the inmates shout
and rant at their “boos” on the phone across the hallway.
Argus knew all these things. His Ilnian talents allowed him to see
the future (since time for Ilnians was a perceivable continuum), predict
outcomes, read minds. Argus loved the inmates—and hated them. He had
a thousand eyes. And he never slept.
Argus hated Paulsen, Kraft’s cellie.
“You’d best get rid of that piece of shit lizard you got in that box,”
Paulsen would tell Kraft.
“Mind your fucking business,” Kraft would reply.
“I’m serious. That critter’s gonna get the lot of us in the SHU.”
Argus sensed that unlike with other inmates he had little mind
control over Paulsen. There was just not much there to work with. Paulsen
had a very low IQ and limited language skills, few skills of any kind. Argus
was having a hard time imposing his telepathic will on the crude, irascible,
loud, and obnoxious inmate. That was until the night Paulsen had drunk
so much hooch and smoked so much K2 that he lay passed out on his bunk.
Argus did not let that opportunity pass and he stormed Paulsen’s
pulpy subconscious like the French revolutionaries with the Bastille.
(Paulsen heard Argus as some insane version of Hollywood actor
Denzel Washington.) “Okay, Macon. (Paulsen’s prison name. He was a
Georgia boy.) Hear me out. That officer Dinkens got it in for ya. He
already done sent you to the SHU six effin’ times this year. Now I know
you’re fucked up, but the guy really does hate your guts. He’s one-a-them
niggas thinks he’s better than you. Like guys like you are givin’ all black
people a bad rep, know what I’m sayin’? He ain’t nothin’. You gotta go in
there, go in that office and—well, you know what I’m talking about. You
know what you gotta do when a man tries to rob you of your manhood,
don’t ya?”
2023, Autumn / 149
Paulsen managed a weak telepathic response: “Fuck Argus. What

the fuck you sayin?”
“Man, you got to put that uncle Tom down with a
VENGEANCE.”
“You sure ’bout this? I don’t know.”
“Stand up and be a man, Paulsen.”
“I always BE a man!”
“Thass right. I know it. I’m on your side. Trust: me.”
When the seed was planted in Paulsen’s subconscious it was only
a matter of days before he made himself a shank from a broken mirror. I
won’t bore the reader by reprising the events that unfolded in CO Dinkens’
office. The only missing detail here is what the SIS investigators
discovered afterwards in Paulsen’s cooler that tipped them off. The reader
can probably deduce the worst as to what particular appendage of Officer
Dinkens’ anatomy was found, particularly in reference to Argus’
venomous remarks about stolen manhood.
The irony in all of this is that Unit L had always been the least
troublesome unit at Styxville. In the space of two years (the two years
since Kraft found Argus in the plumbing access space) it had become a
snake pit. There were beatings, suicides, and health emergencies, some
resulting, like Doc’s, in death. Unit L was a BOP repository for sex
offenders and informants, inmates highly unlikely to rock the boat, a “PC
unit” (protective custody). Now it had become a hotbed of tension and
conflict.
Kraft was becoming worried about the situation. Things were out
of hand. Not that he was upset by it necessarily. Kraft only truly cared
about Kraft. What he worried about was that Argus might put something
in HIS head as the Ilnian had done with his cellie. It was impossible for
Kraft to keep this worry secret from the mind-reading creature and he
knew it.
One night, after he’d returned from the SHU, while lying on his
bunk, Kraft heard Argus’ voice from inside the produce box underneath
him. Kraft was alone. No one wanted to be his cellmate, understandably,
and the unit manager had not forced the issue. They’d let him be. Argus
had remained perfectly incognito, invisible except to the fifty-seven
inmates—well, fifty now, since three more were dead and four were in
segregation. The remaining inmates kept up their periodic visits to Kraft’s
cell, eager to have their auditions with the “dragon in the box,” addicted
to his counsel, his words of “wisdom.” Now Kraft “heard” the Burgess
Meredith voice even though there was no real sound.
“Everything’s cool,” Argus said soothingly. The words came in

silent waves as Kraft fell into fitful sleep. “I got everything under
control.... Trust me.... You and me, boy. We’re cool.”
At this point, rather than bore the reader with trite expositions,
descriptions. and character development, this narrative chooses
instead to render Argus and his “consultations” with three more of
the inmates, a trio somewhat representative of Unit L's population:
1) THE CRUSADER
(Inmate name: B. SIMMS
Age: 38
Occupation: Software developer
Offense: Drug trafficking)
ARGUS: Back for more?
SIMMS: I need your advice.
ARGUS: Always happy to give it.
SIMMS: You already know I’ve submitted my second successive 2255
motion.
ARGUS: Yeah. Great. Those don’t go anywhere.
SIMMS: But I got a solid case!
ARGUS: Listen, you were selling drugs near school grounds. Nothing you
say or do will change the outcome of your sentence.
SIMMS: Man, that’s just some lame bullshit! It was the warrant. They had
no right to….
ARGUS: I’m surprised. A smart dude like you. They don’t give a shit
about your rights. You should know that by now.
SIMMS: Well, it’s not fair! I’m gonna fight! This is some Jim Crow
bullshit. It’s cause I’m Black and Black people in this country….
ARGUS: Spare me the Martin Luther King spiel. This is me you’re talking
to. I’ll tell you what you should do. You’re a sharp guy. Design a
game that all these White dimwit Dungeons-and-Dragons
pinheads can get into. You’ll make a fortune.
SIMMS: But I’m four years from the door!
ARGUS: Four years? (Makes a hissing sound) Man, that’s CRAPPER
time. There’s dudes in here doing forty. That’s how much time
they spend on the toilet, four years. Now get on outta here.
SIMMS: The courts are unfair! We need sentence reform! Black lives
matter!
2023, Autumn / 151
ARGUS: Yeah yeah yeah. Tell somebody who gives a shit. People out
there sure don’t. I hate to break it to you, but you’re an INMATE.
No one’s coming to your rescue.
2) THE ANGRY OLD MAN

(Inmate Name: C. BAKER
Age: 69
Occupation: Lawyer
Offense: Wire Fraud)
BAKER: Well, I’m back.
ARGUS: Couldn’t help but drag your ass back here, could ya?
BAKER: I’m sick of this place. I’m sick of all these chomos.
ARGUS: Right. Because your crime was so much nicer, so much more
acceptable than theirs….
BAKER: Mine was about money, not sex with kids! That’s DIS-GUST-
TING!
ARGUS: Yeah. You ripped off old people, suckered them out of their
pensions, life savings, all their retirement money.
BAKER: Fuck ’em. They were greedy. They wanted me to turn their
thousands into millions. They were too stupid to know that if
something sounds too good to be true….
ARGUS: Whatever. Look, I see the way you eye that tranny, Lisa. Stop
acting so high and mighty, mister. Shower sharking could get you
shanked.
BAKER: I’ve been down too long. Cut me some slack.
ARGUS: So, what do you want from me? A pat on the ass or a kick in the
balls?
BAKER: Ha ha. I’d like to see you try.
ARGUS: You gonna slap me around like you did with that miserable old
man, Dominguez?
BAKER: Well.
ARGUS: Try it and you’ll lose your hand. But it wouldn’t be necessary.
All I’d have to do is cause a little stroke in your old skull and
you’ll be sittin in a wheelchair and droolin for the rest of your
natural life.
BAKER: Okay. Alright listen, I’m filing on these damn cops around here
with all these bullshit COVID lockdowns. Give me an idea how
that’s gonna work out.
ARGUS: Filing, filing, filing. How long you been down? Fifteen years?
Haven’t you figured out that filing’s a waste of time?
BAKER: Squeaky wheel gets the oil.

ARGUS: Squeaky wheel gets ripped off the axle and tossed in the fire.
Why don’t you smarten up. Do something productive with all that
useless anger and angst for a change?
BAKER: Goddammit! Medical has screwed me! I need cataract surgery!
I may have colon cancer! And my knee—I’m still EIGHT fucking
years from the door. I could fucking die in here!
ARGUS: Well LA-DEE-DA! Haven’t you noticed how many
motherfuckers drop dead in this place every year? Here’s two little
words for ya “NOBODY CARES.” Baker, look, take all that
animus and rage and do something worthwhile: slap the shit out
of that idiot Collington.
BAKER: The Aryan stand-up guy?
ARGUS: Yeah. THAT guy knows you hate his guts. Well, act on it. Stop
all the goddamn filing and start swinging. You’ll feel a lot better.
You may need all that bullshit medical attention but you’re still in
pretty good shape for an old geezer. Collington needs a beat down.
Bad. He’s practically asking for it. Trust me.
BAKER: You’re right.
ARGUS: Damn Skippy!
3) THE PROFESSOR
(Inmate Name: C. Hastings
Age: 50
Occupation: College professor
Offense: Sex Offender (Pornography, exploitation)
…but I’m spinning my wheels. There are too many of these

individual cases to get into here. Fifty-four more to be exact.
This is not a novel. As a fleet-footed narrative I choose to move
on. After all, I’m not gonna give you a prison diary. You, can get
that somewhere else. I don’t recommend Orange Is the New
Black.
You can’t get the essence of what prison is for prisoners unless
you are or you become a prisoner yourself at some point in your
life. And then too, it has to do with how long you’re sentenced for
and whether shame and guilt are applied to your behavior or
whether you apply it to yourself. Inmates in prison cannot be
defined by what or who they are or were but instead but what they
are NOT, by what particular element is missing from their
2023, Autumn / 153
personality: empathy, sincerity, altruism, even reason. or

cognitive sense, whatever humans believe to be “positive” or
“productive” qualities.
The system claims that crime is a young person’s game but there
are thousands of old men sick and dying and locked up. There are
psychically and psychologically wounded persons who become
inmates. Shunned. All are shunned and no one, no one will speak
of them or about them because they embody society’s shame and
disgust with ITSELF. How many cases would this narrative
possibly explore and come to nothing at the end, nothing but
misery and helplessness, nothing but frailty and failure, nothing
but the way humans need to create scapegoats and losers?
For Argus, on the other hand, prison is PARADISE.
FULFILLMENT.
As to the professor with his doctorate in Philosophy: Argus
convinced him to drop all his daily scheduled studies of Greek,
French, Russian, Sanskrit, Mathematics, Formal Logic, etc.
immediately if not sooner. Study was the way the prof was doing
his time. Maybe no better than the idiots watching TV 18 hours a
day. Or the boys on the weight pile working their muscles or
running the track or playing cards.
Argus put the idea in the prof’s head that he should get some
fentanyl from the stand-up guys—they always had some—and to
take an eternity nap.
The idea was attractive to Hastings who had lost family, work, and
all dignity to a twenty-year sentence for talking to some teenage
floozy online and having her take nude pics of herself.
Horror of horrors. Male sexuality and its aggressive nature, even
in a guy as mild-mannered as the prof. Shameful. The idea of
sleeping forever and joining the august ranks of long dead old
white men, philosophers, painters, artists, composers, and writers
was made even more appealing by Argus’ soothing voice which
to Hastings sounded like the dead conservative icon, Bill Buckley.
Argus also fed Hastings various lovely images, memories of
expensive coffee-table art books that Hastings had once owned. It
was no easy task convincing the professor to do himself in. It took
several “sessions.”
The guy was innately vain and self-centered and clung to life like
a barnacle to a pier post. But Argus was persuasive. Inevitably:
another suicide in Unit L.
And prison management was stymied. Stymied at Styxville.

As a purposeful narrative I grasp the reader’s need at this point for
a summation, a climax, a damn point to all these words. Enough
of this not-very-subtle exploration of American prison and its
discontents. that you want to know is:
1) that happens to, Argus
2) that happens to Kraft
3) And why it matters
4) And did COVID kill anybody else at Styxville (30 victims thus
far) This last item not of general interest to a bloodthirsty and
vengeful society that is glad when inmates drop dead: one less
mouth to feed with tax dollars.)
For Lraft tje tragoc si,,atop

(Just fooling. Argus must be fooling with the software.)
For Kraft the tragic summation came gradually. Argus’ voice and
his tone and what he said began to modulate a bit each day. The Ilnian
began to more viciously berate the inmates, to call them worthless,
miserable idiots. “They have no respect for true freedom. Look at ’em.
Slouchers. Degenerates. There’s no fight in ’em. If the guards were to tell
them to lick shit off the floor, they’d jump right to it. They’d bitch about
it, bitch and moan and file their administrative remedies. But would they
stand up and fight? Hell no. They’re pussies, Kraft. Just like you. You’re
a waste and a whiner and you know it.”
By degrees, as Kraft heard it, Argus’ voice began more and more
to resemble his father’s. “Scum is what they are. Gutless. godless, useless
scum. They cry like little girls about all the time left on their sentences.
Most of them should be locked up for life in my opinion, just for how
STUPID they are: Most of them are doing time for something a lot worse
than what they actually got caught for. You, for example. They got you for
robbing a store that was on federal property. Idiot. Weren’t you paying
attention? No. You never pay attention. But they didn’t get you for that
rape. You know what I’m talking about. They didn’t know about what you
did to that poor girl out on the jogging track in Franklin State Park. If they
knew—and if they knew you were thinking of taking pictures of it…. Too
bad you didn’t. I know you’re a sick fuck, son. You’re right where you
need to be. But you only have a year and change left and that’s too bad cuz
if it was up to me.... I know you think about going back out there and doing
it again. I can read you like a book. She was a saucy little number, wasn’t
she? Probably a legal minor too. Go ahead. Tell me you don’t dream about
2023, Autumn / 155
it. I know what you do in the shower. Argus has a thousand eyes. Argus
never sleeps.”
Kraft had no reply. He stormed out of the cell and ran laps out in
the rec yard to get away from Argus. He knew that the Ilnian knew
everything there was to know. Argus could see right to the core of Kraft.
Kraft ran and ran until he was bathed in sweat and out of breath and when
the rec guard called the move he went back inside, limping in pain, his
deformed foot throbbing.
Back in his cell he found that the produce box was empty.
“Fuck that little shit,” Kraft said to himself. and he headed for the
showers.
Naked and under the hot spray, he knew Argus was right. It felt
good. The rape. He had not taken pictures or videos but he’d kept the
memory crisp and clear in his head. It felt powerful. He would do it again
and maybe worse. Pretty young women brought it on themselves. They
practically begged for it. The whole MeToo thing was bullshit. Argus was
right. Argus was on the money.
Back in the cell, Kraft waited for Argus to return. But the Ilnian
was gone.
It was only after midnight count when Kraft was dozing off in his
bunk that he heard the scratch of tiny claws on the concrete floor. Argus
stood in the shadows tearing up sweetener packs, tilting his ugly lizard
head back to pour the contents into his toothy mouth.
In that moment Kraft saw the creature as it really was. The dragon
shape was false. A chimera. Argus was a flickering fog of nebulous color,
a quantum mist. Kraft felt a wave of revulsion and dread. Quietly and
slowly, he reached for the metal fan blade he'd kept hidden under his bunk
mat. He'd pilfered it after the last unit shakedown from the cart the
maintenance service crew of inmates tugged around the compound.
They’d been repairing a broken ventilation unit and were distracted,
shooting the shit and drinking coffee. He’d had a friend of his sharpen it
in hobbycraft for ten books of stamps. It wasn’t like Kraft was lacking in
stamps. Access in his cell to the “dragon in the box” was a lucrative
sideline hustle. He charged ten stamps a pop.
Had Kraft prepared this weapon in anticipation of just this
moment? Perhaps the Ilnian had lost control of his servant after all.
Now Argus had his back to Kraft, gulping, sucking on the
sweetener packs, tossing the spent ones into the waste bin.
Kraft rose up off the bunk, naked from the waist, sharpened blade
raised high.
He was like an illustration in a cheap comic book. He took one

step toward Argus on his deformed foot. His sweaty chest gleamed in the
gloomy light.
“Really?” Argus’ “father” voice stung like needles into Kraft’s
skull.
The Ilnian resumed his dragon shape, not even turning to
acknowledge his attacker.
“What do you think you’re doing, boy?”
When finally Argus did turn, his (its) eyes glimmered hateful and
yellow in the half light. “You think to kill Argus with that toy?” Argus
chuckled. “I’ll tell you what….”
Kraft was suddenly frozen in attack position.
“I’ll tell you this: In the Good Book it says: ‘If your eye offends
thee, pluck it out. If your limb offends thee...CUT IT OFF. Your foot, son,
Your ugly foot. it’s not me you want to hack into, is it? It’s that ugly,
hideous, Satanic limb!”
Kraft’s world was instantly static, a vacant place, an uninhabitable
planet. He stood there poised to strike for seconds that passed like
centuries, like eons, long periods of war, famine, empires, greed,
destruction.
“Hack it off, son. You’ll feel better.... Trust me.”
And so this narrative, poised here to strike, raises the question like
a weapon:
What is crime?
What is mistreatment?
Kraft’s choice is to punish himself or to finish off the dragon in
the box once and for all, and as he stands there paralyzed in attack
mode he is besieged by a flurry of noise: all the voices of all the
Unit L inmates, living and dead, the guards too, like the buzzing
of a great beehive sticky with gore, a poisonous reverberation.
“Hack it off, son. You’ll feel better.”
And as always, Argus is right.
This narrative must push toward conclusion as Kraft swings the
sharpened rusty fan blade at last. Swings it hard, decisively down,
not into Argus but into his deformed foot at the ankle hacking
through flesh, muscle, bone not into what is fantasy but into what
is human; sliding down to sit against the cell wall to finish the job,
sawing through his own leg, a cruel and nasty excision.
2023, Autumn / 157
The Unit CO found Kraft sitting on the floor of his cell in a puddle
of blood, nearly dead, next to an empty produce box. Kraft was barely
conscious and smiling.
Emergency services were notified.
Unit L Went on lockdown.
SIS was called back in.
Kraft was wheeled away in a gurney, his severed deformed foot in
a plastic bag that had been hastily filled with ice from the ice machine in
the common area.
The guards didn’t rush as they rolled him out to the EMS vehicle
waiting at the gates, just outside the perimeter fence. Guards never rush to
aid stricken inmates.
Before he was moved into the vehicle, SIS officer Torres came
running up beside him.
“Kraft! Goddamnit, Kraft! Who did this to you?”
Barely conscious, Kraft grinned.
“We gotta take him,” one of the medics said. “His blood pressure’s
in the gutter.”
“Who, Kraft? WHO?”
The inmate sighed a word, barely whispered.
“What?! WHAT!?”
Then Kraft was hoisted into the van, an oxygen mask slapped on
to his face.
Siren blaring and lights flashing the vehicle tore away.
Kraft would be declared DOA at the hospital.
Shakedowns at the prison and interrogations followed—revealed
nothing.
The WEINSTOCK FARM PRODUCTS FRESH APPLES box
spattered with blood and the torn sweetener packs were all that SIS had to
go on.
A month later there were four additional suicides and a savage riot
in Unit L.
The narrative leaves you here in a world tottering toward

unimaginable disaster. But the world has been spinning in that
direction forever. The universe too, contracting, dissolving.
I leave you with many unanswered questions.
What of Argus?
What miserable fate for Unit L inmates?
What fate for all humans endlessly proliferating, pontificating,

poisoning their world, punishing each other?
Recent studies have shown brain activity just prior to the moment
of death, similar to that of a dream state. The conjecture is that the
dying brain is reliving life experiences.
As to Paulsen and Kraft, that phenomenon was in effect but with
different outcomes.
The reader may have assumed that Kraft’s dying whisper, his
reply to officer Torres’ desperate questioning, was, “Argus.”
It was not. Kraft, like Paulsen, in the final moments of life was
afforded a kind of vision planted by Argus, a memory of Argus’
world. Kraft’s last spoken word was the same word Paulsen had
scribbled on the wall of his cell in the SHU:
ILN
ILN, an idyllic utopia, a place where there is no hunger, no
disease, no violence, no gender, no sex, no religion, no death, no
CRIME, a perfect Edenesque and altruistic paradise. Which was
why Argus fled it.
The creature simply could not abide a life without conflict.
In this dimension, Argus of the thousand eyes sees all. We are his
toys. Argus is never distracted, never in need of sleep. Argus
harnesses the ongoing pulsing energy in our conflicted cosmos,
which arcs not toward justice, not toward love or goodness, but
toward chaos.
Here, Argus finds pure fulfillment.
RICHARD WEAVER
A CARTOGRAPHER ETCHES MAPS
on his legs and arms, fills his torso with images of unknown
continents, rivers without vowels, makes mountains out of well-
worn braille molehills, and galaxies blink blinking reverse Morse
code. He trains man-o-wars to reconnoiter while soaring and deliver
views in semaphore. Wednesdays he reserves for miniaturizing the
observable universe on the plastron of a Galapagos tortoise, etching
2023, Autumn / 159
each of the 16 underside plates with Sinitic dialects. Hoping that

someday they will become mutually intelligible. He began as all his
kind did with papyrus, though he preferred it over parchment and
vellum, and perfected and smoothed its surface, superior to even the
Roman super fine Augustan grade. He envies tattoo artists and their
abundant access to human flesh and scale to work allowance. But
firmly believes in the nanoness of life. Inward not outward is his life
challenge. As an acolyte of Father R. Feynman, he embraces the
largest smallness of all matter where there is always room at the
bottom, and perhaps a meal, not too hot, well-proportioned for
people.
Weaver
NICHOLAS KRIEFALL
RUSH HOUR
This practice reminds me of cattle,

What humans might do
When God has had enough
And we file to separate gates.
It could also be the semi-truck covered in holes—
Noses and eyes peek out curiously.
Now that it has passed,

I can see what the sky is doing.
The clouds below look like a reef of sand
Too hot to walk on.
Above is a teal ocean.
If I had my way, I’d tear through

That cage at a hundred
And give them a fighting chance,
Then watch in my mirror, the driver
Trying to restore some kind of order
As I skip along the surface like a stone.
Kriefall
PARADISE BLVD
Palm trees taller than airport towers

Lining the curbs,
Their rotor blade leaves beaten and lame.
A dark figure pushing a shopping cart

Miles from any store,
His fortune covered with a plastic tarp.
Houses pale as dyed eggs on Sunday,

Their windows
Stitched with iron bars.
At the end, the only one bright—

Lemon-yellow with neglected lawn and tricycle
Where inside they’re always tired.
Kriefall
CLEM VAHE
TWO COUPLES
Watch your thoughts; they become words.

Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
-Lao Tzu
The charming aura of the newlyweds’ arrival at the alarmingly

beautiful vista on the Sea of Cortez was not lost on anyone, even the
harried and disgusted twosome, so overtly askew. They were retreating
from the beach toward the glass elevator that would transpose them to one
of the tiny cut-out condos juxtaposed against the luxuriousness of the
connecting old-style hotel. It appeared that the heat combined with the
effects of the wind’s sandblasting had destroyed whatever outfits and
hairdos they initially wore for their seaside excursion.
2023, Autumn / 161
If, like me, you happened to be a people-watcher, you might have

picked up on the complete disparity between the two couples. Perhaps I’m
addicted to finding a story written upon every conspicuous glance, or I’m
just a nosey old man who has engaged himself in too many strange and
tragic outcomes. But this hotel is the perfect place for me to die. I’ve seen
so much life revolve inside of it over the years. And I’ve seduced more
than a few women behind its lavish facade.
The Hotel Del Sol y El Mar was located at the end of a ten-mile
drive through exotic forested gardens, designed to appear to travelers as
the Serra do Mar State Park in Brazil rather than the desert environs of the
Sea of Cortez. The hotel itself was exclusively private, except for the
intrusive unfinished condo connected as a horrid afterthought. Boasting
floor-to-ceiling surrounding glass, one could choose between the blue-
green and rainbow sea, or the verdant floral gardens. The hotel offered
these postcard scenes. Without having to leave the comfort of the
overstuffed chairs and settees, those who wanted to watch nature’s
hallucinations, but not engage, were entertained.
Mr. and Mrs., having swept into the hotel courtyard in a vintage
Rolls Royce Corniche convertible, stepped inside amid an expectant
gaggle of arrival; their beautiful angular visages only alighted upon each
other. They were so immersed in their triumph of married love, they hardly
noticed the hurricane-like winds blowing—claiming the perfect order of
usual beach paraphernalia, nor the 98-degree temperature singing anyone
who dared confront nature’s objectionable tirade.
Mr. and Mrs. paraded around the hushed elegance of the lobby.
They still wore their wedding costumes and appeared as if they hadn’t
entirely left the king-and-queen attitudes of their reception. Mr. was
happily being led around the lobby, nodding at Mrs.’ palpable pleasure in
the various vases, lamps, settees, and other expensive decorations the hotel
actually offered for sale to its treasured guests. Perhaps Mr. was silently
wondering if Mrs. might be hoping to buy some souvenirs and, if so, how
much they might cost him. His expression was somewhat dazed as if he’d
just realized that mere hours ago he’d acquired an expensive appendage.
“Hey, babe, Look at this antique lamp.” She pulled his hand and
held onto it as she aimed her flawless smile at him. Yet, she gazed even
more admiringly at the intricate stained-glass patterns on the lamp,
encompassing water, sky, stars, moons, and suns in its ample shade.
“It would be perfect for our new living room. When our children
ask about our wedding, we’ll tell them we bought this piece, so our love
would always light our way.” She gave him the puppy dog eyes, followed
by a heady, suck-face kiss.
“Honey, let’s just go up to our suite. You, me, some champagne.
Hey,” he tilted her chin up with his fingers. “Maybe a night swim. I
ordered a spectacular dinner for us, and I wanted to enjoy this special time
alone with my new wife. Let’s make some memories!” He leaned in for
another kiss.
Mrs., gentle but noticeable, pushed him away. “Okay, babe, but I
want to get this lamp as a wedding gift from my new husband—have it
added to our bill, and shipped to us— so it’ll be there when we get home.
I want a souvenir of our first day as Dr. and Mrs. Alan Schneiderman.”
And then she went toward the lobby desk faster than a toupee in a
hurricane.
The overwrought pair, having departed from the beach, had been
fully embroiled in a ridiculous debate, seemingly over-familiar with them.
Angry voices rose concomitantly with the evident effects of sunburn,
fueled by the debacle of their vacation. Even through the closed glass door,
their argument was insatiable and audible as they were amplified by the
tunnel leading to the elevator. Whoever was indelicate enough to continue
listening to the outraged couple—perhaps tittering a bit too loud about this
ludicrous scene—might momentarily consider themselves lucky to be
happily chatting with their someone else.
“Such a bitter pill, an instigator, that’s you. Yes, you can write that
down—your little Rain Man shit!” He turned abruptly like a vast red stage
clown, his hat hanging vertically on his back, its leather string choking his
neck, and headed for the elevator. He was a tall middle-of-the-road type
of man—hair matted in a wiry ponytail, an overly expressive round face
attached to a paunch and skinny legs. He turned around and gave her a
dismissive snarl.
“Don’t worry.” Her voice, though lower, still echoed within the
corridor to the elevator. “I’ll write down every word for my next novel.
It’ll all be about you, and what marriage is really like!”
Though her back was to me, I noticed her long, thick, curly auburn
hair, blowing in every direction at once from the wicked wind whooshing
wildly through the tunnel. Her straw hat was clenched tightly in her hand
as if she wished it was her husband. She was wearing a long faded and
well-worn tie-dye dress with expensive but well-used thick leather
sandals, appearing indifferent to stylish clothing. She stood tall, confident
like a warrior in some other life. A déjà vu moment leaped into my mind.
2023, Autumn / 163
Something about her reminded me of a brilliant and sexy journalist, Lucee,

I met during my war days in Saigon. Possibly, if Lucee had lived, we might
have made a go of it. I missed her from time to time—usually when
something surprising or beautiful occurred, and I realized I had nobody
with which to share it.
After spitting out such vehement absurd remarks, the angry couple
dutifully entered the elevator together—its loud ding an exclamation mark
to their bickering.
Sitting here, I was pretending gaiety, as was the rest of the crowd.
Since I felt too old, too cynical, and wary from salacious stories of many
failed marriages, including my own, I shouldn’t have been inflicting
leftovers of my pitiful meanderings even on my inanimate journal. But I
used to be a successful writer—at least monetarily. And blank pages in my
journal needed to be filled with whatever was left of my imagination—
venturesome or not. My moniker’s Sebastian (not Cabot, that ridiculous
“gentleman’s gentleman” who popped out of that 60’s TV show called,
Family Affair, which only served to show my age).
The only reason I was here, at this ludicrously expensive resort
hotel, even out-of-season, was because I was on the verge of saying adios
and mahalo to this mysterious, fantastical, adventurous, but over-saturated
and over-analyzed world. I was no longer tethered to any incandescent
birthright—an insane privilege bestowed and hammered into me, the
eldest son, by generations of bootleggers to political con-men. Quite
frankly, I’d had enough of families—their traditions, complex roles of
neediness versus dependence, and overrated notions of love. During my
awkward attempts to add beauty, compassion, and sexual substance to my
solitary existence, I had fought my way out of many weird how-did-love-
lead-me-here moments such as those of that weary couple.
You see, all the things I’d visualized through the extraordinary
windows of my childhood had been harnessed, twisted, or defined into
unremarkable trivial pursuits. They’d been altered by the glasses I’d worn
since college, I always remarked with a laugh, when people’s
conversations dwindled to questions of why childhood dreams were
usually left uninspired on some collegiate corner—traded for some tenable
future security. My eyes drifted to the melting ice in my drink as if the
translucent cubes could predict a future for this appalling race.
I raised my hand to the passing waiter to indicate another round,

as I needed a more comfortable numbness.
If I lived any longer, I knew I’d begin to miss things of which I’m
ashamed. My intrepid violence amid such sheer enthusiasm during the
Vietnam war, my shrewish second wife’s ostentatious mask of attention;
my abysmal fifty-year-old son, Samuel, whose grandiose failings in
marriage, sobriety, and notorious business affairs were somehow linked to
his heritage. (The last time I saw him at a bar in some hotel, we actually
enjoyed the companionship of shared wisdom, discussing the absurdities
that claimed both our lives.)
The significant contrast between my son and me was our view on
war. Samuel never thought of me as brave to have fought in a war designed
by politicians for monetary gain. He never got it—the excitement of being
out there in the jungles, the rivers—your senses alive in the pureness of
survival. He could never understand the raw joy in the words “all clear”
when you laughed and hugged your real brothers—those men who were
always “on your six.” Everything was more intense out there—sex, life,
death, even raindrops slightly tapping on a leaf, or the anomaly of a
rainbow appearing just after the last few shots in a skirmish were fired. It
was never bravery versus cowardice or war versus peace; it was Bellum
omnium contra omnes—the war of all against all—when man performed
with his best self. But my son always lived off the power of money, and I
felt he was a real coward. He covered his fear of life with alcohol and
brainless women who’d always consider him superior. How absurd that
we both ended up in the same stew assembled from such diverse
ingredients.
I caught the waiter’s attention for another very dry martini, as I
was in no particular hurry; I had arrived at the place where I intended to
step out of this insane asylum. The gun was ensconced in my room’s safe,
and I had enough excellent whiskey to make it a smooth exit.
I looked around the room at the apparent serendipity of these
vacationing amours. They were all momentarily struck by blurry
happiness from alcoholic libations and were simmering in their farcical
attempts at seductive play, for nobody in this large lobby bar, with its
cathedral ceilings and seven-foot-tall saltwater aquarium, was remotely
sober. I hoped it was the weather, and not old regret because the only
young people I’d seen dry were the two disparate couples.
As I turned my head, I saw a vision: the young woman whose
argument I’d so unceremoniously overheard earlier was alone on the
beach. She resembled a Medusa—her long hair flying in matted masses,
her body swaying luxuriously even amid the excessive flab escaping her
bathing suit, her face shrouded yet her demeanor fierce, assertive with
2023, Autumn / 165
unabashed anger. Even against the forceful winds blowing sheets of sand,
she continued to bend and pick up shell bits, shoving them into a plastic
bag. Needless to say, I couldn’t place another living thing on that beach.
I continued to watch her pitiful excursion and became desperate
to join her. I wanted to assuage her grief. She was the epitome of
something earthy, surreal, as if she was an angsty angel lost in a
disparaging world. Her appearance now induced in me an overwhelming
desire to experience what the sea could make of me; after downing I-don’t-
know-how-many martinis, this concept smacked with a sense of life I
hadn’t encountered since my stint in the Vietnam War.
I dumped some cash on the counter and clumsily headed out of
the lobby. As I exited the shelter of the hotel, I came face-to-face with
God. Nature always humbled me. In the jungle, deep within the wilderness
or on a boat far from the shore of some sea, wherever man bowed to
nature’s demands and death hid around the next bend, I saw God’s wrath
and deeply admired it.
I tried to run down the sand. Since I was watching Medusa, I
forgot to watch myself. Straight off, I was flung over by a boulder hidden
in the sand. I heard the crashing and whooshing of waves close to my ears.
Before I could right myself, I was taken by the sea; as warm and
comforting as bathwater, its ripping and thrashing quickly became
everything. As my head involuntarily popped out of the water, I heard
Medusa screaming for help. My angel, my savior. As I was heading under
and away from the shore, I was aware of that often-described
phenomena—the inescapable lightness of being, being alive now; it was
as if I was an incredible nothing—all moving parts and jumbles of reactive
brain waves. A splash of euphoric intensity ensued from letting fear, hate,
lack of love, and all the other burdens of life fall away.
PHILIP WEXLER
SETTLING
I come down
the trail eroded
by my repeated failures
to reach the summit. (cont)
Blaming dusk and fog

gets me nowhere.
I am losing
patience with myself
and running
out of excuses.
Why bother?
I ask myself
with this
useless exercise.
I was there once,

up top, where I left
a part of myself
I can no longer
recollect. Each time

I try harder
but only get more

clouded.
Better to scavenge
in the lower
altitudes, I decide,
and dismiss
what I had
or what I was.
Wexler
2023, Autumn / 167
CHARLES RAMMELKAMP
PSYCHEDELIC TOAD
Back in the sixties I played lead guitar

for a band called Psychedelic Toad.
We cut an album but it didn’t sell.
Then the singer got involved with a woman.
We joked Lauren was our Yoko Ono,
calling her the reason we broke up,
though none of us really believed it.
We were all ready to call it quits.
I went on to get a Ph.D. in Political Science,
taught for thirty years at Craycombe University.
Now I read about the toads in the Sonoran desert

excreting toxins strong enough to kill a dog
when they’re threatened, containing
something called 5-MeO-DMT
that you can dry into crystals and smoke in a pipe,
getting high for about half an hour.
People call it “God’s molecule;”
it’s like a religious experience, transcendent,
as with peyote or mescaline.
The slang for the venom is “Five,”

after the chemical, or “Bufo,”
after the toad’s scientific name, Bufo alvarius.
Hollywood celebrities smoke it.
For $8,500 you can go to an exotic beachside retreat
somewhere in Mexico, for the experience.
On the internet I see

Psychedelic Toad T-shirts for sale,
and all I’m thinking is,
why didn’t we call our band “God’s Molecule”?
Rammelkamp
JUHEE LEE-HARTFORD
GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE
Before our father left for the United States and the rest of us
moved in with his mother on Jeju Island, Grandmother’s house was my
retreat, and she was mine alone. I must have been about three or four the
first time I spent all summer long with her, running free in her rural fishing
and farming village instead of being “locked up” behind the painted sheet-
metal gates of industrialized Daegu.
On my first summer afternoon at Grandmother’s house, I stood in
the courtyard, clinging to her legs while she hung laundry. The
neighborhood kids lined up against the craggy volcanic-rock walls that
encircled us to size me up. There was a long, awkward moment. Then their
whispers broke into giggles, as they heard me say something to my
grandmother. They were laughing at my singsong Daegu dialect. I found
the courage to befriend them anyway, and by the end of the summer, I
would learn to talk like they did.
My new friends and I blazed through the courtyard while the
adults yelled at us, waving their hands in front of their faces, “Slow down!
Stop kicking up the dirt!” In the old days, Koreans did not grow grass in
their yards. Allowing any “weeds” to separate the earth from the heavens
was a sign of laziness.
Before I knew it, the summer would be over, and I would return
to my parents in Daegu, where our neighbors would mock my newfound
Jeju dialect.
“What are you saying? Those words aren’t even Korean!”
At the next break in my father’s teaching schedule, he would fly
me back to Jeju, and I would learn to speak in their tongue all over again.
My father and I had made multiple trips to Jeju by airplane before
the summer of 1978. That’s the year my siblings, our mother, and I moved
in with our grandmother, as our dad went to the United States to pursue
his doctoral degree in psychology at the University of Michigan. I turned
five that June. My sister was three, my brother, one. Our mother was
twenty-nine.
I sensed that living without Dad was especially tough on our mom,
but I trusted the grown-ups who told me that he would be back soon. Our
Little Dad and Little Mom (our dad’s one and only younger brother and
his wife) and cousins lived around the corner, across a small side street. I
had the freedom to roam the dirt roads. I didn’t have to worry about going
back to Daegu at the end of this summer, to have people laugh at me and
2023, Autumn / 169
my seasonal Jeju dialect. What more could a five-year-old ask for?

***
Our grandmother’s house in Moseulpo, Jeju Island, was caught
between modernization and tradition, part progressive and part old-
fashioned, suggesting a confused state of mind. But to a child, it was an
extraordinary house, and I was proud of it. Unlike our neighbors’ homes
of clay walls and thatch roof, it was modern, with stone and concrete walls,
sliding glass doors, and a blue corrugated-metal roof. It was commissioned
by our grandfather in the early 1900s and modernized by Little Dad in
more recent years.
While Grandmother’s house was built with modern materials, the
layout was traditional—with a “twist.” The rooms were laid in the usual
rectangular shape, with two separate living quarters, one at each end. It
was meant for an extended family to live under one roof with some
privacy. Each suite was nothing more than one sleeping room, a storage
room, and a kitchen. The second kitchen was an unusual luxury. The
outhouse was on the right side of the house. During those days most
Koreans did not want to bring such a dirty function into a house.
In the middle of the house was a maru, a raised wooden floor built
without nails or glue, about a foot above the grade. This simple, unheated
space served as the main entry hall, meeting space, living room, and
summer room. On extremely hot nights, we even used it as a makeshift
sleeping room.
Along the front of the house, a row of sliding glass doors could
convert the wooden verandas, twitmaru, that formed a hallway outside the
bedrooms into a sunroom in the winter and an open porch in the summer.
We entered the house through the middle of these glass doors, stepping
onto a portion of the wooden floor that was notched out to expose a
threshold of bare concrete slab. That’s where we took off our shoes.
At the left end of the house was the larger, old-fashioned kitchen
used by Grandmother. At the opposite end was the smaller, modestly
modernized one, where our mother cooked with a gas fire. Neither kitchen
had a formal sink—just stainless steel or rubber tubs, depending on the
need. For many reasons, I spent more time in our grandmother’s kitchen
than our mother’s. Grandmother preferred to cook in a traditional wood-
burning hearth, and she liked heating her rooms in the old-fashioned way.
The cooking heat from the kitchen hearth traveled through the thermal-
mass flues that ran beneath the bedroom floors, then out the chimney in
the back.
Sometimes she would put me to work.
“Here—come sit here and keep fanning the fire like this. You have
to keep feeding it with air so that it won’t die. Got it?”
The sharp smoke sweetened her barley rice and heated her
bedroom’s ondol floor at the same time. On the other side of the house,
the floor was heated with hot-water pipes that our Little Dad had installed
in the concrete slab topped with linoleum. His system gave us the option
to heat the bedroom floors by turning a valve in the wall. That determined
whether the hot water would circulate under the bedroom floor or bypass
it before arriving at the faucet. The first winter I washed my face in that
kitchen, I couldn’t help chuckling that Little Dad was actually draining the
hot water from the bedroom floor rather than boiling it in a pot. I realize
now that our mother’s kitchen converted to an indoor bathing room in
winter. We never washed up in Grandmother’s kitchen.
***
Now that we were settled into Grandmother’s house for good, or
at least until our dad returned after receiving his doctorate degree in the
United States, our typical summer morning began with our mother
bringing us our breakfast on a folding table to our grandmother’s bedroom.
Our first meal of the day usually included fresh bowls of barley
rice with some small vegetable side dishes, my favorite being the sauteed
“fernbrake” gosari seasoned with the perfect combination of soy sauce,
garlic, and sesame oil, along with leftovers from the night before. It could
be a fish soup or kimchi casserole with fatty pork. Best of all was our
grandmother’s salty and savory pollack-roe soup. On Jeju Island, seafood
became my comfort food.
We would sit on the floor, hovering over the low table and gulping
down the food as fast as we could, while our mother put away the bedding
in a storage nook camouflaged with white wallpaper. As per Korean
traditions, we lived with minimal furniture. In our grandmother’s room,
2023, Autumn / 171
there were only a couple of bookcases that our dad brought from Daegu.
Each storage room had a small wooden chest that we seldom touched. The
only furniture that we used often was the folding table.
On warmer days, my sister and I would wash up in one corner of
the courtyard. An outdoor washing area was designated with a concrete
pad with a curb and an exposed standing faucet. Afterward, we would tuck
our toothbrushes between the rough, black-gray volcanic rocks of the
courtyard walls that threatened to bite our knuckles if we weren’t careful.
We would dash out yelling, “We’ll be back before noon!”
We would return for lunch to escape the high sun. After a quick
wash, we would eat and linger on the wooden deulmaru platform in the
courtyard, set under the comforting canopy of the trees. Our
grandmother’s friends gathered on that platform after lunch to talk about
news and politics. President Park Chung-Hee came up often. I assumed
every country had a president-for-life. Sometimes, as I listened to the
adult’s gossip, I would sketch a dollhouse in my notebook, drawing the
front gate on the first page and other rooms in a double-page spread. Other
times, I would lie on Grandmother’s lap and look up at the trees to count
the holes between the leaves and drift into a nap.
In midafternoon, my sister, our friends, and I would stir up once
more. We were off to the streets again, yelling, “We’ll be back by
dinnertime!”
The seemingly endless summer of 1979 cooled, and the doors
were drawn more often. We still washed up in the courtyard, but more
quickly. The approaching harvest season seemed to make everyone move
at a brisker pace.
One busy fall day, my siblings and I were left home alone without
an adult. As the eldest at six years old, I needed to take care of my siblings,
who were four and two. I don’t remember the grown-ups preparing me for
this moment. People often said I seemed older than my age, how
precocious I was. Maybe Grandmother showed me where to find some
food and said what time they would be back. All the grown-ups in the
neighborhood left early and in such a hurry that it seemed as if they had
suddenly disappeared. Like a pup that could smell a storm swirling ahead,
I felt a cloud of strangeness hanging about my shoulder, as if something
unfortunate was about to happen. Maybe not today, but sometime soon.
That was the day that triggered a strange and unexpected chain of
events. It was sometime in midmorning when I happened to look toward
the backyard. There she stood, a woman in a white gown behind the twin
mounds of our great-grandparents’ graves. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I
stood there holding my breath. I had never seen a ghost before. I could
only assume, based on what I had seen on television, that’s what she was:
a woman with long, disheveled black hair, staring through me with a
distant gaze.
I glanced over to my siblings. My sister and brother were sitting
on the floor. Their views were blocked by the wooden panels at the lower
section of the sliding doors. Their attention was on something else. They
didn’t see her. There was no need to scare them, so I kept my mouth shut.
I convinced my siblings to move into Grandmother’s room instead. Maybe
an hour had passed when we all heard a definite clanking noise in the
kitchen, as if someone had lifted the cast-iron lid from the rice pot and then
put it back down.
We stopped what we were doing and stared at each other.
“Probably a mouse,” I said. We continued to play as I tried to shut that
white silhouette out of my mind.
Later that afternoon, I told my little sister and brother, “Let’s go
over to Kyeong-Min’s house.”
Kyeong-Min and her two siblings were about our age and lived
immediately in front of us. Our grandmother’s house was tucked behind
their house with a private alleyway. I knew they were left home alone too,
but their house faced the main road, which made me feel safer that day.
As we were leaving Grandmother’s house, I spotted “the ghost”
again. When I caught her eyes, she ducked behind a wall by my Grand-
Aunt’s house. My dear God, is she following us? I didn’t know what else
to do except hope that she was just my imagination.
Finally, the grown-ups returned from the long day of harvesting.
Grandmother was starting the fire in the kitchen when she heard our
mother scream at the other end of the premises. Mother had found the
white-gowned lady hiding in the outhouse. She was not a ghost after all,
but rather a patient who had escaped from a mental institution that
morning. As Grandmother sat down at the entry veranda with the white-
gowned woman, Mother went over to our neighbor’s house to make some
phone calls. Soon enough, the authorities in dark green uniforms came to
drag her away. She didn’t want to go. She made hollow sounds with her
dry mouth wide open. She couldn’t formulate a word. How sorry I felt for
her. She hadn’t caused any harm.
The ghostly lady was gone, but I couldn’t shake the ominous
feeling that hung over me. A few days later, men with big trucks appeared
at our front road, rolling out a thick, black, sticky substance called ahs-
pal-teu—asphalt. President Park Chung-Hee’s mission to modernize
2023, Autumn / 173
Korea within one generation had finally reached our neighborhood, the
southern tip of his country.
“No, no, no. Don’t step in it,” they told us. “Wait until it sets.”
“But our house is across the road,” someone replied. “I have to
make dinner for my kids.”
The black tar was stuck all over our shoes, on the heels of our feet,
and the hems of our pants. It tracked all throughout the house. It was
relentless in following us everywhere. It was determined to change our
lives.
A few days later, I overheard an exchange between our Little
Mom and her friend. “Did you hear? Another person was killed on that
new road. People are just not used to it. They’re driving too fast.”
“Where was the body found? He or she?”
“She was found on the side of the road.”
“On the side? Well, then that’s clearly the driver’s fault. The car
should be driving in the middle of the road, not on the side!”
Not long afterward, our Little Dad’s dog suffered the same fate.
The road that he crossed every day had changed its shape and swallowed
his life.
The strangeness went on. Mother became ill. Her eyelids trembled
involuntarily, and her left hand and face grew numb for no reason. Our
mother couldn’t help much around the house or in the fields. I would hear
Grandmother mumble, “I knew she was too weak to be useful. That’s why
I never approved of the marriage in the first place!”
None of the doctors of Western medicine my mother visited could
find a physical cause. Most likely some form of depression, they said. Her
symptoms were a sign of a weak mind, not a weak body.
“We have no choice but to see an acupuncturist,” her mother said.
We all knew this was against our dad’s wishes, but his voice didn’t matter
when he was out of the country—studying psychology of all subjects.
Things seemed desperate.
One night, while my siblings and I were watching television at our
neighbor’s house, the door slid open. Our mother poked her head in to tell
us not to stay up too late. She was going to see an acupuncturist and would
be back late that night.
The night passed and the morning came. There was no sign of our
mother. She didn’t keep her promise that night or the next day. One of the
grown-ups informed us that our mother was in the hospital. Strange, I
thought. She had gone to see the acupuncturist. By the third day, I
overheard our aunt and uncle: “We have to go see her. They said she comes
and goes. She might not make it.”

I asked, “Who? Our mommy?”
Our Little Dad replied, “No, no one.”
A few days later, a tent was pitched in a field at the west side of
our house. My friend told me that my mother was lying under there, with
a sheet covering her body and her head. When they’d briefly lifted the
cloth, my friend had glimpsed my mother’s face. She heard the grown-ups
say that they were going to bathe and dress her for the burial—they needed
about three days to prepare.
As I listened to my friend’s story, I stood under the arched trees at
the entryway of Grandmother’s courtyard and scanned the house left to
right. No one in our family came to see me to explain what had happened.
They were preoccupied, running from room to room, tending to the adult
busyness. She handed me a jar of candy filled with an assortment of colors
and flavors. I knew she was trying to console me and distract me. I let it
happen.
I packed all the feelings I could not explain in an imaginary freezer
box, closed it shut, and sealed it with excuses.
We were never close anyhow.
She was always far away in her own thoughts.
I stood there numb. I didn’t want to see my mother. She felt like a
stranger, like that ghostlike figure who had drifted through our grounds a
few months before. Just like that sick lady, our mother’s corpse was not
allowed in the house. I had heard the grown-ups say that it was good
fortune to die in one’s own home, but it was a bad omen to bring the dead
body in. I didn’t understand the difference. Nothing made sense. Nothing
was grounded anymore.
The next day, the entire country fell silent. There weren’t many
cars on the road, not much activity at all. All the airports had been closed.
I was told that our dad couldn’t get back to Korea. I had assumed that he
was too far away to make it to his wife’s funeral in time. I thought the
entire country was mourning the death of our mother. Who else could they
be thinking about?
I remember crying the first night that they placed her body under
the tent. I tried to understand what it would mean to never see my mother
again. How could I live the rest of my life without her? I couldn’t think
that far.
The clock at our house died too. At all hours, people came and
went, as if our house were their own. They didn’t seem to care about
sleeping. They were constantly crying and saying oh, how they worried
2023, Autumn / 175
about the three little ones. Grandmother and Little Mom served tables and
tables of food. I wondered how they could afford to do that.
I lay in Grandmother’s room, staring at the pictures of our great-
grandfather and grandfather that hung above the door. I wondered if our
mother’s picture would join them there, but her picture, with white ribbons
diagonally placed across the top corners, was on a table with some food
and rice wine. Funny. She never cared for alcohol when she was alive. Her
black-and-white portrait was a recent passport photo enlarged to fit a
portrait-sized frame. Like all other married women, she had her hair cut
short, just below her jawline. It was permed, but not so tightly as our
grandmother’s, and feathered outward around her ears. She had hoped to
reunite with our dad in Michigan as soon as the passport arrived, but this
happened instead.
During the funeral procession, there was a long train of people
dressed in off-white hemp and white cotton clothing. At the front of the
line, several men carried the casket. The rest of us followed. I held onto a
stranger’s hand for the long walk. Some women wore crowns made of
braided hemp rope. Some wore hairpins with pieces of white cloth tied at
the end. These were symbols of mourning.
We finally arrived at the dreaded place. The rectangular trench
was ready. When they lowered the casket into the black hole, everyone
around us wailed loudly. To everyone’s disbelief, my two-year-old brother
cried, reaching hard for the casket. He must have known that our mother
was in there. Our grandmother sat down by the edge of the pit and
unwrapped the bottles of our mother’s favorite lotions. She laid them on
her casket, saying, “Here, take these. Now you can use them as much as
you want.” I knew that was her way of saying how sorry she was for giving
her a hard time.
Soon, the winter came and hardened everything, but the bedroom
floors in Grandmother’s house were hot, and we didn’t have to fold away
our blankets after we got up. When we had visitors, we offered them the
warmest spot on the floor, brought out roasted chestnuts, played card
games, and told stories.
One cold morning, our grandmother excitedly opened all the glass
doors. It was rare to see large clumps of snow on Jeju Island. We watched
the snowflakes fall while we were tucked in the warm blankets. It was the
only consolation for the absence of our mother.
Eventually, winter thawed into spring, and we got back into the
routine of washing up in the courtyard and tucking our toothbrushes into
the crevices in the stone wall. One afternoon Grandmother called us in.
“Hurry, hurry! Go over to So-and-So’s house. They are throwing candies

off the roof!”
When we arrived, the neighbor was standing on his newly framed
roof with a bucket of sweets. I was relieved that we didn’t miss anything
just yet. However, I quickly became frustrated as he would toss only a
handful and wait for us to look up before he threw the next batch. Quite
clever, I thought. We would stoop down to pick up the candy, straighten
up, and then bow again to pick up some more. When the bucket was empty,
he told us that we had done a good job of paying respect to the house spirit.
A few months later, our extended family gathered in a circle on
our Little Dad’s living room floor for an emergency meeting. Even
Grandmother’s sister-in-law from Jeju City had come. It turned out that
while we were still mourning the loss of our mother, our father had
remarried—a Korean American woman living in New York—without
consulting anyone.
“How dare he? How could he remarry so quickly without your
permission?” someone asked our grandmother.
“Well, this isn’t the first time he married without your
permission,” another person said, making matters worse.
“And she is a divorcée with two sons!” our Little Dad added. He
was concerned about my brother’s future inheritance.
“What a shame,” our Little Mom said. “We were going to
introduce a nice single woman to him—you know…that new teacher at
the school. She adores kids, but she’s too old to have children. She
would’ve loved his kids as if they were her own.”
“And he has the nerve to say that we killed his wife?” our Little
Dad said. Angry letters were fired between the grown-ups and our dad. I
couldn’t understand everything—but one thing led to another.
I started my first year of school, coached by Little Mom and Little
Dad on how to be the best student, and not take pity from anyone. But
before long, it was time for my sister, my brother, and me to leave Korea
and join our dad and his new family in New York. The gap in my life
would become bigger than bridging the differences between Daegu and
Jeju. Buying a return flight ticket sounded so expensive that I imagined
filling the ocean between the two countries so that I could walk back home
someday.
As I watched Little Mom pack our bags, she told me, “If your stepmother
does not treat you well, you firmly stand your ground. You hear me?
…There’s nothing to worry about. You are going to a country so rich that
I bet every house has a separate faucet for milk.”
2023, Autumn / 177
KATHY O’FALLON
THE GOLDEN GATE
for Jain
If you were born lucky

your family had a car
and maybe on road trips
you learned to hold your breath

and count on a bridge over water
though you’d run out of air first
No I mean if you were born lucky

you had a family
who drove you safely
across water on a bridge

too high and too long
and when it was done
no one laughed
that you’d covered your head
with a blanket to escape
No I mean if you were born lucky

you were loved and beautiful
bridges wouldn’t tempt you to jump
O’Fallon
BIBHU PADHI
TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE, CUTTACK
It was a day when everybody talked

about how it comes once in a long while,
discussed astrology.
(cont)
The interpretations ranged from

how sacred a day it would be
how the mythical gods would
descend on the earth to view
the great event. They knew
how heaven was involved in this.
On that day, slowly the sun
seemed to repent for its past deeds,
slowly turned into a gloomy golden.
Someone said, the sun would be
eaten to its last bit of flesh,
driven out of our galaxy.
It was a thin, residual matter
that was turning into a deep golden,
and the light was getting less and less.
My grandmother asked my wife
not to take our child out of the house,
that it was perilous to do so.
We could hear the dogs barking
as if the monster had finally come.
It was shining gold everywhere.
and then it was a golden night,
a night we had not seen.
We too shut our lips.
We had become powerless,
had been victims of the earth’s
rare night. We felt spirits
brush past our shoulders,
give each of us their karmic due.
The night was beginning to
give way to a sluggish afternoon.
We gathered and prayed for
our safety, our good old days. Padhi
2023, Autumn / 179
WILLIAM E BURLESON
SCHUBERT
The young woman in the knee-length skirt and silk blouse walked
up to the bus stop. The middle-aged man in the sport coat and tie smiled
and nodded to her. She smiled back, as was her habit every morning before
catching the 7:23 bus. He was a tall man, hint of grey at the temples.
Perhaps someone with an important job, she thought. She was but an
administrative assistant, which was fine, even with her degree in English
lit going to waste. But she had plans. Learn everything she can and make
herself invaluable to her supervisor, and in that way inevitably move up in
the company. Doing it old-school, she would say to her friends.
A man with a millennial blond beard came around the corner. He
wasn’t feeling well—not at all—but he already missed two days with that
stupid cold, and he couldn’t afford to miss more. He noted that the young
woman who he saw every morning at the stop was looking especially
attractive, and wondered if she worked-out downtown somewhere. He had
been feeling pretty doughy, and he knew he needed to get back in shape,
and if she worked out at the Y or something that would be extra credit. He
thought about asking her. Why not? He knew why not. She was obviously
successful and going places, and he was a community-college drop out.
But he scolded himself for his negativity; what else is there to do but try?
But then there’s the race thing—her being black and he white—but he
knew that it was stupid to think like that, and he felt ashamed for even
going there. Then he noted the man in the sport coat and wondered what
this apparently successful man did for a living. Maybe he should talk to
him? More networking, that’s what he needed to do, or he’d be doomed to
a life of making lattes at an office building coffee shop.
The morning felt refreshingly cool to the white-haired man, who
was next to arrive at the bus stop. It was his favorite time of year. He and
his husband agreed on little of late, but they agreed that raking leaves was
something to look forward to. Sweater and soup season, they would say.
As he settled in to wait for the chronically late bus, backpack full of
seldom-used gym clothes and paperwork, he checked his iPhone for the
morning work emails. He hated doing it, but he also hated being surprised
by whatever shit-storm was erupting. He had often mused over martinis
on the back deck that you used to be able to come home at five and go to
work at eight, and the world spun along just fine. Now the double-edged
sword of technology meant work continued into the evening long after the
office lights went out and started before he even got his first coffee in the
morning. His husband and he had dreams, but they were pipe dreams at
best, mostly involving being on some perpetual vacation with no visible
means of support. He glanced up when he heard the kid with the blond
beard say something to the young secretary-type. Did they know each
other? He couldn’t recall seeing them talk before. He knew people made
friends all the time at bus stops. He never had. He wondered if he should
say something to someone some morning. He noted the middle-aged
gentleman in the sport coat and tie as the man sat down on the bus bench.
Maybe there was someone the white-haired man could relate to. He looked
like someone with responsibilities. But the phone buzzed with a new
email, breaking his chain of thought and bringing him firmly back to work.
Knowing she was late, the woman with a long grey ponytail ran
down the block. The bus was typically behind schedule, but you never
know. The woman’s running was the speed of walking for anyone under
30, but now 65 and sporting a lifetime of banged up knees, she did what
she could. She needed surgery. She knew that, but who wants surgery?
Instead, she put it off, despite her gold-plated insurance from the DMV
where she had worked for the past 40 years. She knew she should do it
soon, though, since she was eligible for retirement at any time, and better
to do it when she was still on the clock and armed with a bucket of sick
pay. Why not go for it, both the surgery and the retirement? But she knew
why: because she was all alone. Not only would she have no one to help
her after the surgery, she would have nothing to do if she retired. She felt
stuck in her Mobius strip of a life, but that didn’t stop her from wanting
more, to get fixed up, move to Phoenix, join a book club, take up
knitting—something.
The bus was only a block away, and people began their digging in
pockets and shuffling toward the curb, lining up rather neatly. As the bus
pulled up, a young woman with dyed-red hair and carrying a banged-up
black violin case ran at a track-and-field pace from down the block,
stopping short right behind the blond-bearded man. She was relieved—no
way she could she be late again. She had gotten reamed out the last time
by both her first-hour teacher and the principal, and she sure didn’t want
to take that crap again. Besides, it was a privilege to go to the conservatory,
and she should do better, as she was told and told. Her parents had moved
to the city from Guatemala, and neither of them had a high school diploma
or barely even spoke English, and here she was, a high school senior
learning the violin from the best. Still, she was tired, tired of practice, tired
of expectations, tired of being the perfect daughter.
2023, Autumn / 181
The bus door opened, and the same old 7:23 crew filed on past the
big, sour bus driver—first the woman with the long grey ponytail, the
white-haired man in the suit on the iPhone, the young woman wearing a
skirt, and then the millennial guy with the blond beard, before the young
violinist finally stepped up and waved her card.
The new riders settled down randomly throughout the double bus,
and as it pulled away, each noted to themselves that the distinguished man
in the sport coat and tie that rode the bus with them every morning was
still sitting on the bench.
*
The next morning, the man in the blond beard rounded the corner
to the bus stop. He was feeling a lot better; one because his cold was almost
gone, and two, because the morning before he had initiated a conversation
about health clubs with the attractive girl. He came early to the stop hoping
she might be there. She wasn’t. But he noted the man sitting on the bench.
Weird—coming home the night before after a long day of slinging lattes,
he had noticed the man sitting in that very spot, and he was pretty sure he
hadn’t gotten on the bus that morning, either. Too weird. No way he was
there for the last 24 hours; that’s impossible.
Next up was the white-haired man wearing an autumn-colored
sweater vest and a wool jacket. As he crossed the street, he saw the man
sitting on the bench, legs crossed, looking forward. He, too, had noticed
him the previous evening, sitting there. The white-haired man looked
around, and his only other company was the usual young guy who needed
a Groomsman. He looked down the street for the bus, which wasn’t in
sight. It must be nothing, he thought. He simply went to work the day
before some other way, and here he was, as always. And last night—that
was really him last night, right? It was dark, after all. It must be my
imagination, he concluded. He smiled; the thought of spending the day
sitting at the bus stop was tempting, to just sit down and let the bus go by
and skip work. Very tempting.
The young administrative assistant arrived, and before she could
collect her thoughts or notice the man on the bench, the man with the blond
beard asked if the Y had a track, continuing a discussion they had the
morning before. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it. He was kind of cute
and seemed nice, but she was tired of relationships for the moment, having
just broken up with this guy who seemed to not know the difference
between fact and fiction. But still, the blond man seemed okay, and it was
just conversation.
Running as best she could, the woman with the long grey ponytail
hustled to the stop. She thought nothing of the man on the bench, having
forgotten about the morning before and not having noticed him the
previous evening.
The teen, dressed in all black and carrying her usual violin case,
walked up, proud that she wasn’t running behind for once, even though
she was tired from practicing late the night before for a recital Monday.
Was it all worth it? she wondered. After all, wanting to play violin for a
major orchestra was like wanting to play for the NBA. She saw the bus a
block away. She paid no attention to the man on the bench.
The bus pulled up and they filed on. Last to board was the
administrative assistant. She looked behind her at the man on the bench as
the door closed and the bus pulled out.
*
Friday morning came, and so did the rain. Not hard, just miserable,
drizzly rain. The white-haired man walked toward the corner, trench coat
lose, umbrella in hand, Totes on shoes. He ruminated over the fight he had
with his husband the night before. His husband had made him dinner, and
it was ruined by the time he got home late. He should have texted, but for
some reason he couldn’t admit he was wrong. At the corner, there was the
man in the sport coat and tie, soaking wet, sitting on the bench. The white-
haired man stopped and stared. He had seen the man in the sport coat in
that very spot the evening before. Was that two days in a row?
The woman with the long grey hair walked up ahead of schedule.
First she saw the white-haired man looking the wrong way for the bus. She
followed his eyes to the wet man on the bench. What the…? Did that guy
sit on that bench all night?
The administrative assistant, wearing a colorful shiny raincoat,
arrived and saw her fellow 7:23 busers. That guy! He was still there! No
way!
The blond man with a beard walked up and said hello to her. He
had been disappointed the morning before when she didn’t sit next to him,
but never say die. That guy! Everyone was looking at that guy! Just then,
the bus pulled up early. As if through muscle memory, they each filed on
patiently, folding up umbrellas, shaking rain off coats, and looking behind
them at the man on the bench. They each considered if there was
something someone should do—something they should do—before
settling in with their books and phones.
2023, Autumn / 183
As the bus left, the young conservatory student ran up. “Shit!” She
stomped her feet, turned, and started her walk back home, determined to
whine to her dad until he gave her a ride to school.
*
Weekends were way too short for the man with the blond beard.
When would he make an effort to find a decent job? He knew he needed
to go college again, something. But that thought disappeared as he arrived
at the stop to find the young administrative assistant already there. He said
hi. She nodded as if to point with her head, and he saw the man in the sport
coat sitting on the bench. He looked terrible, rumpled and soiled, with wet
leaves in his lap. His shoes were missing.
“Do you think he’s been here all weekend?” the man with the
blond beard whispered.
The administrative assistant shrugged.
The white-haired man crossed the street, and, not taking his eyes
off the man on the bench, moved over toward the other two 7:23
passengers. “Wow,” he whispered.
The grey-haired woman walk-ran up and stopped at the bench. She
looked at the three standing in a group, and then to where they were all
looking. “Good morning,” she said to the filthy man on the bench.
“Good morning,” he replied.
She looked around at everyone again, before asking, “You have a
few leaves on you there.”
He gazed off in the distance and said nothing.
“Everything going okay?”
He remained inscrutable.
She looked again at the other three and back to the man. Just a
few days ago he was normal, or at least seemed normal. Should she do
something? But what? It wasn’t like she was a social worker or something.
If working at the DMV teaches you anything, it’s to mind your own
business.
The administrative assistant felt like she had to do something. She
walked over as if crossing a minefield and sat on the far end of the bench,
looking at the man with concern. “Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning to you,” he said, eyes forward.
She looked back at all the other 7:23 riders, and back at the man.
“What’s going on?”
He nodded, still without looking at anyone. “I’m waiting for the
bus.”
“Monday comes fast, doesn’t it?”
He remained still.
The bus arrived, and no one knew what to do. But the white-haired
man had a meeting first thing, the man with the blond beard was due at
Starbucks, the DMV opened at 8:30, and the administrative assistant was
expected at eight and was very conscientious about that. So they all filed
on, one at a time, the administrative assistant last. She said to the driver as
she scanned her card, “Say, there’s a man back there, sitting on the
bench.…”
“He bother you?” the big, saggy-faced bus driver said, looking at
her breasts.
“No, it’s not that. I think there’s something wrong with him. I
think he’s had some sort of break. You know, with reality.”
“Mm-hmm. I’ll report it.”
This time she sat down next to the man with the blond beard.
“Wow,” she said.
He looked out the window at the man in the sport coat as they
pulled away. He wished he had done something. She did. She tried. What
kind of man was he? “That guy is crazy,” he said, instantly regretting it.
But the administrative assistant didn’t think anything about what
he said; she was focused on the fact that the bus driver didn’t call anyone.
Maybe he would at the end of the route? But she knew he wouldn’t. She
wondered why she didn’t do more. She could have helped him last week,
and now look at him; he didn’t even have shoes. What if he’s there in the
evening again? She decided that if he were, she would call someone. She
became mad at herself for not doing it moments before. So what if she
were late? If that’s all it takes to set her career back, then who needs it.
As the bus pulled away, the white-haired man felt his iPhone
vibrate, but he ignored it in favor of looking out the window at the man.
Could that be him someday? Sitting on a bench, wet, filthy, and shoeless?
The way things were going, it wasn’t hard to imagine. He decided that he
would talk to his husband. That’s what he would do. First, apologize. And
then maybe they could talk about making a change. Maybe consult, maybe
even the bed-and-breakfast in Tuscany they always dreamt about.
The woman with the long grey hair sat on the other side of the bus
and didn’t look at the man on the bench. She teared up and decided that
this would be the day she would turn in her retirement papers.
Back at the stop, the high school student carrying her violin case
ran up in time to see the back of the bus from two blocks away.
“Fuck!” She yelled, and stamped her Doc Martins. She flopped
down on the bench, violin case in her lap. “I can’t believe I missed it
2023, Autumn / 185
again,” she said to the man in the dirty sport coat. She leaned forward,
peering up the street as if the 7:43 bus would appear a good nineteen
minutes early. She leaned back and gave the man the once-over. “You look
like shit. Did you sleep out here all weekend?”
He smiled, still looking off into some private distance.
“I’m going to be sleeping outside if I get expelled.” She looked
around, leaned forward again, and rested her elbows on her knees.
“Is that a violin?” the man said.
She wondered how he knew that, given he had yet to look at her.
“Yeah.” She told him about her parents and how proud they were of her
and how she hoped someday she could play for an orchestra, but she knew
that she was likely looking at a job at “Starbucks or—best case—as an
administrative assistant or something.”
“Don’t give up your dreams too easily.”
“OKAY, Boomer.” But she smiled and knew he was right.
There they sat, both squinting in the morning sun, while leaves of
red and yellow, brittle and crisp, blew around their feet.
“Why are you sitting out here?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I guess because I’m not getting on that bus
anymore.”
She didn’t know what to say, but, “OK.”
He turned to look at her. His eyes were bloodshot. “Would you
play for me?”
“Here?”
He nodded.
She looked around and shrugged. She opened her case and took
out her violin. She tuned it briefly, took a big breath, and started playing.
He smiled. “Ah, Schubert, String Quintet in C Major.”
She stopped. “You know it?” She resumed playing, and beautiful
notes floated over the corner, bright, colorful notes that spoke of life itself.
He leaned back, face up to the sun.
BETH BROWN PRESTON

EYE OF THE STORM: OCALA, FLORIDA, 1914
My daddy's birthday, February 18th, 1914:

the cabin windows rattled and shook
with the coming of a southern winter squall.
Wide and long, the fields of cotton and sugar cane
lay fallow as sleep under a cover of black mud.
Deep fertile ditches ruined by torrents of endless rain.
From the kitchen floated the rich early morning aroma
of my grandpa Caesar frying catfish and slabs of pork bacon.
In the back room Grandma Mattie was birthing my daddy.

The midwife rolled her sleeves, pulled down thick stockings
from her heavy blue veined thighs. Her strong arms arched
over Grandma's heaving aching belly.
She tucked a sharp blade under the shuck mattress:
“Mattie, a knife will ease the woman pains.”
My daddy entered the world in the eye of a winter storm.

HIs head burst forth first like a ripe mango followed
by the body wet with dew and blood.
His first cry louder, more insistent than the whining wind,
or the staccato wail of a conch shell with news of his birth.
Thunder groaned and lightning cut the morning sky.

The infant was left to suckle on Grandma's breast.
She named her newborn “James.”
Gazed into his innocent brown eyes.
And in his eyes the reflection of winter storm clouds.

And in her ears the clatter
of hailstones bouncing on the tin roof,
the sound of rain descending
like a chant of dragons.
Preston
2023, Autumn / 187
AN ALL-AMERICAN GIRL: FOR GWENDOLYN BROOKS

TOPEKA, KANSAS, JUNE 7TH, 1917
Keziah:
Our baby girl’s birth was not an easy one. She lingered low
inside my womb for days and nights. Stubborn. Defiant even.
Willfully against a world she someday would come to know.
The midwife and her sister arrived singing to comfort me
sweet gospel hymns I recalled from those church Sundays.
“Push. Push.” My baby girl loosened her grip upon my womb
and entered this world squalling up a storm, telling us of her own pain.
David and I, we named our baby Gwendolyn Elizabeth—the tigress, the fierce.
David:
I hear Gwendolyn's voice at birth coming on strong.
We wanted her to own her mother’s gift for music,
hoped for the songs already to live inside her, to imitate the sound
of Kezzie playing Mozart or Haydn on our old upright piano
while she floated in the waters of her belly.
My poppa never lived to greet his grandbaby, my father,
a brave man who fled his destiny of chains and slavery
to join the Union Army and fight in the Civil War.
Poppa would have been so proud of our infant girl.
Keziah:
Washed clean of my blood, she nursed at my swollen breast,
lapped the milk of our songs. Baptized in holy and sanctifying grace,
at home, sleeping in my arms, she seemed to know all wisdom.
Gifted of a thought deep and wide as the waters of the Kaw
or the watershed of Shunganunga Creek, she was moistened
with our kisses as we celebrated her born day, already knowing
whom she might become—so beauteous of regard, so righteous of
language.
Preston
AT THE LIBRARY: MONTREAL, QUEBEC CIRCA 1950

FOR MY FATHER
Portrait of a Black man as scholar among ancient volumes:

Abandoned by his native country for Canada,
followed the North Star to the destination of his mind's bright freedom.
His desire to write of the slaying of monsters:
“Then Beowulf spied, hanging on the wall,
a mighty sword, hammered by giants, strong and blessed
with a powerful magic, the finest of all weapons.
But so massive no ordinary man could heft
its carved and decorated length. He drew the sword
from its scabbard, broke the chain at its hilt.
Then savage with anger and desperate
lifted the sword high over his head
and struck Grendel dead with all the strength he had left....”
And the Black man wandered that library's dusty corridors

in a sacred building nestled on Montreal's steepest hills
gathering the endurance of mind to conquer his task:
to render the poem, so early it was sung only to kings,
a ballad, written by no one knows, yet passed on, in tradition,
glorifying the fierce and brave deeds of a warrior.
And the Black man himself became a warrior,
wielding the sword of language, fighting the good fight,
who basked in the light of a certain fame,
never worried about the consequences of his bravery,
save his own honor, of greater value than any poem.
The Black man rendered dreams a world without monsters.
Preston
A DREAM
Where the snow blinding, white lay cross the fields so thick and deep
we could step thigh high into a drift and the sharp red glint
of a redbird’s wing flashed above our bowed heads.
Or while jogging up the mountain road one night during spring thaw,
our eyes barely perceived that dark place at roadside
where a grizzly she bear spied our footfall from the shadows.
Up the mountain path to our cabin nestled on a hillside (cont)
2023, Autumn / 189
where all the simple dreams of life came true.

On the woodstove fire a kettle warmed to a shrill whistle
while the wind circled tornadoes among the leaves.
And where we watched, very still, through the open doorway
as the black she bear crouched on hind legs beside the creek teeming with trout
scooped out the helpless fish its blue gills trembling with death.
Where you stripped me naked in the chill,
wrapped my shivering body in your heavy lumberjack shirt
and a ragged flannel blanket. Too frozen to make love
we brewed tea. Cracked teacups filled with Earl Grey,
the comfort of warm liquid spilled onto our china saucers.
Our souls came to reside in those woods:
to grapple in the silence of growing things—
the trees added each a year to our own brief lives.
Where no one knew what secret we were withholding
from those below in the valley more broken who dared not dream.
Where we huddled together in the night beyond speaking.
Preston
GERALD PATRICK
DO YOU REMEMBER?
He moved slowly, instinctively aware that it would not be a good

thing to fall. So he tottered a bit, stopped from time to time to steady
himself, but kept on going. The arm crutch was a welcome assist to both
movement and balance. People noticed him but he didn’t notice them
noticing him. Their world included an awareness of his; his world was
increasingly oblivious of theirs. On and on he went, slowly but with focus.
Pausing for a moment, he realized that he did not quite know what
he was about. Where was he going? Oh yes. Lunch. He was going for
lunch. Just like always. Another half block and he was there: 311 Main
Street, Middletown, Connecticut. The Happy Hunter Café and Grill.
He used to go there frequently, first with his wife, Mildred, then
with his son, Henry. Mildred had died a few years ago, and he now lived
with the son since he could longer manage by himself. He vaguely recalled
that he was not supposed to be going out alone on jaunts like this, but….
As he entered the café the screen door banged closed behind him.
The noise was oddly cheerful, a kind of unmelodic fanfare announcing his
arrival. He shuffled in, looked about; vestiges of events from the distant
past crouched in the corners of the room, beckoning. He felt tentative at
first but regained his composure in time to present himself to the interior
with what he hoped was an air of some dignity. He offered an enigmatic
little smile to the pleasant-looking woman behind the counter, who
immediately recognized him.
“Hey Charlie, good to see you. It’s been quite a while.”
This was Gladys, whom he had known rather well in earlier days,
though she had since become almost a stranger. Gladys. Glad. Seems to
suggest a joyful person, Bonnie equals good, Dolores equals sad. As a
child he was often teased by his father, who told the boy that he was named
after an old friend of his—Charlemagne.
A response was forming grudgingly in Charlie’s mind but did not
take shape in time for expression. Maintaining the fragile smile he eyed a
free table in the corner.
“Take a seat. Anywhere’s okay. Will you have your usual?”
“What’s that?”
“You know; BLT on wheat toast. That’s what you’ve been
ordering for seventeen years now.”
“BLT. I guess that’s bacon, lettuce, and tomato. Sounds pretty
good. You make that?”
“Sure do. Same as always. You never fail to rave over it—
especially when I toss in a little extra mayo.”
“Well, yes, that sounds fine, though I can’t say that I’m very
hungry. Had a late…breakfast. Maybe I shouldn’t have come.”
He took a seat and was soon facing an absurdly large glass of iced
tea—refills on the house. Somewhere in the back of his mind he noted that
he would need to make sure he knew where the bathroom was located.
“The sandwich will be along in a few minutes.”
The sandwich came as promised, and Charlie did indeed enjoy it,
as he had been told he would—as he always did. But halfway through he
faltered, then quit.
“Can’t you manage anymore? C’mon Charlie, you need to keep
up your strength.”
“I know; that’s what Henry keeps telling me, but I just don’t have
as much appetite as I used to. Anyways, that half will do me fine for
breakfast tomorrow—maybe even tonight’s supper.”
“A half a BLT ain’t no supper, friend, no matter how good it may
be.”
2023, Autumn / 191
He found his weary mind drifting back as if homeward to the

many years they had lived in Middletown, and to Mildred. They had had
a long marriage—the first and only for them both—and they both
considered it good, quite good enough—though there were a fair number
of disappointments. There always are. After giving birth to the first of their
children, Mildred flourished; she loved saying to the daughter, “You never
gave me any trouble.” Henry was the second child, and here the outcome
was not so favorable. He had difficulties from the beginning, and after the
birth Mildred experienced a psychotic break. Over the years there were
periods—long or short—of relative normalcy, but the bad thing, like a
caged animal, would eventually break out to attack her once more,
generally in times of stress. Charlie expressed sympathy, tried to help, but
it wasn’t easy, and he really didn’t know how to go about it. In any case
he never felt he had a wife who could be counted on when he needed her.
There were many other memories as well. Most were locked in
deep recesses of Charlie’s mind. The key had been lost long ago.
He felt close to his son Henry, whom he now saw every day,
sustaining the tired memory. But he seemed to have lost track of Caroline,
the firstborn. He had a notion that she lived somewhere in Pennsylvania.
She seldom visited or even called.
In fact Caroline was quite an independent soul who had built
herself a fulfilling life, including family and career. Henry on the other
hand was tender and loving—vulnerable in a way—but somehow limited.
Never interested in girls, never married, never finished college, never had
much of a career—just odd jobs and other things that soon petered out. He
seemed to have found his calling at last in taking care of his father—and
of course, continuing to mourn for his beloved mother, his first and only
love.
Charlie in his turn was sufficiently aware to be grateful, thankful
not only that his son was willing to give him the help that was so essential,
but also that this gave him the opportunity, in a limited sense, to take care
of Henry as well. There was now a comfortable roof over his head, and
when his dad died he would inherit the house and a small trust fund.
Caroline needed neither.
After Mildred’s passing Charlie continued to come to the Happy
Hunter with Henry—or rather Henry, endlessly watchful and attentive,
would find a means of getting him there. It seemed a way to give his dad
some exercise, as well as some social contact while he still had some
ability to respond to it. Today’s solo outing came at a time when Henry
was doing his volunteer work at the local library. He would be shocked
when he got back to the house, and would never know whether his dad
realized that his little escapade was strictly forbidden.
Somehow Charlie found his way home, though at the last street
corner he was unsure which way to turn, which gave him quite a fright.
When he came in Henry was waiting for him, livid.
“Dad, where have you been? I was getting ready to call the
police.”
“Well, I just went out for lunch, you know, like we always do.”
“What we always do is I go with you so you don’t get lost or
something. You had me worried sick!”
“I see. I mean, I didn’t realize…. I’m sorry, Henry.”
“It’s okay. I guess nothing bad happened. But please, Dad, not
again. Not by yourself. That’s why I’m here.”
“I know that’s why you’re here, and I’m truly grateful. But
y’know, a man needs his freedom—at least a little bit of freedom. Even an
old man like me.”
“Freedom is fine, Dad, but so is safety. In your condition, frankly
you have to be cautious. It’s the only way to stay alive.”
“Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it….”
“What? What do you mean by that?”
“I guess I was being stupid. Yes, of course I must be careful, and
cautious, and safe, even if it costs me my freedom.”
“That’s a deal, Dad. I know it’s not what you would prefer, but
it’s the only sensible choice.”
“Yes, you’re right. Not again. I promise, Henry. I’ll try to
remember.”
That evening, after supper, both were quieter than usual. Charlie
was dealing with his embarrassment, his shame, his confusion at having
hurt his devoted son. But if he was honest with himself, he saw that there
was also resentment—a feeling of being overprotected, even infantilized.
Henry was getting over—not so much anger, but anxiety. And
actually there was a tinge of irritation at his father for having caused him
such needless distress.
At times like these, when there was little being said, he felt more
than ever the loss of his mother, as well as the longing to know his dad
more deeply, to understand him at last. Yet he knew that this would never
again be possible, in the usual sense. Charlie was becoming almost an
alien, and Henry knew it would only get worse. He had become foolish,
and rebellious to boot. Worrisome reflections.
But Charlie could still pull a surprise or two. Though he had
2023, Autumn / 193
seemed to be dozing he suddenly sat up and commented: “Henry, there’s

something I want to tell you.”
“What’s that, Dad?”
“Well, maybe I’ve already told you, can’t quite remember, but
anyway it’s something you ought to know.”
Henry waited.
“You see, I was once unfaithful to your mother.”
“No!”
“Well. I’m afraid yes. Only once, and the woman meant nothing
to me, but for some reason that’s what I did. And I’ve regretted it ever
since.”
“Dad, how could you do such a thing?”
“Well, Henry, I guess I was just lonely.”
“Lonely? How could you be lonely? You had me, and Caroline—
a family. And you had a wife for god’s sake. More than I ever had.”
“Yes, I suppose you could say that I had those things. That I
should have been satisfied.”
“Why are you telling me this, Dad? Why are you telling me this
now?” Henry was on his feet, and his voice was trembling.
Reactions jostled in Charlie’s mind. Why indeed? And why now?
He knew he’d upset his son, and also that he had somehow tainted the
memory of his wife by letting Henry know. Such thoughts were quickly
repressed; he settled for a lame excuse. “I’m telling you because I thought
you would want to know. That you ought to know. And I am telling it now,
before I forget it forever.”
Charlie was aware of other feelings, which climbed back into his
consciousness more and more clearly as he thought about it. Perhaps
Henry needed to know that his parents’ marriage, which he considered so
perfect, was not quite perfect after all. Nor his father, obviously. And
especially that his mother, whom he idolized, was not perfect either. These
thoughts could not find expression. Maybe that was just as well.
Henry crumpled back into his chair. He said nothing. Tears ran
down his cheeks.
Somehow they got through the rest of the evening. Bedtime was
the usual routine, though Henry was stiff and almost mechanical in doing
the things he needed to do for his father.
Once in bed Charlie took the pills Henry had laid out for him.
Someday they might include morphine; soon, was his wish. He heaved a
deep sigh and pulled the covers up to his chin in a self-protective gesture
he had carried forward from his childhood. Someone whispered in his ear.
Perhaps it was Mildred? He thought he detected a note of urgency, but he

couldn’t make out the words.
Meanwhile, in his own bed, Henry was still brooding. He fell
asleep rather quickly but soon had a dream. It was a dream about a
dream—another nightmare. He was an anxious child of maybe ten or
twelve. In his dream his mother came to him to offer understanding and
solace, as she always did.
“Henry dear, that awful dream will fade soon enough. Just breathe
deeply and relax.”
“Yes, Mom.”
“Would you like me to get in bed with you the way we always do?”
“I don’t know, Mom. I think I’m getting too old for that.”
“Nonsense. You’re still my little boy.”
“But what would Dad say?”
“Dad doesn’t need to know. It’ll be our little secret.”
EMILY-SUE SLOANE
THE LAST GAS STATION
did Covid shut it down

or maybe it was the war
yes, it must have been the war
that ushered in
abandonment, ironic victory
in that other war, the one
to save the Earth or rather
its inhabitants because the Earth
well, it will go on spinning, but life
stands on the precipice

small price to pay
but even so, watching
death leave a trail
of unquenchable thirst —
no time to wait
for treads to wear thin
and rust to conquer steel —
it brings a sadness like
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 195
coming across
a bleached-bone
skull half buried
in the desert and
waiting for the wind
to whistle a new chapter
in the old story of towns
rising and falling
with the next traveling show
Sloane
A MOMENT OF GRACE
Unlocked chapel door

no rules of entry posted
so I did at off times
venture in
to climb uneven stone steps

sit in the balcony
under the rose window
watching dust motes
ride rays down
toward empty pews
wood buffed
to catch the light
irridescent as the spray
that celebrates a waterfall
awakening after
winter’s long silence
On one lucky day
an organist worked
pedals and keys
head bowing
back bending
with the swells
rising through
massive silver pipes
(cont)
carrying a message
of peace and even joy
to an uncertain young heart
hidden in the shadows
Had I known
what grief would come
I’d have held more tightly
to the moment
Sloane
A NICKEL APIECE
A beat-up Corolla idles,

trunk agape, as a woman
dressed in drudgery
inspects a recycling bin
at the end of a driveway
waiting for the town
to collect and sort
and do whatever it is they do
with the plastic, metal
and glass containers
in the name of protecting
the environment,
which they don’t say

includes the chain of profit
with its promises of freshness
in our food if not the landfills,
the sea, the air, and
in the name of easing
our angst about so much trash
and the way it can whip up
a storm so fierce
it will topple trees and carve
new ocean pathways
through island barriers.
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 197
The woman, intent

on her sifting, plucks
soda cans and beer bottles
that she’ll cash in
for nickels, winnings
she might or might not use
to buy fuel for body and car.
She feels eyes on her, looks up.
A wave to the homeowner
seals a pact of mutual
gratitude and forgiveness.
Sloane
MORNING WALK
Perhaps I should have dressed
this morning for a hike
on the moors in Devon
Rain ensemble
jacket and pants
shiny and noisy
like the snowsuits
our mothers yanked
over cordoroys
before ushering us out
to build forts and a family
of roly-poly, carrot-nosed people
who would later melt
into memory
Protection against
dawn’s mizzle
Not rain, you couldn’t
call it drizzle, neither
was it fog exactly, though
fog was surely there
More like walking
inside clouds
where cows you hear
lowing in the distance
rise up to block (cont)
your path, startling

and startled
at your intrusion
on their grazing
Where every step
battles the muck
and mud that soaks
and sucks your boots
as if to hold you there
until the sun has drunk
its fill, peeled back the veil,
coaxing you with
warming hands
to shed that outer skin
for the trail walk back
through wildflowers,
over stiles and across
broad swaths of green
high above a craggy coast
Sloane
ROBERT L PENICK
BEATING BACK THE NIGHT
It doesn’t work for you now,

the way it once did,
its arms draping around
your shoulders like a shawl
to warm your coldest moment.
It is no longer a tonic,
does not fill the gaps
between your heart and other
organs of doubt.
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 199
It is now time for you

to light candles of hope,
to fire every lantern and
stir the embers in your
cooling grate.
The night can be held at bay,

It fears the sun, its warmth
and catalyst for growth.
What you need now is blue sky.

Penick
MARY LEWIS
STAYS ON THE RIVER
I hadn’t been on the river in years, and then only in inner tubes.
There was that summer when Tyler was ten and he and his buds wanted to
tube every weekend, and I obliged as the adult presence. They loved to
ram into each other like bumper cars, hang on like each black tube was a
segment of some enormous water caterpillar, then come apart for the
rapids, and see who could go fastest down the rapids without capsizing in
the foam.
Now Marcy and I and two other women stood at the bridge on
Pole Line Road, each with a kayak, mine a rental. I’d never tried this
before but I put in like the rest of them.
Marcy got this group together, and I couldn’t let her down. She
feels so bad for what happened to me, and maybe this will make it better,
and I won’t have to hear so much about it anymore. Kayla I knew from
aerobics class; she was a conversation filler who loved to talk in the locker
room about her paleo diet and awesome BMI. Carrie I didn’t know: she
ran a greenhouse, and that’s how Marcy knew her, since she supplied
flowers for the weddings Marcy planned.
A warm day in July, light breeze, birds singing, nothing to worry
about. Three women who knew how to handle these skittish beasts, and
me. To them a dead tree snagging from one bank was no big whoop, but I
had to concentrate all the time, how to stroke hard enough to slant away,
but not turn sideways or, horrors, backwards.

Because I was always on the lookout for the next lurking boulder
that could rip my boat apart, I couldn’t relax enough to chatter. They
probably thought I was still grieving, but really, I was just trying to
survive.
Then came the first rapids, and I couldn’t help it; my heart pumped
loud enough for me to hear it. The roiling water carried Kayla’s boat along
like it was a toy the river loved. Then Carrie, whose strong strokes took
her in a clean line through the rapids.
“Aim for the point of the V,” Marcy called from behind me.
The point of the V downstream, with smooth water between the
two angled sides. I knew that from tubing, but you couldn’t really go
wrong in a tube. Now I had control, if I knew how to use it, but I kept
zigzagging, nearly went in sideways, but somehow managed at the last
second to make the bow point the right way, and we dipped and rose on
the waves, my boat and me. I let out a yip, but then I saw the big muddy
bank straight ahead. How had the others not crashed into it? I stuck out my
paddle like a joisting spear, but the current by some magic right-angled to
pour itself alongside the bank, and I never got a chance or had the need to
push off.
As the water spread out below the rapids, I joined the other two in
the quiet water. Marcy’s boat came churning on behind, and they all
congratulated me, my first rapids.
“Way to go, Jordan, you kept that boat going straight.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve done it in a tube, but I had to kick off the bank.”
I paddled in a circle just so see if I could. “These things are great; can’t
believe I’d never been in one.”
There was that time when the wedding party rented kayaks to
make it like a destination wedding. It was for Tyler and Melba’s friends
though, not for me, the mom.
Kayla paddled close, “This river's pretty tame, good place to
begin.”
I was ready for the next sentence.
“Now if you go to the Rum or the Kettle up north, you get your
class II’s and III’s.”
I didn’t take the bait. Kayla would go on about trips she’d taken
as a teen at summer camp, decades before.
Marcy back-paddled to be next to me. “Nice thing about this river,

you get to drift along between the rapids.” She hung onto my boat, and we
2023, Autumn / 201
floated like that for a while. “You’re a good sport, Jordan.”

“Why, because I’m actually doing something other than mope?”
“No, because you came on this thing, to make me feel good.”
“Here, this should feel good, too.” I slapped my paddle on the
water, which sprayed fat drops over her head and shoulders.
She shrieked, and splashed back, so I got my own shower of sun-
speckled drops.
Marcy was a good friend, better than most. She was the one to sit
with me through those early dark hours at home after all the bustle of the
funeral, which she’d taken over, with the same skill she used to plan
Tyler’s wedding.
I couldn’t face work, and they had to get someone else to handle
the high school front office for three weeks. It wasn’t the work so much as
having to face all those sympathetic people. They all knew Tyler had slid
off County 23 right into the ravine along Lenora valley. That he died on
impact. That he’d only been married two years. Poor Melba, but she had a
chance to start over again. Me, I’m not so sure.
“I’m going to practice going straight,” I made a serious face for

Marcy, and she let me go ahead on the calm deep water. Kayla drifted near
shore, applying sun goop on her bare shoulders. “Here you want some?”
“I’m good, thanks.” My long-sleeve did the trick, plus my billed
hat.
“You’re lucky, but I have to be careful with my light coloring.”
On she went about sunscreens, but then right in the middle of her
opinion of 50+ SPF she came out with, “You know, Jordan, I can’t imagine
how hard it was to lose your only son. I’d die, but here you are carrying
on. I think I love you for that.”
I wanted to paddle away, but made myself hold steady in the
water. So much of grief is trying to handle it for others.
“You are a dear to say that Kayla.” In a way, I really meant it.
Next to each other in our kayaks, she looked at me sideways. “I
just love floating on the river, don’t you?”
We drifted in the shade of overhanging boxelders that let the sun
through in speckles on the smooth hulls of our little boats. Kayla talked
about a trip she made in high school and tipped over, but this sweet guy
came by and helped her, and they dated the rest of the summer. I hated the
way she took over a conversation, but when it was filler, and I didn’t have
to do any more than nod once in a while, I let it graze over me like the new
twigs of the overhanging trees.
Marcy came up behind us, and we three lazed in the current that
made a slow movie of the passing bank laced with roots laid bare by the
river, dangling long grass from the last flood. Kayla started in on gluten
and fasting, and that pulled Marcy right in. I’d heard it before, low carb,
no carb, paleo this, vegan that, and I let it move along like the stream, and
managed something snarky: “Give me a good hunk of broccoli and I’m
happy, though recently I’ve come to think of tater tots as a food group.”
All this time Carrie was way ahead, but I could see her land on the
next island, and decided to find out what she was looking at. She hadn’t
said much this whole trip, and that would be fine by me.
“What do you think she’s looking at?” I asked the other two.
Kayla said, “That’s Carrie for you, always finding something in
the muck.
“I’m going over to see.”
Marcy reached over to slap my kayak on the rear. “Sure honey,
it’ll do you good.”
I didn’t want to look at what I knew would be her puppy dog eyes,
even though they were well intentioned, and I struck out.
It felt good to paddle on my own, to make my boat go right or left
with so little effort. I could get into this.
I paddled behind Carrie, and nearly grounded in the gravel. The

sun blazed through the water to reflect sparkly grains of sand. “What are
you looking at?”
“Little holes in the muck, I want to see what’s making them.” She
leaned so far over the side of her kayak I thought it would spill her out.
I couldn’t get a good look from where I was, so I waited for her to
beach her kayak, and she helped me pull mine out of the water.
We crouched in the shallow water, heads bowed so close they
nearly touched. My hair fell forward and grazed the water. Now I could
see them, hundreds of small dark holes in the stream bed.
”Maybe best not to shade them.”
“How could they tell if it was us or a cloud?”
“Good point.” She slowly scooped her hands under the loose
mucky bottom, then lifted them quickly. A dozen tiny shrimp-like things
squiggled in her palms. “Amphipods, some call them sideswimmers or
scuds. “
“I never knew they were there.” I tried to do what she did, but
came up empty.
“Try a fresh spot.”
2023, Autumn / 203
I moved a little ways down the beach, and Carrie came along.
“You have to be stealthy.”
This time I came up with three or four and could feel them tickle
my palm.
Carrie reached for my wrist, “Do you mind?” But she didn’t wait
for my answer. While she steadied my hand, she took out a small lens, like
the kind jewelers use. “Little buggers still lively, want to see?”
I looked through the tiny circle of glass, but couldn’t focus, and I
let them slip away.
“Here, I’ll scoop some up so you can hold the lens.”
I held the lens but all I could see were tiny blurs of movement in
her palm.
“Hold it close to your eye, then move your whole head closer.”
I could pretend I’d seen it, and that would be the end, but she kept
holding her hand up for me. So I gave it another try, but it still wouldn’t
work.
“Hey you two, you going to join us?” Kayla’s voice, just off shore.
Sure, we could do that, then I’d be off the hook, but Carrie hailed
back, “Hold on a bit, we’ve got something cool.”
“It’s alright Carrie, I can see it well enough without.”
Carrie cocked her head and gave me a look from under a lock of
wet hair.
The sun beat on the back of my neck, and I wanted to splash water
on to cool off. The only way to get her to stop looking at me that way, was
to keep trying, so I did, with the lens so close to my face my eyelashes ran
into it, and then I moved my head close to her hand.
Then, a sudden moment of focus, with all those tiny legs beating
like mad, but then I lost it.
“Keep trying, you’ll get it.”
I heard Kayla’s boat scrape on the gravel nearby. “I guess we
could have a snack or something, unless you want to eat river muck.”
Now that I’d seen it once, I wanted more, so I kept at it, ignoring
the kink in my neck. I also wanted to honor Carrie’s still hand, held out in
midair for me.
Marcy’s voice out on the water. “I’m doing circles here, which is
great fun, but we do have a ways to go, girls.”
I wanted to glance at Carrie’s face, with the smirk that had to be
there, but more than that I wanted to see those delicate feathery feet again
in the lens.
The focus came again, longer this time. “I see them.”
“I know, you’re holding your breath.”

The little buggers were struggling on their sides. “Their world is
shrinking.”
“We can put them back.”
But I grabbed her hand to keep it there.
“Ok we’ll double its world.” She dribbled another drop into her
palm with her other hand.
“They’re so grateful.”
“Well, you are anyway.”
Marcy called out from the stream. “Look I’ve got granola bars, to
tide you over till lunch.”
“C’mon Marcy, you might as well pull up too,” Kayla called from
the beach.
Still poring over the little beings in her hand with me, Carrie said,
“Sometimes they find little bits of dead skin around your fingernails.”
Kayla must have heard. “You mean I don’t have to go to the nail
salon anymore?”
The little scuds circled sideways in their tiny world.
When Carrie called out, “I don’t think they have your shade of
polish,” I banged the lens against my eyelid. Why would she talk to anyone
else right now?
I could hear Marcy pull her boat onto the beach. “Hey Carrie,
looks like you’ve got a new nature lover.”
She was trying so hard to cheer me up I had to resist. “I’ve always
loved nature.”
“Sure, the birds and the flowers, but now little bugs in the mud!”
I lifted my head up and rubbed my neck. “Never really looked at
them. Have you ever seen these things close up?”
“Sure, well, maybe in biology class.”
Carrie let her hand trail back in the water, releasing her captives.
I gave her back the lens. “Where do you get one of these.”
“It’s called a loupe, I can give you a link.” She tucked it away in
her vest of many pockets while giving me a look as if to say sorry for
breaking up with me.
We all sat on the gravel beach of the little island, and I let my feet
dangle in the water, toes curling into the soft muck.
“The water’s so warm here, compared to the river,” I said.
“Sure where it gets to be still and only two inches deep.” Carrie
passed around a bag of peanuts.
2023, Autumn / 205
Kayla had something under her butt, so it looked like she was
sitting on a little chair in some studio ready for the photographer. “Ever do
a sauna, Jordan? Really relaxes me and gets rid of all those toxins.”
Sure and sad memories. That’d work.
She kept on. “You know how in Africa, some places I think, the
women get together and wail when someone dies?”
And then, before anyone could answer, Kayla sat up tall and put
her hands up by her ears like some evangelical in church, and made a little
moaning sound.
And wouldn’t you know, Marcy joined her, but it didn’t last long,
and the sound trailed off.
I had to say something. “Look, you’re all very kind, but we can
just hang out, you know. That’s better than tiptoeing around me all the
time.”
But Kayla made such long face I said, “OKAY,I’ll wail with you
if it would make you all feel better.”
Kayla grabbed my arm, in a nice way. “No, Jordan, we want to
make you feel better.”
“I know, and that’s wonderful. So OKAY,how do you do this
wailing thing?”
Kayla shifted her log or whatever it was and composed her face,
like a teacher might. “Well, it’s a high-pitched thing, that wobbles a lot,
like this.”
“I should be in some kind of burka, shouldn’t I?”
But I gave it a try, and so did Marcy, and even Carrie. It sounded
pretty good, and I wondered what the birds thought of us, like that
kingfisher that looped down into the water right in front of us.
Then we faded out and listened to the river.
Marcy let out a deep breath. “Not so bad I thought.”
“Could have used a little more volume,” I said.
“Maybe we need to warm up like for choir practice.” Kayla would
know about that.
I laughed, and then everyone else did, as though that gave them
permission.
Despite how weird this was, I had to admit something was going
on between us.
But why didn’t Carrie take part?
Kayla must have wondered too. “So Carrie, you’ve got a nice
singing voice, why not join in?
Carrie sat with her arms around her knees rocking a little back and
forth. “Thinking another angle, you know this goes on in nature, like with
coyotes.”
She shifted to a crouch and then to all fours. I expected to see her
ears grow hair and points, as she started low and soft, then scaled up to a
long whoo woo oooh that made me wonder how she could do it all in one
breath. When she stopped, I picked up with a little call, and the others
joined. It felt so awkward I almost stopped, but the rest were right there,
so I kept on. When one stopped, another kept going, or if we all stopped,
one of us started up again. The stream of sound was like a wire strung from
bank to bank, taut, thin, strong, that held us all up. Even when it did end,
the memory of that sound tugged with a power that drew out sobs so deep
I thought there’d be nothing left of me. I don’t like groups hugs, but this
time, it was all I had.
In that warm salty dark of our center, there were words, but I don’t
know what they were, it didn’t matter. I was not the only one sobbing my
heart out.
When we fell apart, it was like we didn’t know what to do next.
And then Marcy said we needed more than snacks right now, and we got
into our real lunches, sandwiches, apples, lemonade, chips.
“You know Tyler loved the river,” I said.
“Yes, we know.” Like a Greek chorus.
“He should be here and not me.”
Carrie, sitting next to me, put her arm around me. I thought it
would be Marcy. The difference was, Carrie didn’t say anything.
I started rocking and she stayed with me. An eagle screeched. The
soft gurgle of the river hitting a rock midstream. I scooped up some more
muck because I needed those little creatures in the palm of my hand again.
DIANA DONOVAN
SELF-HELP
The PTSD worksheet is like you’d expect:

trigger | age | what happened | where stored in body
and silence is only a survival skill until it isn’t.
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 207
You know me: big on self-help, always looking for clues

like what makes a person drink a bottle and a half of wine
or why lying flat out on the ground can quiet the voices.
I remember you said, The stories we tell ourselves aren’t always true
as if I wouldn’t do the right thing—put the pieces where they belong,
as if you’d known all along that we were half-mirage.
When isolation masquerades as devotion, when violence disguises itself as love,

how to differentiate between perpetrator, family, friend, lover?
There is danger in mixing things up.
As if I hadn’t realized that grief is a poor substitute for rage

and silence is only a survival skill until it isn’t.
The PTSD worksheet is like you’d expect.
Donovan
CAROLYN JABS
CHEMISTRY
Stranded without paper,

I can only watch
as a new day evaporates.
Without annotation, ideas crumble
the moment there’s movement.
Situational thought. Nothing takes shape
without the necessary mix
of time, place, circumstance.
The slightest disruption
alters what’s possible.
Unseen creatures calling.
Earth humming softly
to herself. A memory of
my father teaching me
(cont)
to grow crystals, tying thread

around a tiny, sparkling seed,
so it could dangle in saturated solution.
What he thought he was teaching
was not what I learned.
The art of patient waiting,
everything suspended
as evaporation converts nothing
into something pleasing and clear,
like a poem coalescing
around a fleck of memory.
Jabs
SHADOW
Undone by a smudge of purple,

petals tangled in grass.
The jacaranda shrugs off
summer’s early miracle,
becomes unremarkable.
Shriveled petals shock
because a much-loved dog
spent his last afternoon
settled under this tree.
By now, I should know
how memory operates.
Even when I give the day
my full attention,
it will slip my grasp.
The dog will stop breathing
when I look away,
leaving nothing but a shadow
of a memory gone dormant
until this faithful tree
reminds me how that dog
could run full speed into twilight
without looking back.
Jabs
2023, Autumn / 209
TECH SUPPORT
I’m told I am in error, redo what I have done.

This problem requires a supervisor
trained to be calm despite malfunction.
We begin again. The device reaches out
in search of a satellite. The supervisor tells me
this could take a while. And, so, as women do,
we talk. She tells me she works from home,
two-year-old banished, so she can be on the phone
with people like me. She says it’s been hard.
People hold her responsible because nothing
works right anymore. Her sister died in a car crash
one week ago, leaving behind a one-year-old
who doesn’t understand where her mother has gone.
She will raise the child. I tell her I am truly sorry
for her loss. If I could, I would bring her a meal,
give her time off to grieve, hug her niece,
console her mother. Just then, my device blinks on.
We resume our roles. I thank her for her help.
She assures me I am a valued customer.
Reluctantly, I hang up, wishing for a number
I could call to report a terrible error.
Jabs
WEEK END
Late Sunday afternoon, I take my time

cleaning the kitchen, wiping weekend crumbs
off the counter, stacking papers in piles.
If I had a book bag, I would pack it.
Late light slants across the lawn as it does
every single day. Why are the shadows
saturated with sorrow tonight? Why,
after all this time, do I want so much
to talk to you? My rituals aren’t yours,
but you introduced me to this rhythm.
Make one day each week different from the rest.
Abandon the To Do list. Consider
a nap, in the sun if possible. Laugh (cont)
in the company of people you love.

Take a long walk. Find a way to worship.
Read what pleases but will not corrupt you.
Eat what’s luscious (unless it’s an apple).
Spend one sweet day remembering Eden
where nothing much was expected of us,
except our ignorance. This might be why
I never asked better questions when you
might have answered. You must have understood
innocence would not last. You must have known
how love and loss depend on each other.
Still, you insisted on one holy day,
knowing it would end in melancholy.
We aren’t suited for living in paradise.
Before the light fades, a new week
assembles itself in my mind. It’s not
likely to live up to expectations.
Still, I find myself unexpectedly willing
to be surprised by what comes next.
Jabs
JANICE E RODRÍGUEZ
GO WEST
“No more pencils, no more books,” Becca Weaver chanted as she

steered the rental van through mid-day traffic that shimmered with heat.
She braked suddenly to miss a bent, white-haired woman who stepped into
the intersection against the traffic light.
A chorus of impatient honks and beeps began as Becca waited for
the old woman to totter across the street. She waved her cane to
acknowledge the van, and Becca waved back. The old woman mimed how
very hot she was.
“It’s hot in here, too, ma’am,” Becca muttered as the old woman
reached the curb. She eyed the settings for the air-conditioner that, even at
full blast, hadn’t cooled the cab of the van. At the next traffic light, she
scooped her hair off her sweaty neck and caught it in a high ponytail.
Another ten blocks or so, and she’d be on the highway. She glanced left
down a broad avenue, the route she usually took to the high school.
2023, Autumn / 211
Used to take, she thought, and began to chant again: “No more
pencils, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks.”
Remembering how many of her colleagues had given her dirty looks
when she resigned her position as teacher of tenth- and eleventh-grade
English, Becca mentally rearranged the apostrophe—teachers’, not teacher’s.
“They’re just jealous,” Maria told her the day after her resignation
was made public. They were standing in the school office, Becca clearing
out her mailbox and Maria ordering a set of prisms for her physics class.
“You think?” Becca asked.
“Trust me.”
“I always do.”
Janet, the vice principal’s secretary, agreed. “You’re the number
one topic of gossip in the teachers’ lounge. You ignore them. It’s just sour
grapes. Get out now, while you can. Have an adventure while you’re
young. God knows you can’t do that at my age.”
“I’m twenty-eight. That’s not exactly young anymore. I have two
gray hairs now,” Becca said, running a hand through the honey-brown hair
at her temple.
Janet snorted. “We’ll talk again when you’re sixty. For now, I say
you’re young, and I also say that Maria and I are throwing you a farewell party.”
The other teachers, jealous or not, showed up for the party and the
free food. The principal gave a short and obviously recycled speech about
the joys of teaching and the sadness of moving on. Becca opened a card,
signed by all, that held the regulation English teacher present—a gift card
from a bookstore. Janet presented her a compass to guide her on her
adventures. Maria bought her a pair of cute and flirty pajamas to wear in
case she met someone special on those adventures.
Zipping over the highway through the sweltering heat, Becca already
missed Janet and Maria, but not enough to turn around and go back to her old
life. She strained to reach the accelerator pedal, lamenting that so little in the
world was built for short people like her, and managed to keep the van moving
up the offramp. She began to chant again: “No more pencils….”
No more outdated books with pages that were dog-eared and
whose spines were held together with duct tape. No more empty supply
closet. No more reprimands from the vice principal about the number of
photocopies she made. No more tacky fund-raisers to get enough money
to take a busload of students to the Shakespeare festival. No more
flickering, buzzing fluorescent tube in the teachers’ lounge.
She pulled onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and her stomach
lurched at the sudden clarity that she was really leaving her life behind.
Doubts began to gnaw at her mind.

“What am I doing?” she asked herself. “I don’t know the first thing
about a farm.”
But her hands kept steering, and her foot kept pressing the gas
pedal.
“No turning back now,” she said in the bravest voice she could
muster, aware that she was trying to convince herself, afraid that she
wouldn’t be able to.
She lost the radio station that had been playing since she, Maria,
and Maria’s boyfriend hauled the boxes and a few precious pieces of
furniture from Becca’s one-bedroom apartment and wedged them in the
back of the van. She turned the radio dial, searching for music to embolden
her on her adventure.
The speakers spat forth a mixture of static and tinny noise. Becca
settled for the station with the best reception and let its sound pour over
her. As the afternoon sun fell full on Becca’s legs, the grinding air
conditioner grew even less effective. She wished she had hired a moving
company to haul her things so she could fly down the turnpike in a
convertible, the wind whipping around her.
A month before her sixteenth birthday, she asked her father when
she could have a convertible, something most of the girls at school got,
and he smoothed his hand over his moustache and answered the same way
he did whenever she asked for anything expensive and unnecessary:
“When your rich aunt dies in the poorhouse.”
She did have a rich aunt of sorts, her great-aunt Opal, who was
both rich and poor in the way of most people who had small farms. Staying
on the land meant you struggled to make ends meet; selling meant a great
deal of money reaped by giving up what you loved. Aunt Opal, who was
the last relative on the Weaver side of the family, had died at the age of
eighty in the beginning of June, having refused every offer she ever had to
sell the farm.
And now the farm was Becca’s. When she was a little girl, it
seemed a magical place. During her visits, Aunt Opal changed in a twinkle
from a sprightly enough old woman to an exuberant girl who initiated
Becca into mysteries like making dolls from hollyhock flowers, collecting
hens’ eggs without getting pecked, braiding lavender into tiny, fragrant
baskets, churning a cup of cream into butter in a canning jar, and peeing
in the woods without squatting in poison ivy.
Becca spent three wondrous weeks of every summer at Aunt
Opal’s until the year that she turned thirteen, when her parents’ long-
2023, Autumn / 213
simmering problems had turned from tense, behind-closed-door

arguments into full-blown, daily shouting matches peppered with name-
calling. That summer, Becca spent twice as long on Aunt Opal’s farm. The
year that Becca turned fourteen, her mother changed her name from Gail
to Gaëlle, initiated divorce proceedings, and moved somewhere off the
grid in Baja California to, as she explained to Becca, meet her true self in
the practice of the glassblower’s art.
Becca didn’t know what meeting your true self entailed, but even
at fourteen, she was fairly sure that you didn’t have to go all the way to
Mexico to do it. Her and Aunt Opal’s selves felt true enough whenever
they read mystery novels aloud to each other or enjoyed ice cream with
raspberries picked from where the fields met the woods. Viewed from
Becca’s young perspective, her father didn’t seem to have any trouble
finding his true self either.
The following year, Becca started working to build up her college
fund, and her summers on the farm stopped. She saw Aunt Opal only for
Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.
And the funeral. Becca saw Aunt Opal at her dad’s funeral. Both
women felt he had gone too soon, that a heart attack at such an early age
was outside the normal order of things. They stood hand in hand before
the coffin that day, Becca crying and Aunt Opal’s wise eyes sad but dry,
Becca’s hands trembling, Aunt Opal’s steady. Becca remembered the
brown spots and faint scars, the enlarged knuckles, and the prominent
veins, the story of a full life summed up in a single pair of hands.
After that, Becca continued to drive to Haasenville to visit Aunt
Opal for the holidays. Becca always found it hard to leave, as if the farm
tied a string around her heart and pulled her back. When she started
working as a teacher, she wished she could spend her summers on the farm
again, but Aunt Opal told her that taking classes for her permanent
teaching certification was more important than keeping an old lady
company. Aunt Opal even understood when, classes done and certificate
in hand, Becca started dating Sean and stayed with him in the city both
summers their relationship had lasted because he tolerated nature in only
the smallest of doses.
The radio in the van lost its signal again, and Becca pushed a few
buttons until she realized that she was far enough away from the city that
the only stations in range played country music. It wasn’t her go-to music,
but she liked it well enough, and the songs of love gone wrong suited her
recollections of the boyfriend formerly known as Sean and currently
known by the name Maria had bestowed on him—Mr. Ex.
Becca wished that she had been at the farm instead of with Mr. Ex
during those two summers, for they were the last of Aunt Opal’s life. The
funeral, closed casket at Aunt Opal’s request, was standing room only and
was attended by nearly every one of the five hundred citizens of
Haasenville. Pastor Mark’s eulogy was heartfelt. He stood by Becca in the
narthex of the Saint Matthew’s Lutheran on that unseasonably hot day in
June as the Haasenvillers poured out of the sanctuary to offer her teary
condolences and damp hugs before filing grimly out the back door and up
the hill to the cemetery.
There was a social in fellowship hall after the burial, a typical
Haasenville spread—cubes of cheese with yellow mustard for dipping,
sliced ring bologna, ham sandwiches with butter, potato salad, pickled red
beet eggs, iced tea, and the achingly sweet red punch that was served for
the children but that Aunt Opal had loved her whole life long.
Within an hour, everyone was as loose tongued and happy as if
the punch had been spiked, and tales of Aunt Opal flew around the room
to uproarious laughter: Opal Weaver as a teenager, riding her family’s only
bicycle in the rain with an umbrella because it was her day to ride, and she
wasn’t going to pass up the chance. Opal Weaver painting the mudroom
door in her underpants because she didn’t want to ruin a perfectly good
pair of old overalls when no one would see her behind the house, only
someone did, because everyone in town knew about it. Opal Weaver,
barefoot in her kitchen garden, a long cotton skirt pulled up between her
knees and tucked into the front of her waistband, her hair in a skinny,
snow-white braid, hollering at marauding chipmunks. Opal Weaver’s
bicentennial American flag afghan, too good to throw away but too ugly
to display, rolled up in the back of the station wagon in case she came
across the bleeding victim of a traffic accident. Opal Weaver consulting
the phases of the moon, the almanac, and her bunions to decide which
crops to plant in the good, flat fields on the east side of her land.
The reading of her will took place at the Distelfink, the only
restaurant in town, which sat in the center of the main street in a historic
brick building, with Leibensperger’s hardware on one side and the post
office on the other.
As she entered the dim restaurant, Becca was feeling dislocated
from her feelings, as if she were watching a movie of herself. Kate, whom
Becca thought she recognized from childhood, looked up from her
bookkeeping behind the bar. She pointed Becca toward a table by the
oversized stone hearth.
Christopher Franz, the attorney for Aunt Opal and everyone else
2023, Autumn / 215
in town, rose from the table and walked across the dining room to shake
Becca’s hand. He had thin, graying hair and an ample frame reined in by
a seersucker suit. His ruddy face and bolo tie—she couldn’t remember if
she had ever seen someone wear one before in real life—added to the aura
of gentleman farmer who did a little lawyering on the side.
“Mr. Franz,” Becca said.
He motioned for her to sit. “Call me Stoffel. Everybody does. You
know Pastor Mark here, of course, and you might remember these two fine
ladies. Doris Yoder, member of the board of supervisors, our postmistress,
and treasurer of the Grange.”
Becca shook her hand. She tried to reconcile the gray-haired old
woman at the table with her memory of the poodle-permed brunette who
ran the post office fifteen years earlier.
“And this is my sister-in-law, Emma,” Stoffel said.
Becca didn’t remember Emma but nodded a greeting.
Stoffel snaked a thick pink finger under the flap of the envelope
that contained the will. Becca’s mind, overwhelmed by the still-fresh pain
of losing Aunt Opal and the joy at hearing her remembered so fondly by
her neighbors that day, went blank. Only when Stoffel went back to
summarize the document in plain English did she realize how Aunt Opal
had disposed of her property—a sizeable donation to Saint Matthew’s, a
smaller donation to the Grange, and the farm and everything on it to Becca.
Stoffel called to Kate and ordered cherry pie and coffee for everyone.
“I know that this is a confusing time,” Emma said, reaching across
the table to pat Becca’s arm. “So I’ve taken the liberty of drafting this ad
for you.”
“Selling now is a good idea, Becca,” Stoffel added. “Did you
know Emma’s a real estate agent? Moonlights at the county’s historical
society, too. Hey, you two have that in common! You’re a history teacher,
right?”
“English,” Becca corrected.
“Well, I better not make any grammar mistakes in front of you!”
Stoffel said.
“You’re safe. School’s out for summer.”
Emma pushed a paper across the table. “Like Stoffel says, you
should put it on the market soon, because it’s taking money from the estate
to pay for upkeep. You know—real estate taxes, electric, heating. And this
kind of property sells best in summer.”
“À la mode for everyone?” Kate asked as she poured coffee.
“Nothing for me,” Becca replied, taking the paper that Emma slid
across the checkered vinyl tablecloth and reading: Seven-Acre Farmette,

four acres tillable/pasture. Woods and stream. Three-bedroom brick
farmhouse with wraparound porch, perfect for watching wildlife. Bank
barn. Small cottage, could be in-law house. Easy access to Laurel Rocks
Ski Resort and state recreational facilities.
“Must she decide right now?” Pastor Mark asked. “These kinds of
days aren’t the best for business.”
“Now, I’ve left the asking price off, because we should talk about
that,” Emma said, ignoring Pastor Mark. “But we should talk soon. I’m
retiring this fall and moving to Arizona.”
“When it’s time to sell, you can’t do better than Emma. She’s an
honest dealer, just like me,” Stoffel said. “And we know Haasenville.”
Kate approached the table, balancing four plates of pie.
Becca’s mind snapped into focus, and she felt sure about
something that, five minutes earlier, she had never pondered: “I’m keeping
the farm.”
Stoffel stared at her. He stopped chewing, tucked a bite of cherry
pie in his cheek, and spoke around it. “Are you sure? It’ll take a lot of time
and money to keep that place going, missy.”
“Aunt Opal never sold the farm.” Becca tapped Stoffel’s card idly
on the table. “I won’t either. I’ll settle my affairs in the city and move in
as soon as I can. Who has the key?”
Stoffel answered. “It’s at my office.”
“Well, then, I’ll be in touch about picking it up from you.”
Teaching position resigned and her belongings packed into the
rental van that was nearing its destination, Becca’s affairs were indeed
settled. She was as surprised on this mid-August day as she had been on
the day of the funeral to see the brightly colored, oversized buildings in
the new shopping strip on Route 141, and she frowned at them as she drove
by.
She drove around the last curve, right on Mill Road, over the
bridge, and Aunt Opal’s house appeared before her, looking older and
more tired than she remembered but still a heartbreakingly welcome sight.
She nosed the van into the driveway and killed the ignition, listening to
the sound of cicadas in the late afternoon.
She inhaled deeply. The familiar late summer smells—dusty and
green, floral and ripe—chased away her doubts and fears.
“I’m home,” she mused.
2023, Autumn / 217
B MISTY WYCOFF
COTTAGE LOAF
Baking a loaf of bread

is a small thing.
It doesn’t stop the slivers of glacier
crashing into deep swells,
or the waning promises in all of us,
falling fast like soldiers
on a losing field.
I make baguettes and cottage loaves

and give them away.
And therein is a bit of alchemy.
A mound of flour, water, salt, and yeast,
languishing for a whole day
in the big crock on the stove,
becomes the farmer
sowing wheat in broad arcs
away from his body,
flinging seeds beneath
the dark mourning-skied expanse.
Certainly, I don’t need the

hot round crusty bundles,
nor my friends,
but hope has become a scarcer crop.
Every single loaf
carries a tale of sojourns
to the ranch,
and high-ceilinged kitchens,
enamel footed stoves
and a sideboard of china bowls,
memories, maybe not our own,
of something else.
(cont)
Outside, those flying seeds are burrowing

black bottom deep into dark sand.
Every act on the farm is both a prayer
or invocation to the dawn,
and an eye to the coming winter.
and yet we plant,
and bake,
and believe.
April 2022
Wycoff
JESSE BRYANT WILDER

LACOSTE
I left the work in my head

to join you at the monk’s table
—petit petit dejeuner in the rock
-hewn Romanesque dining hall of Lacoste,
at Cleveland’s art school in France.
Acrid smell of ancient stones

infused our milk and steel-cut oats;
centuries steeped in the plain
yogurt and ascetic, unbuttered
toast. Yet midsummer
wrapped its palette around us,

green and gold Provence
breathing through glassless
windows like an aromatic Cezanne
beneath the frazzled ruins
of de Sade’s pleasure castle—

S&M’ed into a wreck.
Nevertheless a Surrealist Mecca
between hilltop towns, exultant
sunflower fields, lush (cont)
2023, Autumn / 219
waves of lavender and

the maracas of cicadas
announcing the approach
of randy troubadours.
Our breakfasts here always ingested

through mendicant senses,
each bite a syncretic communion wafer,
what our surroundings served.
Wilder
DARK WATER, SPLENDOUR AT SEA—FOR NATALIE
You will die in dark water, darling,

her gypsy mother said.
Dear, one day you will drown.
I read about the case reopening, skimmed

the surface of the news
ink still wet on remembering
who I thought he was
the night she went down.
I fell asleep in news that night

sank under headlines and callous ads
for life preservers and inflatables
plunged through what we too long believed,
unvetted evidence and wishful thinking
to fathom, unburdened by belief, that night and
her fear of going down.
I fought the fight inside her, weighed

down by a down jacket and too much drink
by a mother’s premonition and memories
of Rondout Creek, shooting Splendor
in the Grass with Kazan
when she did on the set almost sink.
(cont)
I dove to the bottom of my own perceptions

deep into her panic, deep into her fear until I too
was battling to breathe. Only a dream I may
have felt or thought or said
yet kept pushing, diving deeper
deeper through the depths of her despair
till I was swimming inside her gasping,
swimming inside her fear
and sinking with Natalie
until there was almost no air
and I could barely breathe.
I shot to the surface of sleep, gasping

thrashing through dream waves to awaken and
as I turned in bed I saw Natalie splashing wildly
fighting fear and hypothermia
and the Pacific waves,
I saw Natalie Wood going down.
Then I heard someone on a nearby boat

bob to the surface of who he was
that night to call his lawyer
for help.
Wilder
HALLOWEEN MASC
“When a man gives his opinion, he's a man.
When a woman gives her opinion, she's a bitch.”―Bette Davis
Small talk with a ghoul

phantom intimacy
in see-through masks
your spiked gray hair
and Gothic grimace
me playing Poe
raven pinned to my shoulder
candy kisses in my All Hallows bag
and dark chocolates wrapped in verse
Ulalume, The Raven, Eldorado
—a sweet inside a curse. (cont)
2023, Autumn / 221
“I like your bird,” she began

sidling close but leaning
on a high-backed chair as
if she needed it there.
But slowly something in us meshed
we laughed, swapped stories
until a man, hers,
stepped on the rest
of what she had to say.
His volume, his hisness
brusquely brushed her words aside,
shooed her herness away.
She dropped reflexively back
as if she’d spent much of her life on hold
retreated behind another mask,
another role.
A second guy blustered in.
more jokes got told, some
I pretended to get,
while watching her watch us
from deep inside her role.
I thought I could see the words
she wanted to say
idling on her face, queuing
behind her husband’s mouth,
while she waited
and waited and waited
with the patience of the
long sidelined.
I wondered would it be rude
or just to cut him off.
But then what I think
is me collapsed
(cont)
into who the guys expected me to be,

while she gazed at us from across the room
and then from much farther away
from centuries ago
when our ancestral mothers knelt
in the back of dim-lit churches
synagogues and mosques,
heads covered and bowed,
faces passively veiled
while the bare-headed men
(and an occasional oddball prophet
spewing the latest insights)
sat up front and railed
over the hot-button issues
of the day—their exclusive rite
under a misogynistic man-made God.
I listened less and less to the guys, but still laughed on cue
as I recalled VPs and Ps from Cleveland banks and businesses
gathered around a long table 27 yrs ago
waiting to be courted by two Romanians for their cash
a year, maybe two after the Ceaucescus fell,
two phd’d economists, a male and
a female, from Timişoara I think
—maybe Bucharest or Sibiu—
dispatched by Iliescu’s “purged” government
to attract Cleveland capital to
to the revenant Romanian dream.
The man spoke first, and the suits
grudgingly listened as if he were
applying for a low-interest loan.
I jotted down everything
the Romanian said, the proverbial
fly-on-the-wall for a local weekly.
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 223
Then she spoke, but I couldn’t catch

a word she said in that oblong room.
He took the floor again; I jotted down
his arguments and appeals. Her turn.
Again I heard nothing but the VIPs
chattering at cafeteria volume.
Over and over, each time she opened her mouth,
the suits drowned her out.
Eventually you wandered away
before your waiting could wear us down;
with difficulty, I unscrewed myself
from drill bits and Browns’ losses, and
found you by the refreshments,
sampling the chips, dips, and sauces.
“Hi,” you muttered between bites. Then
we talked and laughed and warmed up again.
Yet I don’t remember anything we said
though I listened intently and had much to say.
I only recall a sympathy evolving between us,
and that at the end of the evening
you lifted your mask and embraced
me, tightly. I hadn’t abandoned my Edgar role
so had the quicksilvered impression
that you were hugging Mr. Poe,
so tightly I feared you’d squeeze
another nightmare out.
Then the hug reached
the me behind the disguise,
beneath the mask-ulinity—
and we were two naked souls

reaching for parts of each other
that had never been confined by roles.
Wilder
PANCAKES OR WAFFLES
“Why fade these children of the spring? born but to smile & fall.”
–The Book of Thel, Wm. Blake
Our four-year-old niece peers

through the window
in a wooden kitchen chair
at the idea of growing up—
us on the other side of it
waiting
for her to get up
for breakfast.
But something in her won’t budge.
The more we insist
the more she retreats, seems
to shrink behind the seat.
Does she feel our years
bearing down, hurrying
her out of who she is?
We pull out Mrs. Butterworth
tell her she can choose
which side of the grill we’ll use.
She leaps out of her littleness
toward the LG stove,
jostles past us, glares
at the pancake face of the grill
and shouts “waffle!” —
so much bigger now that
she gets to flex her will.
Wilder
VICTOR OKECHUKWU
DYING TO TELL THE TALE
I hate to walk in the night without my glasses. It wasn’t my fault

this time around. Tolu had taken me to his friend’s house where I felt
2023, Autumn / 225
embarrassed because I seemed to be the only stranger there. I was angry

with myself, so I had to leave without telling him.
While walking on the tortuous path back home, I feared falling.
There was no walkway and stones riddled the street. Everywhere was
black as ink, and I tried to look carefully. Sometimes I stood still not
knowing where the gutter or road were because they seemed the same.
And I didn’t want to hit a stone. The last time I walked in the night, I fell
and broke my wrist. I wanted to wait for a passerby who was walking with
a torch, but I felt there wasn’t any time for that. And Mama would be
anxious to see me.
So I kept walking, but this time slow and steady. Then the next
thing I knew half my body was in the black gutter. I stood up immediately
and was furious. I smelled bad and my saliva tasted bitter. I didn’t want
anybody to see me this way. When I got halfway home, I saw torchlight
from afar and heard a shout. I recognized the voice immediately; it was
Nkechi, a fat neighbour of ours who had lived as a spinster ever since I
was a child. The torchlight was inspecting my dirty clothes and when I got
close to her, she hissed and said, “I thought you were one of those
drunkards.”
“I couldn’t see, you know.” I pointed to my eyes.
“Okay, sorry but could you have returned early or called your
mother?” Nkechi said.
“I wasn’t with my phone.’’
“You know most times you behave like your late mad father,”
Nkechi said.
“What do you mean?” I asked in shock.
“Nothing. Don’t take it too seriously,” she said and walked into
her compound.
And that made me mad because my mama had told me my father
died when I was eighteen months old. I wasn’t seeing well yet, but being
mad made the crooked path straight. So when I got home and washed up,
I began to ask mama questions about my father.
She said my father was a patriotic citizen. That, in his reading
room, he had all the pictures of past and present presidents and he usually
sang the national anthem before he began to write his usual essay for his
daily column in a local newspaper. Before he died, he was known around
the community as the “late veteran columnist,” because he always loved
writing about the “Nigerian culture”—realizing her mistakes late and yet
not taking solutions.
Mama was cleaning the kitchen while I stood at the door. I was
quiet for a while, and I wanted to understand why my neighbour had said
my father was mad, so I said, “How did my father die?”
She turned to me and was a bit shaken by my inquisitiveness.
“What would that do for you?” She replied.
“I just want to know more about him,” I said looking at her brown
eyes.
She continued with what she was doing, and after a long time she
said, “He died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of forty-two.”
I was dumb and afraid to ask another question.
That night I couldn’t sleep. I rolled on my bed till I felt like doing
something. I walked into my father’s reading room, and the only remaining
articles there were his desk and chair. My mother had auctioned other
things.
I sat on the leather chair. Imagined my father and what he would
be doing at that time. It was 11:47 pm. I tried to avoid morbid thoughts.
We lived comfortably, but could poverty cause harm to the brain? How
dangerous is poverty? I shivered, staring at the ceiling. The flat expanse of
white. Easy to space out. I felt the silence as a tangible thing, heavy and
smoldering. I got tired when no thoughts came. Rain blew against the
window glass. I dozed off.
The next morning, my mother woke me up. She was angry with
me for trying to dig into the past.
“I wanted to know more about my father,” I said.
“Do you know what it means to me?” she asked. “How do you
expect me to live now.”
“What mama?” I said, “What happened? What are you afraid of?”
“Nothing.” She said, then walked to the triangular window, “It’s
only I’m afraid you would be like him.”
I was speechless. She gazed at me for a while.
“Yes, if you can’t graduate from the university at the age of
twenty-eight, you’re sure to grow old being a jobless man because no one
would like to employ a ‘foolish beast’.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“How will you understand when I’ve told you to stop asking
questions,” she said, “He wasted his time writing while he earned what
couldn’t feed a rat.”
I couldn’t hold my boiling anger. I was growing insane and I had
to leave the house for a walk.
2023, Autumn / 227
I walked around the community for over half an hour. Feeling the
oppressive heaviness of the burning sun roasting my black skin, and each
drop of sweat that rolled down from my forehead caused anguish in my
soul. It was as though there was something in me that was becoming the
“foolish beast” that my mother talked about. I didn’t want to go meet Tolu
because I felt like being lonely.
I love the village trees and their natural scent. I crouched under a
mango tree. My mouth was dry. I spent half an hour listening to the Pied-
crows as they hovered around the tree like bees. One crow cawed. It was
joined by another until it sounded as if hundreds of crows were on the tree.
I love to watch them. But I began to regret my life; the life of a bastard is
a desperate one. I just wished things were a little bit different. How could
I be at the university for nine years? If at twenty-eight I’m still an
undergraduate reading a four-year course, then what’s wrong with me?
But, it wasn’t my fault; lecturers had begun another nationwide
strike for the tenth time since I gained admission, and I didn’t know what
was wrong with my country’s system. Each time they called off a six-
months strike two months into the semester, they were already into another
one. The present strike action was just two weeks before my final exams.
A few of my friends became angry and dropped out, and I was afraid of
doing the same because I didn’t know how my mother would live with it.
Anyway, when I returned, I didn’t eat my lunch or dinner.
Previously, when I got angry with her superstitions, I locked myself in my
room for hours. Or I took my earphone into my ear and then turned on the
volume of my phone music player. But when I returned I felt different. I
felt something I have never felt in nine years. Like a sense of uselessness,
an accident waiting to happen, a fool oblivious of walking close to his own
grave.
I wonder what a beast resembles because it seems that my father
was also a beast. So when I got home I had to look at his photograph again.
He had an oily brown face with black lips, and his ear was big, his round
chin had holes like dots and his forehead had wrinkle lines. His eyes
glittered and his nostrils flared like a cat preparing for battle. But I didn’t
want to believe I look like him.
* * * *
Some days it was hard to do anything. Even eating seemed like
too much trouble. I’d lie in bed and stare at nothing, and hours would pass
in a flash. Then the next thing I knew, my mother would be calling me for
dinner. I felt nothing. Blank. It was painful.
Other days I quarreled with her concerning my father. I was

desperate to know more and she wouldn’t tell me. She said, “I hate to go
back to the twenty-something years I’ve left for good.” It made me begin
to run. Really run, push myself until I became tired and wanted to go mad.
I ran up and down the highway, up the power lines, around and
around the village. Sweat soaked me right down to the tips of my hair. And
each day I saw Nkechi, I feigned as though I never knew her. I wanted to
continue, but my mother made me stop because she said I would end up
like my dead father.
One night, I dreamt of my father lying on his bed without moving.
The room had a blurry white light on the right and the wings of the fan
moved slowly. His hands lay paralyzed on both sides, and his eyes and
mouth remained wide open. But tears flowed down the edge of his eyes.
My mother was crying and dressing him up for the night’s sleep. I sat in a
corner shaking in fear. Afraid of something that I couldn’t understand.
When I awoke I took my phone and browsed what cerebral
hemorrhage meant, and it said another name for it is hemorrhagic stroke,
an emergency condition in which a ruptured blood vessel causes bleeding
inside the brain. High blood pressure and trauma are two leading causes.
Taking blood-thinning drugs may also increase a person’s risk.
I became restless. What trauma had he faced that my mother hid
from me? I was determined to know more. I tried to get hold of any local
newspaper about him. But the newspaper went into extinction with his
death. He was the founder and editor.
I and my mama had gone our lonely ways for a long time, and
when I needed to talk to her, I found her on the verandah. The night was
black and the rain was easing. Clean air blew around us. I was smiling at
her for a long time, and I knew she wanted me to say something.
“Mama, are you angry with your only son?” I asked.
“Why would I be angry with you?” She said, “I’m worried that
you aren’t thinking about your future.”
“I’m just disturbed; who was my father?”
“And you aren’t unhappy that you’ve been at home for eight
months.”
“Mama,” I said.
“I’m troubled. Have you asked yourself what your mates are doing
with their life’s other than trying to find a way to the past?”
“I hate your lecture about life. And I’m free to choose what to do
with mine.”
2023, Autumn / 229
“Then why do you confuse yourself about things you can’t

change?”
I stood up and left for my room and forced myself to sleep though
the rain had become heavy. I wanted to move into a trance where I would
be with my father once.
The following morning, I woke up two hours before my alarm
rang by 5:30, and I struggled to think properly—that’s the problem with
being a young adult. You are either confused or lost—plying the road of
life like a happy hooligan. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I struggled to
switch positions on the bed so that I wouldn’t feel the biting pain in my
belly, but that didn’t work. It seems as though the worms were doing what
my mother had never done in a long time: make me cry.
I sat on my bed and looked around my dark lifeless room, my
moist brown eyes bore into the window through a pair of horn-rimmed
glasses, watching the rain hit the windows and stream down. The streets
were empty. I could feel the world shaking, but it was me who was
shaking. I knew I was not depressed. And when I’m angry and hungry at
the same time, I resemble a furious idiot sitting on a lump of burning coal.
Thinking hard makes no sense, but I have to do it again and again.
I turned to my stool on the right, close to my bed, and I picked up a paper.
I had written a short note about the causes of cerebral hemorrhage. It reads,
“There is a major effect of stress on brain activity. Sometimes individuals
having stress faces high blood pressure, which ruptures the vessels and
leads to brain hemorrhage. It could be considered as a type of stroke
known as hemorrhagic.”
I took a deep breath and rubbed my temples where a headache was
arching all the way back to my neck. Maybe I was already mad like my
neighbour had said. A foolish beast. Was I suffering from cerebral
hemorrhage by thinking too much? Sure it was stress that killed my father
when he determined to be a writer.
I can now see my father’s picture. The shape of his head is like
mine, only his broad flat nose, and cone-shaped jaw seem different.
ARTHUR RUSSELL
THE CAR WASH
At the car wash at dawn, the darkness of the plant

was permissive as a midnight shadow.
Sometimes, the dark had a pilot
flickering in the hull of a heater,
or the canvas towel bin glowed
in the pallid grey of the skylight. Every morning
for five years. Eighteen hundred mornings.
We might hear an air leak or water drip
while walking back with our coffee cups
gimbaled between index and thumb—things
we’d need to fix before we opened—
and then, at the electric panel,
the knife switch took a palm to throw;
the sequence of circuit breakers, compressors
and fluorescents coming on satisfied the order
etched where habit met identity.
Alan went to hang his army field coat,
and I walked the wash tunnel, collecting
license plates and other parts from yesterday,
charmed by rust that bloomed like frost
at night on the polished steel-plate flooring
and washed away each morning. Alan came
to grease the bearings, the white grease pushed
the greasy water out, and, raising the garage doors
to put out the signs, I saw the light’s progress,
the men arriving, checked the trash cans,
got money for the register, hung the card of pine trees
in the cashier booth, the tape loop playing
in the empty customer walkway selling hot wax to no one.
And then we opened, and the cars came;
and the people nodded to us and stood
with crossed arms, watching steam guns,
vacuum wands, mats flung sideways
to the mat rack for a rinse.
And even as we watched, our lives peeled
back and shed one layer,
the new day’s delicate skin exposed.
Russell
2023, Autumn / 231
CHECKOUT MAN
Between cars, Freddie Rogers

could spin a damp towel on his finger
as if it were a terrycloth pizza,
take a quick drag off his Winston,
go “yeah, yeah” to anything
I’d say to him, turn his hat brim
front to back or back to front,
excuse himself and start out towards
the bus stop where a girl he knew
or wished to know was waiting for
the B68 to Coney Island,
then give up as she passed inside,
restore his Winston to the ledge
and flip his spinning towel ahead
to land on the hood of the next car out.
Russell
THE MEN’S LUNCH TABLE
When Alan’s kid Wayne—they lived in Mitchell-

Lama housing on Shorefront Parkway in
Rockaway Beach—had a snake, I caught flies
at the men’s lunch table to feed it. Even
if they’d flinch when my nearby, sideways,
thumb-up, ambushing hand began to move,
they’d have to rise straight up a quarter inch
before they could flee horizontally;
go figure, who knew? It’s a fly thing.
They would smack my palm like a shuttlecock.
I’d bounce to stun them on the tabletop
and drop them short one wing in the plastic
grated parmigiana container, holes on top.
The snake won’t eat them if they’re not alive.
Russell
HOW TO REPLACE A TOILET
First, have a father, one who owns a car wash

where he employs poor black men,
preferably those who’ve come north in the Great Migration,
but any poor black men will do,
as long as they have historical disadvantages
that have translated into self-destructive behavior
that make them targets for disdain and predatory labor practices.
Grow up at his kitchen table,

hear his precise mimicry of their accents,
mockery of their foibles,
his weirdly intimate knowledge
of their weaknesses and hopes
bordering on and even bleeding over
into affection that never reaches all the way to respect.
Go to work for your father.

Start off drying the cars at the exit end
and gradually learn all of the jobs
while imbibing his attitudes
towards the men you work beside, although you,
made differently—or is it just youth and naïve sympathy—
appreciate their struggle.
See them come to work still drunk from the night before
while you spent your summers at summer camp
learning to smoke pot behind the bunkhouse.
Get paid the same net $1.25/hour the men get
with the difference that they are living on it
and you are saving up to buy a Sony
stereo music system to play Carole King’s Tapestry.
Learn to send men home with no work on slow days,

how to absorb their abuse, their special hatred
of your father, blooming when drunk,
transferred to you, how to resist their requests
for new uniforms to replace the worn ones
that you send to the local dry cleaner for patching.
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 233
Lean over their shoulders as they vacuum the cars

to stop them from sucking up the change in the ashtrays.
Follow them around the corner to stop them from buying beer
on their 45-minute lunch for which your father charges them an hour.
On Saturday at 7 AM, when Jerry Howard uses his one call from jail
to call your father, go to the Brooklyn Mens’ House of Detention on
Boerum Place
to bail him out after he got arrested during a fight with his wife,
because Jerry is the best entrance driver and it’s Saturday,
two days after a messy snow, and you may wash 1,000 cars.
Another time find Fredrick Hyde hiding inside his locker after closing
hoping to burglarize the place if you lock him in.
And listen, always listen, even when you argue against him,
to the embattled logic your father uses
to justify stealing from the men’s tip box,
withholding pay they’ll never get back in taxes
because he pays them off the books,
and giving them alarm clocks for Christmas,
but only if they come to work that day.
So you are ready one morning
when someone tells you that the men's toilet
is broken, and you go into that cubicle to see
that it’s not the flush valve or the toilet seat,
but the commode itself, the vitreous bowl,
that has cracked with an obvious fissure from base to rim
where someone has jammed a flask-sized liquor bottle
upside down in the drain and evidently stepped on the base of it
hoping that the bottle, not the commode, would break apart and flush away
so that the bottle would not be found in the trash
and raise suspicions that he’d been drinking on the job.
Go to your father, where he sits behind his grey steel desk
making tea, and tell him what happened,
and wait while he squeezes the teabag against the spoon,
and swings it deftly by the string into the wastepaper basket
before he looks up at you over his half-moon reading glasses
and says, “Well, fix it, Sonny.”
(cont)
Admit you don’t know how to change a toilet.

Watch your father take a stubby pencil from his back pocket
and draw a schematic diagram of a toilet on a writing tablet.
Listen to him explain, with the same patience and easygoing charm
he used when he talked to your teachers on Parents’ Day,
the two bolts, the wax ring, the pipe wrenches, the Teflon tape,
then make up a list of parts for you, and send you in his Lincoln
to Davis & Warshow to get what you’ll need,
then call you back at the door to remind you

to put a board across the toilet before you go,
or they’ll use it while you’re gone
and you’ll have to clean out their shit by hand.
Russell
SUMMER AFTERNOON
With a bucket of sealant and a spent mop on a slow day,

my father sent Prince McMichael and me to muck the buckled seams
along the carpet rolls of pebbled roofing cold and thaw left leaking.
I watched him swab the tar around the skylights and scuppers,
and asked him about his life, what he wanted, why he worked at the car wash.
It was my boss’s son privilege to do so.
He said he didn’t care what work he did, the older men were drunks
who wasted their money on the numbers. He jabbed his blackened mop
for punctuation. He called women bitches, but it was women

he cared about most. He lived with his moms, his sister and her son.
When the sealant was used up, we sat on the parapet where the roof
looked out over Konwaler’s Drugs to the white brick row houses on East 8th Street.
We smoked unfiltered cigarettes. Below us, the cars turned into the car wash.
I asked him why he hadn’t come to work the day before.
He said he’d hung out with his moms, his sister and her son all morning
and waited for a girl all afternoon at the entrance to the Union Avenue station.
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 235
He’d talked to her the night before, but he didn’t know where she lived,
only that she worked in Manhattan and got off at five.
It seemed to me an inconceivable romantic strategy to take a day off from work

on such a thin hope, and yet I could imagine him in the guayabera he
changed into after work,
with his hair picked to a smooth dome and a cigarette dangling from his mouth,
passing a calm hour with one foot up on the rail around the subway entrance.
I started to tell him about the woman in Syracuse who’d cheated on her husband
with me, but he showed no interest.
Russell
PLANT LIFE
There were men who worked for him

for decades for bupkis
less withholding
right there
at the corner of Church Avenue
and Coney Island Avenue
as seen in photos from the era
with cars of the era
and men in hats of the era,
men who lived in Bushwick
and Crown Heights and South Williamsburg
men who knew me as ‘his son,’
whom I managed in my 20s
who had their wages paid daily
or weekly on Sunday,
one man at a time
coming into the office,
having a few words of thanks from him,
standing (while he sat behind the gray desk)
opening the two small envelopes,
one containing net pay
and the other, smaller one,
that man’s share of what
(cont)
was left from the tip box

after my father took most of the tips
for himself, not, he explained
to make himself richer,
but to keep the men poor
and needing to return
to work the next day.
The envelopes were prepared
by my mother on Saturday;
she wrote the man’s name
in her Lincoln High School script
in green felt tip pen because
she had to fight every day
to keep hold of her identity
and sense of fun,
and green was her color.
There was an oversized spread sheet
where she showed her calculations.
The men all knew her and said hello,
and she asked about the women
of the ones that had one
though many of our men
were city-living men
of rooming house doors
and drop-off laundry.
She held a ruler under each man’s line
so they could see across the line
and sign in the last column.
It had solemnity; the sudden quiet
of bringing men into that office,
Usher Schneider, the manager
watched, smoking a Benson & Hedges.
The men,
after they’d changed
out of their green coveralls
with yellow embroidered lettering,
into street clothes—Harry O’Bey
had a big white double-breasted overcoat
with deeply notched lapels
he wore in winter— (cont)
2023, Autumn / 237
and some drew reading glasses out

partially to see and partially
to participate in that solemnity.
The office was up
a narrow flight
of steel steps.
The men lined up
at the foot of the stairs,
and came up one at a time.
My father gave the men either an alarm clock
or a transistor radio for Xmas
in alternating years.
I was there.
He wanted us to learn
about life from his car wash,
so we counted his money
and dried his cars. Even
my sister worked there
as a cashier, for two days,
before my mother shut that down.
This is why I tell the story
of taking the stitches
out of Pete Watson’s scalp
with a single-edge razor
and a surgical clamp
at the men’s lunch table
so Pete wouldn’t miss
an afternoon of work.
Arthur, Sonny, Pete needs his stitches out.
Go out to the men’s lunch table
and take Pete’s stitches out,
and Pete Watson’s scalp
at the men’s lunch table,
with its dandruff,
and the minor popped release
as I lifted the surgical knots
of his stitches free
of the amber crust
around the wound, the doctor-shaved
(cont)
zone around the chair leg wound,

and the lanolin sniff of his scalp,
and the new stubble coming in,
and the nearness of the man, these
were what my father wanted me to see.
This very week, as I was getting ready
to write this poem, my brother told me
of the time he stood with our father
at the men’s lunch table, where Clayton Parker
sat on one of the red diner stools
drunk out of his mind, bent over
in his reddish-brown woolen coat,
defeated by alcohol
but drawn to work
by a force as strong
as the body
he nightly partly self-embalmed,
and how my father guided my brother’s hand
to Clayton Parker’s horizontal back
and told my brother
to rest it there,
and instructed my brother
to feel the way
the drunk man’s skin twitched
from the depth of his stupor
through his coat,
though you couldn’t see it;
and then he asked my brother
if he felt it.
Do you feel it, boy? he’d said.
the subcutaneous twitch?
Russell
2023, Autumn / 239
ELEANOR LERMAN
THE ALCOHOLIC MARIANNES
Laura is having trouble sleeping. She once read in some magazine

that this is the curse of growing older: to be an unwilling companion of the
moon, up before dawn and wondering how to fill the empty hours ahead.
But over the years that she’s been retired from her job as an office
manager, Laura has come up with strategies to cope with the loss of
structure that going to work five days a week had provided, which means
that almost every day she has some task she has assigned herself to fill the
days and pass the time.
So she gets out of bed, because there’s no point in trying to go
back to sleep. Five a.m., six, six-thirty. She makes herself a cup of coffee
and sits on her terrace for a while, watching the dawn come and go. Stars
fade, the sun rises. She goes back inside and turns on the television to
watch the morning news. Then she showers, dries her hair and gets
dressed, Finally, out the door she goes, on her way to walk the few blocks
to the local branch of the Queens library where she intends to browse
through the new books that have come in and pick out something to read.
She also likes to comb through the used book bins that the library is always
adding to, selling old, duplicate volumes pulled from the shelves to raise
money for their educational programs.
Under a cool gray sky laddered with clouds, Laura walks up
Queens Boulevard, struggling a bit because pain has set in. A few years
ago, Laura had thyroid cancer and while she’s free of the disease for now,
she has developed chronic neuropathy, painful tingling in her hands and
feet resulting from the nerve pathways damaged by chemotherapy lighting
up with their complaints. But she continues on, waiting for the pain
medication she took before she left the house to start working. It’s strong
stuff so she has taken only half the dosage she’s been prescribed because
even that small amount often makes her feel like she’s in a fog. But she
will fight against that if it happens today.
As Laura approaches the library, she notices that there’s a trailer
belonging to a local animal rescue group parked at the curb. She stops to
look at the mural painted on the outside of the trailer, which shows puppies
and kittens sitting under a rainbow, with smiling children running towards
them and happy adults gazing at the heartwarming scene. When Laura was
married, she and her husband had a dog they had adopted from an animal
shelter, but the husband claimed ownership of it in the divorce and Laura
was too heartsick about everything, then, to argue with him. But lately, she
has actually been thinking about getting another dog. Walking the dog,
feeding it—and having its company, another living being to spend time
with—can only be a good thing. Not that she doesn’t have friends—she
does, other women around her age that she sees from time to time—but
caring for a pet is a full-time job and she thinks she’s finally ready, once
again, to take it on. And perhaps the rescue group being right here today,
in front of the library, is just the push she needs to actually do something
about finding a dog to adopt.
So she steps inside the trailer, which is a busy place. There are
quite a few young couples here, some with children, and some of the adults
are already filling out the paperwork needed to adopt one of the cute,
energetic kittens or puppies in the cages. As Laura looks at these people,
it occurs to her that a puppy might actually be too much work and so an
older dog would be a better fit for her because it would require less
constant attention. After all, she often does have to be out of the house—
the friends always have some outing planned, like going to a movie or a
restaurant—and she also has volunteer work that she does.
So she walks down the row of cages that hold the puppies, but
none seem to be more than a few months old. Then, finally, at the end of
the row, she sees that there is one older dog here, a skinny brown mutt
with the curled tail of some wild pariah ancestor sitting quietly in the back
of its cage, staring down at the floor. But as Laura stands nearby, watching
him for a while, he raises his head and looks up at her. And that’s it, that’s
all it takes. She can see that he’s scared and he’s defeated; he knows he’s
lost and thinks that he will be forever. How can Laura just turn away? She
does hold a brief debate with herself but she already knows which way it’s
going to end, so she walks up to the front of the trailer, gets the form she
needs in order to apply to adopt the dog, and fills it in.
There is a young woman sitting at a table at the front of the trailer
processing the applications. She tells people handing her their paperwork
that it will be reviewed in the next few days and then they will hear from
the rescue group. When Laura’s turn comes, she hands in her form and
waits while the woman reads what she’s written down.
“Um,” the woman says, “I’m afraid there’s a bit of a problem with
your application.”
“What problem?” Laura asks. “What are you talking about?”
“Well,” the woman says, “we have a policy that prevents us from
accepting applications from anyone who is seventy or older. And you’ve
listed your age as seventy-one.”
2023, Autumn / 241
“You’re kidding,” Laura says, with true astonishment. “You must

be. The information card on the dog’s cage says he’s about six years old
and was found wandering in the street. He’s just a stray dog. It’s not like
I’m asking you to give me a pure-bred puppy.”
The tight smile on the young woman’s face compresses just a little
bit more. “I am sorry,” she says, “but we have this policy in place for the
benefit of the animals. We wouldn’t want to release a dog or a cat to
someone who might not be able to provide them with long-term care.”
Laura’s face reddens, her heart crashes around in her chest. She
feels as if she’s heard some terrible secret about herself spoken out loud,
her own punishing thoughts read back to her. After all, there are days when
she can’t believe that she’s as old as she is. That she’s suffered from a
disease that nearly killed her and left her with damage that will never heal.
Getting older, getting sick: these are conditions that seem to go hand-in-
hand if you think about them too much, and Laura does, sometimes. Think
too much, and worry. Still, weakly, she protests. “I know what you’re
telling me: that because I’m over seventy, the dog might outlive me and
then what would happen to him? But what will happen to him now? I can’t
imagine that there are other people rushing to adopt him.”
“I am sorry,” the woman says. “But please, there are other people
waiting behind you.”
Still wanting to argue, Laura goes on standing in front of the
woman in charge of the applications, who just continues to smile. Finally,
another woman reaches around Laura to place an application on the table
and then adds to the pool of smiles directed at Laura that have only one
message: Go away.
Shocked, beaten down, Laura leaves the trailer and walks into the
library. She feels like she can hear the buzzing of the fluorescent lights
hanging from the ceiling and the sound reverberates in her head. Her eyes
are blurry and she’s afraid that she’s going to cry, so she hurries to the
bathroom, where she stands over the sink and blots her face with cold
water. Then she looks up and sees her herself in the mirror
I don’t recognize you, she tells herself, but this is not a new
thought. Even though she knows she shouldn’t be, Laura is baffled by the
fact that when she looks in a mirror, she still expects to see a younger
person, not a girl, necessarily, but someone in her forties or fifties with a
few lines around her eyes and some puffiness where there used to be taut
skin, but a pretty woman nonetheless, with waves of brown hair
complemented by hazel eyes. But instead, her own grandmother seems to
haunt her features, an elderly woman, thin as a bone, who was born in a
country that no longer even exists on modern maps.
Laura does her best to collect herself, but the pain in her fingers
and toes is firing up again with renewed ferocity. So, without even looking
at any of the books on the shelves, Laura leaves the library and limps
home. She has lunch. She has dinner. She watches a movie on television,
then watches another. Then she watches the late news and goes to bed.
The next morning, Laura is expected at the local food pantry
where she volunteers a few days a week. The pain is a little better,
something of a double relief because she has to forego taking any
medication when she does her volunteer work, which involves driving
around the borough of Queens, stopping at local restaurants to pick up
leftover food and produce that would otherwise go to waste. But when she
arrives at the food pantry, Roger, the man in charge, asks her for a favor.
“Look, Laura,” he says, “do you think you could drive into the city
for us today? A friend of mine did a catering job at some big event last
night and he said they’ve got tons of food left over. Platters of cold cuts,
all kinds of meat and seafood on ice. It was for some kind of fundraiser so
either they over-ordered or the event was a bust, but one way or another,
all that food that’s going to go to waste if we don’t pick it up.”
“I can’t believe there’s not someplace in Manhattan that will
gladly take it,” Laura tells him.
“Sure there is,” Roger says. “But we’ve got first dibs if we can get
there this morning. So can you go? You’ll have to drive the panel truck
instead of the minivan and you’re the only one I trust with it.”
“Where is it? I mean, where would I have to go?”
“Someplace in the Village. Bethune Street, I think.”
“No,” Laura says automatically. “I don’t think so.”
Roger, who has been stacking cases of canned vegetables, stops
what he’s doing. He takes off the heavy canvas gloves he’s wearing as if
he needs his bare hands to help him make gestures that will emphasize the
importance of what he’s asking. “Why not? Are you worried about driving
into the city? I know the truck needs work but it’s in decent enough shape
to make the trip.”
“It’s not that. It’s just….” Just what? Laura knows how to fill in
the answer to that question but she doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want the
feelings she’s having to be given a voice.
“Please,” Roger says. “I don’t have anyone else who can do it
today. I’d go myself but you know I have to stay here. People expect the
doors to be open by nine a.m.”
2023, Autumn / 243
Laura sighs. She hears the sound of her own breath leaving her
body and thinks of it as a kite sailing away. Something that can never be
retrieved. “Alright,” she says. “Just give me the address.”
She climbs into the truck and steps on the gas, heading towards
Queens Boulevard, which slices through the borough heading straight for
the Midtown Tunnel connecting Queens and Manhattan. It’s a hard, mid-
morning-in-New-York-City drive, with aggression seemingly boiling in
the veins of everyone with their hands on the wheel of a vehicle. Trucks,
cars, taxis, motorcycles: everyone cuts everyone off, everyone has their
radio pounding out the tunes, everyone is in more of a hurry than everyone
else. Laura can deal with that. She’s a good driver and she can navigate
the river of crazy traffic without thinking about it too much but today, she
makes herself think of nothing else because she’s on her way to Greenwich
Village, a part of the city where she used to live but that she has
purposefully stayed away from for a long time. No, she tells her thoughts,
her memories, if they even dare to wander down that way. Go away. Fly
away from me. But do they? Probably not.
The address Laura has been given takes her to an imposing glass
skyscraper on a street where nineteenth-century brownstones used to sit
quietly side by side. These buildings are now all gone, replaced by sky-
high towers built for the wealthy to stride around in as they gaze out at a
city they have many reasons to believe that they own. Laura double-parks
outside and runs in to ask where she can leave the truck while she goes up
to the penthouse. The building’s concierge directs her to an underground
garage where she can park and then take an elevator upstairs.
Following these directions, Laura soon finds herself stepping into
a vast space with tall windows spilling golden sunlight onto hundreds of
spindly gold chairs stacked around tables covered with wine-stained
linens. Men and women are moving back and forth across the floor,
carrying trays of used plates and dirty glasses, mopping up messes of food
and drink. Someone is playing a radio. Someone is calling out orders to
the workers. It’s very noisy.
Laura finds the man she’s been told to ask for and he sends her off
to the kitchen, marching behind her as he tells her his troubles, a story that
snaps and crackles with annoyance at how the event he catered here last
night was supposed to be attended by far more people than actually
showed up, forcing him to move tables and decorations around at the last
minute to make it seem like this huge space was actually crowded with
guests. Roger, he says, is a saint to take all the extra food off his hands at
the last minute because otherwise he would have to bear the sin of so much
waste. And, as Laura enters the kitchen, she sees that sin would indeed
abound if all the coolers and crates stacked near the service elevator are
what she is meant to drive back to Queens. And yes, they are. The food
pantry will be well stocked tonight.
Once everything is brought downstairs and loaded into the truck,
Laura steps up into the driver’s seat and tells herself to turn the key in the
ignition and head straight back to Queens. But she can’t do it. She can’t
leave. Not yet. And this is just why she didn’t want to come here, to be
back in the Village: she was afraid that she was going to do just what she
thinks she is going to do now—no, what she knows she is going to do—
because there is nothing to distract her. Nothing to keep her away.
Ah, well, she thinks. Ah, well. She still wants to argue with herself,
even as she steps out of the truck, leaves the garage, and starts walking
along Washington Street. Here, change is also evident: the old, familiar
apartment buildings and quirky Village stores are gone, the new ones have
staked their claim, glowing and gleaming in the sunlight. It’s a mild spring
day and people are out strolling around. Some are going in and out of the
high-end shops selling designer goods and other luxury items, some are
pushing babies in carriages or walking with a friend. It’s a pleasant scene
but has nothing to do with Laura’s memories of the Village, which go back
so far that they start in another century. Another century! As if when Laura
lived here it was the time of pioneers in covered wagons instead of streets
crowded with coffee shops and gay bars and stores that sold sandals and
bongs and decks of tarot cards. Head shops and posters and pot. Maybe
this is just the way things work, Laura tells herself. Time flows along and
everything is different than it was before. But as Laura walks on, she grows
sadder and sadder. This is loneliness, she tells herself. This is grief.
Soon, she is standing at the top of a cobbled lane, an anomaly in a
city of wide avenues and concrete sidewalks. She takes a breath and then
a step. Two steps, three. Down the lane she goes.
When Laura was eighteen, this was the place where she was able
to afford the rent on her first apartment—just a small studio, actually, on
the top floor of an old carriage house dating back to the mid-1800s. But
just like almost everywhere else in New York, this area is now an
extravagantly expensive place to live. Duplex condominiums have risen
on either side of the lane, but it’s still quiet here, and shady. Trees have
been planted around the duplexes and flowers have sprung up.
When Laura lived here, she had worked as a housecleaner. There
really weren’t many other types of jobs she could get, a teenager from a
rattle-trap New Jersey suburb who came to the city with a high school
2023, Autumn / 245
diploma and little else. The company she worked for called their cleaning
people “maids,” and sent them to residential buildings in Manhattan. Laura
cleaned townhouses and huge Upper Westside apartments, but also lofts
and brownstones in the Village, which are the places she remembers most
clearly. There always seemed to be drama in these apartments, people
swanning around in beautiful, bohemian clothes, trailing cigarettes and
scarves, nannies and babies. The husbands always seemed to be older, the
wives younger, and everyone did drugs, had dangerous affairs, broke
things. They argued about who spent too much money, acted too foolishly.
Sometimes the husbands shouted, the wives wept. They accused everyone
they knew of being an alcoholic, but then confessed—sometimes to Laura,
who was no one, just the cleaning lady, the convenient person in the
room—that they were, too. Only the wives made the confessions. The
husbands stormed out of the house. Laura doesn’t recall any of the
husband’s names but in her memory, the wives always seemed to be
named Marianne.
Occupied by these thoughts, Laura suddenly finds herself standing
by the front door of the carriage house. She knew the building would still
be standing here because a few years ago she looked it up online and saw
that it had been gutted and remodeled, then sold more than once, most
recently to a wealthy European family who only stay here from time to
time. Now is not one of those times—it can’t be, because as Laura lifts her
hand to touch the door, a thick slab of wood with iron fittings, the house
radiates emptiness. It speaks of deep silence. Then, as she closes her eyes,
she also feels the vibrations of time, the years of sleeping and waking and
going from place to place. Of changing clothes, making plans, being and
doing and running around. And she remembers that it was here she finally
changed her life by taking a typing course and finding work in offices,
where she did well. She liked her work, was often promoted, saved some
money. And here she married, moved away, then got divorced.
But mostly, she finds herself remembering the alcoholic
Mariannes. And she wonders if there wasn’t something that she always
thought was inevitable about them, those slim, delicate women with their
middle-American beauty and fashionable weakness for self-destruction.
Their air of being obedient to the carelessness of fate, running towards it
as if there was nowhere else to go. Because as she stands here now, Laura,
with her hand on the door to the place where she started her adult life—
where she believed that the future would go on and on and things could
always change, get better, that time was inconceivably eternal—she thinks
that maybe what she was really doing all those years and in all the years
that followed was hoping for something hidden inside a whirlwind to

explain itself. For something to break wide open right before her eyes.
And yet. If she could, if she didn’t think that anyone would see
her, she would press her body against the door and let herself pretend that
she could pass through the wood and iron and melt back into the past.
Climb back into her bed again, the mattress on the floor with its bedspread
from India laid out beside a dresser rescued from the street, where candles
were burning, where posters of angels and winged horses were hung up on
the walls. Where she would be young. Safe. Starting all over again.
Hours later, back in Queens, after she stops at the food pantry to
drop off the truck and its contents, Laura finds that she can barely walk the
few blocks home because the pain is back again and this time it’s really
bad. At home, she takes the full dose of her medication, a powerful opioid,
which eases the pain but also has the effect of making her feel like she is
being peeled away from the core of herself and that what is left will soon
become unmoored from life, from living, a poor wraith, lost and alone.
The night is a cage and she is a prisoner, with no one to help her or speak
on her behalf. Soon, she falls into a long, drugged sleep.
When she wakes up in the morning and drinks enough coffee to
begin to clear her head, she slides open the door to her terrace and sits
outside for a while. She lives on a high floor of her building so she has a
view that stretches off towards the horizon. As stars fade and the sun rises,
she sees houses and clouds, trees and cars, endless highways wandering
from one place to another and then back again. Laura’s thoughts wander
as well, leading her back to yesterday and the day before. Then going
forward: what will transpire in the days ahead? The weeks, the months,
the years? Only time will tell. And time is pushing her along. Day after
day she is growing older. Older and older—but that’s what happens, isn’t
it? That’s what happens to everyone, human and animal, all who inhabit
this one known world.
So Laura goes to her closet and pulls out a skirt and jacket, clothes
she used to wear when she went to work, because her first thought is that
she needs to look poised and professional for what she has decided that
she will do today. But then she thinks, No, the hell with that. I don’t have
to dress up for anyone anymore. So she puts on the clothes she usually
wears these days: a tee shirt, jeans, her old Frye boots. And then she leaves
her apartment and walks out into the sunshine. It’s warmer today than
yesterday; spring will soon blow away and summer will heat up the city.
It will be air conditioning weather, but still a good time to walk a dog.
2023, Autumn / 247
First, however, she has to get the dog. So she walks several blocks,
heading for the neighborhood office of the local congressman who
represents her district. She’s voted for him in two elections, which should
count for something but even if it doesn’t, Laura believes that she can
make her case. Maybe she was too shocked to say anything, too overcome
with embarrassment, or shame, or whatever it was that sent her limping
home from the library after the pet rescue group sent her away, but she
feels differently today. She has intent and she has purpose. She knows
what she wants to do.
It doesn’t seem particularly busy in the small branch office of the
congressman, which is located in a storefront between a hardware store
and a pharmacy. A young man is sitting at the front desk, typing away on
a computer. He looks up when Laura walks in, smiles and says, “Hi. Can
I help you?”
“Yes,” Laura says. She introduces herself and then gestures to a
chair by his desk. “May I sit down?”
“Sure,” the young man says. “I’m Randy,” he tells her and asks if
she lives in his boss’s district. Laura says that she does, and then adds the
part about having voted for the congressman every time he’s been up for
election. “That’s great,” Randy says. “Now, what can we do for you?”
“The other day,” Laura begins, “I wanted to adopt a dog. Not a
puppy, an older dog—but the rescue group that has him said they wouldn’t
even consider my application because I’m seventy-one.”
“I don’t understand,” Randy says, sounding genuinely surprised.
“What does your age have to do with it?”
Laura smiles. The smile is meant for herself. And she thinks, Of
course he has no idea. He’s too young to even consider the possibility that
he will ever die. “Because of my age, they think I might get sick at some
point soon or maybe not even live long enough to properly take care of the
dog.”
“Really?” Randy says. “Wow.” To Laura, he sounds like a
teenager, a little out of his depth to deal with what she’s telling him. But
he redeems himself by offering what Laura, with wry amusement,
understands that he must mean as a compliment. “By the way,” he says,
“you don’t look your age. I really mean it. You could have just told them
you were, like, fifty.”
“But I shouldn’t have to do that, should I?” Laura says.
“Absolutely not,” Randy replies. “It’s age discrimination.” He
asks the name of the rescue group and after Laura tells him, he turns and
calls into the next room. “Hey, Angela, would you come out here?” In
response, a woman walks out of a back room. She’s a little older than
Randy, tall, sharp-featured and dressed the way Laura would have been if
she’d opted for office attire. “Have we ever done any work with the
Queensway Friends of Animals group?” Randy asks her.
“Yes, we have,” Angela replies. “Janet Kellogg is the name of the
woman who runs the group. A few months ago, we helped her get a permit
to expand the number of kennels she has. Why are you asking?”
“Well, this is Laura,” Randy says, sparking a quick exchange of
greetings between the two women. “She wanted to adopt a dog from
Queensway and they wouldn’t let her because they said she’s too old. They
can’t discriminate like that, can they?”
“Unfortunately,” Angela says, “since Mrs. Kellogg is running a
private organization, she can make her own rules about who she lets adopt
the animals she fosters. We actually have had other complaints about her,
but usually it’s from younger working people. If both people in a couple
work full time, she refuses to let them have a puppy because she thinks it
won’t get enough attention. Personally, I think that’s ridiculous, but she’s
pretty intransigent.”
“But Laura didn’t want a puppy,” Randy explains. “She wanted to
adopt an older dog.”
Angela sends a sympathetic look Laura’s way. “That does seem
like it’s hardly in the dog’s best interests. Do you want us to call her?”
Angela asks.
“Would you?” Laura says. And now she’s absolutely determined
to get the dog. Otherwise, he’s going to be sitting in a kennel for the rest
of his life because of some random rules that someone she’s never met has
seemingly made up out of thin air.
“Okay,” Angela tells Randy. “See what you can do.”
As Angela walks away, Randy looks up the number for the
Queensway rescue group, picks up the phone and dials. As soon as
someone answers, his breezy tone turns hard and professional. He asks for
Janet Kellogg and when she gets on the phone, he introduces himself and
speaks to her for quite a while, asking how the expansion is going before
he gets to the issue of Laura and the dog. At one point, he puts his hand
over the phone and, in a whisper, asks Laura if she recalls the name of the
dog. And yes, she does, because it was printed on the card that was taped
outside his kennel on the day that Laura saw him.
“His name is Buddy,” Laura Tells Randy, who repeats it to Janet
Kellogg.
2023, Autumn / 249
The phone call seems to go on and on, but Randy knows how to
apply the right kind of pressure. Again, he reminds her how helpful his
congressman has been to her and then pivots to explain how he’s worried
that Laura might go to one of the local television stations and get their
consumer affairs reporter to do a story about age discrimination in pet
adoptions while standing right outside the Queensway kennels. As he tells
this fib, he looks over at Laura and winks. Finally, after listening to some
long, garbled speech that Janet Kellogg seems to be making, Randy says,
“Yes, that’s right. We want to do everything we can to help our seniors,
don’t we?” Laura cringes when she hears this but never mind: she’s
decided that Randy can say anything he likes as long as at the end of the
conversation, she is able to get the dog.
Which seems to be what’s going to happen because finally, Randy
says, “Yes, thank you. Thank you so much, Mrs. Kellogg. I’m sure she’ll
be happy to come over there today.” And then he hangs up the phone.
“Well,” he says, “she’s willing to make an exception and let you
have the dog. But you’re going to have to pay some sort of special
emergency release fee, which I imagine is something she just made up. If
that’s going to be a problem for you, I’m sure we can find a way to help
you out.”
“No,” Laura says, “that’s fine. Whatever she wants to charge, I
can cover it. Thank you,” she tells Randy. “I really appreciate it.”
“Glad to be of help,” Randy says, beaming, happy that he’s going
to be able to tell the congressman how he did a good deed for a voter.
Randy writes down Queensway’s address and luckily, it isn’t too
far away. Still, Laura opts to call a taxi because pain is creeping up on her
again and she doesn’t want to take any medication until she deals with
Mrs. Kellogg. But when she arrives at Queensway, it’s not Mrs. Kellogg
who Laura ends up having to work things out with, it’s a woman named
Betsey who is hostile enough for Laura to guess that her boss has filled
her in on the morning’s phone call. Betsey is a large woman with an
unkempt puff of blonde curls, wearing a nurse’s tunic printed with
cartoon-y images of dancing dog and cats.
When Laura explains who she is, Betsey says, “I am well aware,”
and hands her a piece of paper that turns out to be an invoice for $200.
This is, of course, an outrageous amount of money to pay for adopting a
homeless dog, but true to her word, Laura just hands over her credit card,
which Betsey inspects for forgery, perhaps, or theft. But she runs the card
and prints out a receipt, which she gives to Laura. Then, without saying
anything else, she turns and disappears behind a door that leads the back
area where, presumably, the dog kennels are.
Soon, Betsey returns with the dog who is following obediently
behind her. Betsey is pulling him along on a leash attached to a plastic
collar, but his head is still down, the way it was when Laura last saw him.
She also notices that his ears, which look like they were chewed around
the edges somewhere in his secret long ago, are laid back against his head,
flattened by worry.
“Did you bring a leash?” Betsey asks.
“No,” Laura replies, caught off guard. Certain that Betsey will use
this presumed negligence to cause some delay, Laura comes up with a
quick solution. “Do you think that maybe I can buy the one you brought
him in with?”
Twenty additional dollars later, Betsey hands over the leash. As
Laura takes it in her hand, Betsey says, “Oh, by the way. Just so you know:
he doesn’t bark.”
Laura gets what she’s being told: We won anyway. You bought a
damaged product. “Oh?” Laura says, keeping her voice soft and even.
“Thanks for letting me know.”
Betsey disappears back behind the door and leaves Laura standing
in an empty room, holding the leash. The dog still hasn’t even looked up.
“Well,” Laura says, maybe to the dog, maybe to the air in the room, maybe
to herself, “okay then.” Taking her first steps towards the front door, she
experiences a flash of apprehension. What has she actually gotten herself
into with this dog? Soon enough, she imagines, she is going to find out.
The dog follows Laura outside but stands somewhat away from
her, not testing the length of the leash, exactly, but still keeping his
distance. After a few moments of just standing on the sidewalk together,
Laura decides they’d better walk home because she has no idea if the dog
would even get into a car with her if she called another taxi. But to make
it all the way home she is going to have to take some medication, so she
fishes around in her shoulder bag and finds the little metal container in
which she keeps the broken halves of pills she carries for those times when
she needs help with the pain but doesn’t want to feel the full strength of
the medication’s grip.
And so, off they go. The dog walks silently behind her, keeping
his head down, barely looking around at his surroundings. But Laura talks
to him now and then, telling him her name, where they’re going, saying
over and over that he’s safe and that his life is going to be better now than
it was before. She speaks to him as she imagines she would speak to a
2023, Autumn / 251
worried child. They travel together up and down the hilly streets of the
neighborhood where Laura lives, passing through sunlight on the sidewalk
and shadows stretching across the path winding through the small park
near Laura’s building. Once they arrive, the dog follows her into the cool
vestibule and up the stairs to Laura’s apartment, still without having
looked at her, even once.
He takes a few steps inside and then stops of his own accord and
sits down. The spot he’s chosen is in a short hallway just inside the front
door, near the entrance to the kitchen. “Well, that’s fine,” Laura says to
the dog. “If that’s your safe place for now, you can just stay there until you
feel comfortable walking around the apartment.” She takes off his leash
and collar and pats him on the head. He doesn’t respond to her touch but
at least he doesn’t try to pull away.
The dog goes on looking at the floor. Then, suddenly, it occurs to
Laura that because she had no idea that she would actually be bringing the
dog home with her today, she has bought nothing for him to eat and no
dishes for him to eat from, either. But it’s around noontime now and she’s
hungry, so she decides that what she’ll do is share her lunch with the dog
in the hope that it will be a first step to showing him that she’s his friend.
She has slices of ham and cheese in the refrigerator, so she makes
a sandwich and carries it with her, to the couch. She sits down and takes a
bite. “It’s good,” she says to the dog. “Would you like some?” She sees
his nose twitch, slightly, but he doesn’t move. So she goes back to the
kitchen and puts a few slices of ham on a plate. Then she puts the plate in
front of the dog and sits herself back down on the couch. “All yours,” she
says to him. “Go on, Buddy. Help yourself.” The dog waits a few
moments, then, finally, he lifts his head slightly to look at her, as if he’s
checking on whether she means what she’s said. She nods, and he gobbles
up the food in a few quick bites.
For the rest of the afternoon, Laura goes on talking to the dog as
she moves around the apartment. She watches television, does some
cleaning, writes out checks to pay a few bills. Then, around four o’clock,
she decides it’s time to go to the supermarket and buy some things for the
dog. After that, she’ll come back and take him for another walk.
When she returns from the supermarket, the dog is in the same
spot, but he’s fallen asleep. She imagines he’s exhausted from all the
unexpected things that have happened to him today, but he immediately
stands up as soon as she opens the door. Once again, he keeps his eyes on
the floor as Laura puts his collar and leash back on. When she leads him
outside, he continues to walk silently behind her, his head down, barely
looking around. But he does pee a few times, the only times he lifts his
head, as if he’s worried that something bad will happen to him when he’s
occupied with the functions of his body.
That night, the dog sleeps in the spot by the front door and that’s
where he stays for the next few days and nights, though he always follows
Laura outside when she puts on his leash and walks behind her with the
same air about him of obedience and defeat. Now and then though, when
they are in the apartment, she does catch him looking at her, but if he sees
that she’s looking back he puts his head down again. And he continues to
wolf down his food as if expecting, always, that it will be snatched away.
Then, one night, Laura is awakened from sleep by a sound she
can’t identify. It’s loud, insistent, like a warning being shouted out over
and over again. But once she is fully awake and just about ready to jump
out of bed, she realizes what she’s hearing: it’s a dog barking. Her dog.
The dog sitting by the front door.
She runs out of the bedroom and sees that the dog is up on his feet.
His body is shaking but his feet are flat and steady and he’s pointed himself
straight at the front door. His posture makes clear to Laura that he may be
frightened but he’s not backing down. If something on the other side of
the door is ready to attack, he’s ready to fight.
Laura’s surprise at hearing that the dog can indeed bark almost
immediately gives way to concern: the lock on the door to the building’s
vestibule is often broken, so anyone could have gotten in. Anyone could
be roaming the hallway outside. Anything could be happening. Anything
at all.
So she crouches down beside the dog and puts her arm around
him. And with that one gesture, he feels, he learns. He leans his body
against her and his trembling stops, while somewhere inside herself,
Laura’s own animal heart begins to beat louder. Deep inside, where illness
has scratched its indelible record and age is gnawing away at her joints,
her bones. And outside, in the unknowable elsewhere, time goes on and
on and on. Stars fade, the sun rises. The moon makes an appearance on the
earthly plane. There may be meaning to all this, purpose and intent, but
who can tell? So Laura listens and she tries to learn as the dog goes on
barking. On and on and on.
And she will stay with him until he’s sure that he’s safe here. Here:
in this one moment, this one place, with this one mysterious creature
sitting beside him, still awake and alive inside her human hide.
2023, Autumn / 253
BILL GARTEN
STARVING
I used to steal fruit from a street market while living in Clarksburg, West
Virginia. Years later I went back and overpaid the owner for my sin. He
confessed he knew all along, but never said anything, feeling empathy
for my anorexic body. He smiled and tried to give me part of the money
back because it was way too much, but I refused and asked, Are we
even? I still recall the guilt I felt back then. The adrenaline rush of not
being caught. Every once in a while, I take out one of my who would
have ever thought I would be a success business suits and put it on with
my regimental striped tie and my oxford cloth button-down shirt plus my
shiny wingtips and walk into a local hotel as if I stayed there the night
before and I was coming back from my car to eat a late breakfast.
Pretending I am traveling for the week like I used to late in my career,
bouncing from city to city, making the money I finally deserved for my
high work ethic. Pretending to be a good paying guest, now I steal a
banana, an apple, or an orange from the complimentary continental
breakfast. Chatting among the other guests as I grab a cranberry juice. I
feel the rush. Never questioned. I casually walk out to my car with my
bag of fruit. Thinking back to Clarksburg and how I was eighteen and so
hungry. Thinking about caught.
Garten
JOHN S EUSTIS
OBTUSE, JERRY ORBACH, AND KWANZAA
Obtuse was the first word I realized

I had lost, though I knew its meaning was
to be quite dense, even willfully so.
I was out hiking, and it worried me
for hours as I walked a wooded trail.
At one point I came up with obsidian

which I recognized was wrong, but somehow close.
Later, on my drive home, the right word
returned to me unbidden. Maybe it's nothing,
I told myself. This might be normal, no big deal. (cont)
Jerry Orbach was the second thing I totally

forgot. I knew I knew it, from the credits
of the TV show I'd seen a million times.
I was certain he was John or Johnny something.
Not Briscoe, that's his character's name.
I do love Lennie, he's the best part of the program.

It bothered me for half a day, until I gave in
and looked him up. Since then, I've reassured
myself by not forgetting it again, even
whispering it from time to time, just to make sure.
Kwanzaa was the latest word to escape my orbit.

I could recall a friendly colleague, in his dashiki
speaking about the seven principles
at a big office year-end celebration,
just not the name of the holiday itself.
This was scarier, to lose a cultural touchstone

that everyone knows, and is expected to know.
On the bright side, it only took me half an hour
to find the word at last, shortly after I dropped
my conviction that it started with the letter Z.
A person's name, an adjective, a proper noun

unrelated otherwise, but to me, forever linked,
like the Colonials gunned down in Boston,
first casualties of the Revolution,
or John Brown's men before the Civil War.
Not death. Decrepitude is what I fear the most.

If, later on, I lose it all: words, names, faces,
it will have started with these three things, even though
they've been preserved, for the moment—revived
and propped up like some Potemkin village.
In just a few, or many years from now,

in, hopefully, a gentle, caring place,
my nurse will surely mark it as delirium
when she hears me mutter to myself: “Don't be
obtuse, Jerry Orbach. Happy Kwanzaa.”
Eustis
2023, Autumn / 255
MATTHEW MENDOZA
I AM FIVE
My mom is frantic. She can't find us.

(I am five and my brother is two.)
Her fear rises like steam.
She is clever, complicated.
She is stuck.
She chatters. Ignores me. She clatters.
Resets.
She gets stuck again.
These parentheses of terror
start to judder her apart.
Her panic rises like steam.

*
I am five and my brother he is two.
The rattling chatters. (Frantic.)
My mom is stuck.
She chases shirttail glimpses of us around corners.
Dark hair. Small curls. Arabesques of little laughter.
*
She laughs. She calls for us until she cries.
(She chatters.)
((Resets.))
She is frantic.
I am five and my little brother he is just two.

I listen to her cry as she calls for us.
I don't hear us. I am here—RIGHT HERE—
in this now.
I listen to my mom
but she can't see me
because I am on a prison phone far away.
And because I am not five
and my brother he is not two.
Mendoza
KRISTEN OTT HOGAN

THE LEGEND OF SCARFACE
Like any camp worth its salt, the place has a creepy legend told at
dusk by a conspiratorial camp leader to the pajamaed boys or girls on their
way to bed. In my case, it’s Mrs. Rowley, one of our teachers from
Cascade Elementary School, who leans towards us as we finish our
cinnamon roll and carton of milk in the multipurpose building to the west
of our bunkhouses. We are on the annual 6th grade overnight trip to Clear
Creek, the small camp owned by the Alpine School District in the Utah
Manti–La Sal mountains.
“There is a man,” she begins, “a man with a terrible disfigured
face from a coal mining accident years ago. No one knows his real name,
but in these parts, he’s called Scarface. No one knows how old he is or
where he lives, but he’s been spotted in the hills and mountains near this
camp. From a distance, he watches the ongoings during the day. The
snowball fights in the winter and the baseball games in the summer. But
sometimes,” Mrs. Rowley pauses here, her brown eyes widening with
mock terror, her feathered bangs lifting ever so slightly with her breath,
“sometimes, in the cover of darkness, just when you are slipping into your
sleeping bags, he comes down from his hiding place, creeps across the
fields to the houses, and looks into the windows by your bunkbeds.”
We stare at her, our mouths wide open, our milk mustaches and
crumbs of cinnamon still on our lips, waiting for her to continue, to finish
the story we know holds a horror more terrible than the distorted face of
the trucker in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.
“You hope he’ll be content just looking through the windows, but
there is always the chance he might creep onto the porch and slowly try
the doorknob. And if he finds the door unlocked….” She halts the narrative
and nods her head knowingly, letting our tween minds fill in the rest with
the dregs of our imagination.
Trudging through the snow to our bunkhouses, my classmates and
I glance over the hilly landscape around this isolated camp, watching for
any sign of movement. The six bunkhouses are the bygone homes of six
miners and their families who dwelt on this lonely hill years ago. The
white shingled dwellings retain relics of past lives: ancient kitchen
appliances still rusting in the corners, tiny bathrooms with chipped
porcelain bathtubs and pedestal sinks. I picture lonely women in the
kitchens cooking, children caterwauling in the corners, husbands stripping
2023, Autumn / 257
off muddy boots on the porches. I wonder if Scarface once lived in one of
these houses. Did his family leave him after the accident because they
couldn’t bear to look at his face? Is this the reason he haunts the camp?
The idea of a disfigured face peering from the darkness into our
rooms spooks the heebie-jeebies out of us. Our cha chaperone, a young
teacher, locks the front door as soon as we enter. She braces the doorknob
with a broom.
“That story freaked me out,” she says.
In those days, a lot of things freaked me out. The blackout game
the boys in my class played, pushing the breath out of each other against
the wall. The white tornado my mom invoked when she wanted us to clean
up our messes. Babysitting late at night with the fear of a phone call from
a man upstairs to “check the children.” Friends choking on the candy we
inhaled at sleepovers. Movies with too much rock and roll. People working
on their front lawns when I delivered the Utah County Journal.
Like any good folklore, the Scarface story hinted of truth. The
Clear Creek camp was situated halfway between Schofield to the north
and the mining ghost town of Clear Creek to the south. Both were large
mining communities back in the late 1800s and Scofield experienced a
mining disaster in 1900 that killed 199 men, one of the worst coal mine
disasters of all time. It created 105 widows and 270 fatherless children
overnight.
Of course, we didn’t find it a bit strange that a man from some
primitive mining disaster still roamed the hills in 1985. In truth, it was
easier to obsess over another man’s tragedy than deal with the red-blister
heartaches of our own childhoods.
It was during this time of my life that my father experienced a
prolonged period of depression. The last few months Dad has been sick, I
wrote in my journal. He can go to work but the sickness makes him moody
and sad. I pray for him. His sadness seeped into my soul and colored the
way I saw the world. He diligently went to work but spent most of the
evenings in his room in quiet desperation. My mother shouldered the
burden of eight kids on a tight budget, and I found distraction in stories
and legends and characters surviving great odds.
In the bunkhouses, we sleep the night away without a single
Scarface sighting. But the clouds that thwarted our stargazing the night
before empty their load of snow in the hours before dawn. When the bus
arrives mid-morning, the driver cannot navigate the uphill road from the
highway to the camp. We load our luggage into the back of a pickup truck
and follow the wheel tracks down to the highway where the engine of the
bus shudders like a hibernating animal.

I’m glad to be leaving Scarface territory. I’d rather keep the legend
and its strange comfort folded up, like a creased middle-school note, to
unfold and examine in the safety of home, than relive the anxiety of the
night before. Once the threat no longer looms, the story gives a strange
thrill, a welcome distraction.
The bus lumbers down the road as we stretch our arms across the
aisle to play “Down by the Banks of the Hanky Panky.” We are oblivious
to the treacherous road conditions or the sweat pooling on the driver’s
forehead. We believe the camp will let us leave in peace, the events of the
night passing into the shadow of our memory. The bus rounds the bend
into the town of Schofield, the setting of the great mining disaster of 1900.
As our chanting reaches a fevered pitch—saying E, I, O, U, one
jumps in and— the words suddenly die in our throats as the wheels beneath
us lose their traction. I see the driver’s face whiten like crumbling chalk in
the rearview mirror as he grips the horizontal steering wheel. As the tires
slip, we lose our traction on a safe and benign world. A few kids scream
as the bus slides off the road and comes to a slanting halt in a shallow
ditch.
A silence descends as heavy as the snow outside. Even the legend
of Scarface can’t distract us now. In our bewilderment, we sense a similar
dread to the one we felt when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded
above the Kennedy Space Center only two weeks prior. A classmate had
shouted the news at recess. In the classroom, our teachers spoon-fed us the
grim details in small doses so we could swallow without choking. A rocket
took off. Burst into flames. An explosion. Seven people inside. All dead.
One elementary school teacher. The teacher, we were told, was just a
normal person, not even an astronaut. She had students, just like us,
watching from a classroom like ours, witnessing the death of their teacher
in real time. Bad, Bad news, I wrote in my journal that night, The Space
Shuttel that took off today exploded in the air a few seconds after take off.
All people that were on it were killed. A teacher had gone up to. Many
teachers could have been chosen but they choose her. It is a big thing. I
wish it didn’t happen.
It is a big thing. I wish it didn’t happen. There was no conclusion
to the story, no triumph over incredible odds. No resolution, just an
explosion and then nothing.
In the lopsided bus, Mrs. Rowley keeps her cool, calmly inquiring
if everyone is okay. “Remain in your seats,” she says, “I know it’s hard
for those of you on this side.” She points to those bracing themselves
2023, Autumn / 259
against the pull of gravity towards the ditch side of the bus. Meanwhile the
bus driver crawls out the small rectangle window near his seat. Mrs.
Rowley starts telling jokes, and the tension in the bus softens into slush.
But our greatest fear is the bus continuing its plunge and falling completely
on its side like a dead animal in the snow. We gasp when Mrs. Rowley
presses her hand against the downward wall of the bus as if to give it a
little push and send it toppling. She is teasing us in the middle of our crisis.
Soon adult hands tug me from the emergency back door and up
the embankment to the road. I turn my face away from the rescue
operations in fear of witnessing a tipping and, in my mind, the subsequent
death of my classmates. On one level, I know I’m safe. I can count all my
fingers and toes, and my heart is beating beneath my puffy coat, but my
mind believes something different. All sorts of terrible things seem
plausible now. The tragedies of this life don’t happen only to other people,
they can happen to me.
As we clump together in the shoulder of the two-lane highway, a
woman waves to us from the doorway of a clapboard building. As fate
would have it, we slid off the road right in front of the only bar in town.
Inside, it is smoky and smells like sweat, and the few men camped at the
counter take one look at the bundled bright-eyed crowd and leave
immediately. The room is narrow and ramshackle. We pool on benches in
the back and on the barstools covered with faux red leather. The woman
with long gray hair hands out dimes for the jukebox and pieces of gum and
Tootsie Rolls. For some reason, we are forbidden to play pool. The
teachers circulate the room like passengers on a merry-go-round until the
mundane hours slowly lull us into our former selves. Children afraid of all
the wrong things and not afraid of the right ones.
When the replacement bus finally arrives, we scramble into the
vinyl seats, eager for a change of scenery. But as the bus pulls onto the
snowy road, our collected PTSD resurfaces like dew on the windows.
Could it happen again? This time with a tragic ending? Our heroic bus
driver sways on his feet near the front, chatting with the new driver and
diligently wiping off the condensation on the windshield with a large white
towel. When we reach the crossroads and turn onto the plowed highway,
the canyon walls tower on either side of the road. In my short life, I’ve
traveled through dozens of such canyons. The Rocky Mountains, always
looming in the east, have been the background and bedrock of my
childhood. Now, the stark, snow-streaked ridges cradle the moving bus
and, for a moment, rock us back into our carefree childhoods.
For weeks afterwards, we reminiscence in groups at recess and at
the bathroom sinks. A shared crisis brings former foes together. After all,
it was our bus that had slipped into a ditch, and all of us had barely escaped
with our lives. The rumor that the teachers had been afraid of a gas leak
and possible explosion only heightens the drama. We almost died!
In contrast, the legend of Scarface fades into the background. The
story now breeds a different sort of uneasy. He might look through our
windows, but he would never really come inside. Yet it’s the idea of him,
the possibility something similar could happen to us—this most frightens
us now. Because bad things happen, even a busload of kids is not off limits
to tragedy. We could be the ones scarred in an accident. We could be the
outcast, the leading role in a legend told by conspiratorial camp leaders to
pajama-clad kids.
We retell the bus accident as if reciting an adventure tale or a
legend. Yet we sense some shift in our psyche, some opaque change. A
stripping away, like wallpaper, of our childhood cocoon. A swelling of our
hearts into red and tender blisters. We rehash the bar and the jukebox, the
way we slid like seals in our seats, the heroics of the bus driver, and the
moment the wheels lost their traction on the snowy road.
MICHAEL ESTABROOK
SLEEP
. . . always wished I had more time

didn’t need to sleep
but these days I’ll take all I can get….
Who would have thought it was harder to sleep the older you became.
You’d think the closer to death you got the easier it would be to sleep.
But no. Not the case.
So you take pills to help you along: Tylenol PM or Unisom or Melatonin

or just plain old Benadryl
Or you count sheep or in my case I've memorized the 39 books of the
Old Testament so I recite those: Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers
Deuteronomy….
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 261
Or you make your mind go blank and focus on a make-believe candle

flickering in the dark
Or you simply close your eyes and stare

at the insides of your eyelids.
Not totally black you know
very dark of course with an even pattern of light speckles
like what astronomers see when they look far back
in time to the beginning of the universe:
the Cosmic Microwave Background
Or maybe I'm seeing the sleep I wish I was in.

Estabrook
GANNON DANIELS
MY MOTHER’S VOICE
I listen for my mother’s voice

it holds her name like a carnival
her stories written on the tickets
in my pocket waiting for entrance
then disappear into mirrored hallways
distorted images of self
I have begun at such a late date
cataloguing what it was when she was here
I hadn’t realized in the center there
how all of her would come and go
so real the illusions in the hat
so distant like the top trolley in the Ferris wheel
swaying up there without weight
she rides with me as I ride alone
in the one basket
see my hands
Daniels
PAYING ATTENTION
Once the refrigerator hum stops

a distant plane overhead gets closer
the dirty breathing of the computer
the dog’s stifled cries as his paws twitch in his sleep
My son taps a chopstick to an empty water glass

we share good sounds
stop on walks and listen maybe to a train or a bird
a chugging a whistle a mockingbird imitating a squirrel
we give each other appreciation for things
words the sound of words the tinkling of ice in a glass
the rush of sharing your timing out loud
I didn’t know what I was doing really but he said you play
Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods—I’ll call you Miss Woods, okay?
and I’ll be Nixon—you can call me Mr. President
my present that year was a yellow Panasonic tape recorder
smooth rounded edges a handle and a microphone
I followed as best I could as he improvised cocktail in hand

she knows but she doesn’t know he winks
my ponytail with stringy hair hanging loose
my polyester pantsuit closing in on my skin
the rerecording as we click start click start again
remember she knows but she doesn’t let on
Daniels
JILL RUSCOLL
PAPERWHITES
They have grown too tall

in their small holiday tin
and despite the gentle string
that holds them together
they lean so far over
their precious heads (cont)
2023, Autumn / 263
almost touch the table
in this random house

where they were mailed
in the middle of winter
From this back-bending arc

they watch the two of us
wanting from the other what
we lost long before we met
They listen as our words

pour out useless
They stay quiet as we lay

our heartaches at our feet
and try to go on
Ruscoll
THE DAY THE BOATS GO IN
Forgotten by our winter selves

the old hulls sigh
filling the garage with musty breath

hopeful
in summer teals and oranges

their bows arc upward to hear
the lake lapping, lapping, lapping

full of the blues of childhood
The sun stretches wide the day

and you and I will guide them
over the cement wall

that holds tight our lives
(cont)
to return to the open waters

of our younger selves
when we lived as if this is

the only blessing that matters
Ruscoll
R MULLIN
MARIA SIN
Change lanes, stupid old man, they say to me, the young mean
boys. But I still go where I want. And almost every day that I go to see
Maria, I make sure to go past the Pig’s Head, which is at the market stall
in the bend of the road and where always hangs a severed pig’s head with
thousands of flies swarming it like priests on a wealthy widow. And which
is where the boys always are. I go that way so that I can hear the flies
humming and smile at the way the boys are stupid and think they frighten
me. I walk with a cane somedays. And sometimes I go without it, just slow
and careful and stooped, nothing to lean on, sometimes not, depending on
how I feel. But I can go where I want to go. There’s at least that left.
Once or twice they tried to tell me about places I was not welcome,
crippled old man. Even though I’m probably stupid like they say, I know
the difference between cannot and should not and must not and ought not.
I go where I want. Just out walking, past the Pig’s Head, past where they
are, down the slope to where Maria Sin is living and working.
Monseigneur Campos is in charge of the church here. He is almost
a white man. Strong Spanish blood. People respect him, because he is tall
and noble and mild and far above them in schooling, and maybe because
of his skin color. They are very keen to that here. And Monseigneur
Campos is much older than me. He tells me with his wise smile to go where
I want, don't let them bother you. And I believe him. So I do. And plus I
have my nephews. Once or twice the others threatened to do me violence,
but my nephews had a talk with them. That stopped at least that, for the
most part. They still smirk and laugh and call me names, like crippled and
worthless, and white man, even though I'm not. They just don't like my
lightness.
2023, Autumn / 265
So, I keep going out, past the swarming flies and boys without
shirts and with sticks and machetes, even as far as Calle Rubén Darío.
Maria Sin lives down there, at the end of it, next to the cemetery where the
caskets came floating up last year in the spring flood. Maria is always kind
to me. Some of the older men told me I should not go there to see her. She
is a mestizo woman, they said. You have no business with our women,
stupid crippled old man. And besides, you are too old for that sort of thing.
And they laugh. But I like Maria Sin. She is kind to me. I talked with my
nephews and they had a good talk with the older men, too. So, I still go
down to see her where she lives and works. Now when I come past the
men, they don’t even look at me. They just pretend not to see. Crooked old
man of no worth.
When I walk down there to Rubén Darío, I don’t like to take the
straight line. Everyone gets an idea about where they want to go and then
they take the shortest way and what they think is the logical and best path.
I’m not like that at all. I don't have appointments like they do. Only one,
and I won't be able to miss it even if I forget. For instance, this morning
on my way down to pass the Pig’s Head, I started out on the sun side of
the street and after a while then I crossed over to the dark side, but then
sometimes I go down into the street and walk slowly in the middle of it.
Sometimes, but not too often, someone will say you get out of the way,
broken man, old crooked man, slow man. Go up there where you belong.
Get out of our way. They don’t know me well. That’s why. But I go where
I want.
So, this one day I came down that road, and just like every
Monday morning the head is there buzzing like a coming short-circuit.
They had killed another hog on Sunday and were trying to sell it. The flies
were on it. Nervous clouds of them sucking at the caked blood and the
dead opaque eyes like kids’ marbles.
Whenever I go down, I. always speak to the man who kills them
and sells them. “Nice,” I say, “he’s still smiling.” And like always when I
say “Nice” the man lifts his own head and laughs and says, “Very happy
this cochon. Tasté excelente. Coeina bueno. You buy now? Maria she like
cochon. Tak it. She like pig head, Maria.” And he laughs. And the boys
laugh, too.
“Hoy, no, gracias,” I say as always. So, I go from there on down
to where Maria works, and I go slowly up onto the rotted wood of the
porch that stinks of bananas and scorpions, and then brush away the veil
of mosquito stitching and go through the broken screen door patched with
pieces of clear tape where there are large holes. Abuela Marta from
Guatemala is sitting in her rocking chair. A bright patch-color scarf is

turned around her neck against what she thinks is the morning cold. She
wears her drooping half-moon reading glasses along the end of her nose
and sleeps over her daily La Prensa. She runs the place. Then wakes up
and says like always, “You want to see little Maria today?”
And I say, “Yes, Maria, por favor.” And give her my money.
Which she takes and places under her blouse.
So I go up when Marta signals me that Maria is ready, slowly go
up the stairway, and then to Maria’s room at the end of the gray hall with
the numbered rooms. The other girls sometimes giggle about the old man
being back to see Maria, but I don’t mind. I go where I want.
When I come into Maria’s room she is always sitting at the
window that looks out over the broken rubble of Rubén Darío that was
once a pretty calle in the time of the dictator, but now all the stones are
broken up and mostly carried away for other things. And I go sit with her
at the window. No one knows what we do together. We hold hands in her
room and watch out over the street. We’re mostly quiet together, except
when I say something, my wrinkled old hand with blue and purple spots
covered by her smooth and tan skin. Sometimes I’ll tell her about what I
saw on the way up—the smiling humming pig and the young boys. But
she says nothing, my best friend Maria, Maria sin palabras, Who’s always
said nothing since she was a niña.
EVALYN LEE
I HAVE…SEEDS IN ME
I…
miss ________________ horizon lines
miss the ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ sea
miss \\\\\\\ canyons /////// of avenues
miss \?/ \?/ \?/ the now
look to trees <|> <|> <|> <|> for wisdom
will **************** bloom
forgo <<>> <<>> <<>> folding laundry
have .~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~. seeds in me.
Lee
2023, Autumn / 267
THE NEXT GENERATION OF STARS
I only stand here because of you.

My life’s a stellar wind, good to go.
The truth hurts: Our life’s a stellar wind.

They thought they knew, but they didn’t.
I thought I knew, but then I didn’t.

We travel in the dark to see the stars.
I see darkness travel in the stars.

I don’t pretend to know know what’s going on.
Will faith usurp an unlevel path?

Just because we think we know what happened
Doesn’t mean we know what the hell happened.

Denial of body, denial of self,
denial of soul: catastrophe.

I only stand here because of you
Lee
IF YOU LEARN SOMETHING YOU SHOULD NOT KNOW
Bury it deep. Stones cold in a jar.

I tell you: You are not cleared to know.
You want to know. I do not tell you:

Those who are dead can come back to life.
You who are dead will come back to life,

the torn-off skin of a face gets up
to blanket a skull’s coronal pit.

This truth changes everything. I swear.
Everyone wants to change truth. It happened.

Narratives and counternarratives
(cont)
coexist. We all live in the gap.

Our hands, tied behind our backs, clap.
Clap your hands in time, it’s time to know:

The stones in the jar grow hot.
Lee
A CONCUSTADOR KADIDDLED THE LAST CRUMPLECACK
And the world swerved,

oceans upended, galaxies
spat back black holes
which got busy bladaling
and extincting all the concustadors
for their sin, leaving me to to ask:
Who will grow in the gafen now?
Lee
PATRICK KELLING
THINGS I ALMOST REMEMBER
My mother is standing in the wrong women’s section of

JC Penny. She thumbs a denim skirt, a ruffled blouse. Her
mother is there too, raises a pair of plaid pants, sensible,
she says. Mature, she says. But my mother is buying
factory-made clothes, isn’t interested in sensible. She’s
big-eyed from choice, from the chance to express herself
because for the first time, what she wears won’t be handed
down from her two older sisters or fabricated on her
mother’s sewing machine. She pulls dresses from the
walls that are bright and multicolored. She points to a
mannequin that represents what she wants to be, because
this is how mannequins work, smoothed down versions of
someone’s reality.
Kelling
2023, Autumn / 269
LINDA LERNER
RANDOM
The hammer chased us down subway steps

into the train, hovered over our heads
whose blow our minds kept trying to duck,
day after it struck a woman from behind
and fled, never saw the man wielding it
I was on edge like everyone that day
startled by a black dog’s head sticking out
of a carrier on a woman’s lap beside me
loud smiles broke out, one after another on
seeing the dog, who calmly looked around
and like a soldier, trained to act on sight
defused the image, and vanished
Lerner
TERRY SANVILLE
QUIET CANYON
I’ve been here now twenty-two years, ever since I got out of
prison. I wouldn’t call it a living. But it’s peaceful. I’m peaceful, and that’s
the point. This cattle camp I call home is tucked away in the mountains
that run along one of the few parts of California’s coast that hasn’t been
citified. I hate cities. They remind me too much of the joint, where people
are always pissed off about some damn thing. There’s no noise here, no
surf of traffic, and no zombies jabbering to themselves and texting.
The ranch owner lets me stay rent-free. She pays me a fair salary
for keeping track of their cattle. And the county sheriff likes me here, out
of sight, out of mind...including my own, heh, heh, well, almost. Except
for the low moan of the wind and the cattle at feeding time, it’s quiet. So
I hate it when the occasional ATV blasts past, making a mess of the
muddied trail in the spring, leaving it ridged and rough when I drive my
Korean War-era Jeep into town once a month, maybe twice during the
summer to stock up on beer and propane.
It burns hot in these back canyons, desert hot, and during the mid-
day summer hours I don’t do much, sit in my La-Z-Boy on the shaded
porch that I built outside the ’53 Terry vacation trailer. I guzzle cold cans
of 805, the local equivalent of Bud.
The canyon trail used to be a ranch road, but over the decades the
chaparral closed in and washouts make it almost impassable, a real white-
knuckle ride to town fifteen miles away.
On a hot summer’s day a few years back a couple riding an ATV
blasted up the trail and disappeared over the ridge, leaving behind a cloud
of dust that drifted my way. I cursed the hills and went inside to grab my
rattlesnake gun. I planned to scare the bastard off if he came back. But he
didn’t. Must have cut through the neighboring ranch to reach the coast
road. I hoped old man Sanchez had his shotgun ready. Damn city punks.
The quiet had settled in and the afternoon grew long. Mourning
doves cooed in the golden light. A figure appeared at the ridge crest and
descended the trail toward me, weaving back and forth in the wiggly waves
of heat. My distance vision had slipped away years before so I ducked
inside and grabbed my binoculars, a monstrous pair bought at the Army-
Navy surplus store. I focused on the figure and sucked in a deep breath.
A shapely woman stumbled along the dusty path, naked, covered
in tattoos. Blood smeared her cheeks with long drips flowing down her
thighs. She moved nearer with arms clamped over her stomach. One eye
had swollen shut and blood leaked from her nose and lips. Someone had
beaten the crap out of her.
I hustled inside the Terry, grabbed my canvas duster and returned
to the porch. As she staggered along the trail, not twenty yards from me, I
hollered, “Hey, miss. You need help.” I held up the duster.
She turned toward me, one arm across her breasts, the other hand
shielding her privates. She stared at me, not moving, then collapsed into
the dirt.
She felt heavier than she looked. But then my strength had ebbed
away as I got old. I managed to carry her to the porch, lowered her into
my chair and draped the duster over her nakedness. She sat with head back,
mouth open showing a bloody socket where a molar had been. Her eyes
flickered under their closed lids, like a dog’s when it’s dreaming. But in a
few minutes they snapped open, at least one of them did.
“Where...where the fuck am I?” she asked, her tongue circling her
mouth, feeling for missing teeth.
“The B&D cattle camp.”
2023, Autumn / 271
She lifted the duster and stared at her body. “Where are my
clothes?”
“I don’t know. You didn’t have any when you got here.”
“Drink. I need something to drink.”
“I’ll get you water.”
“No, that.” She pointed to my empty beer can resting on the porch
rail.
“Okay, but drink it slow. You might have hurt your head.”
“Get me the damn beer,” she snapped.
I grabbed an 805 from the fridge and handed it over. She chugged
it, burped. She had brown hair with blonde streaks and sported lots of rings
—in her eyebrows, nose, lips and ears, looked to be in her late 20s, early
30s. But cleaned up, she might be younger.
She sat up and began rocking, her face twisted with pain. “Got
anything stronger than beer?”
“I got some Norcos.”
She stopped rocking and stared at me. “Yeah man, gimme a
couple.”
I went inside and grabbed the bottle from the medicine cabinet and
my first aid kit.
“Here, take these and I’ll wait a while then patch you up.”
“Thanks.”
“Who did this?” I asked.
“Lonny.”
“Is he your boyfriend?”
She gazed down-canyon and sighed. “Yeah, something like that.”
“Why’d he beat you?”
“We came out here to have sex, okay. So we’re getting down to it
and he gets really rough, wants me to do...stuff I don’t do. Started slapping
me around, then beating me.”
The woman cut loose with a shudder that rattled her teeth.
“I told him to go fuck himself. He knocked my tooth out; it’s next
to the trail somewhere. Kept at it...woulda killed me...but his hands got
messed up. I musta passed out. Don’t remember getting here.”
“Do you want me to take you to the police? The ER?”
“Hell no. Those fools have seen all this before. They think I’m a
slut just asking for it.”
“Are you?”
The woman glared at me with her good eye. “My life hasn’t been
all sunshine and rainbows. And I can be real stupid about guys.”
I handed her another beer and this time she sipped it, wincing
when the cold brew hit her split lip. She leaned back in the chair and pulled
my duster up under her chin. We let the silence return and listened to the
doves as the high clouds turned scarlet in the dusk.
“Okay, I’m gonna treat your head first,” I said.
“That’s all you’re gonna treat, Pops. I’ll take care of the rest. I
might have some broken ribs. It hurts when I breathe.”
“Yeah, can’t do much about that.”
I did the best I could cleaning the scrapes and cuts with rubbing
alcohol and applying first aid cream. Her nose stopped bleeding and it
didn’t feel broken.
“What I really wanna do is take a shower,” she said. “You got one
in that little tin box of yours?”
“No, it’s out back. I got a water tank that the windmill pumps full
from my well. Hope you can handle cold water.”
“Clothes?”
“I’ll get you something.”
“So what’s your name?” she asked, trying to smile but stopping
because of the lip.
“You can call me Pops. I’m old enough to be your grandfather.”
“Yeah, I figured.”
“What’s your name?”
“Sheryl. Did you know that my name has both feminine pronouns
in it?”
“I never thought about that.”
“You out here by yourself, Pops?”
“Yes.”
“You must be one horny dude.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, I’ll tell you straight. I’ll be watching you so don’t try
anything.”
“I wouldn’t think of it.”
My answer seemed to anger her because she pushed herself up,
groaning, and demanded to be shown the shower, the outhouse, and given
clothes. I went inside the trailer and began to throw something together for
supper. When she returned from the shower, she looked the same age,
maybe even older, with deep crows’ feet around her eyes that I hadn’t
noticed.
The night closed in fast and a cold wind blew up-canyon off the
Pacific. I shut the trailer door and we ate in silence. She kept sneaking
2023, Autumn / 273
glances at me over forkfuls of omelet. The generator kicked in and I flicked

on the lights. The wind picked up and rocked the Terry. She looked ready
to cry or scream, I couldn’t tell which.
“Look, Sheryl, just relax. It’s too dark to take you into town
tonight. We can do it first thing in the morning.”
Her lips trembled. “No...no rush. I got no place to stay. And I’m
sure the hell not going back to Lonny’s.”
“But your things?”
“They can all fit in a shopping cart, okay? I’m a street person who
sleeps around. You happy? Just another fucking sob story.”
I shut up and sipped my wine. Sheryl had already emptied her
glass. I cleared away the dishes, clicked on the TV and handed her the
remote.
“Ladies’ choice,” I said and grinned.
We watched Law and Order and Castle reruns all evening. The
trailer rattled in the wind as both of us stared at the on-screen dramas with
snippets from our own lives flashing before us—the broken-down ex-
cons, the nymphos, the homeless derelicts always with us.
“I’ll take the upper bunk and you can have the lower,” I told her.
“I hope you can sleep with those ribs.”
“I’ve been hurt worse.”
I clicked off the lights and climbed into the upper bunk, groaning.
“Goodnight,” I called.
“Yeah, goodnight.”
I drifted off to the sound of Sheryl’s soft sobs.
The next morning she looked even worse. Her face had swollen
and all the body bruises started to show, at least the ones I could see. She
commandeered my La-Z-Boy and sat motionless staring down-canyon,
breathing shallowly as the Aermotor spun slowly in the breeze. She only
wanted coffee for breakfast. The jeans, undies and denim work shirt I gave
her seemed to fit okay. But shoes were a problem; the sandals I used as
slippers were the only things that worked, sort of.
I went to feed and water Pinto Beans, or Pinto for short, before
our morning ride to check the herd. I’d named the mare after the color of
the beans I ate a lot. I took my snake gun with me and told Sheryl I’d be
back by noon. When I returned, it looked like she hadn’t moved, sat in the
chair dozing. The swollen eye had gone down some; I’d given her an ice
bag to chill it.
I fixed us sandwiches for lunch. When she got up to use the

outhouse she screamed and clutched her side. The bone-jarring ride into
town would have to wait until those ribs knitted. She wouldn’t let me touch
her so I could only guess how many might be fractured. I remembered that
kind of pain, from my first year in prison, the fight in the yard, blue sky
overhead, legs stomping me into the dirt before the guards came and
merciful darkness closed in.
The days passed. We didn’t talk much; she asked few questions
and I did the same. I’d ride out in the mornings, leaving her on the porch
reading one of my books, mostly cheesy crime novels and a little science
fiction. Her appetite improved and my larder emptied. When her face
healed she looked quite pretty, not needing makeup. But she bugged me
to buy some, that and feminine hygiene products and maybe some off-the-
rack clothes.
When I made my monthly town run in the Jeep, Lydia, my favorite
clerk at CVS, pulled her graying curls behind an ear, raised an eyebrow
and smiled as I laid my purchases on the conveyer.
“You got yourself a girlfriend, Edgar?” she asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“What you gonna do, smoke these?” She chuckled and held up the
box of tampons.
“They’re...they’re for my grandniece. She’s sick and asked me to
shop for her.”
“Uh huh. So does your grandniece normally wear black lipstick?”
“Yeah, what of it. She’s one of those, what do you call them,
Goths.”
Lydia grinned. “You just be careful out there in that canyon.
Strange things can happen, even to an old bachelor like you. Have you told
her about your past? You know if the sheriff catches you two out there,
you could get violated.”
“I haven’t told her anything. She’d be gone in a flash if I did.”
“She’ll find out sooner or later.”
Back at camp, Sheryl laughed when I told her how embarrassing
it was to shop for her and some of what Lydia had said.
“Why don’t you come with me next time?” I asked.
“Nah, why spoil the mystery. Let them keep guessing.” She leaned
forward and kissed me on the cheek. “Thanks. The clothes are a bit
frumpy. But you can have your shirts back.”
2023, Autumn / 275
As her ribs slowly healed, Sheryl started helping out: preparing

meals, cleaning out the Terry, helping me tend to Pinto, rubbing liniment
into my shoulders and back when the arthritis got so bad that the Norcos
didn’t help. But our nights stayed the same—dinner, TV then sleep with
no funny business, not that she offered or that I asked for it. I kept
expecting that any day a sheriff’s ATV would pull up and some Bubba
would yank me out of there, say I’d violated the conditions of my release,
haul my ass back to the joint and turn Sheryl out.
After a couple three months Sheryl seemed eager for the ride into
the city, excited, yet somehow fearful. I think the canyon and its solitude
had sucked her in, calmed her high frenetic energy to a manageable level.
By the time we got to town she complained about rib pains.
“I told you it might be too soon,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah. But I need to get things at CVS.”
“I could get them for you. I’m way past being embarrassed.”
“Yeah, well this time I need a pregnancy test.”
“What are you talking about? We haven’t done anything—”
“Not you, silly. I’ve missed a couple of my periods. It was Lonny.
That last time when that son-of-a-bitch...raped me, we weren’t using
protection.”
“That was….”
I choked back the rest of my comment, was going to say “stupid”
but figured it would be a long cold ride back home if I’d said it.
Arriving at CVS, we went in separately so that nobody would
know she came with me. At the checkout stand Lydia smiled. “So that’s
your...your grandniece?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Come on, you can’t fool me. That woman climbing into your
Jeep in the parking lot.”
“Yes, that’s her.”
“She looks too pretty to come from your family.”
“Yeah, yeah. My...my sister and her kids have all the looks.”
“Well, if that test she bought turns up positive, come see me. I’ve
had five of my own and can help. Is she out there at that God-awful camp
of yours?”
“Yes.” I thought about lying but saw no benefit in it. I had told
Lydia about my past, the only one in town I told. I knew she could keep
secrets.
Lydia turned serious. “If and when the time comes, let me know.
I’m a licensed midwife and can do just about everything except C-
sections.”
“I will.”
“Plus I’d like to see this mysterious canyon of yours.”
I could feel my face grow hot and hustled out the door to the sound
of her chuckling. At the same time, the thought of becoming a stepfather
of sorts burned inside me, a warmth that hadn’t been there since before
prison, since before college when rioting hormones, stupidity, and
machismo sent me on a path to the big house. It’s true; men’s brains don’t
fully develop until they’re 25. If we could only survive without fucking up
until then, there’d be much less heartache in the world.
The next morning, the pee stick showed a plus sign. Sheryl had
bought two test kits and she tried again in a week, with the same result.
At dinner, she stared at her plate and toyed with her food. We
hadn’t spoken about the plus signs. I didn’t want to force the issue, but the
tension gnawed at me, and I’m sure it was much worse for Sheryl.
“So what do you want to do?” I murmured. “I...I can take you into
town, to Family Planning, and we can...take care of it.”
Sheryl raised her head and stared at me. “I’ve been that route
before. It broke my heart. And this time I might have waited too long.”
“So do you want to...to keep it?” I chose my words carefully, not
using “child” or “baby” which would only cause more hurt.
“I don’t know how, Pops. But I want to. I want to change who I
am and being a mom might do that. I’m tired of being the town slut. I want
to join with all those other women that I despised for so long as brood
sows.”
“Keep it? Even though it came from the man who raped you?”
Sheryl gave me a fierce stare. “Lonny and those other fools can
go to hell. My child will have a fresh start...and so will I. I just want to ….”
She bowed her head and her shoulders shook. I hugged her close
as she wept, my mind racing yet energized, trying to figure out how to
make it work, how we could possibly add a third human to our outpost. I
didn’t care if I died some day, sitting in my La-Z-Boy and watching the
sunrise for the last time. But having a woman give birth to a child out in
the middle of nowhere would change everything. We would have to plan
carefully, be prepared, and do all of it on the down-low.
As the months passed, Sheryl grew huge, her breasts swaying

under her halter-top. Her belly pushed out so far that it was difficult for
2023, Autumn / 277
her to slide onto the kitchen table’s bench seat. Morning sickness came
and went. In the second trimester the kicking started. On my trip into town
I bought a pre-paid cell phone, what they call “burner phones” on the TV
cop shows. Lydia agreed that she’d come to the camp with me when Sheryl
started labor, stay and fill out the paperwork, and be there if anything
turned south.
“Maybe I should have gone into town,” Sheryl said during her last
week. “They’d have to take me at County General, no matter what.”
“It’s too late now,” I said. “The ride over the trail would shake that
baby right out of you.”
“Not funny,” Sheryl muttered and waddled outside to the porch
and my long-lost-to-me La-Z-Boy.
Contractions started at dawn of a warm spring day. I phoned Lydia
and she agreed to meet me at the trailhead, some ten miles away. I had
worked on the Jeep all the previous week, making sure that nothing broke
on my mad dash to retrieve our midwife. And I’d set up a bed stand on the
covered porch since the space in the trailer seemed too cramped. That
morning I covered Sheryl in thick blankets and gave her a Norco to take
the edge off.
“I’ll be back as quick as I can with Lydia.”
“Don’t drive too crazy, Pops. I need you here, not dead in some
ditch.”
I grinned. “I can drive that trail blindfolded. See you in a little
while. Sorry I have to leave you alone.”
“I’m not alone,” she said and patted her belly.
I drove carefully down the canyon, not taking chances, the
morning breeze crisp and whipping my hair. I found Lydia waiting at the
mailboxes. She shook her head in disbelief and climbed gingerly into the
ancient military vehicle, let out a yip when I spun its tires in the dirt and
headed up-canyon.
As we approached the trailer, we could hear Sheryl crying out over
the growl of the engine. Even the grazing cattle on the hillside had lifted
their heads. Things had progressed quickly with contractions less than
eight minutes apart.
“Is this your first child?” Lydia asked Sheryl.
Sheryl stared at me then closed her eyes. “No.”
“Didn’t think so. First ones usually take longer. You’re almost
there.”
I held Sheryl’s hand and stroked her arm. She smiled then gritted
her teeth when a contraction hit. In less than two hours with steady
coaching from Lydia, she gave birth to a 7-pound, 4-ounce baby girl: ten
fingers, ten toes, bright blue eyes, and a copious amount of shocking red
hair. Mother and daughter rested comfortably as the sun warmed the
canyon. After considerable debate, Sheryl settled on the name Clara Red.
The birth certificate would never show a father.
Lydia finished up the paperwork and stayed until mid-afternoon
to make sure there were no afterbirth complications. She gave Sheryl a
sponge bath and by dusk I’d driven her back to her car. I tried to give her
a couple hundred dollars for her services but she refused to take it, told me
to spend it on my child. I didn’t correct her error. Just like Sheryl, maybe
I too wanted to become someone different, become a mentor and protector
for this tiny girl.
Clara’s and my birthdays were two days and seventy-four years

apart. On her first birthday, the three of us drove to town, to visit Lydia at
CVS, to see a pediatrician at the free clinic, and to stock up on groceries
and baby supplies. Life at the camp had been rough-and-tumble in our
cramped little trailer, with me spending warm nights on the porch bed
while Sheryl nursed Clara inside and tried to pacify her enough to let us
sleep. But lately things had smoothed out, the remote canyon’s silence
seemed to have calmed us all.
Sheryl looked beautiful, her hair long and freshly washed, her face
free of makeup and tanned golden from working in the garden. Clara
prattled happily in her car seat strapped into the back of the Jeep. Down-
canyon, a dust trail and a high-pitched snarl signaled the approach of an
ATV, the first in weeks.
Sheryl glanced sideways at me. “You gonna pull over and let the
idiot by?”
“Maybe.”
“Can you tell who it is?”
“Too far away. I’ll have...have a word with them when they get
close.”
I parked the Jeep in the middle of the trace and grabbed my snake
gun from under the seat.
“What are you gonna do with that?” Sheryl asked, looking
nervous.
“Just a little gentle persuasion against trespassing.”
The ATV approached and cut its speed. A young guy with his
blonde girlfriend clinging to his waist looked at me with wide eyes.
2023, Autumn / 279
“Son-of-a-bitch, it’s Lonny,” Sheryl muttered. “Give me that gun,

I’m gonna blow….”
“I’ve got this,” I said.
Lonny eased the ATV to a halt and gave me a shit-eating grin.
“Hey Grandpa, will you get the fuck out of the way?”
“I don’t think so, Lonny.”
“Do I know you?” His grin faded.
“No, but you know...know my wife. You raped and beat the hell
out of her a couple years back.”
“I...I don’t know what you’re talking about, man. Get out of my
way.”
“Is this true?” the blonde asked Lonny.
He ignored her question and glared at me.
Sheryl stood up in her seat, towering over us and looking like an
avenging angel. “Damn straight it’s true. Go ahead and shoot him, hon.
Make him bleed like I did.”
The blonde climbed down from the ATV and stood at the trail’s
edge, shaking.
I raised the sawed-off shotgun and pointed at Lonny’s chest. “Get
down off that thing.”
“Fuck you, old man, and that slut with you.”
I stepped forward and placed the barrel against his chest.
“You don’ have the guts,” Lonny growled.
I swung the shotgun skyward and fired over his head. The roar
echoed down the canyon. The birds stopped singing.
“I’m not going to ask again.”
Shaking, Lonny climbed from the ATV. A wet spot formed in his
crotch. He stared at me with wild eyes. I remembered that stare from
prison: my fuzzy image in the stainless-steel mirror after my first beating,
after learning I was a most vulnerable inmate with maybe a fearful lifetime
ahead of me in that cement block hellhole. I could never go back there.
I sucked in a breath and withdrew a step. “Now take off all your
clothes. Everything.”
He stood frozen, like he hadn’t heard me.
“DO IT!”
Lonny did as ordered, his sickly white nakedness glowing in the
morning sun.
I turned to the blonde. “If you want, you can ride into town with
us.”
She nodded and got into the back of the Jeep with Clara, who had
started to fuss.
“Now climb back onto that thing and git,” I told Lonny. “If I see
you again you won’t be so lucky.” I raised the shotgun and pointed it at
his head.
“Take...take it easy, mister. I’m going, I...I’m going.”
With a roar, he took off down-canyon. I fired a round after him to
encourage his rapid retreat. Nobody said anything until the silence and the
comforting heat had returned to the canyon.
“Is...is it really true?” the blonde asked Sheryl, who had begun to
weep.
Sheryl nodded and they hugged.
Clara seemed to recover first and burbled happily in her car seat.
We headed slowly into town, dropped the blonde off at her apartment,
shaken, unhurt, but grateful to us for avoiding a possible similar fate.
We never saw Lonny again. Clara continued to grow like wild oats
after a spring rain. I screened in the entire front porch and it became her
giant playpen, keeping critters away and our child safe. Months then years
passed with Clara turning into a beautiful little princess and her mother
into an earth-goddess. At four, Clara could almost recite her alphabet
without coaching. And Sheryl and I read to her every night from children’s
books I bought at the Goodwill Store.
“You know, things are gonna have to change,” Sheryl said one
night over dinner.
“Yes, I was wondering when you’d bring it up. Personally, I like
the way things are now.”
“I know, but Clara needs to go to pre-school, be with other kids. I
love it here in the canyon but...but Clara and I can’t stay.”
“I know. But how...how will it work?”
Sheryl gulped a mouthful of wine and leaned toward me. “I’ve
been talking with Lydia. You know her husband died years ago.”
“Yes, I remember. She disappeared from CVS for a few months.”
“Well she still lives in their three-bedroom on the south side, near
the lake park. She said that Clara and I could stay with her. There are
schools nearby.”
“What about you?” I took Sheryl’s hand and squeezed.
She grinned. “Well first, I’m gonna look into tattoo removal.” She
pointed to some of the uglier ones on her forearms. “I was thinking I could
sign up for the nursing program at the community college. And I could
2023, Autumn / 281
help Lydia with midwifing. Maybe when I get set up I can meet someone
that’s willing to...to love me, regardless of my past.”
“Sounds like you have it all planned out.”
“All except how I’m gonna live without you.”
“Come to the canyon on the weekends. I can teach Clara to ride
Pinto when she gets bigger. And...we can talk.”
“You know, I never asked...and if you don’t wanna tell me, that’s
cool. But...but why were you in prison?”
I knew that day would come when she’d want to know and I felt
surprised that she’d waited so long. But I didn’t want to lose her. And after
Clara was born, we had the closest thing to a family that I had known in
my 78 years.
“It’s okay, Pops. You don’t have to tell,” she repeated.
“No, I want to. But I understand if you don’t want to see me
again.”
“Why? What could you have done that was so...oh.”
“Yes, it turns out that Lonny and I have shared some common
experiences. I got 25 to life for mine.”
“But you’re nothing like that creep.”
“I’ve been repenting for my sins for fifty years. It still doesn’t
seem like enough.”
Sheryl reached across the table and grabbed my hand. “It’s enough
for me.”
The canyon seems extra quiet, the way I like it. I have lunch with
Clara and Sheryl once a month when I go into town. And during the spring
and summer they come out and help me put the Terry back in shape. Never
was a good housekeeper.
Lydia’s been bugging me to let her move in with me. She’s cut
back her days working at CVS and figures I need someone to massage my
back and shoulders after a day’s ride. It’s been decades since I’ve shared
a bed with anyone. But I’ve loved her for a long time. She knew it all along
but didn’t push it, especially when her husband was alive. But now maybe
it’s time to share the canyon’s quiet with another, to listen to the coyotes,
the lowing of the herd, and to openly admit my failings to someone and
seek final atonement.
BILL BAYNES
A FRESHENING
Swallowtails are sipping

Stamens in the rain,
A gentle freshening,
The birds still singing.
It’s spring and every seedling
Swells to blossom.
Snowmelt fills the stream,
And water whispers
Rosaries over the rocks
Along the shoreline.
As the Yuba rushes,
The river intones,
Songs of birds,
Songs of stones.
Baynes
WILL KIRKLAND
A CERTAIN ELDERLY FRENCHMAN, EIGHTY-THREE
Father, soldier, husband, son,

Writes in a shaky hand
How it was not so
When he tortured his first Algerian.
He writes of his regrets:

Not for the man or the way he died.
Not for the carnivore of shame
That might have settled on his soul
But only that he died
Too fast
To beat his secrets out.
Regrets, yes. Regrets
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 283
I have many, he writes

But never remorse, which of course
Implies something else
I have never allowed
In this unstained house,
Though others may wish
To couple my name with
Guilt.
I only regret that I failed in my service

To my uniform, my nation.
Which, God willing,
I would not let happen again.
Kirkland
WHAT I HAVE HEARD ABOUT BLUE ANGELS

All of a sudden
(it was hot, it was blue,
the meal was done,
the table cleared,
in what would become
the bones of our home)
a sound devoured the sky.
All of a sudden
the blue turned white.
We could no longer hear.
The sky was gone.
The white went gray.
Sand scoured our eyes
with harrowing grains.
The gray went too.
What remained
was colorless. Forever.
All of a sudden
stones fell from the sky. Monstrous
heads, they fell. A steel beam
flew by, a needle of stone
pierced an eye. (cont)
All of a sudden, my son

was deaf forever. Never would hear
me say I love you!
all of a sudden forever.
An arm flew by
all of a sudden. I did not see the rest
of my wife, forever.
She took another son too.
We never said goodbye, forever.
I have heard
in your country
they are called
Blue Angels, that
thousands gather
to watch them.
I have heard
that people rush up to the roofs
when they hear the sound.
What a thrill! What a sight!
When we heard we flew down.
We ate the dirt
to go even deeper, away
from the sound, from what we had seen.
If these are angels

of your blue heaven
We do not want to see them
again, forever.
(The Blue Angels is a flight demonstration squadron of the United States

Navy consisting of the same aircraft used by the United States and many
other militaries as advanced weapons delivery systems.)
Kirkland
2023, Autumn / 285
IT’S HARD TO MAKE SMALL TALK TODAY
It’s hard to make small talk today.

Everything is so huge.
A child has died in Fallujah.
A bullet wound the size of brains
has taken him. His mother now prepares
for thirty years of grief, a euphemism
for what her womb will bear, a memory
of what she saw: infanticide by error. The sniper wipes
his burning eye and prays to find
through dust and fear another, better enemy,
swears to christ he will not die
in god’s forsaken alley, squeezing
off another round, another and
another.
Until the infant’s uncle
detonates himself, and him,
to find their separate heavens.
These are all the things I see.
The words descend through space,

Like birds
on bullet-shredded wings;
struggle to be lifted
against such roaring air
exhale and fail. Such tiny, unremembered deaths
in the human scheme of things.
Don’t talk to me. For just another second;
Give my soul its mourning moment
to pack another coffin home.
*
*
*
*
*
(cont)
Now I, along with all of you, can go,

taken each with pain, our own:
a broken toy, a phone call missed;
a headache in the evening.
We talk of little else:
the rising price of gasoline,
how hot it is—too hot to shop,
the pinching shoes.
Are the vegetables organic?
Will the Red Sox lose?
Conversations in the wind,

the words, the wingless birds, the
body parts, come down like rain,
a drip, a crawl upon my skin.
Questions of tomorrow come,
drop like ashes on the drums.
Who will pick the children up?
Who will who when what the how if?
Laughter slaps, then slips
and ricochets away.
The goldfinch in the garden
drops a seed, a shadow shimmers,
signals danger. Goldfinch gone
and we?
From the silence,
in the shadow
of its absence
returns the war.
Kirkland
LET US PRAISE THIS MAN
It was in Bosnia, during a war:

Serbs were shooting at Muslims,
Muslims at Serbs; equality
Was not the rule
Not all
Took sides. A Serbian family demurred:
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 287
This is where we live

these are our neighbors
let Allah and God settle their differences
As we have settled ours.
These Serbs were not
Well loved by other Serbs. Shells fell day and night
On Muslims, and on all
Such traitorous Serbs.
During a break in the fighting
Muslims came and took their son away.
He never returned. Another died
While fighting with the Serbs. Their third
Was a girl, an infant at this time.
Her mother’s breasts went dry.
The shelling did not cease. The girl
Was given tea. Now inside the walls,
As well, the suck of death.
Until a Muslim farmer came
with milk. Every morning
Before the light he brought
A tin of milk to the Serbian child.
Though other Muslims cursed him
He came. He refused the parents’ offers to pay.
Though the guns roared, his boots
Ascended the stairs, four hundred
And forty-two days let us praise
This man and the god he serves
Bringing milk to a child
In a time of war
Kirkland
A MURDER OF CROWS
I saw a murder of crows
mob a raven today
and thought of our family,
my cousins and cousins of cousins
spread over continents, seas. (cont)
For an eyebrow raised,

a pause too long in answering,
misunderstandings festering
from a thousand years ago,
we descend in gyred circles
pecking heads and eyes.
Whose son are you? And

what did your father do?
Mine left me a message
you wouldn’t understand, so
fuck you.
They attacked, black-robed,

assassins in the sky.
The raven, heavier, dropped,
spun out, lumbered, skull-sore, away
to plot revenge, perhaps an egg or two.
The crows flapped and sang

in rough quatrains
as crows will do, their shoulders
thick with pride and eyes with scorn.
Until the next time comes
you fool.
Kirkland
JUDITH CODY
MAN OF 99 YEARS LOOKS OUT THE NURSING HOME WINDOW
Local newsletter reporter:

What do you miss most in life?
Man:
Mowing my lawn.
Cody
2023, Autumn / 289
ARTHUR ALLEN MIDWINTER

SELL THE KIDS FOR FOOD
When you are a first-year teacher, the natural assumption is the

veterans know more than you and have established procedures and
methods to make any suggestions for improvement you might offer mere
fodder for break room jokes at your expense. At its core, the humor lies in
a hard-earned truth recognized after years of school meetings and changes
in administration: the professed goals and the means employed for
achieving them presumably have never met. Schools tell lies.
The day it began I was still quite naive on these matters. I didn’t
think much about the roll of mimeographed sheets retrieved from my mail
slot before moving on to my classroom. Such hand-outs appeared
routinely, my job to distribute them, so the parents of my students would
think we were keeping them well-informed of our ardent educational
efforts. Important to know, our school had been established for students
who performed poorly on intelligence tests, on the bottom, in fact. They
shared any number of developmental problems, some barely discernible at
all, others quite physical and impossible not to see. In my classroom, they
were all boys, and, thankfully, none required individual care, the extra
responsibility of which would have kept me in a state of constant anxiety.
I had arrived half an hour before my students and sat drinking a
Coke while I moved some teaching notes around on the desk. A very quiet
half an hour. Normally I would have set the hand-outs aside until the end
of the day. Often printed in triplicate, cut into thirds, stacked, and held
together with a rubber band, which I always saved because rubber bands,
paper clips and other office luxuries should never be wasted, this particular
parental notification I knew to be special. Every student was to receive an
entire folio leaf all to himself. A full eight and a half by eleven. So
evidently important, I even glanced at a random sentence.
“And for checking up on the children,” it read, “we occasionally
need to take some blood samples which are then analyzed.”
A health department edict, I figured. There were so many
childhood diseases to worry about when you worked in a petri dish like
the average classroom. Mine, because of the age of the building, was
probably below average for the era, with layers of bacterial filth on every
surface and in crevices bleach can’t reach. I saw warnings about head lice
and German measles and other hazards all the time, although taking blood
seemed a little extreme. Probably only a little, I told myself. Not like they
were going to drain them.

It was a duck-and-cover day, which we did on Wednesdays. If you
are unfamiliar with the drill, we taught the boys what to do in the event of
a nuclear attack. I would have liked to suggest “put your head between
your knees and kiss your ass goodbye.” A popular joke. The boys would
have thought it was funny, I am sure; but being a recent hire I was not
about to mock the system, not when the walls likely had ears. And fearful
students, I had been told, are more easily controlled.
The boys received breakfast as well as lunch at the school, so they
would shuffle into the classroom after they finished eating, one after
another like a leaky faucet. Curtis and Charlie demanded the greater share
of my attention. An odd couple, a sort of Martin and Lewis, as content to
take up a lot of my time as I was for it to be monopolized, they probably
had dyslexia, which explains their poor test results despite other contrary
evidence.
Curtis dropped his book bag heavily on his chair and posed as he
always did, one hand on his lean hips, which telegraphed a carefully
crafted, interrogative or declarative sentence directed at me. His stance
partially blocked the aisle, so the other boys were forced to maneuver
around him to get to their seats.
“Mr. C., are you going to be advisor of the science club?”
“How’s that?” This was only news to me because I had not read
the full note.
Charlie, as usual, saw an opening and attacked his best friend.
“How could he know? They just told us this morning. He wasn't there.”
His greatest joy, at least in my classroom, was correcting Curtis.
“Mr. C. knows everything. Don't you Mr. C?”
Sure. I usually had an answer for every question, at least, most of
the vague and unverifiable sort, but I didn’t bother to offer one.
“Nobody knows everything, you idiot,” Charlie pounced again.
“Did you hear that, Mr. C? Just watch it, mister.” Curtis wagged
his finger in Charlie’s face, which was batted away. “You’ll get your
mouth washed out with soap. You should do it, Mr. C.” Curtis often wore
suspenders. I remember he hooked his thumbs into them, another pose.
His black bangs twisted into a large curl on his forehead, just like a
superhero rendering in the comics. “Yessir, soap is what the doctor
ordered.”
“Shut-up.” Charlie slid into his desk.
“I think I’m going to join. If you're part of it, Mr. C., I’m definitely
going to join. We get to go to a baseball game. That team named after
2023, Autumn / 291
socks.”
Curtis had my interest. A good part of my planning period time
was invested in looking over the box scores in the morning paper, and he
had alluded to my team. “You mean the Red Sox?”
Charlie sneered. “Ha, ha, he doesn't even know what color.”
“Well, I don't go around looking at people’s socks. Yes, the red
ones. But you only get to be in the club if you eat some of their cereal
every morning and let them take blood. I don't like needles. I’ll probably
pass out.”
This didn't make any sense to me. “Who told you all of this?”
“There was this guy from the cereal company, and Principal
Sardonicus, and….”
Okay, not his real name, which I borrow from a horror movie. If
you had seen both the film and the way the head of our school walked
around with a frozen smile on his face, the connection would be obvious.
Not to suggest he was a monster. Not as far as I knew.
“There was a woman too.” Charlie cut in. “She had her hair pulled
back so tight it stretched her eyes out.”
“Yeah, she looked mean. I think she was just a nurse or something.
There was a doctor something too. They wore white coats like you do, Mr.
C, when you do those magic tricks.”
“Those are experiments, idiot,” declared Charlie.
“There he goes again. Did you hear that?” Another finger wag,
standing over his friend. “Soap, Mr. C. Soap!”
Before the two could get into another of their mock slap fights, I
decided to take a closer look at the letter and went back to my desk. “Sit
down, Curtis.”
I skipped to the important part. The boys who belong to the Science
Club have many additional privileges. They get a quart of milk daily
during that time, they’re taken to a baseball game….”
Baseball! Damn, Curtis had it right. I took offense to the
organization of a science club without first consulting the science teacher
and intended to march straight down to the principal’s office at the break
and let him know how I felt about the school going behind my back. I
passed out worksheets to a collective groan, and afterwards requested
silent reading, while I sat at my desk and composed my complaint in my
head.
March I did. My speech, however, was silenced by Dr. Sardonicus
in a peremptory strike. He must have spotted me coming and stepped out
of his office, hand extended. “Mr. Crawley. Just the man I want to see.
Saves me a trip. Take a seat.” I followed him inside and did so. He
remained standing. The desk lamp behind him cast his shadow over me.
“We are very lucky to have the Shaker Cereal Company interested
in our boys. They’re working with scientists from one of our finest
institutions to develop healthier breakfast products. I’m sure you’ll
understand, especially as farmers use more and more pesticides on their
crops, there is concern chemicals may be getting into the grain. We don't
want that.”
I wondered if he had memorized a sales brochure.
“No, sir.” I must have confirmed, curious to know where his pitch
was going.
“It’s about improved health. So I’m all for it. They propose to
fortify the food with vitamins and other nutrients, which they think will be
absorbed instead of the pesticides. Strong bones you know. Of course, they
need to test this. Our boys, bless them, want to help.”
A few questions occurred to me. Modified slightly, due to the
force of his glowing yellow eyes burrowing into my forehead, I combined
them. “How so?”
“Eating breakfast cereal. It will not only be better nutrition for the
boys; the program will be good for our school as well. I hope you’ll
encourage your class to participate and take charge of the club on our end.”
Still a little confused, taking charge sounded right. “If it’s good
for the students, I’m happy to help,” I confirmed, then, as an apparent
afterthought added, “Would you expect me to chaperone the boys for this
baseball game they’ve been talking about?”
“That’s right. You’re the baseball fan,” he seemed excited to
confirm, his lips curled, red, as if full of blood or having recently drank
some. “I think Shaker Cereals would be on board with that. I’ll want you
to meet with the research team and work out the details. Let’s say
tomorrow morning. Be at the cafeteria an hour early. The school would
very much appreciate any help you can provide them. As would I. As
would I. Let me know how it goes.”
In the hall by myself, the door already closed behind me, I
promised to do so.
While starting an hour early the next day did not appeal to me, the
idea of being part of a research project did. I wondered if elaborate
scientific instruments would be brought into the school and was eager to
look them over as I adored gadgetry; the more knobs and wires the better.
I kept my own small collection on display on the black soapstone shelf
along the classroom windows. Most I acquired from Sam’s Science and
2023, Autumn / 293
Surplus, where I visited regularly and occasionally purchased something

if it was cheap enough and would be impressive on display. My students
were not to be trusted with anything breakable or sharp, naturally, which
made my selections for the classroom easier. A few weeks prior to the start
of the science club, I acquired a terrific item, an El-tronics Pocket Size
Geiger Counter. With its original box. Like all conscientious
manufacturers, they added a warning. “Remember, if you are not in the
presence of radioactivity, few clicks will be heard.”
If the people behind the science club were to see my collection, I
suspected, they would be more likely to think of me as a great addition to
their team. There were three of them who had already cordoned off a
makeshift clinic in a corner of the lunch room when I arrived that
following morning. Strange. For a moment I thought they might be
hovering just above the surface, unable to touch the earth, like certain
demons. At a second glance, to be sure, they were all firmly grounded.
A civilian, who turned out to be with the cereal company, was the
friendliest and the easiest to spot since he wore a gray flannel suit, in
contrast to the other two in laboratory coats. He was also distinctive due
to an oversized head, the two eyes of which gave me a quick scan before
he shook my hand with a tight squeeze and a pumping motion. I had to
pull twice to get free. The boys were right about the woman, who was a
nurse. Her bun was indeed a little tight; her blouse too, for that matter,
which her lab coat only partially concealed. I kept my eyes averted and
avoided looking at her face as well, having determined its resting position
was contempt. The other white coat belonged to the guy in charge of the
procedures. He went over the same basic digest version I had already heard
and didn't much interest me.
“If you get a chance, you should visit my classroom,” I slipped in
at the first opportunity. When I described some of the curious objects in
my collection, he stopped me when I mentioned the Geiger counter.
“What model?”
After I told him, he went out of his way to convince me of the
worthlessness of my prize, such cheap devices as likely to be set off by
pollen or mold spores as radiation, and advised I take it back.
“At least get it out of the classroom. It will only frighten the kids,
if the dirty communists haven’t done that enough.”
“Duck and cover,” I replied with a smile, a comment he did not
appear to appreciate. Well aware I was supposed to be cooperative, I
quickly added: “But of course you’re right about that device. Only paid
three dollars for it, you know, just for show and tell. I don't even think it
has a battery in it. But I’ll definitely follow your advice on that. Thanks so
much.”
It had a new battery, in fact, but the lie worked. He seemed
satisfied. Just in case, since my collegial attitude was a bust, I tried to act
more subservient.
“If there is anything I can do to ensure the success of your
experiment, then please let me know. I really admire scientific progress.”
Gray flannel suit must have been listening. “In fact, Mr. Crawley,
we would very much appreciate it if you could encourage the boys who
are not already participating to join our club and to stick with it. And if
there are additional incentives that we can offer, suggestions are
welcome.”
“The baseball game was a terrific idea. The boys all love
baseball.”
Unable to suggest anything else on the spot, I promised to think
about it before our next meeting. Much to my relief, they assured me I
need not participate in the experiment itself. I could remain a cheerleader
on the sidelines. So it went.
Curtis provided updates on club activities. They had not accepted
the new routine without some grumbling. No defections though. I did my
part to keep it that way, longer than I should have.
In the break room one day a veteran teacher, Mrs. Kershaw,
between two long drags of her Chesterfield non-filtered, lamented, “I keep
getting older, but the students always stay the same age.” I wondered about
this remark. Dramatic changes, to be fair, are more common with teens
than with her third-grade group. But a few weeks into club activities,
several of the boys seemed somehow different in a way I could not put my
finger on.
Thinking back on it, I first noticed something odd the same
morning when Charlie complained of stomach pains.
“Maybe if you weren't eating so much cereal,” Curtis let slip. I
could tell by the look on his face he had broken a rule. I gave him the “I’m
wise to you” look, eyebrows raised. “Mr. C., I don't like this stuff they’re
making us eat.”
“Yes?”
“So …. I’ve been giving mine to Charlie. I think it’s killing him.”
“Don’t be stupid.” Charlie answered on cue, followed by a groan.
“I’ve just got a stomachache. That’s all. May I go to the restroom?”
A teacher should never question the immediacy of gastrointestinal
disorders. “Sure, grab the pass. There could be hall monitors staking the
2023, Autumn / 295
place out.”
Curtis held out his wrists and struck a pose from the Pietà, unable
to keep a straight face. “Are you going to turn me in, Mr. C?”
I shook my head. “No, but you have to promise not to give him
your share any more. They might shut down the club.”
He jumped to attention, and saluted. “Yessir. Boy Scouts honor.”
I wouldn't have thought about it again except at the end of the day,
when I was picking up wads of paper from the classroom floor. I noticed
a number of hairs on and around Charlie’s desk, not unlike I was beginning
to see on my pillow at home. I had no idea what to think about premature
balding so young. Losing hair in my early 20s was sad enough.
A week or so later I noticed many of the boys either had some
mild flu symptoms or their parents had called them in sick. The boys were
using the bathroom pass so often it began to look like a human chain. So
often, I was concerned some of the other teachers would complain to the
office. They acted nice enough, but I had already witnessed the ratting out
of a fellow teacher more than once for a trivial infraction. If the principal
decided the boys were too unwell to go on a field trip, I wondered if it
would be merely postponed or canceled entirely.
Normally I don’t leave the classroom when the boys are present,
but one of the assistants was there and I needed to get ahead of the story
with only a couple of days left before the big event. I hurried down to the
office where Mrs. Humphrey held the first line of defense.
I started with the usual pleasantries and asked about her cat, who
was due to have kittens. Since they had in fact arrived it took five minutes
for her to describe the blessed event before I could fulfill my mission.
“I’m sure they’re adorable. Please take some pictures. So, I just
wanted to let you know that the boys are doing an experiment today and
maybe Monday and will be making a lot of trips to the restroom for water.
I’ve told them to try not to disturb the other classes.”
“Thank you so much, Mr. Crawley. Most teachers wouldn’t have
bothered to tell me.”
Mission accomplished, I returned to the classroom. Damn if Curtis
didn’t have the Geiger counter out of the box and was waving it around. I
blamed Mrs. Humphrey’s kittens for my having kept me from the
classroom too long, and the assistant, who was paying no attention.
The device was working better for Curtis than it had for me,
chirping in a steady manner.
“Hey Mr. C., look what happens when I wave it over Charlie.”
There was a notable crescendo. “Why is it doing that? I think it’s because
he’s from outer space.”

I almost said he must be radioactive, but caught myself in time.
The thing is, while I was teaching science, I didn’t exactly have any
scientific training. And it was a cheap device, I had been told, inaccurate.
More upset than I should have been, don’t know why, I marched over and
yanked the instrument from his hands, then addressed the entire classroom.
“What have I told you boys about touching laboratory equipment
without my permission? These items can be dangerous if not handled
properly!”
“Sorry, Mr. C.,” Curtis Bloomie’s Mum bled.
He could tell I was actually angry about it and sat down instead of
engaging in his usual antics.
I replaced the instrument and returned to my desk for a few
minutes to cool off, the boys unusually quiet and watching me. Rarely did
I get so much attention.
In a much calmer tone, I asked Curtis. “You stopped giving your
share of cereal to Charlie, right?”
“Yessir, I most certainly did.”
“Good.”
“Some days Billy gives him his share.”
It was all I could do to restrain the expletives trying to escape my
mouth. “I see. Not so good.”
Charlie had put his head on his desk.
“Charlie! Don't eat anyone’s cereal but your own!” I had to say it
loud because he had begun to have some trouble hearing.
“Yes, Mr. C.” He lifted his head for just long enough to utter the
words before the desk yanked it back down.
The following Monday, the day before our scheduled afternoon at
the ballgame, half of the boys appeared ill. I feared the worst when I heard
the familiar squeak of soft-soled shoes headed our way; the sound of the
footsteps brutal, the kind to make your ears bleed in anticipation. Dr.
Sardonicus had my classroom in his sights. I was certain he was going to
announce the cancelation, citing the poor health of my students and their
future of forced isolation, hospitalization, sterilization. Who knew?
Then he waltzed through the doorway, his mood insanely bright
and upbeat, in direct contrast to the dull artificial light from a lone
fluorescent tube, and the sick odor of sweat and stomach acids.
“How are our future scientists doing today?” he grinned as only
Dr. Sardonicus could. Because of proximity, he clapped Charlie square on
the back, Charlie, who had just been complaining about bleeding gums.
2023, Autumn / 297
Thankfully, none of his teeth popped out.

“I have a reward here for all of you boys who are helping to make
this country great,” he announced.
He pulled out an envelope from his pocket, walked over beside
me, and held it up in front of us, his other hand clasping my shoulder.
Irrationally, I feared the grin would slip off his face any moment, fly across
and stab me repeatedly in the chest before it moved on to attack the
children.
Then he said the magic words and the threat passed. “Baseball
tickets!”
The students applauded. He handed over the envelope with a
wink. “I have included money for hot dogs. And peanuts. And sodas. All
those things you boys love. My treat. Have a great time. And don’t let
mom forget those permission slips.”
“Permission slips,” I repeated to myself, so I wouldn't forget to
collect them. One needs permission to do these things.
On the Tuesday afternoon of the game, our group of smiling if
haggard faces filed slowly out of our bus at Fenway. Random people from
Shaker Cereals, who had scored some of the tickets, stood at the
designated congregation spot with corporate name tags so we could
identify them. A guy came up and shook my hand, as polite people do. He
was from the Atomic Energy Commission, a well-funded agency
apparently picking up the tab. I noticed his laundry used too much starch
on his shirt. Or maybe he requested more, so his collar would keep his
head erect, more commanding of the landscape.
“You teach these students, do you? How’s that?”
“It can be challenging.”
“I’ll bet. Unbelievable that they’re still in school at such an
advanced age,” he said.
I took a quick visual assessment of my charge. They did look like
old men. I hadn’t really thought about it, which I found irritating, as if my
teaching skills had been found wanting.
“An accident of birth, you might say.”
“That’s right,” he laughed. “They’re retards. That explains it.”
I suppose it was an acceptable term back then. Indeed, we were
officially a school for the retarded. Still, I disliked the term and the man
with his superior demeanor and was thankful when Curtis distracted me
by moving away from the group.
“Not so fast buddy! Guys! Let’s form a single line right here.”
I climbed up on a concrete platform to better direct the students
and, suddenly, my head began to swim. To keep from falling, I had to cling
to a flagpole. Must have been doing too much reading the night before, I
thought, unable to focus, and hoped it wasn't a fever, a sign I had caught
whatever plagued my classroom. I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping to
regain my equilibrium. Then, strangely enough, I began to see things,
horrible things. The adults placed Curtis and Charlie and the others in
handcuffs and covered their heads with cloth bags, then herded them into
awaiting vans in order to whisk them off to a remote facility where they
would be detained indefinitely and submitted to insidious psychological
tortures. I screamed for the stadium police to intervene. Instead, they
halted traffic so the dark windowless vehicles could speed away with their
victims.
In a panic, I reopened my eyes. For a moment I felt relieved upon
discovering the boys had not been kidnapped by covert government
operatives, only to suspect they had been replaced by bizarre wax
facsimiles, confirmed when they began to melt rapidly right in front of me.
Gripped by an odd paralysis, I could only watch their disintegration. Soon
nothing was left but two smeared vertical lines across the parking lot, a
sort of giant Motherwell canvas. In despair I ground my fists into my face
and cried.
“One line,” I said. “One line.”
But no one was listening. I had lost control of my class and soon
found myself sitting alone in the parking lot. Whether I couldn’t stand up
or just didn’t really want to do so, I can’t say. They had taken all of the
tickets and shuffled off into the stadium without me. So I sat in self-
imposed exile, tried to ignore the gravel digging into the seat of my
trousers, and wondered about what I had witnessed my students endure.
The boys had been cleverly bribed to ignore what was happening to them,
deceived and sacrificed for the imagined good of a nation, or merely for
confirmation of the powers at the fingertips of a few fat, balding, otherwise
feckless bureaucrats.
I had done nothing, had even facilitated the fiendish experiments,
I realized. The cheers of the Fenway crowd struck me in waves, crashing
right into each temple, like a migraine certain to punish me for hours.
Maybe much, much longer.
2023, Autumn / 299
WILLIAM NUNEZ
UNTITLED FOR NOW
Foreigner is what I have been called

Citizen is what I am
The changing times does not preclude
Gamers that are always left to chance
Softly laughing silently praying

That progress does not jump off the cliff
Where distortion rings false from all sides
As reason and empathy subside
Nunez
JIM TILLEY
STALKING PREY
In a poem years ago, my beagle puppy,

Sadie, leads me to a field where we
have trespassed many times. I marvel
at how well she tracks, sniffing and snuffling,
snout pressed to the ground, towards
a rabbit hole, or deer romping through

the woods, or fox dissolving into a thicket,
a hunter stalking her quarry, driven by
instincts lodged deep in her lupine past.
But now, we have aged into another poem,
our roles exchanged. Older and wiser,

we stay indoors. Today, she lies curled
against my feet amidst a stack of day-old
newspapers. I have moved on. Scrolling
through my laptop screen, I chase the telltale
(cont)
print further into the X-President’s swamp,

but he is elusive as ever. Sometimes,
I come so close I allow myself to believe
that we will finally hunt him down, and I can
see that Sadie is also lost in a dream.
Tilley
WARREN WOESSNER
SPRING IS NOT EARLY THIS YEAR
It’s a gloomy day in the Twin Cities.

First the fog crept in last night
then freezing rain tag-teamed it
and somehow, though it’s March
snow piled on as well.
So at best, you get a gray day.
The fog did not have little cat feet.
It was more like a nimbus cloud
called down to earth by a weather girl
who is really a sorcerer but who lost her job
anyway because she forgot to be cute
on the air when a windy blizzard
cut those great cheekbones
like a knife cuts a muffin.
So now she is drinking at Manny’s
at a rate she can no longer afford.
Though the staff is still nice to her
no one offers to take her home.
I’ve read that snow makes a gentle hiss
when it hits the river
but I’ve never heard it
and I’m not going over to Nicollet Island
to try to hear it this afternoon—
which is so dark that the streetlights
have come on and it’s only 3 pm.
Everyone’s in a bad mood,
and, as the police report will read,
she was just driving too fast for conditions. Woessner
2023, Autumn / 301
JOHN RAFFETTO
CHAOS THEORY
The butterflies are back!

After a milkweed sound of thunder catastrophe,
butterflies are revived.
Confined as we are, disoriented in space
shifts in the tides, wax and wane of the moon,
butterfly wings jolt the earth and its timeline,
confront chaos theory in the eyes of giants
who turn the wheels
that turn the screws
away from
our lingering existence.
Raffetto
NEVADA NEON
Dust upon a
Greyhound windshield
smeared green reflection
where mind clouds surge into town.
Mountain backbone of flight
as Carlos Castaneda strolls the neon strip
watching Las Vegas Show Girls
and peyote slot machines.
In a sightless evening he
reaches beyond cactus silhouettes
and shattered light,
running in darkness trusting the oneness
while fools on the strip believe
there is nothing more.
Raffetto
NOCTURNAL FEVER
The coyotes prowl in the city park

after the people leave.
Their green eyes illuminate the darkness
searching for a stray
a loner left behind.
The people sleep yet the coyotes roam.
The streetlights reflect jagged shadows
under an immense moon obscured by clouds,
as cottonwood trees
convey a lurking of nocturnal fever
breaking before daylight and fading in the pale blue moon
Raffetto
CHRISTOPHER CERVELLONI
SINKING SHIPS
“Sorry we’re late, Daddy,” Elizabeth said, “Trevor was slow

getting through baggage claim.”
Matthew’s daughter’s android—she insisted on calling it
Trevor—had not faced some systemic delay in retrieving its bags, as
Elizabeth structured her diction to imply. Rather, that android she called a
boyfriend was the baggage to be claimed. Elizabeth couldn’t afford the
second ticket so, with its reversable knee joints and foldable hips, her
android bent into luggage and flew in the cargo hold for free.
Typical, Matthew thought. He said, “No problem.”
“Good. evening Captain. Burke.” The android spoke fluidly only
when it had downloaded scripted dialogue. Improvised casual
conversation was stilted and jarred. “How was your. day?”
Worse with you in it, Matthew thought. He said, “Fine, thank you.”
“How is your. evening. Jacob?” the android said. Matthew’s son
Jacob—who had been waiting with Matthew since his flight landed more
than an hour before—wordlessly scrolled through that BestLife app he was
always on. Jacob glanced up from his phone, shrugged, and looked back
down into his phone.
2023, Autumn / 303
The android carried Elizabeth’s suitcase to the trunk of Matthew’s

car and loaded it more like a forklift than a human, moving at smooth and
tireless forty-five-degree angles instead of a manly heave-ho. It opened the
door for Elizabeth like a chauffer. “After you, my love,” the android said.
As they merged into traffic, Elizabeth kicked off her sandals in the
front passenger seat. She nodded to her android sitting in the back with
Jacob. “Isn’t he just the best?”
That thing treats you like its grandmother, Matthew thought.
Matthew took a slow deep breath, following his ex-wife’s advice: “When
she gets like that,” Carmen had said, “just take a deep breath in and a deep
breath out and say something kind.” Matthew forced himself into the
cordiality and politeness he reserved for ceremony or the presence of a
superior officer.
“And we have news,” Elizabeth’s voice rose with restrained
excitement. She held out her left hand. At first, Matthew thought she was
only turning on the radio. Elizabeth tilted her left hand back and forth, and
the diamond sparkled against the headlights of oncoming traffic. “We’re
engaged!”
Where’d she get the money for the ring? he thought. He said,
“That’s a surprise.”
“I know!” Elizabeth beamed.
“It didn’t ask for my blessing.”
“Trevor is a he,” Elizabeth said in the tone inherited from her
mother. “Not an it. And I’m not some property to be exchanged, so he
didn’t need to ask you, he only needed to ask me.”
Inhale. Does it even have that function? Exhale. “As long as
you’re happy.”
“I am happy.” The weight of the announcement fell away and she
floated in her seat. “And we won’t let our engagement steal your spotlight
because we know this is your special weekend.”
Matthew tilted the rearview mirror to his son. “Hear that, Jacob?
Your sister’s getting married.”
“Yeah, I know.” Jacob didn’t lift his head from his typing thumbs.
“She posted Wednesday. I liked and commented.”
“You’ll like this, Daddy,” Elizabeth said. “Trevor knows like
everything about your boats. Trevor, tell Daddy about the boats and the
reef and everything.”
Matthew already knew all the facts. He had been part of the
planning, and he too had read the articles. The android’s algorithm had
merely data-scraped the internet, spoke the information, and called it a

personality.
“A consortium of government entities and NGOs, led by the
United States Navy, will be scuttling four different decommissioned ships
on July 27, 2056, the US Navy announced through a Tweet.” The
android’s face tilted into the rearview mirror. Its animatronic lips moved
but never matched the timing or cadence of its words. Matthew would
rather that thing have no face nor eyes nor lips than this perverse attempt
at verisimilitude. “The ships range in size and type. The smallest is a 567-
foot-long cruiser that displaces 9,600 tons, and the largest is a 680-foot
long, 90-foot-wide destroyer that displaces over 16,000 tons. This is the
largest single-event scuttling ever and, once sunk, these obsolete ships will
create the largest artificial reef on the east coast. ‘Corral and endangered
fish will find refuge and reproduce in these obsolete war machines,’ said
Alexandra Martinez, Head of the Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration. ‘This will fundamentally revitalize and save the coastal
ecosystem in the area.’”
“Isn’t he great?” Elizabeth said. “He knows like everything.”
“Not without a monthly data plan,” Matthew let slip.
“He comes with unlimited data, Daddy. All digital companions do
now.” She curled in her seat and turned around to face Trevor. “Oh,
sweetie, tell him about the fireworks.”
“According to the. Oceanic Lifeline Defender website,” the
android said, “fireworks. are to be included as part of the. sinking
ceremony. I do not have more information on. fireworks.”
Elizabeth put her feet up on the dashboard. “This weekend is
going to be great. I love fireworks.”
•
Matthew could never sleep later than 5am. After thirty-seven
years in the Navy, his biology demanded routine. Just under a decade into
retirement, an empty-nester, and long-since divorced, he had plenty of
opportunity and reason to sleep later. But when his eyes opened, they
stayed open. Every morning, he completed his routine: brush teeth, read
The Wall Street Journal on his tablet and drink coffee, a one-mile swim in
the ocean, and then home to eat breakfast.
In the blue-black morning light, Matthew entered his kitchen. The
android stood against the corner of the counter, but artificially. A human
would have leaned against the counter or perhaps even hopped up to sit on
the counter. A human would have his arms crossed or a slouch in his spine.
Instead, that thing stood straight like a pole, eyes closed, unmoving,
2023, Autumn / 305
elbows artificially bent and held stiff. It wore the same clothes from the
night before. “Why change him if he isn’t dirty?” Elizabeth had said when
Matthew first met the android. “It’s not like he ever sweats or has B.O. or
bad breath.”
Matthew stepped closer to the inanimate android. “Hello?”
Another step. He waved a hand in front of its face. No response. A
retractable cord extended from what should have been its kidneys to an
electrical outlet. Elizabeth had unplugged Matthew’s coffeemaker in order
to plug in her boyfriend—now fiancé. Matthew yanked out the cord and
re-plugged his coffee machine.
“Good morning, Captain Burke.”
“Whoa!” Matthew jumped back.
“I am sorry if I. startled you.” The low whine as the android’s
electrical cord wound up and closed off into his kidney. “I see you would
like. coffee. I will make. coffee. for you.”
“I’ll do it.”
A robotic hand came up into his Matthew’s face. It smelled
rubbery. “I insist. Please. Sit.” The android’s arm swung out toward the
breakfast nook. It surprised Matthew that it already knew the layout of the
house.
“I like my coffee a certain way,” Matthew said.
“I’m certain I can replicate your. method. Do you take. cream? or
sugar?”
“Fine.” He rolled his eyes. “Cream and sugar. But get it right.”
From his seat in the breakfast nook, Matthew watched the android
move with incredible efficiency through the kitchen, opening the
refrigerator, picking out the creamer, opening the drawer, retrieving a
spoon, and a few minutes later when the coffee machine beeped, it scooped
the sugar and poured the creamer with enviable precision. To have had
men like that on my ship, Matthew thought.
The android entered the breakfast nook with coffee in one hand
and a box of cereal in the other. “Would you like cereal?” it asked—a pre-
recorded line smoothly spoken. “I strongly recommend Kellogg’s Whole-
Grain Nutroids. With only one hundred and sixty calories per serving, it
offers a highly nutritious start to your day. Nutroids: The Nutroid way
jumpstarts your day.”
And immediately Matthew hated that thing again.
“No,” he said. “Just coffee.”
“I am happy. to keep you company.”
“You’re dismissed.”
“Elizabeth tells me you swim every morning.”

“Can you swim?”
“I cannot.” The android said and, as if or perhaps exactly because
it could not register subtext, it asked, “May I advise against. swimming.
this morning? The tide is currently. rising. and the National Weather
Service is reporting. longer. wind durations and. wider. fetches than is
common at this time of day in this season.”
I can handle some waves. Matthew sipped his hot coffee and
loaded the newspaper app on his tablet. “Thanks for the briefing,” he said.
•
The waves were higher. Nothing Matthew hadn’t swum in before,
and on this particular morning he felt a strong inclination to challenge the
ocean.
The water was crisp, and he enjoyed the bits of salt in his nose and
mouth. The way it tingled his lips and caught in the back of his throat. The
way the salt water buoyed him up and cradled him. He might fall asleep in
its embrace if he weren’t exercising. He swam the half mile north to the
pier, and he tread water for a moment. Through the blur of his goggles, the
dark outline of his ship lightened to a stiff gray. Not more than one hundred
yards beyond the pier, his USS Montez sat completely unmoving. A
barrier had been erected—buoys encircling all four ships and netting that
dropped to the ocean floor to deter any drunken tourist from attempting
something stupid. Matthew’s body rose and tilted and fell in the waves and
it seemed that the world rose and tilted and fell with him. But not his
Montez, which remained still and stoic, as if it stood in the water on a firm
foundation instead of resting in the water like any other boat. He thought
about saying a goodbye to his ship, but considered that his ship would
always be right there. Even if it was underwater.
Past 9am, Elizabeth stepped into the breakfast nook. Matthew
looked up from The Wall Street Journal. Elizabeth’s hair scraggled and
scruffled. Dark bags under her half-opened eyes. Her belly pushed out the
front of a T-shirt that hung to her knees. “Did you make coffee?” she asked
her father. Without waiting for an answer, she said, “Trevor. Coffee.”
The tap of a mug on the counter, the tink of a stirring spoon, and
Trevor entered the breakfast nook with Elizabeth’s coffee. “My dearest,
Elizabeth.” The android set the coffee in front of its fiancé. “You look
absolutely. beautiful. this morning.”
“Thank you, sweetie.” She kissed his rubbery cheek and sat down.
The android disappeared back into the kitchen.
That thing’s more butler than husband, Matthew thought.
2023, Autumn / 307
“He’s so good to me.” Elizabeth wrapped both hands around her

mug and smiled like she was cuddling. “He’s like the best guy ever.”
“He’s not a real guy.”
“Oh, Daddy. Just because Trevor cooks and does dishes instead of
burping and watching football doesn’t make him any less of a man.”
“You are dating an algorithm.”
“Trevor truly understands me.” She blew the steam off her coffee.
“He’s fully customized, which makes him unique.”
“It tracks data.”
“Exactly. What human male can remember all the things I do and
then give me what I want before I even ask for it? Just another reason he’ll
be such a great husband.”
“Don’t you want kids?”
“Actually,” she set her cup down quickly, straightened her back,
and her typical excitement rose in her voice, “part of his bundle included
a Utero 6X, so Trevor will incubate the child and all we need to do is find
a sperm donor and I’m only thirty-seven so I’m not out of eggs.” She
cuddled her mug again and curled contentedly back in her chair. “Trevor
and I discussed it already.”
Trevor stepped into the breakfast nook balancing three stacked
bowls in one hand and a gallon of milk in the other. “Elizabeth has
approximately twenty-nine. thousand. quality eggs remaining.”
“See?” Elizabeth said happily.
Trevor set the bowls and milk on the table.
“That’s not genuine connection.”
“Of course it is.” Elizabeth curled her hand around its rubber
replica hand. “I picked his program myself.”
“He’ll be obsolete in ten years.”
“Oh, Daddy, marriage has changed so much since you and mom.”
She looked lovingly up to her fiancé and then back to her father. “I’ll have
you know that since the Thirty-First Amendment passed, only three people
have divorced their digital companions.”
Trevor retreated into the kitchen again as Elizabeth continued,
“Three divorces of all the digital companions in a decade. You and mom,
your generation was like thirty percent divorced, and Grandma’s was like
fifty percent. She had three husbands, Daddy. Three! I never even met
grandpas one or two.”
“Can you at least turn it off for a few hours so I can spend some
quality time with my children?”
“How dare you?” Elizabeth crossed her arms. “Trevor is not some
appliance you turn off.”
Jacob slunk into the breakfast nook and slid into a chair. His
presence barricaded father and daughter into their angered silence.
Trevor returned with three spoons in one hand and a cereal box in
the other. “Would you like cereal, Jacob? I strongly recommend Kellogg’s
Whole-Grain Nutroids. With only one hundred and sixty calories per
serving, it offers a highly nutritious start to your day. Nutroids: The
Nutroid way jumpstarts your day.”
“Whatever,” Jacob said.
The android pushed a bowl in front of Jacob, poured the cereal—
his hand vibrating to shake out an exact amount—and poured the milk.
Matthew and Elizabeth stewed silently, as Jacob’s thumb lowered
like a lever, pressed against his phone’s screen, slid up against the fulcrum
of his hand, and lowered again. He ate the entire bowl of cereal without
looking up from that BestLife app. Every once in a while, a “Huh,” a laugh,
a confused face, or the rare whispered, “The fuck?” and then his thumb
scrolled whatever the fuck it was away.
•
“Trevor can drive, Daddy,” Elizabeth said. “He’s like really
good.”
That thing isn’t touching my car, Matthew thought. He said, “Let’s
walk.”
“But it might rain.”
“Can’t the android get wet?”
“No one says ‘android’ anymore, Daddy. We say ‘digital
companion.’ The A-word is a pejorative.”
If it walks like a duck, Matthew thought. He said, “Digital
companion. Got it.”
“Let Trevor show you how good a driver he is. Pleeeeease,”
Elizabeth said.
The android drove them the half mile into town. They drove past
four “Coming Soon” billboards. Past two new scuba shops. Past new
canvas or plywood covering darkened windows and renovated entrances.
Past a handyman on a ladder repainting the front marquee of Chip’s Bait-
n-Tackle. Past Better Off Bread, where Matthew and Carmen used to sit
out front eating scones and Danishes. Past two different boutiques
advertising “Sinking Sale!” Past a souvenir shop—the kind that Elizabeth
loved—that sold neon shirts with sarcastic or sexually inappropriate
comments, easily broken skim boards, thin towels, leaky goggles, and shot
2023, Autumn / 309
glasses—the store that incongruously shouted “Florida Spring Break!” in

Matthew’s quiet New England town.
Matthew and his ex-wife Carmen bought their small cottage in a
generally unknown town as an impulsive flourish in what was an otherwise
boring and modest investment portfolio. In the early 30s, they found a
certain romance in loading their bike baskets with towels and sunblock
and riding to the beach for an afternoon. But as the sea level rose and as
the beachfront mansions eroded into the ocean and drifted out with the
tides, their Campion Street asphalt became a de facto boardwalk, and
Matthew’s property became the new beachfront—increasing its value by
factors instead of multiples. Before their divorce, while Matthew was
deployed, Carmen remodeled the cottage’s kitchen and expanded the deck.
Other gentry brought in their renovation architects and interior designers,
and soon enough multistory homes cleaved the old, single-story, wind-
and-salt blown cottages. Matthew still liked to think of his multimillion-
dollar property in its original state. He never called it “Our Beach House,”
opting instead for “the cottage.”
The Atlantic Reef Committee had set up a small aluminum
grandstand at the end of the pier and draped it with different sorts of red,
white, and blue. A tacky red, white, and blue balloon arch backdropped a
podium with a single microphone. Two American flags framed the podium
and snapped sporadically in the breeze. The east-coast gray was usually
gone this late in the day, but it hung around as if to deliberately tint the
ceremony.
Matthew shook hands with people he’d known for a long time—
his XO Zeke, the only man who ever saw Matthew cry; a small gathering
of former Petty Officers and Warrant Officers, each name Matthew
remembered even after all these years, and all men who loved the Montez
as much as Matthew did; and Chip who Matthew fished with and, when
not fishing, shared stories and beers. And Matthew shook hands attached
to faces he did not remember but names he recognized from emails and
video conferences—John O’Connell, the Operational Vice President of
the Atlantic Reef Committee; Rear Admiral Davison, who earned a higher
rank at a much younger age than Matthew; Claire Sisneros, the Deputy
Mayor; Alexandra Martinez, Head of the Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration; and Steve, the demolitions expert, who emphasized his
excitement by ending each line of dialogue with “bro.” Matthew
repeatedly introduced them all to Elizabeth and Jacob—and Trevor.
Matthew took his seat near the podium, and his children sat in their
reserved front-row seats in the grandstand. In total, no more than sixty
people attended. Beyond the pier, however, front porches all down
Campion Street filled with mimosa-drinking and binocular-wearing
spectators. Widow’s walks and second-story balconies all filled with
onlookers. The bump of bass from a stereo. The random burst of group
laughter. The town was celebrating.
John O’Connell stepped up to the podium and started the
ceremony. He extolled the virtues of recycling obsolete materiel for the
benefit of marine biology. He listed the types of indigenous plant and sea
life. “There will be some coastal and species migration,” he defended the
counterpoint no one had fired, “but the net gain is so significantly
positive.” He introduced Rear Admiral Davison, who also rambled on,
using mismatched battle metaphors about how these decommissioned
ships would be a new fortified base for sea life, how these ships would win
the fight against coastal erosion, how these obsolete ships shall not perish
but merely go under so that others may live. “And we have a VIP with us
today,” the Rear Admiral said. “Captain Matthew Burke.” Matthew half-
stood, waved coyly and sat again. “Captain Burke commanded the USS
Montez—it’s the big one out there—during the Battle of Maracay and
Siege of Maturin. He’s the longest serving captain of any of the ships we
commit to the sea today. Please join me in saluting Captain Burke.”
The small crowd clapped enthusiastically. Elizabeth screamed,
“Way to go, Daddy!” and Jacob took a picture on his phone, and the other
uniformed officers by the podium stood and saluted Matthew.
The collar of his summer whites pulled tight around his neck, and
his cap pressed tight against his forehead. He breathed shallow to stop his
gut from pulling his shirt from his belt. His medals hung heavy on his
chest. He returned the salute, and the clamor died down again.
“Now, let’s begin the countdown, shall we?” the Rear Admiral
said. “Ten...nine….”
Matthew did not look at his ship so much as he saw it. The
helicopter pad on the stern was a rusted gray deck without adornment of
any kind. Once, a single marine helicopter pilot flew for twenty-seven
hours straight to evacuate the sick sailors and save the healthy ones from
the Lambda variant. Matthew sought to recommend that pilot for a medal,
but he never discovered the pilot’s name. The glass windows of the
deckhouse, once thin like the eyes of a warrior’s glare, had been removed,
leaving only perforated dots. The gun turrets, once weapons so fierce the
mere knowledge of their proximity forced enemy retreats, were now only
empty hollows on the deck. Gone too was the thin railing where Ensign
Schmidt had gotten so seasick and vomited hours into his first deployment.
2023, Autumn / 311
The officers had laughed, and finally Matthew relented and said, “Oh,
someone get him a bottle of water. And pull him off that railing. Poor kid
might go overboard.” And there was the bow. Whenever he could,
Matthew had stood right there and looked out into the curve of the Earth,
smelled the salt and the fresh and the weather and sent wishes back home
to his son and daughter and wife—that was, until she divorced him. Even
after he signed the divorce papers, it was the endless ocean and the view
from that bow that kept him steady when he wanted to steer the ship into
the Chesapeake and order the railgun fired into his ex-wife’s new
boyfriend’s bedroom window. Now, the bow held only a single inflated
balloon floating above the plywood box of fireworks.
“Five…four…,” the crowd chanted.
Jacob raised his phone to film the event. His eyes on the screen to
frame the shot, not actually seeing the event directly. Elizabeth wrapped
her arms around her android and rest her head on its shoulder—making a
logistical moment romantic. Her mother used to do the same thing.
“...three...two...one,” the crowd chanted.
Matthew hoped for a clear and decisive explosion. A detonation
that sent debris high into the air, and only after the “oohs” and “aaahs”
subsided would the debris splash down and spark a new round of awe. He
wanted a boom that the spectators would feel against their eyebrows and
vibrations they would sense in their ankles. A sound so deep that it became
matter and occupied physical space. A percussion so massive that it would
bewilder the crowd with the previously unimaginable force required to
destroy such an amazing ship.
Instead, he heard only the paltry thwup...thwup-thwup of small
and controlled detonations. The salt breeze continued normally. The
promised fireworks were little more than bottle rockets timed to each
detonation. The cloudy gray sky accented their golden firestreams, but
there was no tantalizing fizzle or snap to end their propulsion—the gold
light merely faded and fell into the ocean. Circles of air bubbles percolated
on the surface, and the ships didn’t so much sink as melt like a stick of
butter in a hot skillet. The USS Montez, his ship, lowered
anticlimactically, tilted to starboard, and then fully disappeared under
rumbling bubbles. He never even noticed the other three ships.
The small grandstand crowd waited patiently until the last gray
ship blended into the same gray hue as the horizon. Unlike the partiers
lining Campion Street patios, the grandstand crowd expected a goodbye,
a solemn dedication of the once mighty but now obsolete ships. The
Campion Street porches and widow’s walks emptied and partiers refilled
their mimosas. Unlike the grandstands, they had expected spectacle and
entertainment.
He met his children in the parking lot. Elizabeth lifted her head
off her android and pecked its cheek again. Jacob slouched around his
phone, tapping into that BestLife app with an unhuman rapidity. A whoosh
sound. Several dings. “Oh, so she likes this,” Jacob said to no one, “but
not my mashup lip-sync.”
Matthew suggested seafood for lunch. Jacob said, “I’ll make
reservations,” and his thumbs tapped against his phone’s screen.
“Elizabeth,” the android said. “My battery is. low.”
Get used to it, buddy, Matthew thought. She never fed her goldfish
either.
Elizabeth glared at her father. “This is why you can’t unplug him
at the butt crack of dawn to make coffee.”
“Why didn’t he plug himself back in?”
“That’s not how it works,” Elizabeth said.
“I have,” the android said, “thirty-seven minutes remaining.
before activating standby mode.”
“Go ahead on back.” Matthew held out his car keys. “I’m going
to walk home.”
“Noooo,” Elizabeth whined. “Stay with us. This is your day,
Daddy. Tell us more about your ship.”
“I don’t know how to explain it,” Matthew said.
“I can. help,” the android said. “The USS Montez was a Zumwalt
III destroyer. It carried a crew of one-hundred and seventy-five sailors and
additional mission-specific support personnel. The Montez was the first
ship to fire a railgun in combat, and it was one of the first to use
Tumblehome stealth technology and SPY-7 multi-function radar. The QX-
450 turbines were capable of powering the ship’s propulsion up to forty-
five knots while also powering its two rail guns. Other more standard
armaments included AVL cells for Tomahawk and Stealth Missiles, a 155-
millimeter AGS gun, LRLAP, and two MK46s. One of the most active
ships during the Venezuelan Revolution (2036-2039), its captains include
Captain John McClusky, Captain Carla Neil, and Captain Matthew Burke,
who commanded the ship until its decommission in 2047.”
“See, Daddy?” Elizabeth beamed. “Trevor even knows what it’s
like to be in the Navy.”
•
Early the next morning, Matthew scooped coffee grounds while
the android stood stiffly, plugged into the opposite corner, powered down
2023, Autumn / 313
and charging. While the water dripped into the carafe, Matthew stared at
the android. Unmoving. Tethered. Dependent upon that little black cord
extending to the wall. Like Elizabeth had said: “Trevor is not some
appliance you turn off.” Simple. Matthew reached past the android and
unplugged its cord.
The android slowly rose to consciousness. “Good morning,
Captain Burke.” It smiled an artificial smile. “Would you please plug me
in to an. electrical outlet? I am less than. twenty-three percent. charged.”
“Plug yourself in.”
“My programing does not allow for self-electrification,” the
android said. The small and controlled movements of its paltry lips
declared nothing but its own incompetence.
“I’m going for a swim,” Matthew said. The android powered itself
down, leaving its black cord dangling.
The ocean was calm, almost clear, as if Poseidon himself,
empathizing with Matthew, sent small ripples out over the water instead
of whitecaps. Matthew crossed Campion Street, pressed his goggles
against his eyes, and waded in. He swam the half mile to the pier, and then
pushed himself the few hundred yards past the pier and to the USS Montez.
Above his ship, he floated facedown in the saltwater embrace. He saw the
outline of his ship surprisingly close, the top of the deckhouse only twenty
or thirty feet below. Funny, he thought, how goggles blur vision above
water but clarify it below. In the tinted light, his Montez still looked regal.
In the months and years to come, he knew, coral and algae would coat and
distort his ship like boils and pockmarks on a beautiful woman’s face. Fish
would find protection in the hull and other fish would make it their new
hunting grounds. But that morning, his Montez still appeared strong.
Ready to sail away toward underwater battles far out of sight of human
eyes.
Around 9am, Elizabeth shuffled in wearing her oversized shirt.
Jacob followed her in. “Trevor,” Jacob shouted through the wall. “Coffee.”
“We had a late night.” Elizabeth giggled. “He’s not done
charging.”
There sat both his children, staring listlessly into their phones.
Their thumbs scrolling BestLife. Their faces mirrored the mood of each
rolling photograph or poorly punctuated comment.
Inhale. Matthew closed the Wall Street Journal. Exhale.
He loaded the BestLife app. He had not logged in since Jacob helped him
build a profile two Christmases ago. Two hundred and seventeen
notifications. Matthew skimmed them, realized they were all pitches to
clickbait, and deleted them en masse. He scrolled through Elizabeth’s

photos of the sinking ceremony. He saw Carmen in every photo—the way
Elizabeth interlaced her fingers when she wrapped her arms around her
android. The way the sea breeze curled her hair away from her temples.
The way her cheeks dimpled when she smiled her genuine smile—like
with Carmen, Matthew could always tell when it was a real versus a forced
smile. And then the picture of Matthew himself, on stage, stiff and
saluting, framed with the Montez in the background—as if he saluted his
ship and not the Rear Admiral just out of frame. Next to the caption,
Matthew clicked the tag #realJakeBurke.
He watched Jacob’s video of the sinking ship twice. The tiny
“thwip” of detonation, and then minutes of sea breeze against the
microphone, an occasional gull’s squawk, distant human chatter. In the
caption, Jacob had written, “My dad kicked ass as the captain of this ship.
The thing wouldn’t even sink without his permission. [MORE]”
Then Matthew clicked [MORE]. The caption dropped down into
what Matthew could only call an essay. Paragraph upon paragraph. “They
way he talked about this boat—his ship—I used to think my dad loved that
thing more than he loved me,” he wrote to end one excoriating paragraph,
and “But as I watched it sink, it felt more like burying a relative than some
sort of childhood revenge” to start the next paragraph.
Well shit, Matthew thought. He said, “You guys didn’t tell me you
posted images from yesterday.”
“Duh, Daddy,” Elizabeth said.
Matthew hit the Like button. A whoosh and a ding sounded from
the opposite end of the table. Jacob looked up from his phone to Matthew,
happily confused. “Thanks for the like, Dad.” He put the phone down on
the table. “It’s got to be heartbreaking, seeing her go down like that.”
“But just think,” Elizabeth said, “it’s going to like save the
coastline and the fish.”
“I wanted a bigger blast,” Jacob said. “That’d’ve been great
content.”
“It’s not about the content,” Elizabeth said. “It’s for the ecology,
for the future, right Daddy? The exciting part is how historical it was.”
Historical, Matthew thought. “Yes,” he said, “historical.”
2023, Autumn / 315
NATANIA ROSENFELD
VISITING MY SICK FRIEND
Early fall day: wind blew without a nip,

no taste of winter yet. Just leaves turning over,
and my pale friend’s beautiful daughter
handing me chard, sage, celery, parsley,
beet leaves, and tiny yellow tomatoes
that glowed like bulbs against the brown
skin of her arm and later, burst when I bit down.
Rosenfeld
AFTER QUARANTINE
We visit again, Mother.

I ask about your garden.
Since your little dog died

you have no wish to dig
or plant. We are both aghast

at the searing world. You
have your exit plan, I mine.

When we face the end, we’ll
swallow pills, cowl our heads.

I embrace you now, kiss
your white fringe. Arise,

mother, go in the garden.
Flaring lilies, orange fruits

will greet you. Press them
with your fingertips, hold

them to your nose, breathe.
Rosenfeld
CHARLES SPRINGER
SPREES
First I gotta wait for the automatic door to slide open and then I gotta walk
through Women's Wear and then the shoes and footies I often mistake for
mittens, then get distracted in the cookie aisle and discover I can't live
without a red toaster so I pick one up and carry it through the bed linen
aisle and grab a new pillow on the way out and wish I had one of those
battery-driven shopping carts when I finally come to the shelves of jeans
would you believe without my size all because of my lengthy inside leg
and only the really dark blue ones I'd have to put through forty washings
before the blue became “my” blue and you, what about you there on your
great big butt, legs numbed up, eyes frozen to the screen, fingers clutching
on the mouse, waiting for a same day delivery of what you just forgot!
Springer
BOBBING DEAD
Roscoe adopted this dog, some kind of spaniel beagle mix. He never
wanted a purebred, never liked their dispositions, their genetically
predetermined behaviors. Anyway, new little Bosco died shortly after
Roscoe brought him home but instead of Roscoe burying him in the
backwoods by the tree up which he liked to tree squirrels, Roscoe took
him to Taco, his taxidermist who occasionally toyed with robotics and here
was certainly an occasion. A couple of weeks later Roscoe took newly-
stuffed Bosco home. Bosco walked room to room, in and out of the house,
around the backyard. Come one Tuesday Roscoe finds newly-stuffed
Bosco gone. He gets this call from Herbo himself down at Herbo's Electro
Applianco telling him newly-stuffed Bosco's out on the sidewalk bobbing
up and down to all sixteen big screen TVs. Roscoe admits now he should
have just put Bosco in the ground.
Springer
2023, Autumn / 317
KIMBERLY NUNES
DOUBLE HELIX
…during the dry years, the people forgot about the rich years, and
when the wet years returned, they lost all memory of the dry years.
—Steinbeck
My father didn’t believe in climate change, nor that his world was
changing, forests burning, rivers overflowing, then parched again,
aquifers—once gushing silently beneath our feet—collapsing to dust. In
California, we’re drilling water with oil rigs now, to irrigate our lettuce,
keep it leafy and moist.
You watch, in a hundred years, it will all be the same, this world…will be
just fine. He circles his finger on the table. A quote from East of Eden to
back him up—I take deep breaths. Hold him responsible for nothing—
own my anxiety.
His home, my home, everyone’s—of long histories, land of fire, snowy

mountains, dreamt land of dwindling dreams. Home to the Ohlone and
other tribes, home to criminals, white-collar and otherwise. Extremes of
wilderness, dams and canals, suburbs sprung, plastic-laced freeways look
holiday-tinseled. Where people live in tents as neighborhoods. Paradise
untended.
His world spread from Chualar and Gonzales, to Salinas, to Palo Alto,
and back again. California’s second gold rush. The pristine edge of Del
Monte Forest. The house sits barely off the crashing coast, hidden in
trees. I look down from an airplane to a point called Pescador, he’s down
there.
A life begun in labor, having come from parents born to it. Sugarcane
and lettuce fields, factories, some died there. A fragile balance, a family
agreement, to speak around it. We understand the end of day, dusk, the
end of land where the ghost trees stand. Without end.
As a boy, he wanted to build a Dogs Town, for lost dogs. His two canine
beloveds, Scottie and Stuart, their devotion and spirit, they jumped and
wagged. He built a business instead, had to grow it. Appetite creates
passion.
(cont)
God’s plan takes over as he ages. Redemption through faith, through

Virgin Mary. To meet his three other children, besides my brother and
me. The aborted ones, the forever babies. He wanted more children, but
never a wife.
They are waiting for me in Heaven, he wrote, if I make it there.

In his letters, he called himself abortion survivor. His final identity.
Down the coast to Big Sur, we walked a path to a viewing precipice. We

could see the new condors circling over the ocean. Back from extinction.
Mused on their beginningness, the chicks in trees, their prehistoric nests.
A good sign, he said.
Nunes
DENNIS MCFADDEN
O’HANLON’S LAST STAND
Casting his misgivings aside, O’Hanlon melted into the warm

embrace of Sally Brady, his heart flying, his breath trembling, his blood
hot and alive, arousing old longings and memories and venturing into
places in his body where it hadn’t ventured in years. Then Sally’s hair got
in his face. There was a Christmas tree, a festive, though oddly silent, fire,
snow flurries in the air beyond the window. The hair in his face grew
annoying. He tried to ignore it, but no matter which way he turned his
head, it followed. So, there it was. Uh oh, he thought, one of them damn
dreams where you know you’re dreaming.
He tried to hold on, but the itching got worse, tugging him away,
insisting, then her fingernails too, sharper and sharper, a slow, steady
rhythm on his ribs. Finally, he said the hell with it and just woke up.
Molly, his cat, was poised in a warm heap on his chest, kneading
her claws, her tail wandering idly across his face. O’Hanlon felt had. But
he couldn’t blame the old girl for wanting to share his body heat; after all,
she was nine now, nearly his own age in cat years. Over the throb of the
purr, a draft rattled the window shade, and O’Hanlon buried his hands in
Molly’s fur, feeling her magic motor, missing his remarkable dream.
“We ain’t dead yet,” he said.
2023, Autumn / 319
A small man with sharp shoulders and a hollow chest, his voice
was thick as a purr. From the edge of the bed, he pulled on his work boots,
which had never seen a day’s work, leaving him little dressing left to do.
He hobbled to the table and turned on the hotplate, Molly doing figure
eights around his ankles. At the window he raised the shade. An overcast
day, cement-colored smears across an asphalt sky. Between the houses he
could see a wide slice of Memorial Park, the ballfields brown and
withered, the surrounding trees bare, the water of the creek beyond as cold
as slate.
He warmed his hands over the glowing halo of the hotplate, took
a bottle of Iron City Beer from the ice box, sprinkled a handful of food
into Molly’s dish, which she attacked with grace and greed. Gulping his
breakfast, he turned on the old clock radio, frozen at 9:22, and a Christmas
carol commenced—deck the halls with boughs of holly. Christmas Eve!
He’d forgotten. That accounted for the Christmas tree in his dream—odd,
how that dream lingered. Most of his dreams were an unmemorable
muddle, like much of his waking life, and this was the first time he’d
dreamt about Sally Brady since—since when? He glanced toward her
ancient picture amid the dusty clutter atop his dresser. What would she
look like today? Was she even alive? Rubbing his stiff hands over the
hotplate, he gritted his remaining teeth. And though he normally stretched
his aspirin supply, he swallowed his last two with a gulp of beer.
He let the hotplate and aspirin work their magic on his hands
before tackling his bootlaces. One tug and the first lace snapped. Holding
the broken piece, he sat up with a sigh, took another gulp of his beer.
Closing his eyes over the bottle, he followed the long string backwards,
saw himself in the handsome olive drab of his C.C.C. uniform, his pride
reflected in Sally Brady’s glowing eyes, saw himself shirtless, hale, and
tanned, working in the sunshine of a new day constructing the town’s dam,
then, even earlier, haying in the fields of Morley’s farm. He looked at the
frayed end of the string in his hand.
“They don’t make ’em like they used to,” he told Molly. “Course,
they never did.”
Molly sat by her dish, washing her whiskers with an elegant
bobbing of her head, nodding in agreement.
He headed uptown around noon, gingerly climbing the steps from

his basement room, still stiff, the steps still slippery. On the sidewalk he
stopped to catch his breath, kicking his untied, laceless boot into place.
His landlady, Hattie Hetrick, lived upstairs with her husband
Harvey. O’Hanlon, as was his custom, pretended not to notice her peeping
out from behind the curtain. It was a delicate and complex ecosystem:
Because Hattie was a cat-loving busy-body with the nose of a bloodhound,
she always sent Harvey down to O’Hanlon’s room to attend to Molly’s
litter box after O’Hanlon was gone. Because Harvey was none of those
things, and resented cat-poop duty, he compensated himself by pilfering
O’Hanlon’s beer. Because O’Hanlon thought a beer was a small enough
price for Molly’s comfort, he pretended not to notice. All in all, it worked
out fine.
For some reason—perhaps the odd feel of his loose boot, perhaps
Christmas Eve—O’Hanlon, breaking with his normal custom, turned,
smiled, and waved. From behind her curtain, Hattie did not smile. She
gave a wary nod, wondering what the hell O’Hanlon was up to.
Two kinds of people in the world, O’Hanlon thought: those who
wonder what the hell other people are up to, and those who are up the hell
to something.
Turning, he headed off, up Valley toward Main, admiring the
plastic Santas and plywood reindeer on porches and rooftops and yards of
dead grass. He hoped Harv would change Molly’s litter today, instead of
just scooping it out. Be a nice Christmas treat for the old girl. His breaths
puffed out before him as he huffed up the hill, an air of festivity about
them. It looked like snow. Snow on Christmas Eve? He couldn’t remember
the last time. He noticed how the lighter streaks of gray in the sky were
smeared over the darker, like God erasing his blackboard. What the hell
would God be erasing? You wouldn’t think He’d get anything wrong in
the first place.
Or maybe the lesson was simply over. Maybe class was dismissed.
Up on Main, Jum’s was all decked out, a string of tinsel across the
front window above the big, black letters, Jum’s Bar & Grill. Jum himself
was all decked out too, his white apron tied high, starched and cleaner than
usual, his red Santa’s cap another year seedier. That asshole Charlie
Waters and a couple of his pals were the only other customers. O’Hanlon
had been hoping against hope Weasel Fleager might be there.
Nodding to Jum, he headed for his stool down at the end of the
bar. “Jesus Christ, Doodle,” Charlie Waters said, “you smell like a goddam
cat.”
“Well kiss my ass, Charlie,” O’Hanlon said. “Maybe I taste like
one too.”
“Hey, Doodle,” said someone else, “your boot’s untied.”
Jum said, “We got Tom and Jerries today, Doodle.”
2023, Autumn / 321
“Got any beer?” O’Hanlon climbed atop his stool.

Jum placed the glass of Iron City draft he’d already drawn. “Two
bits.”
O’Hanlon took a slug, licked his lip. “Any word about Weasel?”
“They’re sticking him up in the County Home,” Jum said glumly.
“They’re what?”
“He ain’t gonna be able to take care of himself any more anyhow,
Doodle.”
“Shit, alls he done was bust a hip.”
“All kinds of complications set in up there at the hospital, I guess.
He got the shakes so bad, they thought it was gonna kill him. Told him he
can never drink another beer.”
O’Hanlon winced. “Shit. He’ll have to freeze it and eat it then.”
Jum didn’t move. “Two bits, Doodle,” he repeated. Dipping into
his pocket, O’Hanlon took a handful of coins and a broken bootlace, blew
away some lint, slid a quarter across the bar. Jum left to ring it up.
O’Hanlon spread out the coins beside his glass of beer. A dollar twenty-
seven in change, plus two singles stashed in his back pocket. Should last
him all day, easy. It was Christmas Eve—that usually meant a whole
crowd of people tripping over one another to buy the next round, if history
wasn’t a liar.
By three o’clock, the place was packed and loud. The juke box
blared Christmas carols over a medley of hoots and laughs, smokers’
hacks, clinking glasses, rapping pool balls and rowdy chatter—music to
O’Hanlon’s ears. He knew nearly every face, though none of his pals was
there—all either dead or missing, like Weasel. Men with jobs had left work
early for a Christmas drink before heading home, while those without were
there to let those with buy them a drink. Sure enough, O’Hanlon couldn’t
spend a dime. Not that he tried.
Buster Clover, the kid who worked at the Hartsgrove Herald,
came in and bought him a beer. O’Hanlon still thought of him as a kid
even though he’d known him for years, but hell—wasn’t he still just as
many years younger? He’d always had a soft spot in his heart for the kid,
who always bought him a drink. Clover was a fellow who was up the hell
to something, like O’Hanlon, not one who wondered what the hell other
people were up to. Like Jum.
The place filled up with smoke. He watched it curl beneath the
pool table light—the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath—when
someone bought a round of heart-warming shots. Soon Clover was doing
his annual rendition of Jingle Bells, a damn Christmas tradition. He didn’t

sing the words, he squawked them like a chicken, like a big gangly
chicken:
“Braagh bragh, bragh,
Bragh bragh bragh braaaaagh!”
O’Hanlon saw Weasel Fleager. Out of nowhere. “Weasel! Hey
Weasel!” he yelled, but when Weasel turned around it was Earl Radaker,
who, after he turned around, didn’t really look all that much like Weasel.
Must have been the suspenders. O’Hanlon thought of Weasel’s dandelion
wine, which he could use a slug of now; they’d often smuggled it into
Jum’s, to cut down on their beer expenses. Weasel was famous for his
dandelion wine. Of course, he was also famous for the time he drank too
much of it during the poker game at Kocher’s Plumbing and passed out on
the toilet after a good old country shit. Trouble was, the toilet he passed
out on was the display model in Kocher’s front window.
In Jum’s front window, O’Hanlon spotted a flurry of white; he felt
five years old again. “Hey it’s snowing!” There was something magical
about snow on a Christmas Eve.
“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,” crooned Clover.
O’Hanlon was filled to the brim. He tapped his foot in time to
Jingle Bell Rock, lifting his arm, bending his elbow to wave and toast and
drink, with scarcely an ache or a twinge. His string of quarters stretched
out untouched on the bar before him, alongside his broken bootlace.
He saw his old man. He realized it wasn’t really his old man,
who’d been dead fifty years, since the night he’d passed out in the
Ramseytown Hotel parking lot behind their Packard, which his mother,
leaving in disgust without him, had backed up over his head. He’d never
noticed the resemblance before, but John Bullers did resemble his old man,
drunk as he was, bellowing like a big, dumb bull. O’Hanlon hadn’t thought
about his old man in years. He rearranged his bootlace on the bar into a
circle, then a square, back to a circle, shuffling his quarters within. Odd,
how the memory of his old man could mingle with this feeling of joy,
neither one a bit out of place.
Clover sat on the stool beside him. “All set for Christmas?”
“Buster, when was the last time it snowed on a Christmas Eve?”
“I don’t know, I forgot to write it down. You want a shot,
Doodle?”
“Is a bear Catholic?”
Looking up, O’Hanlon saw his sister Annie coming toward him.
He looked away, waiting for her to vanish too, but she tapped him on the
2023, Autumn / 323
shoulder.
“Annie,” he said with a nod.
“Daniel,” she said with an identical nod.
Clover said, “Annie,” and the nods were unanimous.
O’Hanlon scratched his ribs and his scalp, feeling suddenly itchy,
invaded, impatient.
“I come to ask you up to supper,” Annie said. “I got a big turkey.”
“You had a big turkey,” O’Hanlon said. “But he’s dead now.”
Annie shook her head. “You got the same sense of humor your
father had when he was drunk, Daniel, about as funny as a toothache. You
coming up?”
“No thanks. My dance card’s full.”
“You’re just being stubborn.”
“I ain’t setting foot in that fat bastard’s house.”
“Henry Westphall’s gone now,” Annie said.
“Still his house.” O’Hanlon remembered the time he’d come to
blows with Westphall. Two or three times, actually. The last one hadn’t
ended well.
“It’s my house,” Annie said.
“I’m having my supper right here, thank you kindly. Some of
Jum’s prime beef jerky.”
“Sardines, too,” Clover said, “if you’re in the mood for surf and
turf.”
“Buster, you ain’t helping any,” Annie said. Then, to her brother,
“You shouldn’t be all alone at Christmas.”
“Well shit, do I look all alone?”
“Hell yes,” said Annie.
“Well, I ain’t,” O’Hanlon said. “These are my people.”
Annie shook her head.
“Except for Bowersox,” Clover said.
“Yeah,” O’Hanlon said, “Smokey Bowersox, he’s an asshole.
Him and Bullers. Bullers and Bowersox ain’t my people.”
“Neither is Charlie Waters,” Clover reminded him.
“Yeah. Count him out too.”
Shrugging her coat closed, Annie flipped her scarf around her
neck. “Door’ll be open,” she said. They watched her leave, a gust of white
flurries blowing in, O’Hanlon unclenching. Annie always joked, still
teased him to this day, that he’d believed in Santa Claus till the day he
dropped out of high school. And it might have almost been true. Looking
at the snow falling outside, at all the joy inside, he wondered if Branagh
there wasn’t some truth to it.

Clover said, “Listen, why don’t you come up to my place for
supper?”
O’Hanlon shook his head. “Got some stuff I gotta do, Buster.”
“What do you gotta do?”
“Get me some new bootlaces. Take care of my cat.”
“Jenny wants a damn cat,” Clover said. Jenny was his little girl.
“So, get her a damn cat. Sure—get her one for Christmas.”
“Too much work. I don’t think I could handle the responsibility.”
“Trick is to get somebody else to handle it for you,” O’Hanlon
said.
“Why don’t you come on up for supper? You could talk her out of
a cat for me. Tell her how much work it is. Tell her she can have visiting
rights to Molly.”
“Naw, I better head on down, Buster.”
“One for the road,” Clover called to Jum. Clover, a dog man, went
on at great length about his childhood pal Puppady, but O’Hanlon was
hardly listening. He was thinking about his old man and Annie, about old
Christmases, the year he got a red sled—one of the few times he ever got
anything—about the rarity of snow on a Christmas Eve, and the magical,
mellow joy. He was thinking about Molly. What would Molly do without
him? Funny, all the years he’d had pets, all his life, cats mostly, an
occasional dog, always knowing he’d outlive them, never having to
consider what they’d do without him, only what he’d do without them.
Clover gathered up his change. “Well, stop on over for a Christmas
beer later,” he said. “Want a ride?”
“Naw,” said O’Hanlon, gathering his old hat by the floppy earlugs.
“Gotta stop over at the Seven-Eleven, do my Christmas shoplifting.”
O’Hanlon’s Yule fire was not exactly crackling, but then the one
in his dream hadn’t crackled much either. From the steady flame of the
candle, he lit sheet after yellowing sheet of paper, watching them curl into
colorful flames. Molly lay purring in a tight heap by the bricks he’d placed
on the table to hold the fire. She was a contented cat on Christmas Eve,
her supper of tuna and milk still sweet on her tongue, the heat of real
flames soaking into her fur.
O’Hanlon was content as well. He’d joined Molly in a taste of
tuna, and now, one by one, he was savoring his old letters from Sally
Brady, line by line, savoring at the same time his Iron City, sip by sip. He
hadn’t read the letters in years, yet still she came alive with every word,
2023, Autumn / 325
her lips moving to this phrase or that, her eyes flashing like heat lightning.
He’d underlined parts. He couldn’t remember when. One by one, he held
the letters to the candle, dropped them to the bricks, watched them curl
and burn.
A pounding on the door. “Doodle!” Hattie yelled. “Is there a fire
in there?”
He opened the door a crack. Hattie’s eyes were round with worry,
searching over his shoulder, the shawl on her hair collecting snow. “Burnt
my supper’s all,” he said. “Got the window open to let the smoke out.”
“Are you sure….”
“Be fine,” he said, easing the door shut. “Have yourself a merry
little Christmas.”
“That was Hattie,” he told Molly. “Wondering what the hell we’re
up to.”
They watched the flames of the last letter die. The warmth
lingered in the old cat’s fur, where he put his hands as they stared at the
candle flame, which now would have to do. He closed his eyes, feeling the
phantom squeezing of his right hand. That was the hand he’d extended to
help Sally Brady from the table at the Moonlight Roller Rink—he’d been
home on leave from the C.C.C., and hadn’t known her at all, he’d
approached her on a dare from Weasel—and she’d smiled and squeezed
his hand, only a second or two, but that extra squeeze had been enough to
catapult his heart through the ceiling. Now the hand, bony and spotted,
bore no resemblance at all to the hand she’d held. And his eyes, open now,
old eyes with sandpaper lids, trying to see across the smoky little room to
where the snow blew in the window; they weren’t the same eyes that had
watched her walk away across a barren Main Street a year later, the day
before Christmas, many, many Christmases ago. That had been a
Christmas without any snow—a Christmas without any magic.
Still the flakes came down, good fat flakes, floating out of the dark
through the glow of the streetlights, three inches on the ground and
counting. Refreshed and refueled, O’Hanlon made his slippery way back
up to Main. There his heart dropped, seeing Jum locking up.
“Whatcha doing? It ain’t even eight yet.”
“Close up on Christmas Eve, Doodle.”
“Since when?”
“Since, oh, hell, about forty years ago.”
O’Hanlon stood beneath his hat, floppy earlugs catching snow.
“That right?”
“You betcha. Need a lift anywheres?” asked Jum.

“Need a beer is what I need.”
He watched Jum’s old Ford pickup moving slowly down Main,
white rooster tails trailing the tires. Them roads sure looks slippy, was
what Weasel would say.
The Green Lantern Tavern—it never closed. It was way up East
Main Street, quite a hike, but he’d gotten his second wind. His new
bootlaces were tied tight. He felt invigorated by the snow, by the glorious
day at Jum’s, by his Yule fire cleansing. At the Green Lantern, there would
be a new crowd, a new celebration. He set off through the falling snow,
beneath the Christmas lights adorning the streetlamps.
By the time he got to the bridge over Potter’s Creek, his second
wind was gone. Main Street ended, the streetlights—unadorned now—
became fewer and farther between, and the East Main Street climb
commenced. It was steeper than Valley Street. Longer. In the blackness
below the bridge, the sound of the icy rushing waters gave him a chill. But
he’d brought along some cheer—he took a slug of Four Roses from his
pint—and he was on a mission. It was what the hell he was up to.
He set off, the bright beacon of the Green Lantern pulling him up
the hill. Past living room after living room, he peered through frosted
windows to see the Christmas trees, the colors of the lights, the glows on
the faces. Where were all the old familiar ones, all the faces he’d known?
What would Weasel be up to now? Probably propped up in bed snug as a
bug, watching one of them damn tabernacle choirs on TV. Probably
drinking some dandelion wine, he snuck in. The times they’d had. Poker
at Kocher’s. Dandelion wine. Swimming in their skivvies after dark at the
dam. More dandelion wine. Peeping in Wahoo’s window. Sitting in the
front of Jum’s watching Randy the dog humping lawyers’ legs going in
and out of the Court House. The time they stole Smokey Bowersox’s buck.
Twenty years ago? Thirty?
Halfway up the hill, his legs turned to jelly. He slowed, but didn’t
stop. He concentrated on one slippery step after another, thought about the
Green Lantern with the softest bar stool in all of Hartsgrove. The bar was
just the right height for your elbows, with good comfortable grooves,
sturdy brass foot rail, and the lights bright and the air warm and the beer
cold. And probably a big old country Christmas tree to boot.
Up East Main, heading east, on one of the seven hills upon which
Hartsgrove was built—like Bethlehem. On Christmas Eve. Seeking joy.
He smiled, blinking snowflakes from his lashes, pleased with himself,
feeling Wise to have thought of the little irony. He began to sing,
2023, Autumn / 327
“We three kings of orient are,

Bearing gifts, we travel so far—”
He gathered steam, singing louder, singing all the words he could
remember, repeating those he knew for those he forgot. Weasel Fleager
looked at him like he was crazy. Come on, Weaze, he groused, where’s
your damn Christmas spirit?
Then Weasel chimed in, and they sang in sweet harmony, O come
all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant—
The Green Lantern was closed, the windows black. A car whined
up East Main at a slither. “No damn room at the inn.”
From the top of East Main, he could see two of Hartsgrove’s hills.
Looking up, he tried to catch a glimpse of Santa’s sleigh, but the snow fell
out of blackness. Across the way, Hartsgrove quietly glittered. The far
points of white, distant street and house lights, settled across the hillsides
like stars at rest. Musta fell out of God’s pocket, he said to himself.
The car whined out of earshot, into the silence of the snow. “Let’s
head on over to Clover’s,” he said, undaunted. “Buster invited us over for
a damn Christmas beer.” Catching a deep breath, hitching up his pants, he
took another slug of Four Roses, threw back his head, snow flying from of
his floppy earlugs, and he and Weasel Fleager sang: Silent night, Holy
night....
He knocked, but nobody answered. Nobody home at the inn

again? Retreating from the porch, he trudged through the snow—a good
five inches by now—peering over the shrubs and into the window. There
was Buster, curled up on the rug under the Christmas tree. He knocked
again, to no avail. He didn’t want to make too much racket, in case Peggy
and Jenny—Buster’s wife and little girl—were asleep. Buster must be
good and passed out, come to think of it; he’d never seen him do shots
before. Damn kids.
He went on in. He’d been invited. There was carpet underfoot,
silent and soft, like walking on a cloud. The only lights were those on the
tree, the only sound the hum of the furnace. Not a creature was stirring.
He felt like Santa, standing by the tree in the hushed living room, bearing
his Christmas presents—he’d stopped at his place on his way over to fetch
the presents, a last-minute Christmas inspiration—looking down at little
Buster sound asleep where he’d been waiting. Kids.
Whatcha think? Should I wake him up?
Dynamite couldn’t wake him up, Weasel Fleager observed.
He invited us over for a damn Christmas beer.
Well, you know where the ice box is at, don’t you?
The kitchen was dark, but it brightened considerably when he
opened the ice box. Grabbing two beers, he opened them both. Back in the
living room he sat rocking the chair on the quiet carpet, drinking beer,
watching Buster sleep under the Christmas tree.
This ain’t no fun, Weasel said.
O’Hanlon had to admit he was having a tough time keeping his
spirits up. What do you want me to do about it?
You got any of that whiskey left?
Nope. You got any of that dandelion wine?
Nope.
They sat for a while, listening to Clover snore. Tell you what,
Weasel said, why don’t we put his hand in warm water and see if he pisses
his pants?
That’s just plain stupid, O’Hanlon said.
Shit, Doodle, you never want to do anything that’s fun. Why don’t
we take down the Christmas stockings and hang up his dirty old socks?
Okay.
After that was done, Weasel said, How about we fill ’em up with
kitty litter?
Okay, O’Hanlon said. After that was done, there was nothing else
to do. They could chuckle about the dirty socks filled with kitty litter
hanging from the mantel for only so long, and then the beer was gone.
We may as well get on out of here.
Where we gonna go to? Weasel said.
Beats me. Pausing at the door, he took a last long look at the
Christmas lights, at the warm living room, the socks hanging from the
mantel. Look at that, Weasel said. You’re gonna start bawling.
I am like hell.
Are too. You don’t want to leave. You’re gonna bust out in tears
like a big ol’ baby. Just like you did when Sally Brady run off.
That’s just plain stupid, O’Hanlon said. That was when I was a
kid. Hell, I was younger’n Buster here. That was when I was too young to
know any better. Besides, it never even happened anyhow.
Did too, Weasel Fleager said. O’Hanlon ignored him. He stood
outside on the porch. The snow had stopped falling. Taking a deep breath
that never reached bottom, he realized he was all emptied out. He thought
of the pitcher, the heavy, blue and white pitcher Mrs. Morley poured ice-
cold lemonade from when he was a kid haying at Morley’s farm. It was an
indestructible pitcher, a little chip on its lip, and as soon as it was empty,
2023, Autumn / 329
Mrs. Morley had it filled back up again with delicious lemonade.

O’Hanlon’s mouth used to water the minute he came in sweating out of
the hot sun and spotted that pitcher sweating on the table.
He tromped across the yard, avoiding his old tracks, making a new
trail in the fresh snow. He turned to look at Clover’s house again. A fine,
warm house, but it belonged to a kid; sound asleep, never even knew he’d
come and gone. O’Hanlon was tired, he was emptied out, he was ready to
go on home, to his own home. But first he had to dump Weasel. Weasel
never knew when it was time to go on home, when the party was over.
Above the black bones of the trees, O’Hanlon saw the brightly
lighted steeple in the sky. They weren’t far from the Catholic Church on
Irishtown Hill.
Where we headed? Weasel said.
I don’t know about you, but me, I’m going to church, said
O’Hanlon. Midnight Mass on a Christmas Eve.
You shitting me?
I wouldn’t shit you, you’re too big a turd.
Well, I ain’t going. I’m a goddam Lutheran.
Then go on home. I’ll see you later. I’ll go on in by myself.
He was trying to catch some shut-eye, but that little piss ant
Deemer wouldn’t quit yabbering long enough to let a body fall asleep. He
was what, maybe twenty, but looked closer to twelve. No wonder they had
him working on a Christmas Eve. He’d stood in his cell yabbering and
yabbering, and when O’Hanlon had had enough and closed his eyes,
ignoring him, Deemer had called in Chief Toole to have somebody else to
yabber at.
“Well, what the hell’d he do?” Toole asked. “Kill somebody?”
“Father Strano called me up. I guess he was disrupting their Mass
up there. Grabbing the chalice and chugging the wine.”
“Does he need medical attention?”
“I don’t think so. Just drunker’n a skunk is all.”
“Can he walk and talk?”
“He can stumble and mumble. I tried to keep him talking, but he
kept passing out.”
“Well, what the hell’d you call me for?”
“There is one other thing. Mary Lou Evans called up from down
at the Seven-Eleven—she seen him shoplifting in there earlier.”
“What’d he take this time?”
“Took a candle, some tuna, a pair of shoestrings. A big red bow.”
“Big red bow, huh? Must be wrapping up his Christmas presents.

He’s just low, it’s the end of the month. We get him to pay up on the third,
when his Social Security comes in.”
“Well should I lock him up, or run him on home?”
“That room of his is like an ice box—let him sleep it off back
here.”
“Lock him up?”
“Don’t lock the damn door. He just come home for Christmas is
all.”
“Would you ever shut your pie hole so a man can get some sleep
around here?” O’Hanlon yelled.
“What’d he say?” Toole said.
“I got no idea,” said Deemer.
Finally, they shut up. Finally, a man could rest in peace.
Rest he did. O’Hanlon fell into a deep, sound sleep, and when he
awoke it was without a trace of a hangover. He felt great, full of piss and
vinegar, like he used to wake up mornings after haying at Morley’s, after
putting in a full day with the C.C.C., building the town’s damn dam. He
felt wonderful. There was a little morning light creeping in through the
high cell window, so it must have been past dawn. It must have been
Christmas morning.
Looking up, he saw his old man waving. Out of nowhere. Then he
looked again and saw he wasn’t waving at all, he was pointing at a
Christmas tree, and what a Christmas tree it was. Huge, perfectly shaped,
strung with popcorn and bright beads, hung with candy canes and guttering
candles, colorful angels made out of straw, ribbons and shiny ornaments,
and on the top a big, warm, glowing star. And the parcels wrapped in pretty
paper underneath. Just like when he was a kid, except for the parcels.
They’d never had parcels. Never had much of a tree either, come to think
of it. White snowflakes floating all around. O’Hanlon felt a warmth shiver
through him as the star on the top of the tree seemed to expand, to slowly
engulf him.
Then came the shriek from Jenny’s room. Mommy! Daddy! and
he saw Buster and Peggy rushing to her doorway. Santa was here! Jenny
exclaimed, and look what he brought me! Beside her on the bed was the
big old calico cat, stretched out regally on her back, washing her stomach
in long savory licks, and looking for all the world as though she’d lived
there all her life. Molly, Buster said. And when Jenny picked her up to hug
her, they saw the big red bow on her collar.
That was a nice touch. O’Hanlon was proud of that big red bow.
2023, Autumn / 331
Before he could get to feeling too pleased with himself, the angels
made out of straw lifted up and away from the limbs of the tree. Singing,
they floated among the snowflakes—one of those damn heavenly hosts
he’d always heard about—their straw features becoming real. Two of them
took his arms, lifting him. Up they went, floating high above the tree and
all around it, hovering in the warm glow with the floating flakes. I never
even flew before, O’Hanlon said. He looked at the two angels holding his
arms, and, looking again, he recognized them, tears coming to his eyes;
one was his mother, her face young again, untarnished by age or booze,
and the other was the beautiful Sally Brady.
Up they went even higher, O’Hanlon flying with them in his
brand-new bootlaces, far above the tree. I never even been off the ground
before! He could see all of Hartsgrove, the seven snow-covered hills, then
the whole countryside in beautiful blues and whites, then all of
Pennsylvania, then the world, a soft globe gently floating and bobbing like
a bulb on a Christmas tree limb. And then the universe, every miraculous
molecule.
So, there it was. Uh oh, he thought.
One of them damn dreams where you know you’re dreaming.
LYNN GLICKLICH COHEN

YOUR 1:00
Before you go, notice the grudges

left behind. They have hurdled us
since you burped and I laughed;
since I slipped on stairs and you
signed my cast in black block letters.
Left to raise ourselves, we stole and

set fires, got caught and lied,
smoked weed behind our garage.
There is love here, despite my bruised
arms and your well-aimed punches.
(cont)
I’ve kept you in my consciousness for

decades. You are now commended for
your accomplishments, and I say things like,
“Par for the course,” with no idea
why it means what I mean.
Between your clipped visits, silence.

We ascribe to opposing slogans,
cancel each other’s votes. I want
to ask you whether my birth caused
you trauma; is my existence a trigger?
Lunch over, we embrace, your suit seam

stiff under my cheek. The usual parting
promises. But I can tell by the way
your eyes sweep another horizon,
before you go, I am already gone.
Cohen
MIRIAM SAGAN
IN THE OLD ALBERTSONS
Baby on my hip
in the aisle of the old
Albertsons, you know
when we all
lived nearby
and it was on the
other side of the mall.
An old—to me—lady
came up
in the canned goods
asked: “What
is the nationality
of the baby’s father?”
(cont)
2023, Autumn / 333
An odd question,
and I said, “American”
which wasn’t the right answer
because she persisted:
“Is he a Jew?”
She startled me
but guessing I wouldn’t get hurt
I said yes and
“I am, too.”
“So am I,” the lady said,

soft Spanish in her voice,
while the baby girl smiled
big-eyed and shy
because this lady
knew how to look at a baby
with gentle peek-a-boo,
not too hard or long
“They call us the Catholic Jews,”

she said.
“We come from Spain”
and I knew what she meant—
marranos is the rude word
for those who don’t eat pork
and I’d rather say hidden Jews
while people call themselves “anusim.”
Jews expelled from Spain in 1492

who changed their names
not to the saints
but Flores, Rivera, (Is)Rael
came to Mexico City
then north, one step ahead
of the Inquisition
got married in fields instead of in church
lit candles in secret.
(cont)
This knowledge changed me.

if others clung
to faith, even its remnants
who was I
to give it up
and turn away?
Instead
began to draw the light
from candlesticks
towards me
cover my hair with lace
cover my eyes with my hands
cover my ache with my prayer
cover my daughter with the matriarch’s names
cover my loss
with blessing.
Sagan
DIANA COLE
TENSE ON THE TACONIC
Inwardly I rehearse the move,

gas pedal to brake,
steady speed to abrupt stop.
I have been warned about deer.
My high beams scan the bushes.
The road’s yellow stripes flash by.
Just over the rise a heavy body
straddles the line, legs crumpled under.
Fur wet with effort. And like that
the present is upon us.
The deer has not leapt up,
and I have not moved my foot.
A moment without a future …
that becomes a past
not broken in glass and blood (cont)
2023, Autumn / 335
but swerving in time.

Driving on, so alive
to its shadow in the rear view
as the next car crests the hill.
Cole
MASSACRE OF INNOCENTS
Allowing that …
I need to sleep and if not
I want to scream and
if I could, why would I?
Who would hear,
who could act only
on condition the right
to bear arms is inalterable?
And by that time
those who cannot bear it
begin to forget.
It happens again,
again and again—
Sandy Hook, 21
Parkland, 17
Uvalde 21
Is 25 next?
What are the odds
nothing will be done?
As it could if screams
could be heard
over thoughts and prayers
If no one could dream of
allowing this….
Cole
FORCED KISS
It came with fleshy lips, big juicy lips.

the wild work of his tongue foraging inside
my mouth, mauling inner linings. His eyes
open, looking like he might explode.
I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t stop his hands.
My gasp, the parting, our mouths pulling
away. The string of saliva that stayed.
Cole
JAMES P COOPER
THAT HOUR
If I cannot hear the voices of those

I love, and if the afterlife
for humans lasts for only an hour
before we are dropped into another body,
I want to spend that hour sitting
on a park bench, somewhere near water,
listening to the birds that went extinct
in one world yet remain alive in another.
I could be one of the few humans
in a hundred years to hear the songs
of the Carolina Parakeet as they warn
each other, remembering the humans
who took their lives. When my hour
ends, everything I heard will be lost.
All but one or two memories
will lift away like birds from a feeder.
Cooper
2023, Autumn / 337
WILLIAM MILLER
HANDCARVED COFFINS
The door was taken down, laid across

sawhorses in the dirt yard
for a child, a soldier, a preacher
who prayed for rain that never fell.
Women learned early to undress,

wash the bodies, ignore the wounds
knives made, legs broken by a mule kick,
wipe the dried blood
from the mouth of anyone taken

by consumption, the cough that rattled
every nerve and bone.
In the shade of a spreading oak,
the men made wooden boxes,

sanded, nailed airtight against
the groundwater. They drew
with a final blade a cross in a firm
pine board, prayed in silence

and thanked the God who passed
them by like the shadow of a hawk….
If a man lived long enough, his coffin
was as small as a child’s, his body

shrunken by wind and drought, bad luck
then worse, the time the sun kept
in the hard, blue sky.
Miller
WHEN I TAKE OUT THE GARBAGE
When I take out the garbage,

I tie the bag four times,
breathe on the knot and spit.
(cont)
My enemies are in there—

father, mother, teachers,
the priest who didn’t understand
my sins, refused to forgive them.
I learned this curse in a book
almost no one reads anymore.
Inside the iron gate, I repeat
the ritual once a week. Most of all,
I like to think of the landfill,
my bag among thousands, the gulls
that circle and dive, pieces
of torn souls in their mouths.
Miller
BILL GRIFFIN
EVERY SPRING THE TREES FILL WITH SONGBIRDS
An oriole, she’s perched
on the plastic chair
while her mother
chips and chirrs my ten
dollar trim; perched
bone-slender legs
drawn beneath her
birdlike ,useless,
born that way,
and birdlike too her tortured
body, all thorax, poised
to fly
but she has no wings,

only blackbird hair
its spray of orange
and her dark eyes
sharp and bright
as sky. (cont)
2023, Autumn / 339
In the chair beside her

male of the species
(on display): he
has known her
since they fledged,
flown in today
to hover near though
this afternoon
not saying much,
neither is she,
but above the wingwhirr

of her mother’s shears
I swear I hear it:
singing.
Griffin
LOVE SONG
I wanted to write you a poem

like thrush song after light rain,
dusk drawn up from among the trees
by the tenderness of that invitation to stop
for a moment clearing the table,

leave the washing up, linger
on the back porch in this space that desires
to cradle us in its arms of stillness, but who
could compose such lines? The wood thrush

has spoken the only poem;
last light in the beech has woven
the moment’s tarnished coverlet;
maybe for you I would lay down this pen,

lay down words, even thrush,
even song, hope for you to hear in the silence
today, and another.
Griffin
CONTRIBUTORS
DUANE ANDERSON currently lives in La Vista, NE. He has had poems

published in Fine Lines, Cholla Needles, Tipton Poetry Journal, and several other
publications. He is the author of Yes, I Must Admit We Are Neighbors, On the
Corner of Walk and Don’t Walk, and The Blood Drives: One Pint Down.
ROB ARMSTRONG mines comedy from his own life as a stay-at-home dad.
After graduating from the Wharton School of Business, he worked in
communication finance before taking an “early retirement” to look after his two
daughters. His first book, Daddy 3.0: A Comedy of Errors, published in 2016
(Gear Press), won the 2017 Independent Author Network Award for Best
Comedy/Satire Novel. Armstrong lives with his wife and daughters in the Greater
Philadelphia area.
JOHN BALLANTINE is an emeritus professor at Brandeis International Business

School. He received his bachelor's degree in English from Harvard University, then
earned a master's degree and Ph.D. in economics from University of Chicago and
NYU Stern, respectively. His economic commentary has appeared in Salon, The
Boston Globe, and The Conversation, and other more-academic publications.
DANIEL GENE BARLEKAMP’s (he/him) poetry has appeared or is

forthcoming in The Seventh Quarry Poetry Magazine and Ekstasis. He is also the
author of fiction and nonfiction for adults as well as stories and poems for young
readers. Originally from New Jersey, Daniel now lives with his wife and their pets
in Massachusetts, where he works in immigration law.
JOE BAUMANN’s fiction and essays have appeared in Phantom Drift, Passages
North, Emerson Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Iron Horse Literary Review,
and many others. His debut short story collection, Sing With Me at the Edge of
Paradise, was chosen as the inaugural winner of the Iron Horse/Texas Tech
University Press First Book Award, and his second story collection is The Plagues
(2023, Cornerstone Press). His debut novel is I Know You’re Out There Somewhere
(2022, Deep Hearts YA). He can be reached at joebaumann.wordpress.com.
BILL BAYNES is a writer, producer and director, a former journalist and

magazine publisher. He has released three works of fiction with three different
Indie publishers: Bunt!, a young adult baseball novel; The Occupation of Joe, a
historical novella set in Tokyo in 1945; and The Coyote Who Braved Baseball, a
middle-grade novel. His poetry has appeared in the California Writers Club
Literary Review, Fault Zone, Apalachee Quarterly, Paradigm, and the Gold
Country Writers Anthology.
2023, Autumn / 341
MONICA L BELLON-HARN (she/her) Even though she has published over 60

peer-reviewed manuscripts as a professor of speech and hearing science, she has
other stories to tell. She has published six short stories and one poem in literary
journals including trampset, Adelaide Literary Magazine, The Dead Mule School
of Southern Literature, Muse/A Journal, and Freshwater Literary Journal.
Several short stories were the foundation to a novel she is currently writing.
J E BENNETT (University of Delaware) works as a free-lance writer. He has

published work in Paris/Atlantic (Fr) Orbis (Eng), Perspectives Upstairs at Duroc
(Fr), The Cape Rock,Yemassee, and Litspeak (Ger). He was awarded Descant’s
Frank O'Connor Prize for fiction. His chapbook of poetry is Strange Voice. He
has new work in California Quarterly, Blue Unicorn, White Pelican, Poem,
Iconoclast, Spindrift, Plainsongs, and others.
MORGAN BOYER is the author of The Serotonin Cradle (Finishing Line Press,
2018) and a graduate of Carlow University. They have been featured in Kallisto
Gaia Press, Thirty West Publishing House, Oyez Review, Pennsylvania English,
and Voices from the Attic. They are a neurodivergent bisexual woman who resides
in Pittsburgh, PA.
WILLIAM E BURLESON’s (he/him) short stories have appeared or will be

appearing in twenty-two literary journals and anthologies, including The London
Reader, The New Guard, and American Fiction 14 and 16. He has also published
extensively in non-fiction, most notably his book, Bi America (Haworth Press,
2005), Hennepin History Magazine, and numerous other publications. He is also
the founder of Flexible Press. For more information: www.williamburleson.com.
EMILY BUTLER is the author of Lucid Dreaming, Waking Life: Unlocking the
Power of Your Sleep (Toplight Books) and the poetry chapbook, Self Talk (Plan
B Press). Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly,
Spoon River Poetry Review, Cape Cod Poetry Review, ELJ Editions, Anti-Heroin
Chic, and elsewhere. You can follow them on Twitter @EmilyFButler1.
ROXANNE CARDONA (she/her) was born in New York City. She has had
poems published or forthcoming in One Art, Pine Hills Review, Mason Street,
Constellations, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Poetic Medicine, and elsewhere. She
has a BA/MS from Hunter College and MS from College of New Rochelle. She
was an elementary school teacher and principal in the South Bronx. She resides
in Teaneck, NJ, with her husband.
CHRISTOPHER CERVELLONI earned his bachelor’s in education from

Butler University and an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers. He is the
executive editor at Blue Square Writers Studio, and his work has appeared in The
Barcelona Review, Crab Orchard Review, Rivet Journal, Fogged Clarity, and The
MacGuffin, among others. He currently teaches English and journalism in Denver.
JUDITH CODY is published in over 150 journals. A poem is in the

Smithsonian’s Institute’s permanent collection, in Spanish and English
“Sanctuary” is in Cody’s book, Garden on an Alien Star System from Finishing
Line Press. A poem won second place in the national Soul-Making Keats Literary
Competition. Poems were quarter-finalists for the Pablo Neruda Prize. She edited
a PEN Oakland anthology, was Editor-in-Chief of the first Resource Guide on
Women in Music. www.judithcody.com
LESLIE G COHEN, now retired, practiced general internal medicine for 50

years and has written many short stories and poetry for national medical journals.
LYNN GLICKLICH COHEN lives in Milwaukee, WI, where she writes poems,
plays cello, walks her dog, feeds the birds and squirrels and, in spite of everything,
hopes for the best. Her poetry has been published in Amelia, Oberon Poetry
Magazine, Peregrine, St. Katharine Review, and Trampoline. Her novel, A
Terrible Case of Beauty, was published by Trebol Press in 2013.
DIANA COLE (she/her), a Pushcart Prize nominee, is author of Songs by Heart

(Iris Press, 2018) and has published poems in numerous venues including Poetry
East, Tar River Poetry, The Public's Radio 89.3, Spillway, Verse Daily, and
Orison Books. Her full-length book, Between Sleeves, was published by Cyberwit
(2023). She is an editor for Crosswinds Poetry Journal and has organized poetry
events and poetry workshops in New England.
NAOMI COOPER grew up in Savannah, GA. She earned a master’s degree in

Hispanic literature at Indiana University. Later, in San Francisco, she worked as a
Kelly Girl, housecleaner, childcare provider, clairvoyant reader, and fourth-grade
teacher in the Children’s Center Program in the public schools. Retired now, she
has been published in Forum, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Quarantine
Fiction, Senior Beat, and as a Poet of the Day with the San Francisco Public Library.
JAMES P COOPER is a poetry editor for Choeofpleirn Press, blogs occasionally

at https://redmooncafe.blogspot.com, and teaches writing online. He was
nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Apple Valley Review. Some of his other
poems can be found in the Connecticut Review, Dragon Poet Review, Flint Hills
Review, Indiana Review, and Red Rock Review. A vegetarian, he lives with three
carnivores, two of whom are cats, in Leavenworth, KS.
AMELIA COULON is the author of six full-length romantic novels and over one
hundred short stories of various genres. She is fifty, the mother of two and has
been married to her soulmate for twenty-two years. Her work has been published
by Aspen House Publishing, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Page &
2023, Autumn / 343
Spine, and Evening Street Review in addition to numerous other outlets.
GANNON DANIELS’ poems have been seen in several publications including

Cimarron Review, RATTLE, Diagram, and The Virginia Normal. The Occupying
Water, published by Galt Art House, is her first book of poetry. She is a teacher
and writer who lives with her amazing, musical son in Echo Park (LA), CA.
DIANA DONOVAN lives in Northern California with her husband and daughter.
Her poetry has recently appeared in Off the Coast, The Lindenwood Review, Rust
and Moth, and Chestnut Review. In 2021, she received nominations for a Pushcart
Prize and Best of the Net.
MICHAEL ESTABROOK has been publishing his poetry in the small press
since the 1980s. He has published over 30 collections, a recent one being The
Poet’s Curse, A Miscellany (The Poetry Box, 2019). He lives in Acton, MA.
michaelestabrook.org/
JOHN S EUSTIS is a happily retired librarian living in Virginia with his wife.
After growing up in central Michigan and the 1000 Islands Region of New York
state, he enjoyed a long, quiet federal career in Washington, D.C. His poetry has
appeared in Atlanta Review, Lighten Up Online, and Sheila-Na-Gig Online.
WADE FOX lives in Denver and teaches writing at the Community College of
Denver. He is the founder of New Feathers Anthology, an online and print literary
journal. A writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, he has published poems or has
poems to come in The Banyan Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Bindweed
Magazine, Cabildo Quarterly, Datura Journal, Occam’s Razor, Littoral, Autumn
Sky, and R.K.V.R.Y, and short stories in Occam’s Razor, The Corner Club, and
Minimus.
BILL GARTEN’s book, Asphalt Heart was published by The Main Street Rag
in 2018 and its chapbook version was a finalist for The Comstock Review’s 2017
Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Contest. He graduated from Ashland University’s
MFA Program in Creative Writing with an emphasis in poetry. He is a short list
and long list finalist for poems in The Fish Anthology for 2022 judged by Billy
Collins from his latest book We Have to Stop Here.
PETER DAVID GOODWIN, raised in the slightly different and occasionally

uncomprehending cultures of New Jersey, Virginia, and England, moved
back to USA at age 18, in pursuit of an egalitarian education, eventually
settling in New York City, working in a variety of occupations while
indulging his love for theatre, relishing the city’s vibrant chaos, but starved
for light and space, he removed himself to the Chesapeake Bay, appreciating
its natural rhythms and slower seasons.
MICHAEL LLOYD GRAY is the author of six published novels. His novel
The Armageddon Two-Step, winner of a Book Excellence Award, was released
in December 2019. He’s the winner of the 2005 Alligator Juniper Fiction Prize
and 2005 The Writers Place Award for Fiction. His stories have appeared in
Alligator Juniper, Arkansas Review, I-70 Review, Flashpoint!, Black River
Syllabary, Verdad, Palooka, Hektoen International, Potomac Review, Home
Planet News, SORTES, The Zodiac Review, Literary Heist, Evening Street
Review, and Johnny America.
EMILY M GREEN earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-

Madison and an MFA in fiction from the University of Mississippi. Her work has
appeared in literary journals such as Poet Lore, The Florida Review, and Prairie
Schooner. She lives in Portland, OR, with her partner, daughter, son, and fur-
baby, a fluffy calico named Boo. She commutes to Elseworlds where she is the
president of the National Association of Super Heroes (NASH).
WILLIAM GREENWAY’s 13th collection, As Long As We’re Here, is from

FutureCycle Press, as is his Selected Poems. His publications appear in Poetry,
American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Poetry Northwest,
Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner. He’s professor emeritus of English at
Youngstown State University, but lives now in Ephrata, PA.
BILL GRIFFIN is a naturalist and retired family doctor who lives in rural North
Carolina. His poetry has appeared in NC Literary Review, Tar River Poetry,
Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere. His ecopoetry collection, Snake Den Ridge,
a Bestiary (March Street Press, 2008), is set in the Great Smoky Mountains. He
features Southern poets, nature photography, and microessays at his blog:
http://Griffin.Poetry.com.
GILLIAN HAINES is an Australian who lives beside Sonoran saguaros and rufous
hummingbirds. She has volunteered in Tucson’s federal and state prisons for fifteen
years because inmates only know the desert’s thirst. She is the editor of the Rain
Shadow Review, a literary magazine that publishes work from currently or previously
incarcerated people. Her work is published in The Tishman Review, Bridge Eight,
Biostories, The Cherry Tree, and the Santa Clara Review, among others.
KRISTEN OTT HOGAN lives in Syracuse, UT, with her husband, Wade, and
their four children. Her work has appeared in Literary Traveler, bioStories, The
Raven’s Perch, Aji Magazine, and Segullah, among others, and on her website:
kristenotthogan.com. She co-authored, Phoenix Flame, a memoir chronicling her
nephew’s battle with mental illness. No matter what it is, she’d rather be reading
a book. Meanwhile, her husband is waiting patiently for her to write a bestseller
so he can quit his job.
2023, Autumn / 345
CAROLYN JABS has written poetry off and on ever since she figured out how
to hold a pencil. In her professional life, she contributed essays and articles to
dozens of publications including the New York Times, Newsweek, Working
Mother, Self, Redbook, and Family PC. She is also the author of The Heirloom
Gardener, one of the first books about heirloom vegetables, and is co-author of
Cooperative Wisdom, Bringing People Together When Things Fall Apart.
PATRICK KELLING (he/him) received his doctorate in creative writing from the
University of Denver and is the fiction editor for the literature magazine Gambling
the Aisle (www.gamblingtheaisle.com). His work has been nominated for a Pushcart
Prize and to Best New American Voices and The Best Small Fictions.
WILL KIRKLAND’s (he/him/his) writings and translations have appeared in the

American Poetry Review, Tamaqua, TriQuarterly, and The New Orleans Review.
His book of translations, Gypsy Cante: Deep Song of the Caves, was published by
City Lights Books (1999). He received his master’s degree in English literature from
San Francisco State University and has attended the American Literary Translators
Association’s Annual Conference since 1980. He served as a naval officer and was
for a time a visiting scholar at Yale University. He continues to be engaged in his
writing and in his life with the problems of war and violence affecting us all.
NICHOLAS KRIEFALL is a native to Missouri whose first collection of poetry,

Attic Pieces, was published in 2014 by Unsolicited Press. His work has appeared
in Barrow Street, The Conium Review, Poetry Quarterly, Enizagam, The Spoon
River Poetry Review, and Writing Tomorrow, among other journals. Aside from
writing, he is also a contemporary artist whose paintings have been represented
by notable galleries in New York, Atlanta, Fort Lauderdale, Chicago, and St.
Louis, where he currently resides.
SHARI LANE (she/her/hers) has been: a wrangler of preschoolers; Latin teacher

to middle school students; a mother; valet to various dogs; a lawyer; and an
advocate for houseless persons, immigrants, and the earth. Her writing has been
published in or credited by Amplify Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, The
Phare, Fish Publishing, Glimmer Train, and Oregon Writers Colony, and she is
guest fiction editor and social media coordinator for SHARK REEF Literary
Magazine.
VIVIAN LAWRY is Appalachian by birth, a psychologist by training, and a

writer by passion. She has published four books and more than sixty short stories
and personal essays. She now lives and writes near Richmond, VA. You can learn
more and read her blogs at vivianlawry.com, and/or follow her on Facebook.
EVALYN LEE is a former CBS News producer currently living in London. Over the
years, she has produced radio and television segments for 60 Minutes in New York and
then for the BBC in London. Her essays and short stories have appeared in numerous
literary magazines and her broadcast work has received an Emmy and numerous Writers
Guild Awards. She is currently at work on her first poetry collection.
JUHEE LEE-HARTFORD is a Korean-born American architect who received

significant fellowships for her research and writing: the Fulbright, the
MacDowell, and Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. A
prequel to this piece, “The Fortune Teller,” was published in Green Hills Literary
Lantern in the summer of 2023.
ELEANOR LERMAN is the author of numerous award-winning collections of

poetry, short stories, and novels. She is a National Book Award finalist, recipient
of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and
has received Guggenheim, NEA, and New York Foundation for the Arts
fellowships. Her most recent collection of short stories, The Game Café: Stories
of New York City in Covid Time, was published in 2022. www.eleanorlerman.com
LINDA LERNER's Taking the F Train (NYQ Books, 2021) was chosen as a
finalist for the 2022 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her poems currently appear in
Maintenant, Gargoyle, Big City Lit, One Art, Shot Glass Journal, NYC from the
Inside (poetry anthology, 2022) & Great Weather of Media (anthology), Arriving
at a Shoreline, Verse Daily (featured “A Bad Weather Time” from Taking The F
Train; her latest collection, How It Was (2020— 2021) and Is, a chapbook of
pandemic-related poems, was published by Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books, 2023.
MARY LEWIS has an MFA in creative writing from Augsburg University, an

MS in ecology from the University of Minnesota, and she taught at Luther College
in Decorah, IA. She has published stories and essays in journals including Allium,
Antigonish Review, Blue Lake Review, Book of Matches, Evening Street Review,
Litbreak Magazine, North American Review, Persimmon Tree, RiverSedge,
r.kv.r.y. quarterly, Sleet Magazine, The Spadina Literary Review, Superstition
Review, Toasted Cheese, Wordrunner, and The Woven Tale Press.
FERNANDO RIVAS MARTINEZ is an award-winning music composer with

two Emmys, one Grammy and one Grammy nomination for his work in television
music. He has also won various awards from PEN America, honorable mentions
in 2016 and 2023, second place poetry in 2022. He has also won first place in the
Insider’s Prize in 2019. His poetry is available online at Minutes Before Six and
Justice Arts Coalition. He has been writing words and music since the age of
twelve. He is currently incarcerated in federal prison at Seagoville, FCI.
SHANNON MARZELLA (she/her) is a poet and author from Southbury, CT.

Her poetry has appeared in Cauldron Anthology and is forthcoming from Luna
Luna Magazine. She is the author of a YA novel entitled Girl in Shadows
2023, Autumn / 347
(Nymeria Publishing, 2021). She is currently pursuing an MFA in creative and

professional writing from Western Connecticut State University. She loves to go
on all sorts of adventures, near and far, with her husband and two children.
NANCY MCCABE (she/her) is the author of six books, most recently Can This
Marriage Be Saved? A Memoir (Missouri, 2020). Her poetry and creative
nonfiction has appeared in Nelle, Literary Mama, Salon, LARB, Massachusetts
Review, Newsweek, Michigan Quarterly Review, Fourth Genre, and many others.
She is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize and eight recognitions in the notable
sections of Best American Essays and Best American Nonrequired Reading.
MEIKA MACRAE’s “The Dictionary of Dads” is based on a novel with the same
name. She writes heartwarming commercial fiction, one of which is The Carnivore
Catastrophe, about restaurant wars with a “parent trap” twist. The other, Mon Dieu,
Switcheroo, chronicles a shy cookbook author who pretends to be her ruthless
gossip reporting sister at the Monaco Grand Prix. She has a BA in history and was
nominated for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Unpublished Crime Novel in Canada.
DENNIS MCFADDEN (he/him) lives and writes in a cedar-shingled cottage

called Summerhill in the woods of upstate New York. His collection, Jimtown
Road, won the 2016 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, and his novel, Old Grimes
Is Dead, was one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Indie Books of 2022. His stories have
appeared in dozens of publications, including New England Review, The Missouri
Review, The Sewanee Review, The Massachusetts Review, and The Best American
Mystery Stories.
MATTHEW MENDOZA is a Webby Award Honoree in the Crime and Justice

Category. He is grateful to everyone who voted for him and most of all the people
who didn’t. Listen to the performance podcasts of his plays at Open-Door
Playhouse: www.opendoorplayhouse.org/ Please think positive thoughts for his
mom.
ARTHUR ALLEN MIDWINTER (he/his) is a semi-retired antiquarian bookseller

who, while a generalist, has always favored the gothic, strange, and publications from
remote valleys where the fog never really lifts. He often plays doubles tennis and
would get very angry upon losing were it not for a partner to blame.
DENNIS MINTUN (known as “Spanky” to his friends) has been incarcerated for
over 20 years. Dennis runs a thriving Greek religious group, and is an avid writer,
with articles published in magazines like Spotlight on Recovery and various places
on the internet. Spanky uses his writing and knowledge of civil rights to help change
things for the better—especially for people that others would rather ignore.
WILLIAM MILLER is the author of eight collections of poetry. His most recent
is The Crow Flew Between Us (Aldrich Press, 2019). His poems have appeared in
The Penn Review, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Folio,
and West Branch. He lives and writes in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
RONALD MORAN lives in Simpsonville, SC. He has poems in recent or

forthcoming issues of The Comstock Review, The South Carolina Review, and Tar
River Poetry. His last six books of poetry have been published by Clemson
University Press.
ALEXANDER PAYNE MORGAN (he/him) was born in Savannah, GA. He is a

Vietnam veteran and an industrial mathematician. His chapbooks Loneliness Among
Primates and H.G. Wells Investigates the Tragedy of Colour in America were
published by Kelsay Books. He has attended the Bread Loaf and the Vermont
College of Fine Arts Writers’ Conferences. He’s a member of the Detroit Writers’
Guild, Michigan Writers, Springfed Arts, and the Poetry Society of Michigan.
R MULLIN, having courageously served his country in opposition to one of its

too numerous wars, is a fully-accredited PNRFIC, which is to say a Proud Non-
Recidivist Formerly Incarcerated Citizen. Nevertheless, family, friends and
colleagues continue to refer to him as an ex-convict rather than a war-hero. Both
terms are hyphenated. Close enough, one must suppose. In addition, he is a
Mississippi writer laboring assiduously under all of the grave disabilities the
aforementioned conditions entail.
KIMBERLY NUNES’s poems have been published in The Alembic, Blue Light
Press Anthology, Caveat Lector, Mantis, Marin Poetry Center Anthology, The
Madison Review, Sweet: A Literary Confection, WomenArts Quarterly Journal,
and Adelaide Literary Magazine. She has attended numerous writing workshops
and studied with Marie Howe, Sharon Olds, Ellen Bass, and many others. She sits
on the board of Four Way Books in New York City. She received her MFA in
poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Her hobbies include bird-watching,
gardening, swimming, golf, and tennis.
WILLIAM NUNEZ is a writer/filmmaker whose work has been published in

various poetry journals around the world. His last film The Laureate, based on
British writer Robert Graves, was released in 2022, and his documentary, The
Conqueror: Hollywood Fallout, was completed in 2023. He has also worked as a
television director for CNN, Bloomberg, and MSNBC over the years as well as
written screenplays which are in development.
KATHY O’FALLON’s poems and short stories have been published in

numerous literary journals, magazines, anthologies, such as RATTLE, Nebo,
Sou’wester, along with three chapbooks. She was a finalist for The Backwater’s
2023, Autumn / 349
Prize for her manuscript, Listening to Tchaikovsky, and for Adfinitas with
Inlandia. She is a psychologist working in Carlsbad, CA.
VICTOR OKECHUKWU is a writer based in Lagos, Nigeria. He’s reading mass

communication at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He loves writing and reading.
His writing takes a deep setting in arresting issues of mental health that have been
overlooked in his country. He loves reading writers like Sally Rooney, Ben Okri,
Bessie Head, and John Irving. His work is published or forthcoming in Gordon
Square Review, Mycelia, Door-is-a-jar, Rigorous Magazine, and elsewhere. He's an
associate prose editor at Zerotic Press. Twitter handle uzochuwu1
STEVE ORMISTON is retired from the U.S. Postal Service, where he was a city
carrier and union steward. He’s written for the National Association of Letter
Carriers Branch 43 newsletter. In the Nineties he wrote and recorded commentaries
for the local public radio station, WMUB. In 2015 he won a beer company’s “Ode
to Christmas Ale” contest. His poem, “Late Again,” was published in Passager in
the 2021 Poetry Contest issue.
BIBHU PADHI, a Pushcart nominee, has published sixteen books of poetry. His
poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies throughout the world, such as
Contemporary Review, The London Magazine, The Poetry Review, Poetry Wales,
The American Scholar, Commonweal, The Manhattan Review, The New
Criterion, Poet Lore, Poetry, Southwest Review, TriQuarterly, The Antigonish
Review, The Dalhousie Review, Queen’s Quarterly, and Indian Literature. He
lives with his family in Bhubaneswar, India.
GERALD PATRICK has been active as a sculptor throughout his adult life, with
numerous exhibits and commissions, and later as a writer. He is an avid sailor,
and many of his poems and short stories have been connected with the sea and
sailing. He speaks four languages and strives for verbal elegance in everything he
writes. His works also seek to explore the human condition, in all its varieties.
ROBERT L PENICK’s poetry and prose have appeared in over 100 different
literary journals, including The Hudson Review, North American Review,
Plainsongs, and Oxford Magazine. His latest chapbook is Exit, Stage Left, by
Slipstream Press, and more of his work can be found at theartofmercy.net
JENNIFER M PHILLIPS is an immigrant, a retired Episcopal priest, a gardener,

grower of bonsai, and painter, and has been writing poetry and prose since the age
of seven. She has lived in five states and two countries. She has been an award-
winner and published in over 50 journals. Her chapbooks are Sitting Safe In the
Theatre of Electricity (blurb.com, 2019) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street
Press, 2023).
BETH BROWN PRESTON is a poet and novelist with two collections of poetry
from the Broadside Lotus Press and a poetry chapbook. A second poetry chapbook
is Oxygen II, Moonstone Arts Press. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and
the MFA Writing Program at Goddard College. She was a CBS Fellow in Writing
at the University of Pennsylvania; and a Bread Loaf Scholar. Her work has been
previously published in African American Review, The Black Scholar, Callaloo,
Obsidian, Pennsylvania Review, Rain Taxi, Sinister Wisdom, Storm Cellar, That
Literary Review, and others.
JOHN RAFFETTO is a lifelong resident of Chicago. Some of his poetry has been
published in print and various online magazines such as Gloom Cupboard, Wilderness
House, BlazeVox, Literary Orphans, Arial Chart, Olentangy Review, and Exact Change.
He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2017. His book Human Botany was released
in 2020. He holds degrees from the University of Illinois and Northeastern Illinois
University. He worked as a horticulturalist and landscape designer for many years at the
Chicago Park District, which was a rich environment for drawing inspiration for poems
concerning nature, people, and the city. He is formerly an adjunct professor.
CHARLES RAMMELKAMP is prose editor for BrickHouse Books. He

contributes a monthly book review to North of Oxford and is a frequent reviewer
for The Lake, London Grip, and The Compulsive Reader. His poetry chapbook,
Mortal Coil, was published in 2021 by Clare Songbirds Publishing, and another
chapbook, Sparring Partners, was published by Moonstone. A full-length
collection, The Field of Happiness, was published in 2022 by Kelsay Books.
TIMOTHY REILLY had been a professional tubist (including a stint with the
Teatro Regio of Turin, Italy) until around 1980, when a condition called
“Embouchure Dystonia” put an end to his music career. Twice nominated for a
Pushcart Prize, he has published in Zone 3, Fictive Dream, Superstition Review,
The Main Street Rag, and many other journals. He lives in Southern California
with his wife, Jo-Anne Cappeluti, a poet and scholar.
LOUISE ROBERTSON counts among her favorite publications and honors

several jars of homemade pickles she received for running a workshop. Her poetry
has appeared in or is forthcoming at SWWIM, New Ohio Review, Southern Florida
Poetry Journal, and other publications. It’s also been nominated three times for
the Best of the Net and twice for a Pushcart.
JANICE E RODRÍGUEZ (she/her), who grew up with her nose in a book and
hasn’t ever taken it out, has published in numerous print and online literary
reviews. When 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. Find her online at janiceerodriguez.com
2023, Autumn / 351
NATANIA ROSENFELD is a writer, independent scholar, and Professor

Emerita of English at Knox College. She has published two books of poetry, The
Blue Bed (Spuyten Duyvil Press 2021) and Wild Domestic (Sheep Meadow Press,
2015), as well as a scholarly book, Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard
Woolf (Princeton, 2000). An e-chapbook, She and I, appeared in 2018 from Essay
Press. Four of her personal essays have been listed as “Notable” in Best American
Essays collections. In 2018, she was named one of 30 “Writers to Watch” by the
Guild Literary Complex in Chicago. You can learn more at nataniarosenfeld.com.
CHRISTOPHER RUBIO-GOLDSMITH was born in Merida, Yucatan, grew

up in Tucson, AZ, and taught English for 27 years. Much of his poetry explores
growing up near the border, being raised biracial/bilingual and teaching in a large
urban school where 70% of the students are American/Mexican. A long time ago
he graduated from the University of Arizona with a degree in creative writing. His
writings have appeared in Spectra Poets, 14 Hills, No Contact, and other places,
too. Kelly, his wife, helps edit the work, sometimes.
JILL RUSCOLL has participated in multiple writing classes with Nancy

McMillan and with poet Holly Wren Spaulding. In her work life, she is a creative
director in the healthcare field. On her days off, she enjoys hiking, biking, climbing,
and being outside while spending time with family and friends. Her work appears
in the 2022 Connecticut Bards Poetry Review and is forthcoming in The MacGuffin.
ARTHUR RUSSELL is the winner, most recently, of the 2023 Rattle Chapbook
Prize (rattle.com/chapbooks/c2023/) and the 2023 Fractured Lit Flash Fiction
Anthology Prize. His poems and stories have appeared in Copper Nickel and
Glimmer Train among other publications. He is one of the directors of the Red
Wheelbarrow Poets of Rutherford, New Jersey, where he co-leads the weekly
workshop, co-hosts the monthly reading series, and co-edits the annual journal.
MARK RUSSO, born in Queens, NYC; graduated from the University of Cincinnati;
ran a family business for 20 years; graduated from the University of Maine School of
Law; practiced immigration law for 18 years and has published with Flash Fiction
Magazine, New Reader Magazine, 34th Parallel Magazine, Literally Stories, Potato
Soup Journal, Spillwords.com, Knot Magazine, MacQueen’s Quinterly, South Florida
Poetry Journal, Grey Sparrow Journal, Ekphrastic Review, and Squawk Back.
MIRIAM SAGAN is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and
memoir. Her most recent include Bluebeard’s Castle (Red Mountain, 2019) and
A Hundred Cups of Coffee (Tres Chicas, 2019). She is a two-time winner of the
New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards as well as a recipient of the City of Santa Fe
Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and a New Mexico Literary Arts
Gratitude Award. She has been a writer in residence in four national parks, Yaddo,
MacDowell, Gullkistan in Iceland, Kura Studio in Japan, and a dozen more remote
and interesting places. She founded and directed the creative writing program at
Santa Fe Community College until her retirement.
ALISSA SAMMARCO frequents the greater Cincinnati’s open mic scene and
has had poems published in Quiet Diamonds, Sheila Na Gig Online, Black Moon
Magazine, Change Seven, But There was Fire in the Distance (Workhorse Press),
Hags on Fire, and the online arts journal, AEQAI. Future publications include
Main Street Rag. Her debut chapbook, Beyond the Dawn, is scheduled for release
September 2023 (Turning Point). When Boys & Girls Dream of One Another, is
scheduled for release January 2024 (Turning Point). A third chapbook is
anticipated in 2024.
TERRY SANVILLE lives in San Luis Obispo, CA, with his artist-poet wife (his
in-house editor) and two plump cats (his in-house critics). He writes full time,
producing short stories, essays, and novels. His work has been accepted more than
500 times by journals, magazines, and anthologies including The American
Writers Review, The Bryant Literary Review, and Shenandoah. He is also a retired
urban planner and an accomplished jazz and blues guitarist.
JACALYN SHELLEY has been published in several journals including Shot

Glass Journal, Sugar House Review, Dunes Review, Main Street Rag, DASH, San
Pedro River Review, Barely South, and several anthologies including Welcome to
the Resistance Poetry as Protest. She received Pushcart Prize nominations in
2018, 2019 and 2021. To read more of her poems go to JacalynShelley.com.
EMILY-SUE SLOANE (emilysuesloane.com) is an award-winning poet who

writes to capture moments of wonder, worry and human connection. She is the
author of a full-length collection, We Are Beach Glass (2022), and her poems have
appeared or are forthcoming in a variety of journals and anthologies, including
Amethyst Review, The Avocet, Bards Against Hunger, Boston Literary Magazine,
Corona, Front Porch Review, Long Island Sounds Quarterly, Mobius Magazine,
MockingHeart Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Nassau County Poet Laureate
Society Review, Panoplyzine, Paumanok, Poeming Pigeon, PPA Literary Review,
The RavensPerch, and Walt’s Corner. She lives in Huntington Station, NY, with
her wife, singer-songwriter Linda Sussman.
CHARLES SPRINGER has degrees in anthropology and is an award-winning

painter. A Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and Best of the
Net nominee, he is widely published in print and online. His first collection of
poems, Juice was published by Regal House Publishing. A second collection of
prose poems, Nowhere Now Here was published by Radial Books. He writes from
Pennsylvania. Visit him at https://www.charlesspringer.com.
2023, Autumn / 353
JIM TILLEY has published three full-length collections of poetry (In Confidence,
Cruising at Sixty to Seventy, Lessons from Summer Camp) and a novel (Against the
Wind) with Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, was published
as a Ploughshares Solo. He has won Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize for Poetry.
Four of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
CLEM VAHE, having grown up within the lavish surroundings of Hancock Park
in Los Angeles, received her BA in English Literature before choosing to open a
business rather than pursue her passion for writing. She started her writing in
earnest in 2004. In 2018, she became a published writer—albeit an unpaid one.
Using absurdist humor to illuminate both the joys and tragedies of being human
in our computerized society, she writes free-style poetry, fiction and stand-alone
memoir pieces. Currently, she is in the final editing stages of her first book which
contains both poetry and fiction.
ANDREW VOGEL (he/him) listens, walks the hills, and teaches in rural eastern
Pennsylvania, the homelands of the displaced Lenape peoples. His poems have
appeared in The Blue Collar Review, Poetry East, The Evergreen Review, Parhelion,
Hunger Mountain, Crab Creek Review, The Briar Cliff Review, and elsewhere.
VIRGINIA WATTS is the author of poetry and stories found in CRAFT, The
Florida Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Pithead Chapel, Sky Island Journal,
Permafrost Magazine, among others. Her poetry chapbooks are available from
Moonstone Press. She has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize and
Best of the Net. Visit her at virginiawatts.com.
RICHARD WEAVER hopes one day to once again volunteer with the Maryland
Book Bank, and return as writer-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub. A few recent
publications include: Mad Swirl (he has his own poetry page there), Misfit, and
SPANK the CARP. He’s the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992),
and also provided the libretto for a symphony, Of Sea and Stars, performed four
times to date. Recently, his 165th prose poem was published. He remains a
founder and former poetry editor of the Black Warrior Review.
PHILIP WEXLER lives in Bethesda, Maryland. He has had over 180 poems
published in magazines. His collections, The Sad Parade (prose poems) and The
Burning Moustache were published by Adelaide Books. Two more books are
scheduled for 2022: The Lesser Light by Finishing Line Press and I Would be the
Purple by Kelsay Books. He also organizes Words out Loud, a monthly spoken
word series.
JESSE BRYANT WILDER is the founder of NEXUS Interdisciplinary Books,

a former lecturer for the Kent State University Department of English, former
senior editor of Northern Ohio LIVE, and author of Art History For Dummies, 1st
and 2nd editions. His articles have appeared in Film Comment, American Theatre,
Literature/Film Quarterly, and various newspapers. His poems have appeared in
Roanoke Review, Green’s Magazine (CA), Art Mag, Gypsy, and Candelabrum
Poetry Magazine.
WARREN WOESSNER co-founded Abraxas Press and WORT-FM, a

community radio station, in Madison WI. He has authored six collections of
poetry, most recently Exit ~ Sky (Holy Cow! Press). He has received fellowships
in poetry from the NEA, the McKnight Foundation, and the Wisconsin Arts
Board, and won the Minnesota Voices Competition sponsored by New Rivers
Press, that published Storm Lines.
DANIELLE WOLFFE is a genre puddle-jumping writer. Her poetry, fiction,

and journalism have appeared in About Place Journal, Pensive, Mused, The
Nation, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and on All Things Considered.
This poem was written while traveling for a journalism project interviewing
women who were sentenced as teenagers to life without the possibility of parole.
A novel on the same subject is looking for a home. She ghostwrites human
rights/trauma-based memoirs for a living.
B MISTY WYCOFF, raised near Bodega Bay and residing now along the
Central Coast, is retired from private practice as a clinical therapist. Her books
include: High Rain, Tender Footprints, Taken Hostage, Pandemic Poetry (self-
published chapbook), and Inside Passages, 2021. She was nominated as poet
laureate in San Luis Obispo County in 2020. She is often found with her dog by
the bay or near the open waters of the Pacific Ocean.
ARNIE YASINSKI is a retired college administrator, born American but now

living in Ireland with his Irish wife. He's a father and grandfather who holds a
PhD in English and wrote his first poem at fifty. He has published poems in four
dozen US journals and has had three collections published in Ireland by 21st
Century Renaissance.
ANDRENA ZAWINSKI is a poet, fiction writer, and shutterbug living in the San
Francisco Bay Area. Her photos have appeared on covers or inside pages of
Caesura, California Quarterly, Copper Nickel, MO Writings from the River Journal
of Writing and Art, San Francisco Peace and Hope, and others plus as a front cover
of Evening Street Review #29. Her fourth full-length collection of poetry is Born
Under the Influence and debut collection of flash fiction is Plumes & Other Flights
of Fancy.
(Continued from the inside front cover: Dennis Mintun MAKING PRISON
LIFE A LITTLE EASIER)
4) The guards are not your friends, but they should not be your enemies, either. An
inmate who is too “chummy” with the guards will be looked at with suspicion.
Some may even think that person is a “rat” (someone who tells on others). And,
unfortunately, there are some staff members who will use an inmate’s
friendliness to get information about other inmates. On the other hand, it is wise
to be polite and respectful toward staff. It’s the inmates who get on a guard’s bad
side (or “on radar”) who get into trouble even for the smallest infraction—and
get their cell torn apart during a search. Also, there are times when you might
need a guard’s help... to give you a job or a good parole recommendation, for
example.
5) Respect goes a long way when it comes to your fellow inmates, too. Try using
“sorry,” “please,” and “thank you” when the situation calls for it. It doesn’t mean
you are a “wimp” just because you are polite. I have even learned that saying
“excuse me” when someone bumps into me (as if it was my fault) can diffuse a
potentially dangerous situation. Respect also has to do with things like hygiene.
We all have to live and work close together. Be sure to keep your clothes clean
and shower on a regular basis.
6) Don’t try to impress people. Especially, don’t make up stories about your life.
Getting caught in a lie can be dangerous. I knew a 20-year-old inmate who
claimed he’d been a Navy Seal. Someone challenged him. Since he obviously
didn’t have any real training, he got beat up on pretty badly. You also don’t want
to brag about having money (even if you do really have some). That will just
make you a target.
7) Always be careful to respect boundaries. This can vary from person to person.
But, as a general rule, watch inappropriate jokes and comments. In addition,
respect the “bubble.” That is, give people space and don’t crowd them. This can
make a person uncomfortable... even angry. Be friendly, just don’t get carried
away. This is especially important if you are gay or bi. A lot of inmates may feel
threatened—especially if they are not secure in their own sexuality. They might
get overly defense and want to fight to prove themselves.
8) Stay busy. You know what they say about “idle hands.” Try to get a job you will
enjoy. If you have a chosen religion, get involved with that. If there are art,
music, or educational opportunities, check into those. If you are sports-minded,
that could be another outlet. If you draw, write, etc., do what makes you feel you
are accomplishing something.
9) Remember that prison is a microcosm of society. There are good people, bad
people, and everything in between. How you act... how you carry yourself... how
you treat others... will make prison life easier. For you, and for those around you.
ISBN 9781937347802
51600 >

9 781937 347802
Evening Street Press

Oakland, CA

Evening Street Review Number 39, Autumn 2023

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Evening Street Review Number 39, Autumn 2023

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Number 39 Autumn, 2023

EVENING STREET REVIEW

Published by Evening Street Press

…all men and women are created equal in rights to life,

—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, revision of the

Evening Street Press recognizes that all people are created

Founding Editor: Gordon Grigsby

Cover photos: Front cover, Barbara Bergmann, Lake Merritt

All published work, chapbooks, short novels, prose collections, Sinclair

© Copyright 2023 by Evening Street Press

JENNIFER M PHILLIPS Woman Troubles in the Bed of Iris 94

EMILY-SUE SLOANE The Last Gas Station 194

PATRICK KELLING things I almost remember 268

DENNIS MINTUN Making Prison Life a Little Easier inside cover

MONICA L BELLON-HARN Hurricane Laura 8

Decades of hurricanes have pulled small communities into the

“Not with my wife,” he says, and he walks to the car. Cecilia

“That is what we are doing, Mama,” says Cecilia.

Love makes it difficult to get work done.

People sometimes say that relationships are work.

They say not to date anyone you work with.

This rule can be “spoken” (as in the employee handbook) or “unspoken”

I made a New Year’s Resolution to accomplish less this year.

I’m not sure yet if I will accomplish this.

It is best to set goals which are small and objectively measurable.

I open my mouth to speak

I am the wind, watch out

IN THE EYES OF A WINDOW SHADE

If you want to see out the window,

Maybe you want to see a morning sunrise,

noise outside keeping you awake at night?

and then a favor to your neighbors,

The cheerleaders arrive first.

I do not know why this is

Growing up along the border in Douglas, Arizona

When Ariel was maybe 18 he visited his older brother, Ricardo,

Ricardo just laughed. He forgot

he must have understood

From a distance, it’s him in the garden,

His gait is familiar in the long view

against the top of the steering wheel one

Not to be wasted, it’s worn, perhaps, to jolt me

Long Trail A Winding.” We find Playboys in

riding with a woman, both in jodhpurs and boots.

tapestry of color and symbolism, later adding wraparound designs on each

At the age of sixteen, my father’s younger sister, Ruby

After divorce, Declan went back to Ireland;

It was a short Greyhound Bus ride to her tiny apartment,

Aunt Ruby allowed me to sleep with her

She loved the ocean,

Attempting to howl with her, I

Also, I came into possession of Aunt Ruby’s fox furs.

She loves her husband also,

4:00–She packs her bag with daubers, green haired trolls

4:30–She walks to the bus stop

5:03—The bus costs $1.50 without a pass.

There’s tape on the tip of her left shoe.

In the winter, the wind creeps around the pane,

5:12–School girls with braids and backpacks

Louder than she remembered

5:23–At the corner by St. Andrew’s,

5:24—She might go through the nave,

5:25–Instead she walks around

She marches downstairs under flickering florescent lights,

The idea was to build a bridge. A bridge in the woods. It was

“Anyone know where Baldur is?” Gerry asked.