Category: Literary Features

Solace and Hope: A Conversation with Bridget Bell

All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy
Bridget Bell
CavanKerry Press
$18.00 (paperback)
Publication Date: February 4, 2025

 

Sophia Saco: “This Is How You Lose Your Body” was originally published in The Florida Review, and it’s exciting to see the poem again in your collection All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy. Can you speak to the changes in this poem, and perhaps the collection itself, since its original publication?

 

Bridget Bell: When I originally wrote “This Is How You Lose Your Body,” I was super into enjambment; I love the way enjambment can create interesting double meanings on the line break and how it can function to pull a reader through the poem. However, during the editorial process, I worked with Baron Wormser, and he suggested that I organize the stanzas according to the sentences rather than letting the sentences meander so much. I made that edit based on his suggestion, and I think the new lineation creates a more urgent tone. In fact, most of the revisions I made to the full-length manuscript had to do with lineation and stanza changes.

 

Sophia Saco: Postpartum depression is a “common complication” that often goes undiagnosed, as mentioned in the introduction by Dr. Riah Patterson. I was particularly passionate about your collection for its unabashed honesty regarding this seemingly “taboo” subject. Your poems investigate postpartum life from all sides to achieve a nuanced and tangible depiction. What craft challenges did you face in the rendering of these depictions?

 

Bridget Bell: I think the biggest craft challenge was finding the right form for the right content. Postpartum life is so wild, particularly if you are struggling with perinatal mood disorders (PMADs) with symptoms that are all over the map. Some symptoms like intrusive thoughts or ruminations feel very cyclical while other symptoms like disassociation or hopelessness feel very unmoored. It was interesting for me to see how the use of strict form or the total lack of form could connect to the content of each poem. For example, “Sleep Deprivation,” which is one of the least structured poems in the collection, with inconsistent stanza lengths and lines that jump all over the page, tries to mimic how fractured reality can feel when you are sleep deprived. That broken form works for the broken feeling engendered by sleep deprivation. It was a lot of fun to play with that intersection of the emotional content and the form for each poem.

 

Sophia Saco: “I Worry About Women” mentions Sylvia Plath and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The last lines are rife with satisfaction: “To be able to reach up with my bare palm / and crush an insect’s ancient back.” Would you say that All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy is in conversation with the work of women writers whose anxieties were dismissed? If so, is the collection in conversation with other specific writers?

 

Bridget Bell: The collection is absolutely in conversation with the work of women writers whose anxieties were dismissed, and not just with women writers, but women in general. That same poem you reference starts with the speaker worrying about women “in 1957 Leetonia, Ohio with nothing useful to stop / the babies from coming.” That line was inspired by my grandma who had my dad when she was sixteen and went on to have eight more kids. It hurts me to think about what her postpartum experience must have been like. The poem “Escape” is in conversation with Judy Garland—when I was depressed, I’d quietly sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” to my daughter because I was comforted by its sad longing. “Dangerous for Mothers” is in conversation with Connie Voisine’s “Dangerous for Girls,” which if you have not read, you should read. It’s amazing, and it’s also deeply rooted in the idea of dismissing female anxieties.

 

Sophia Saco: I’m interested in your use of strict forms, as in “Sestina In Which The World Fails To Tell You About The Tedium,” as well as your critical look at postpartum complications. I see a connection between the sestina framing the speaker’s monotony (without escape) and the tendency of medical professionals to send patients in circles (without answers). Are there other moments in the collection that function similarly?

 

Bridget Bell: I love how you describe the sestina working in that poem—thank you! It felt like the perfect form to capture an idea that so many people gloss over, which is that infants are boring. With a new baby, your days repeat and your nights repeat and they all start to blur together. I hoped the loops of the sestina would capture that idea. I also use the sonnet a few times throughout the collection, and I think that form functions similarly. For me, the iambic pentameter in sonnets is a bit sing-songy—almost like the nursery rhyme of poetry, so it felt like a natural form to use to sort of poke fun at the idealized “nursery rhyme” version of motherhood. I also felt like the sonnet mimicked that subversive, dark side of nursery rhymes—that ABAB CDCD rhyme scheme can be a bit mocking in its perfection.

 

Sophia Saco: All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy weaves several epigraphs into the fabric of the collection, from section breaks to singular poems. Barbara Ras’s “A Wife Explains Why She Likes Country” and Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” are two among many. In the book’s acknowledgements, you also thank the researchers whom you reference, noting their work on maternal mental health. Can you elaborate on your influences for this collection, both obvious and subtle?

 

Bridget Bell: Writing and reading were such huge parts of my recovery process when I was suffering from postpartum depression, and the idea of being in communication with other women—even on a figurative level—through my writing has always appealed to me. When I’m stuck on a poem, I often go back and reread certain poems that I love. Barbara Ras’s “A Wife Explains Why She Likes Country” and Carson’s “The Glass Essay” are two of those poems. So is Connie Voisine’s “Dangerous for Girls.” It’s powerful to imagine that these women’s words helped me to crack open the world of the poems they inspired. I was also super influenced by texts written by maternal mental health experts. Particularly, Karen Kleiman’s book This Isn’t What I Expected: Overcoming Postpartum Depression, which I read early on in my recovery process, was hugely important when I was working on the poems. I also returned over and over again to the website for Postpartum Support International, which includes a section called “Stories of Hope” where women can talk about their personal experience with maternal mental health struggles.

 

Sophia Saco: In “This Is For The Mother (Postpartum Psychosis)” the speaker addresses a “you” at the end: “I am sorry we left you alone. I am sorry we failed you.” I was struck by the poem’s transformation into an apology. I’m reminded of your collection’s title, All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy, and the impossibility of fulfilling such a request. To “always be happy” seems a torture for anyone, let alone for a mother who has just undergone hormonal changes. Could you elaborate on your debut’s title?

 

Bridget Bell: The manuscript was very close to complete when I finally decided on a title. I had other working titles—The Bruise Hurts Less Each Time It Gets Bumped and Normal—but none of them were fully doing what I wanted the title to do. The first was a lyrical way to say that postpartum depression is highly treatable. The second played off the idea that PMADs are quite common. While the treatability and commonality of PMADs is important to the collection, I wanted something with more teeth, something that highlighted the immense pressure new moms feel to “cherish every moment” when in reality the moments to be truly cherished with a newborn are sporadic. I’m also sarcastic by nature, so snark felt right—that also connects back to some of the anger the speakers of the poems feel. When the phrase for the title popped in my brain, I was completely psyched because I knew I’d found the right sentiment.

 

Sophia Saco: All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy toys with language on many levels, and you create your own mother tongue. You do away with age-old expectations and express ideas of motherhood in new ways, both visible and less visible. If you could leave us with a final comment, what do you hope readers will take from this collection?

 

Bridget Bell: My hope is that my poems’ representations of maternal mental health struggles will help other people. In the same way that other women’s stories helped me to recover when I was barely surviving the chaos that is motherhood, I hope this book provides solace and hope.

 

Bridget Bell’s debut poetry collection—All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy (CavanKerry, 2025)—explores maternal mental health. She is the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Artist Support Grant and teaches composition and literature at Durham Technical Community College. Additionally, she pours points at Ponysaurus Brewery in Durham, NC and proofreads for Four Way Books, a literary press based in Manhattan. Originally from Toledo, Ohio, she is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence’s MFA program in creative writing. You can find her online at bridgetbellpoetry.com.

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Review The Dissenters by Youssef Rakha

Review of: The Dissenters, by Youssef Rakha; Graywolf; $17.00; 272 pages; February 4, 2025

Review by Alex Ramirez-Amaya

 

“I sought permission to beg forgiveness for my mother; but He did not grant it to me. I sought permission from Him to visit her grave, and He granted it to me.” This epigraph, taken from Book Four of the Sahih Muslim, a collection of hadith, details two appeals: one of forgiveness, and one of remembrance—only the latter of which is granted. This aptly chosen epigraph encapsulates what readers will find in Youssef Rakha’s latest novel. Instead of forgiveness and black-and-white morality, we find the memories of a woman living through a tumultuous time in Egyptian history.

 

The Dissenters is Youssef Rakha’s first novel written in English. For the better part of twenty-five years, Rakha has written fiction and poetry in Arabic. In an essay on “The Slow and Satisfying Discovery of Arabic,” Rakha recounts that, as a young man, Arabic represented two things: “the practical, and the religious,” two things which, in his mind, alienated Arabic from the possibility of literature. On the other hand, his lively and polyglot mother tongue, Egyptian Arabic, was a spoken dialect that proved difficult when it was time to get complicated. It wasn’t until after earning a BA in English at Hull University that Rakha realized both the potential of the Arabic language as a medium for creation and that his world was Arabic-speaking. If he wanted to explore this world, he needed to do it in Arabic, to capture the “intellectual and psychological kicks specific to that world.”

 

Rakha’s publisher aptly describes The Dissenters as “transgressive.” Transgressive works break with the moral and social conventions of their day or historical setting which, in this case, is Egypt in the twentieth century. Such transgressive works seek more than just hedonism and the erosion of archaic social norms; instead, they move us toward a radically new way of seeing and being in the world. Rakha pushes these transgressions further through his use of language. By blending vernacular Arabic with the standard and the religious, Rakha initiates us into a world where change can be enacted through the words we choose to utter. Rakha blurs the lines of language, dialect, life, family, memory, and desire—not only in content but in form and style.

 

The novel is framed as a series of letters written by Nour to his sister discussing the “secret” life of their mother, a woman who went by three names: Amna, Nimo, and Mouna. The opening page contains a jarring admission from Nour, who marvels at his desire for “Mouna, a Mouna that is and is not [his] mother.” In the pages that follow, Nour recounts to his sister, Shimo, their mother’s past, and, along the way, multiple decades of Egyptian history, spanning from the Egyptian Revolution of the 1950s up to the Arab Spring of the 2010s. Nour begins Amna’s (Nimo’s? Mouna’s?) story as a panicked Baccalauréat student on the morning after her wedding night because she cannot present a bloodied white bedsheet as proof of her virginity—though this is through no fault of her own: her husband, a much older man with a case of erectile dysfunction, cannot consummate their marriage. Amna worries about her absence from school and about what may be perceived as her questionable virginity.

 

What follows is a work of art unafraid of peeling back the layers of history to find the often ugly and complicated truth beneath. The novel’s short, nonlinear chapters and interjections read more like prose poetry than anything else. As I made my way through the novel, I could not help but think of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, another magnificent display of living language reminiscing on the dead. Yet, Rakha’s novel cannot be defined as simply continuing a tradition that began with European modernists. In The Dissenters, Rakha has successfully created a novel that is wholly his own.

 

Mirroring Rakha’s mother tongue, Egyptian Arabic, The Dissenters reflects a similar “polyglotism” in the way Rakha weaves globalization and imperialism past into a meditation on culture, revolution, and memory. One of the protagonists memorizes Jacques Brel’s “Ne me Quitte Pas” to the point that she can play it “in her head.” Others drive Cadillac DeVilles. Polyglotism is evident even at the sentence level: the narration and dialogue are often interjected with Arabic and French phrases—sometimes, there are three languages in one sentence. For the characters of the novel, Arabic, English, and French are not multiple streams of thought; rather, they are a single river of communication and existence. I’m often critical of multilingualism in English literature because it risks caricaturing what life in multiple languages is actually like. In Rakha, I find someone who understands the experience of multilingualism, which is not just a string of code-switching, but fluid movement and thought across many languages.

 

In an interview with afikra, an organization dedicated to a better understanding of the Arab world, Youssef Rakha opined that what makes a particular text different—and therefore important—is the writer’s “capacity to make themself vulnerable.” This goes beyond objectivity and intellectual curiosity; a writer must have felt the “horror, pain, and grief of being human, of being mortal, of being on Earth.” I would only add that being vulnerable and open to our worst experiences also requires courage—a kind of courage that is not easily found. We should consider ourselves grateful, however, that we can find such courage in the works of Youssef Rakha.

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At the Whistle, Begin: A Conversation with Jonathan Fink

Don’t Do It—We Love You, My Heart
Jonathan Fink
Dzanc Books
$17.95 (paperback)
Publication Date: January 28, 2025 

 

David James Poissant: Don’t Do It—We Love You, My Heart is your third book of poems. How has your thinking, about life or about art, changed from one book to the next over the years, and how have you grown as a poet? What does this book offer that your earlier books couldn’t?

 

Jonathan Fink: Kurt Vonnegut described an author reviewing their sequence of works as looking back at their path in the snow, and that feels accurate to me (though we don’t get any snow in Florida)—you can see the path that brought you to where you are, though you’re not in the same place. In my current collection, I am in some ways reacting to the compression of my previous collection, which was a collection of sonnets about the Siege of Leningrad. I’m trying to be as inclusive as possible—as welcoming as possible of material and expansiveness—while maintaining and challenging form. There are a lot of one-sentence poems in this collection, and I find that if I can focus my attention grammatically and structurally on something like the expansion of a single sentence, the thematic elements of the poem can rise organically from the material. I am also hopefully continuing to expand my openness to ideas, connections, and the rhythms of voice and music that I can embody most naturally.

 

David James Poissant: One of my absolute favorites here, “Gorbachev’s Birthmark,” a poem that recalls the bad old days of grade school gym and murder ball misogyny, ends with the lines: “‘you have but one life to live. / Be vigilant. Be bold. At the whistle, begin.’” These lines put me in mind of Mary Oliver’s celebrated “The Summer Day.” I’m curious if that poem was on your mind. And whether it was or wasn’t, who are your poetry lodestars? Do you consider your poems in conversation with the work of others?

 

Jonathan Fink: I didn’t have that poem in mind, though I do very much like the courage and stance of Mary Oliver’s poems. Her openness is challenging and encouraging. In my poem specifically, I was thinking back to the decidedly unpoetic experiences of middle-school gym class in 1980’s West Texas juxtaposed against the middle-aged boredom of professional jobs where some days you just wish someone would set up a wrestling mat or obstacle course like the old days and you weren’t just answering emails or pushing paper around all day. I always encourage my students to explore a memory where you can structure two competing points of view, the persona in the past and the persona in the present currently looking back, and the moment where those points of view intersect or are at tension. 

 

I have lots of poets and writers that I find myself returning to for their literary encouragement and example. I frequently return to the contemporary poems of Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Marie Howe, Jane Kenyon, Philip Levine, Natasha Trethewey, Matthew Olzmann, B.H. Fairchild, C. Dale Young, Yusef Komunyakaa (the list goes on and on), as well as writers I think of as “poetic”/lyrical, fiction writers like Michael Ondaatje, Colum McCann…. 

 

David James Poissant: Many of these poems concern place, but not one place. We travel from New York City to West Texas to Spain to Boston, and on. How does place inform your work? Does a place ever dictate the form you choose for a poem?

 

Jonathan Fink: I feel like both place and time are essential to the success of many poems. Not all of the poems in my book are set in time and place (some are more traditional lyric poems), but the benefit of defining time and place in a poem is that you immediately have a past and future in the poem and a “here” and “there” landscape. As I mentioned above, once you have a past and future, you immediately have a past and future persona—you can bring in competing points of view and show change and argument in the persona, not just a singular perspective or momentary viewpoint. Place also gives you rich sensory and experiential details. An apartment in an early 20th century building in Cleveland overlooking the Cuyahoga River is going to have different sensory details from a modern condo in Miami or a flat over a record store in Lawton, Oklahoma. 

 

David James Poissant: Speaking of form, this collection contains poems with numbered stanzas, poems composed of couplets, a prose poem (“When You Least Expect It”), and all manner of poem lengths, from ten lines to over a hundred lines. The variety is stunning. How do you juggle so many shapes so deftly on the page?

 

Jonathan Fink: I feel like much of the process of writing is trying to find the right shape and form for the piece you are creating or the story you are trying to tell. Broadly, I encourage students (and myself) to be open to the expectations of a piece. These expectations aren’t just rhetorical, but are also tonal, imagistic, and structural. They build and generate through the process of writing. Thomas Aquinas said that beauty has three elements: wholeness, harmony, and radiance; and I like how these concepts work together—the wholeness of a piece’s architecture and content/inquiry, the harmony of how everything works together, and the radiance of how the piece moves beyond its singular existence in an expansive and communicative way. So, I hope I can remain open not so much to me dictating a form for a poem but to whatever form might arise to fulfill those elements of expectation and beauty. 

 

David James Poissant: As many of our readers are also writers, maybe you could speak to the mystery of line breaks. What’s your rule of thumb for breaking lines? How do you instruct the beginning poets in your courses at the University of West Florida, where you’ve taught creative writing for many years? Are we all overthinking line breaks, or do they deserve even more reverence?

 

Jonathan Fink: There are lots of different reasons for line breaks—how they look on the page, tone, rhythm, formal meter, among others—but my favorite types of line breaks are where the reader creates an image or scene in their mind based on the line and then there is a slight pause as the image holds over the line break and transforms with the beginning of the next line. William Stafford’s poem “Traveling Through the Dark” has a great example of this. The first line is “Traveling through the dark I found a deer,” and in the reader’s mind (at least mine) this deer blooms alive in the night and holds there until the beginning of the next line which follows, “dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.” In my mind’s eye the initial image suddenly revises. I am struck by surprise, as I imagine the persona was as well, that the deer is not alive, but dead. It has been alive this whole time across the line break. A lesser poet would have written, “Traveling through the dark I found a dead deer / on the edge of the Wilson River Road”—same information but lacking the surprise and emotional investment of the persona in the line break as Stafford has written it. 

 

David James Poissant: Some of your poems feel deeply personal. Others concern recent or current events and stories from the news. Others are engaged with the history of a place or the examination of a painting. And plenty, like “A Year of Growth,” first published by The Florida Review, defy categorization, allowing subjects to overlap in intriguing ways. Do you begin a poem knowing its subject matter, or do poems ever surprise you in the turns they take as you compose?

 

Jonathan Fink: The poems definitely surprise me, which, as many poets have said, is the essence of writing. I’m not writing blindly, though. I find that there is often a balance between having a triggering idea combined with a general sense of architecture, while also being perpetually open on a line-by-line basis to see how the poem moves and transforms. (I always like the conceptual idea of “yes, and…” used in improv comedy.) In that poem specifically, it’s true that I was building a treehouse, and my youngest daughter colored the end grain of one of the 2x4s to reveal a rainbow. I was surprised by this and liked the image, and I felt like the image had narrative and metaphorical/symbolic potential. I like the Ezra Pound quote that “the natural object is always the adequate symbol,” and I frequently begin poems with a symbol I hope to explore, as in the case here. As the poem developed, though, much of the subtext started to work its way to the surface as an elegy for my mother-in-law who had recently passed away. 

 

Another way of stating this concept of expectation/form/beauty, etc. is to say broadly that when I write, I am thinking about how I am using language to map/explore neural pathways. Not long ago, I heard a good feature on NPR about how neuroscientists were studying how sensory language traces similar pathways in the brain to the actual action described. So, when we say we “feel” it when someone writes that they accidentally stepped on an exposed nail, piercing their flip-flop into their foot, we actually do “feel” it in the sense that our brains receive that sensory language in a similar neural pathway pattern to the action itself. So, in my writing I try to remind myself that I am not just writing symbols or words, but I am building neural pathway scaffolding. Strange, I know, but I hope conceiving writing this way has helped me to write better poems. 

 

David James Poissant: New Testament stories appear with some frequency here, often in the context of paintings. Did growing up in the church leave an indelible mark on your art, or have the stories taken hold as you’ve grown older?

 

Jonathan Fink: Absolutely and both, and this is something I actually think about a lot. My mother and father were amazing examples to me, as they have always lived their lives in a radical way, taking Christ’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount literally and instructively. This of course is the hardest thing in the world to actually do. My father, after retiring as an English professor, works daily serving meals to anyone who needs a meal in a small town in Texas. Through their church, they make 400 meals a day. My mother was an elementary school counselor before retiring, and much of her day was spent finding shoes for kids or driving to pick them up when their parents couldn’t be there or contacting social workers, etc. They’ve lived their lives motivated daily by the literal and instructive teachings of Christ. My parents are deeply intellectual and soulful people with deep conviction, and they found and instilled great purpose in our family by trying to follow Christ’s example literally. The fact that religion has been so manipulated and bastardized locally, nationally, and internationally by those in search of political power and social control is a great and real frustration for many people, I believe, who find wisdom and beauty in things like Christ’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. So, yes, these things are inescapable in my writing. 

 

I always loved Flannery O’Connor’s statement in “A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable” where she says, “Much of my fiction takes its character from a reasonable use of the unreasonable, though the reasonableness of my use of it may not always be apparent. The assumptions that underlie this use of it, however, are those of the central Christian mysteries. These are assumptions to which a large part of the modern audience takes exception. About this I can only say that there are perhaps other ways than my own in which this story [“A Good Man is Hard to Find”] could be read, but none other by which it could have been written. Belief, in my own case anyway, is the engine that makes perception operate.” For me, it’s not necessarily “belief” that is the engine behind perception in my writing, but the framing of a moral understanding of the world and the mysteries of a person’s “soul” informed by the example and guidance of my parents’ lives and convictions. 

 

David James Poissant: As a father of daughters, like you, so many of these poems resonate deeply. If, in the future, your daughters should read your poems, what do you hope they’ll find there?

 

Jonathan Fink: It’s interesting in that they do read them now, in a sense. My daughters are eleven, eight, and five, and I am reading the Harry Potter series to them at night before bed. I read through the books several years ago with my oldest daughter, and now the younger two, who share a room, are interested in reading each night before bed. I read to them from a Kindle, and sometimes the battery is dead, and they’ll ask if I can just read them one of my poems (preferably one that features my daughters as characters) instead. They’ve heard all the ones, I think, about them in the new book, and now they ask for new ones, and it clarifies my limitations that I can’t just pull these things out of thin air. As for what I hope they might see in the future, I hope they see our love for them and the world. 

 

David James Poissant: In closing, what is next for you? Are you already conceiving of your next book-length project?

 

Jonathan Fink: I completed a poetry project for Joshua Tree National Park as an artist in residence last year about the musician Gram Parsons and his life and legacy and the botched cremation attempt there at Joshua Tree after his overdose. My wife did the art for the project, which was a lot of fun. It’s available for viewing for free on my website. I’m also currently thinking about trying to do a book-length poem structured around a central initiating event that spirals out in different directions. Hopefully more on that soon. 

Jonathan Fink is Professor and Coordinator of Creative Writing at University of West Florida. His most recent book of poetry is Don’t Do It—We Love You, My Heart (Dzanc, 2025). He has also received the Editors’ Prize in Poetry from The Missouri Review, the McGinnis-Ritchie Prize for Nonfiction/Essay from Southwest Review, the Porter Fleming Award in Poetry, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Joshua Tree National Park, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, and Emory University, among other institutions.

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A Year of Growth

Jonathan Fink

 

My youngest daughter does not know

that each tree ring marks a year of growth

when she selects a piece of scrap wood

 

from the sawdust and shavings

that have covered our back patio

and carries the board inside to color

 

the rings revealed by the saw blade,

my daughter filling the arching semicircles

until a rainbow appears as her sisters

 

lay other scraps across the floor to make

a path on which to leap from board to board

to furniture and back again in a game,

 

I imagine, every child in history has played,

the game requiring only the belief

that the ground is not as solid as it seems,

 

that a misstep or tip of balance will lead

to peril, whether lava or river or canyon below,

even though, while laughing, they jump again,

 

shrugging off each demise, protesting

only when I collect the boards

and insist that the world be ordered

 

over their appeals to fairness,

the mantra of childhood, to which

I and every parent I know responds,

 

Who says the world is fair? mostly resisting,

though sometimes not, to itemize,

while wielding a clothes-less Barbie

 

or broken toy like a judge’s gavel,

every slight from work and love

and politics both foreign and domestic

 

as the neighbor’s dog howls at the burgeoning

moon and the kids give each other that look

meaning, What’s got into dad—all we meant

 

was we were having fun? which is when

I see myself reflected in the glass

of the patio sliding doors and realize

 

how large I must seem to them,

large, though clearly not authoritative,

as the youngest starts spacing

 

the boards again behind my back,

and I lift one and point to the rings

in the grain, and say, see, this too

 

was once alive, how, though rooted,

it turned it leaves to the warmth of the sun

and drew water from the earth, its limbs

 

not unlike yours when you lift the hems

of your skirts to hop through puddles,

or wave to me from the treehouse

 

we are building together, a project begun

before the passing of their grandmother

though intersecting now with her loss

 

as grief permeates all things, and they ask

the questions one would expect

(if she looks down on them from above

 

just as they, from the tree, look down on me)

and the questions one doesn’t expect

about how the tree feels holding

 

the remains of another tree in its limbs,

transformed, though it is, to a house,

and I tell them trees aren’t capable

 

of abstract thought or have feelings

like we do, though what do I know,

thinking of Michelangelo’s Pieta,

 

and Mary, though stone, holding

her deceased son, and how the body

is itself a house of memory and love

 

and loss, as my wife and I explained

to our daughters, that the sadness they feel

is sadness, yes, but also love transformed,

 

that grief is love for the one who was lost,

just as my wife expressed on the day

before her mother died, after a month

 

of hospice at her mother’s home and the gift,

my wife said, to be there with her,

to measure and administer the morphine

 

when the great pain came, when any touch,

even a blanket, became unbearable,

to honor the effort at the end for her to stand,

 

holding to the walker, and request what would be

her final bath, and my wife, afterwards,

drawing a comb through the fineness of her hair,

 

never more beautiful, my wife saying

that night, and again the next day

even after the workers had come so quickly

 

to take her, to gather and remove

any remaining meds, count every pill

as her final breath still hung in the air,

 

and our daughters cried unceasingly

so that when, that night, we drove away,

the trees that lined the road seemed to bow

 

to the car, to lift their limbs in the breeze,

the undersides of their leaves lighter

than the backs, like the palms of hands,

 

which, I believed, if they could,

they would place on our car, on the shoulders

of my wife, or interweave their limbs

 

as a canopy above us, their petals

below, and the road would no longer

be a road but a tunnel, to where it ascended

 

I did not know, only that we were

like breath released at last from the throat,

becoming the words we were unable to say.

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The Bigfoot Parade

Will Musgrove

 

As the high school band warmed up down Main Street, Kerry slipped the folded napkin under the wiper of the rusted Ford in the Sneakers Grill parking lot. Written on the napkin in Sharpie were the words I’M PREGNANT, CALL ME, followed by a random phone number. Since life messed with us, we messed with it. It was something to do until he and I got out of Podunk. We lived in a small Midwest town, everyone rattling around like the leftover screws from a piece of IKEA furniture.

 

The door to Sneakers Grill opened. The smell of fried mozzarella sticks drifted on stale, air-conditioned air into the Fuck You July heat, and we took hungry breaths. A family of three, a mom, dad, and son, all wearing We Believe Bigfoot hats, exited the sports bar to search for a spot along the parade route. They nudged their way past fellow believers and disappeared.

 

Everyone in town had their own Bigfoot story except for Kerry and me. My uncle Gary claimed he’d once seen Bigfoot break up a fistfight outside Walmart before vanishing in the trees behind the big-box store. Bigfoot was always performing good deeds, a local superhero, someone you could count on in a pinch.

 

If the missing link existed, why would it care about a small town of slaughterhouse workers, a town where all there is to do is look to the woods for help? Sometimes, I’d put on the Bigfoot onesie pajamas my parents got me for Christmas and wander outside. When someone spotted me and called for help, I ran in the opposite direction. I’d run until I was alone and panting, feeling like I could squish the whole town between my fingertips, feeling like I was better than this place because I recognized a costume when I saw one.

 

Kerry wrote something on another napkin, and the high school band marched down Main. Above the row of spectators, I watched the band members’ hairy hats bob up and down. They looked like groundhogs poking their heads up to see if it’s safe to come out. A float featuring a giant papier-mâché Bigfoot crept along behind the band. Candy scattered the curb, and Kerry and I shoved our way to the front.

 

We stuffed Jolly Ranchers and Tootsie Rolls into our pockets. A middle-aged woman accused us of being too old, but we ignored her and kept grabbing. When our pockets were full, Kerry spun and asked the woman why her precious Bigfoot hadn’t stopped us. To avoid getting our asses kicked, I grabbed Kerry’s arm and dragged him away. Then we walked down the block to the Kum & Go gas station.

 

“I can’t wait to get the hell out of here,” Kerry said. We leaned against the fuel pumps. We didn’t have a grand getaway plan. I guess we hoped we’d wake up one day and be somewhere else, somewhere where no one believed in Bigfoot.

 

Kerry went into the gas station to get a couple of Cokes. I waited outside. Bored, I retrieved a plastic fork from a garbage can and held the fork to my face. I watched the world through the tines. My older cousin Jack’s truck pulled in. Last I’d seen him, he’d just started work at the slaughterhouse, saving to escape, like us. He wasn’t a believer either. He compared believing in Bigfoot to believing in Santa Claus.

 

He got out of his truck, smiling and wearing a We Believe hat. I studied him through the fork’s tines, how he stood behind bars. When he noticed me, I wondered if he saw the same.

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Slowdeatha

Andrew Brininstool

 

I.

 

Rochelle Pickford had gone to El Paso for a lip injection, but the esthetician had been distracted and the Restylane meant for the organ tissue had instead gone into one of the veins. Rochelle’s lips bruised a deep blue-gray, as did most of her right cheek. She was a bad sight. There was nothing to be done about it except to put ice on the bruise and take Valtrex. She didn’t want to see anybody for a few days. But when the doorbell rang on a Friday afternoon and she peeked through the blinds and saw that it was her neighbor, a young man named Ryan, she answered anyway.

 

“Don’t look at me.”

 

He wasn’t. He had more pressing matters. He held a goat in his arms as though it were a child. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I have to go out of town. I wasn’t expecting this.” He wanted her to look after the goat. “It doesn’t need much. Just leave it in the backyard. I’ve got a stake and a leash. Put a bowl of water out. Don’t worry about feeding him. I won’t be gone long. Like I said, I’ve already fed Cline.”

 

Then he was gone, and Rochelle was holding the goat. It happened so fast.

 

She didn’t care for goats. She didn’t care for animals in general, but goats especially. Once, when she was young and visiting her uncle in Kansas, a billy goat had butted her in the ass, sending her flying a few feet across the backyard. It was humiliating and terrifying—the first truly frightening experience in her recollection. The adults all laughed as though they’d never seen such divine comedy before.

 

But Ryan was recently divorced, Rochelle knew. And he’d looked pained to leave Cline with her. Whatever had forced him to leave town must’ve been important. Rochelle still believed you could count on your neighbors.

 

Not that the goat didn’t spook her.

 

To take her mind off of it, she put on a lot of rouge and a wide pair of sunglasses and ran some errands. She dropped off drapes to be hemmed. She went over to the Steven’s Inn and found some of her friends drinking coffee in the restaurant.

 

“I look hideous.”

 

“Hush.”

 

“It’s karaoke at the lounge.”

 

“You know I can’t sing,” Rochelle said.

 

“None of us will be singing. We’ll be playing the slots.”

 

“I might stay home tonight.”

 

“Really, Roche. Your lips don’t look that awful.”

 

“It isn’t that. I’ve taken on a responsibility.”

 

Nobody asked for details.

 

“Dale might be there,” one of them said.

 

Rochelle was glad to be wearing sunglasses. She didn’t want to react. Dale Envers had been her crush forty years earlier. They were town rats in this sleepy mesa of the Chihuahuan plains. They’d had Honors English together, and Dale played baseball. He was smart and often told Rochelle she was smart, too. Smart enough to get into UNM, or maybe even St. John’s. Rochelle didn’t believe him, but Dale had been right about UNM. And she would have attended if, the summer beforehand, she hadn’t met Charlie Pickford, a Penn graduate who’d moved to the area as a geologist. He had been a fine man, and they’d had what Charlie’s snobby brother once called a “little life” together. It was a throwaway comment, but Charlie never spoke to his brother again. Funny. The comment never bothered Rochelle. What more was there to be had? They joined the country club, the Rotary, the Elks. At the time of Charlie’s death, they’d saved enough money to travel—something he had wanted in retirement. It was unfortunate they’d never made good on his dream, but Rochelle was ashamed to admit that the fact left her relieved. She never wanted to see the world. The world scared her.

 

◊

 

When she got home she watched Cline, out in the backyard. He’d found the stump of a pecan tree and was perched upon it, staring out onto the golf course. The tree had had anthracnose, and Charlie cut it down years ago. Now the goat was there.

 

◊

 

At 7:30 p.m., she decided to go to the Lodge. At 7:45, she decided against it. She drew a bath. Five minutes later she drained the bath and drove the short distance up to the hill where Lodge #1558 stood, the stucco repainted the white of a bleached bone.

 

She used to love coming here. Charlie would come home from work early and try on a new suit jacket and make them each a tipple while Rochelle did her makeup. Then, as Charlie pulled their car up the steep drive to the lodge, Rochelle would crane her neck to see which of her friends’ sedans were in the lot.

 

Now it was filled with dually pickups caked in dust. Their back windows had decals of derricks spewing oil. My Boyfriend Slings Pipe, some of them read. Or: Drill ‘er Deep Pull ‘er Wet. The newcomers filled the Lodge with cigar smoke. They wore jeans. They ordered beer and whiskey all night. Many of the fieldworkers had wives back home, but that didn’t seem to matter: little tarty things sat in their laps. As she entered the Lodge Rochelle heard somebody singing, “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother,” and the workers hooted and bayed. By the grace of god, the slot machines sat off away from the lounge in a converted coat closet.

 

It was so much more pleasant here. Here, the machines chirped and rang. They cast red and yellow lights along the ceiling and carpet. Rochelle’s favorite was called The Mystical Lamp. It was a five-reel game; when you hit it big a strange creature, a genie, rose from a cartoon lamp on the digital screen and congratulated you. It was nice to win, but the eyes of the genie flashed in an unsettling way.

 

Her friends were already at the machines.

 

“You made it.”

 

“I won’t be staying long. I’ve taken on a responsibility. You know my young neighbor? His name is Ryan. I’m caring for his goat while he is out of town.”

 

“Did you say a goat?”

 

“You should see how Ryan cares for it. It’s as though the goat were his own child.”

 

“That’s strange.”

 

Rochelle placed the first of her Elks coins inside The Mystical Lamp and pulled its lever. “People do all sorts of strange things when they’re going through something like a divorce.”

 

Someone out in the lounge was screaming a hideous song. Its chorus went: “Pooour some sugar on me!”

 

The Mystical Lamp lit up. It chimed and squealed, and the genie appeared. His wicked grin and eyes congratulated Rochelle before the machine spit out eight tokens.

 

“I didn’t mean strange to be bad. Remember when Charlie died and you spent so much time up in Santa Fe with that group of mystics?”

 

Rochelle said nothing.

 

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

 

“No, it’s okay. I think it’s just the medication I’m taking for these lips, is all.”

 

“They don’t look as awful as you think.”

 

◊

 

Her friends left around 9:00. Rochelle stayed behind. She was hopeful to see Dale, and at 9:15, he walked into the slot machine room.

 

Rochelle swiveled in her chair and acted as though she hadn’t noticed. When he finally said hello, Rochelle didn’t know what to say. “I’m up six dollars.”

 

“I just got back from Odessa,” he told her. “We had a court case this morning.”

 

“How did it go?”

 

He didn’t say anything. It was clear he’d been drinking on the drive home. Dale hadn’t, in the end, gone to UNM or St. John’s. Instead he went to a tiny college in Oregon, received a law degree, and disappeared for a while. When he finally came home, he was a changed man. That’s what everybody said. There were a lot of rumors about what had happened to him. He’d gone crazy, or he’d done too many drugs in South America. Rochelle didn’t care what people said. Dale Envers was the smartest man she’d ever known.

 

The genie’s eyes lit up. A chime belted. Elks coins fell onto the tray.

 

“Look at you,” Dale said.

 

“I’m lucky tonight.”

 

“You always have been.”

 

“I don’t know about that!”

 

Drinks at the Lodge came in small plastic cups. Dale ordered them both a drink, and he drank his fast. His hands and fingers were massive, and the skin on his knuckles was dry and cracked.

 

“Are you going to play?” Rochelle asked. “The machines are loose.”

 

Dale looked uncomfortable on the stool, like a circus animal. He crossed his big arms and peered into the lounge. “I don’t know what to do anymore,” he muttered.

 

“Dale? You know how I’m always getting into things? You won’t even imagine what I’ve signed myself up for this time. I’ve taken on a responsibility. Do you recall that young man who—”

 

“They’re changing everything, Rochelle.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Look around. Do you remember how this place used to be?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Now look.”

 

“I know. It breaks my heart. They used to require a jacket for the men, and for the ladies—”

 

“I don’t mean that. I mean they’re changing everything. The world is off-kilter. Do you know what these fracking bastards are doing in our town? Do you know what they’re doing?”

 

“You mean with the drilling.”

 

“I’m talking the very ground beneath us. They’re pumping water into the ground, fresh clean water that can never be used again. And we have a water restriction in place! We’re in a drought!” A morsel of spit clung to his lip. “And the sinkholes.” He paused. “They’re changing the very geography of this place. The entire goddamn earth, Rochelle.”

 

“Would you like another drink?”

 

“In Odessa,” he said to her, “there’s nothing but white trucks. For miles. Corporate white trucks. And meanwhile the water there is turning cancerous. It’s sulfatic. You can taste it. Children have learning disabilities. Slowdeatha, the residents are calling the town now. Their own town. They mean it as a joke. As in, they don’t really give a shit.”

 

He turned and looked at her as though for the first time. “Your lips.”

 

She blushed. “I know. They’re hideous.”

 

He kissed her, hard. Pain rose through her face and entered her right eye. She thought she was going to go blind. In fact, she did go blind. She heard him tell her he was sorry, but when she could finally see again, Dale Envers was gone. Rochelle collected her earnings from The Mystery Lamp and drove home.

 

◊

 

She couldn’t sleep after that. She ran cold water over her wrists. She poured a glass of wine but felt too dizzy to finish it.

 

She turned on her floodlight.

 

Cline was there, staring at the new light that’d come over him. He hadn’t moved from the pecan stump. He wore a strange grin. She didn’t know how goats slept. This one, apparently, didn’t. The only thing Rochelle knew about goats was that they ate everything. Was it true, or a myth? She decided to find out. She went to the pantry and grabbed a can of black beans. From the freezer she took out a carton of fish sticks. She went out onto the patio.

 

Cline didn’t move. He stared at her. She opened the can and dug her fingers in and pulled out a handful of beans and felt them in her palms, her fingers, before tossing them. They scattered in the dirt. The goat didn’t move. In the mornings, Rochelle often came out here to read the paper; the second fairway was just beyond her gate, and she’d wave at the golfers and take in all that green. But at nights, without light or trees the course gave way to a vast nothingness. The only light was on Cline. It was Rochelle and the goat and nothing around them.

 

The animal hopped down from the stump and inched forward and ate the beans. Rochelle was shocked. She tossed more. Cline ate them. She tossed the entire can into the yard. She expected Cline to eat the can, but he gave it a lazy look and flicked one of his ears at her. Rochelle tore open the box of fish sticks and scattered them throughout the yard. They were still frozen, but Cline followed their path, eating each one without trouble. Finally, he found the empty box. Rochelle watched Cline sniff at it.

 

“Eat this,” Rochelle said and pulled from her purse a few of her Elks coins. She approached the goat, holding her palm out. “Eat them,” she said.

 

Cline pulled one of the coins into his mouth. She felt the goat’s warm tongue on her palm. He chewed and swallowed.

 

“Good,” Rochelle said. “Yes, that’s right. Eat them all.”

 

The animal stared at her. He stopped and was quiet, and Rochelle stared at him and waited. “Come on,” she whispered.

 

The goat looked at her and screamed the scream of a child victim. The noise went out over the neighborhood, over the golf course, over the river. Rochelle rushed inside and turned off the lights.

 

◊

 

Sometimes she dreamt of the day, early in her marriage, when she’d asked Charlie just exactly it was he did for a living. In response, Charlie had taken her in their new car out along Highway 62 to the escarpment and led her up onto one of the shorter mesas. They stood in the dirt near a lechuguilla patch. “Look there,” he said and pointed south, toward the Guadalupe Mountains. “That was once a massive ocean reef.” Long before dinosaurs, he told her, there’d been a great big sea right here, right where they were standing. It’d been filled with sponges and algae, brachiopods, trilobites, single-celled fusulinids, and snails and fish so strange she could not even imagine they once called Earth their home. The seas dried, he said, and minerals preserved the dead. “And now,” Charlie told her, “we use them to live.”

 

◊

 

She woke late. Her lips throbbed. They felt as though they would burst. It took her a while to piece the previous evening together. She went out onto the patio and saw the coins, covered with mucous, in the yard. The goat was missing. He wasn’t anywhere. She worried that if Cline had gotten out onto the golf course, she’d have her membership revoked. She pictured him chewing up the fairways, eating the begonias near the clubhouse. She called. Nobody had seen him.

 

Rochelle didn’t wait to get dressed. Without makeup, in her pajamas, she took to driving around town. She drove up and down Canal Street, over to Halagueno Boulevard. She followed San Pedro Street as it snaked alongside the San Pedro arroyo. The wide creek used to run irrigation from the Pecos for cucumber and onion farms, but it’d been dried by the frackers. Now it held hillocks of box springs and shopping carts. Soon the houses grew smaller; the yards went from St. Augustine to lava rocks. She was in Alegre Vista, the bad part of town. Here the houses had ramps instead of steps. Here were cut-out-of-your-house obese people, hiding behind bedrooms with quilts for drapes.

 

“Cline!” she shouted from the window, driving slowly. “Cline!”

 

Some people looked at her. She knew what they were thinking. A woman with a battered face, looking for her husband.

 

She had no idea what to do. She knew nothing about goats. She knew nothing of their internal lives, their desires—what drove them to escape a backyard or what might drive them to return. She would have given up if she could think of a single thing to tell Ryan that would not break his heart.

 

Later in the afternoon, at a home in Alegre Vista, an unpainted wooden place that looked collaged together from parts of other, long-gone houses, she spotted a small herd of goats in the backyard.

 

“These are my goats,” the old man told her. She’d been out near the fence posts, eyeing the herd. The man must’ve seen her through his back window.

 

“I’m looking for one. His name is Cline. He’s black and brown, and he escaped my backyard early this morning or, who knows, perhaps last night.”

 

“Nope,” the old man said. “These are my goats.”

 

Rochelle didn’t move from the fence. She inspected every one of the goats in the herd. None of them appeared to be Cline.

 

“Get on out,” the old man told her.

 

She left and drove far out from the town, out along the highway and then down a county road of hardened chip seal. The road passed a mobile home park before flattening out along the plains of the desert. This used to be a ranch, owned by a wealthy family. Now there were warning signs everywhere—there were signs all over town. The road thinned to two lanes with no center stripe. The sun was big and white, and the sky looked anemic, as though it were an overexposed photograph.

 

She needed to collect herself. She needed to come up with something to tell Ryan. She understood now that in these years since Charlie’s death she had only been faking her way along, faking it every day: at the slots or at coffee, at church, in the produce aisle. Now with the lips. Now with Dale Envers.

 

Rochelle pulled over to compose herself. She put her hazards on and searched the console for tissues. She found some, wadded and coffee stained, and dried her eyes and cleared her nose. She told herself she was going to be okay, that she had, within her, a deep well of resource and strength. She took a few breaths before looking out to the north, out at a long dry stretch of nearly white desert pocked with creosote bushes and bright red budding ocotillo—a mile or two shy of a pump jack. Cline stood there alone, staring back at her.

 

She took her time. She laughed. She opened the door and stepped out onto the road. “Cline,” she said, and felt relief. “Cline!” she said and walked across the county road. Nobody was out here. The wind was still. Rochelle carefully pulled apart the barbed wire and let herself through, making sure her pajamas did not catch. “Let’s go home now,” she called out and smiled. Cline waited for her. He made a strange movement with his jaw, as though he knew what she was saying. As though he were agreeing with her. “I forgive you,” she said to him and slowly stepped toward him. Cline did not move. He whipped his tail and nodded again. “You’re a good boy,” she said, and, when she was near, slowly took him into her arms and embraced him the way she’d seen her neighbor embrace him. And had you been passing by, had you seen the hazards blinking on the sedan and slowed and looked off to the north for the car’s owner—had you looked in time—you’d have witnessed the world open wide and take inside itself a woman in her pajamas along with a small goat.

 

II.

 

On the evening Ryan and Kendra first pulled into town, a great dark plume of smoke seemed to rise from the ground and hover above Canal Street and darken out the neon signs of the motels and fast food restaurants. This cloud did tricks. It changed shapes, recategorizing itself from a blob into a taut arrow, a diamond, a V. “Look,” Ryan said. “Bats.” Kendra glanced at them for a moment before yawning and going back to her phone.

 

This was the detail TOWBoss had wanted men in their subreddit to find: the moment they knew they’d lost their wives. TOWBoss said it was often not a slap in the face or a tearful fight, but something more mundane. He told users to do something physically exerting and to take days, weeks even, to hone in on the moment that useless cunt ruined your life. He created a thread for responses: The Cunting of America.

 

Ryan found the group by accident. He’d Googled “signs of depression” and “divorce depression” and then “divorce guilty.” And he kept Googling until he found men who felt no guilt nor depression, but searing rage.

 

They railed against the Duluth Model, against vasectomies—what one Redditor called “self-cucking.” A theater in Michigan posted an Equal Pay Night, wherein men paid 25 percent extra for a ticket. The subreddit was outraged. They, along with a pickup artists’ subreddit, flooded the phone lines until the theater had to change numbers. They purchased an entire theater’s worth of tickets and believed the business would be dismayed when nobody showed up.

 

Initially, Ryan didn’t relate to most of the men going through divorce. A lot of them were wealthier than he was. Older, with children. But the rage was something he shared. He read the sub late at nights, after drinking. Some of the men spammed a college’s rape report form with dozens of false reports. Ryan didn’t partake, but he watched the post-act banter.

 

Kendra had left, just left, one day while he was at work. Her things were still in their house. The plan had been for her to become a veterinarian, but she’d failed a few courses and before long Ryan had a job offer far away from the Mid-Atlantic. The job paid well. He’d be working as an engineer for an oil concern. Kendra wouldn’t say yes or no. She lay in bed all day. This was an answer in itself. Finally, not knowing how to convince her, Ryan had purchased a goat at a market. Kendra still had not said yes, though when the time came she climbed into the car with the kid in her hands and told Ryan its name was Cline. He smiled, and they headed west. She left the goat at the house, too.

 

When she had finally called it was from a phone with an Annapolis area code. Annapolis was where she’d grown up. She had family there and old friends. And old boyfriends.

 

It wasn’t uncommon for Ryan to call her at night. Kendra would listen as he asked for a second try or pointed out her many flaws—it was her failure, not his, that’d led them out west—or accused her of cheating or asked if his cock wasn’t big enough, if he was too fat or not romantic enough. If she wanted to date a Black man, a Jew. And Kendra would listen patiently, not saying a word until he was done shouting and done crying. And finally she would say, ultimately, there wasn’t anything to say.

 

After hanging up, he’d hit the thread.

 

At work, when he caught himself looking at a female coworker and thinking slut or gash or cumwhore, he felt guilty only for a second before reminding himself of what TOWBoss had said: this was how Ryan had always really felt. This was Ryan finally being true to himself.

 

He’d never played youth sports. He hadn’t joined a fraternity in college. He’d spent his time alone and happy, he thought, and totally confused at this term he always heard, community, and why people put so much emphasis on it. But one night last week he found himself drunk on gin and weeping with joy for having found ToughToeNails3 and Raw_Hide_ and CraveMore, and TOWBoss, their fearless leader; and when TOWBoss posted about the retreat, Ryan was quick to say he’d be there and was there anything he could bring—anything at all.

 

◊

 

The retreat was held in the tall grass alongside the Rio Costilla, not far from the Colorado state line. There was an RV park and campground further to the south, near where the Mesa Stream and the Cordillera Ditch came together, but TOWBoss had told them no way was he paying the fees, and anyway, they were Free Men.

 

In the winters there were no streams at all, but it was late spring now, and the Rocky Mountain runoff had formed a fast-moving gulley ample with cutthroat trout.

As soon as Ryan arrived he realized he’d made a few miscalculations. He’d assumed the retreat was for getting wasted and talking about women and that the fishing was only a pretext. This was not the case. The men he saw were all in waders and very seriously going about fly-fishing the gulley. Their tents, nearly all of them military-grade canvas, were set up immaculately, taut as drums, not even flapping in the mountain wind. Ryan had stopped in Albuquerque on the way up and had purchased a little pup tent. His rod was all wrong: a spin fishing rig that’d cost him twenty-five dollars. He felt ridiculous unpacking his gear and ridiculous moreover when the other men looked back and spotted him but did nothing more than nod and return to the stream. The wind was coming off the mountains all wrong, forcing Ryan’s hat off his head and making him run beyond the parked SUVs to catch it; and he struggled with the tent poles—what maniac had designed this thing?—and out of embarrassment acted as though he were doing a high-concept comedy act about a man who could not put a tent together. The few men who looked on did not laugh. Ryan wanted to toss his gear in the Subaru and leave.

 

Finally, a squat man came to him and offered a hand. “TOWBoss,” he said. Ryan was taken back. TOWBoss had described his ex as being superhot but batshit. Ryan had figured TOWBoss to be a young and handsome devil. Instead, here stood a man in his fifties, graying, with a mustache.

 

“I’m Ryan.”

 

TOWBoss looked up from the tent poles and grimaced. “Yeah, we still go by our Reddit handles here. For the sake of maintaining anonymity.”

 

“Okay,” Ryan said. “So for the rest of the weekend, I’m still SamDongleson?”

 

TOWBoss nodded. “Over there is SemperFi4121, Luv_StuffNM, CarlosZeroShits, and SquirtMaster500.”

 

“Where is ToughToeNails3?” SamDongleson asked.

 

“Stuck in traffic outside Denver. He’ll be here.”

 

Soon TOWBoss had SamDongleson’s tent up. Looking it over, TOWBoss said, “I hope you have a zero-degree bag. It gets awful cold up here at nights.”

 

SamDongleson lied. He’d brought his duvet from home.

 

After TOWBoss introduced him to the clan, and the clan simply nodded, he asked SamDongleson if he had his tackle with him. Before he could answer, TOWBoss marched to SamDongleson’s campsite and returned with the rod. SamDongleson’s face went hot, but after an inspection, TOWBoss said, “Don’t let anybody tell you you can’t catch good fish with one of these. I had a rig like this as a boy. Held onto it through college. Best rod I ever had.”

 

He handed it to SamDongleson. The other men, each of whom had handmade and intricate flies attached to their vests or hats, quit casting. They waited. SamDongleson took the rod and cast the line out in a long, whispering arch. The line went on forever. It was a glorious cast, a strong and strange cast, and when it came back to him, a trout was on the end.

 

◊

 

It was true that the campsite turned cold when the sun went down, but SamDongleson didn’t mind it. His catch on the first try had become an instant legend among the men. Never mind that the fish was too small to keep. They kept it anyway. SemperFi4121 had smashed its head against a rock and handed the lifeless thing back to SamDongleson. “Take it home and have it mounted.”

 

SamDongleson laughed.

 

“I’m serious. This is a feat worth remembering.”

 

Now, at 8:00 in the evening, the men cooked beans and hamburgers and poured whiskey into cups with Diet Coke and talked about SamDongleson’s catch in a way that made his chest feel big. By 9:30, any trepidation SamDongleson first felt had melted away. The whiskey and the campfire made his face warm, and when he pulled his duvet from the Subaru and wrapped himself in it—and when the other subredditors let out a communal chortle loud enough to bounce along the arroyo—SamDongleson knew it was in good fun, that these men were rapidly becoming brothers to him. He was to become a reference point in their conversations for years. He pictured newcomers to the subreddit. Tell me the duvet story. Fill me in. And SemperFi4121 and Luv_StuffNM and CarlosZeroShits and SquirtMaster500 would let the little pups know just exactly what a classic moment they’d missed out on.

 

Something that struck him was how mild-mannered, even shy, the men were. If they bumped your elbow or knocked over your drink, they were quick with an apology. There was nothing of the anger SamDongleson had expected. If, initially, this had let him down, he soon came to appreciate it. The men finished their meals and tossed the paper plates and plastic forks into the fire and watched the fire change colors as it melted away the chemicals. They told jokes and farted. They stayed out of the deep waters that’d brought them all together—at least at first. It wasn’t until 11:00 that night, when CarlosZeroShits pulled out a joint and the men shared it, that the nature of the outing began to shift. SamDongleson hadn’t smoked pot since high school, and this stuff was a new strain from Colorado, and it sat with him weird, a little too powerful.

 

An older guy, redheaded except where the crown of his head poked through, steeple-steep and burned by the sun, said: “Sometimes, when I think about Helen, I remember that when I snored she had me sleep on the floor of the bedroom. She swore the flatness helped my snoring. She said I didn’t snore when I was down there.  I resented her for it. I felt like a dog or a slave or something. I’d lie there all night, just seething with anger. And then something funny happened. I came to enjoy the floor. I looked forward to it. In fact, I began fake snoring so that she could order me to the floor.” He paused, his hands folded in front of him. “Isn’t that sick?”

 

“Unless you’ve worked on it,” Luv_StuffNM.

 

“What does that mean?”

 

CarlosZeroShits said, “He means unless you’ve turned it into some kind of kink.”

 

“Oh, hell.”

 

“We aren’t here to kink-shame.”

 

The redhead went to retort, but instead he just let out a strange, nervous chuckle. The men were quiet. SamDongleson stared up at the stars.

 

Another man said, “I get to see my two kids every other weekend. I’ve come to dread those weekends. Marsha hasn’t moved in with another guy, but I’m gathering there’s one. And the reality is? I don’t care. At all. About her or about the guy. And I’m beginning to lose interest in my two children. One day they’ll be a new family, and I won’t be a part of that, and it used to keep me up at night but doesn’t bother me at all now.”

 

The conversation went on like this, but SamDongleson didn’t like it. The stories were lame. They were pathetic. Finally, they were clichéd, something he could have heard from any limp-wristed group therapy session in the basement of a church. He straightened himself and prepared to tell them about Kendra and the goat, but just as he began, one of the men said, “You hear that?”

 

“What?”

 

“Be quiet. Listen.”

 

They listened.

 

“Someone’s out there. Someone’s stalking us.”

 

The men looked at each other. TOWBoss stood and produced a buck knife from his boot. The other men followed his lead; SemperFi4121 had a little .22 pistol in his satchel, and he looked more than happy to brandish it. The men went down from the campsite into the arroyo and crept along the gulley, listening for something. TOWBoss raised his hand. The men waited. “Over there!” he said, and they followed him across the gulley, sprinting through the water and up and over the other bar. Then they were in dense juniper brush. They squatted and listened. SemperFi4121 pulled the action on the pistol. “I see it,” TOWBoss said, and a moment later he was screaming and running with his knife out. SemperFi4121 cracked the pistol twice in the air and followed him. None of the rest moved. When the pair returned, TOWBoss had an Allsup’s bag on the end of his knife. A small, wrinkled plastic bag. The men looked at each other and fell out laughing.

 

◊

 

SamDongleson woke up around 5:00 that morning, still drunk. The rest of the men were already at the fire, making coffee. He wrapped the duvet around himself and joined them, but before he could say anything a pair of headlights strafed the site. They disappeared, returned.

 

“Must be ToughToeNails3,” TOWBoss said.

But soon the lights were multicolored, red and blue, and a door opened. Soon somebody was shining a flashlight down onto them. It was a park ranger.

 

She was young and redheaded and wider than SamDongleson, with her brown pants pulled high above her midsection. They watched the ranger struggle down the rocky embankment and into the tall grass. She trained the flashlight on each of their faces.

 

“Y’all have a permit to be down here?”

 

None of them responded.

 

She looked at the Igloo where SamDongleson’s trout sat on ice. “What about a fishing permit?”

 

They were quiet.

 

The ranger responded to a call from her shoulder mic. Her breath was deep in the cold air. She looked at each of them again for a long while but didn’t move or say anything.

 

Ryan found himself saying, “You know, if we ran, who could you possibly catch?”

 

The ranger’s face went red. Or perhaps it was already red from the cold. It didn’t matter. The men giggled. The ranger pointed her flashlight square into his eyes. He knew he was smiling; he knew he was still drunk.

 

“I’ll be back,” she said, and left in the cruiser.

 

The group howled. They hugged Ryan.

 

Only TOWBoss kept his distance. Later he said, “She will be back, you know.”

 

“She won’t,” Ryan said. Ryan said he needed to take a leak, and he moved into a nearby thicket. The men were still laughing.

 

◊

 

His tent was the last one down. It was not yet noon but close, and only Ryan and TOWBoss were left at the campsite. TOWBoss poured more water onto the firepit, making certain the embers were dead. He looked for trash and placed it into a trash bag and then tightened, once more, the cables holding the kayaks to the roof of his car. Ryan ran his hand through his short beard and thought about telling TOWBoss about the goat, about Cline. But there wasn’t any point. It was a boring story, and Ryan had decided to get rid of the animal as soon as he got back to town.

 

He waved goodbye and left TOWBoss to finish packing. On the road leaving the Rio Costilla, Ryan felt freed from a burden. He was hungover but happy, and by the time he merged onto the highway, he sang along to “Ramblin’ Man” on the radio. He passed through Taos going too fast, and soon he was south of Santa Fe and its traffic and into the badlands along US Route 285.

 

He stopped for gas in Vaughn. A thunderstorm was threatening to the west, pulling itself together like the bunches of a skirt. A man, some kid, was wandering between the pumping stations smacked out of his gourd. Ryan offered him five dollars, but the kid grabbed him by the wrist and stared at him. “You’re a hollowed-out soul if I’ve seen one.” Then the kid ran away from him, looking terrified.

 

“What the fuck was that?” Ryan muttered. He got back in the car and turned on the radio. He let the tuner scan, hoping to hear something about the weather and what he could expect for the rest of the drive home. He heard a voice come through, far off, hardly intelligible from the static. He turned the dial and listened more intently. It was clear that the voice was in a language he did not understand, and he turned the radio off and drove for a while, preferring the silence.

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That Boy When You Were Sixteen

Jacqueline Doyle

 

Let’s say there was a beautiful boy when you were sixteen. Tall and skinny in the way of adolescent boys, he had long eyelashes and smelled like Old Spice deodorant. His bare skin felt very warm when you buried your face in his chest. The two of you spent every afternoon after school making out in his bedroom while his mom was at work. He had an unzipped sleeping bag he used as a bedspread. The plaid flannel lining smelled faintly of unwashed boy and sweat and cum and Old Spice, smells you liked because you associated them with the way his hands and tongue made you feel, and the excitement of taking off some of your clothes and leaving on others and saying no and saying yes, oh yes.

 

Let’s say none of that is true. Let’s say there was no boy, and what you remember from the year you were sixteen is being mouthy in classes and yelling at your mother and listening to the Doors holed up in your room and standing on the sidelines at mixers. And this: riding your bicycle in a sudden thunderstorm as evening is about to fall, coasting down a long steep hill, drenched, ice cold, exuberant. You thought you would never get away from the suburb you’d lived in your entire life, where everyone cared more about money and conformity than spirit or intellect or art and where there wasn’t a single boy who liked you. Soon enough there’d be college and lots of boys, and you’d take off your clothes and say yes, yes, oh yes. Beautiful boys whose names you no longer remember. But that year, you were alone.

 

You never imagined you’d look back at that sixteen-year-old girl and exult in her fierce integrity. Anyone at sixteen can imagine a boy with long eyelashes, after all. And you can imagine him now, balding, gone soft with a paunch, or maybe even gone to an early grave. A heart attack, cancer. You like the girl, though, still very much alive. She nods when you look for her in the mirror, unabashed and defiant, grateful for the life you managed to give her, grateful that she got away from everything she despised. Surprised, really, at what she couldn’t have foreseen: the power of her imagination and where it would take her and how it’s all turned out.

 

Let’s say there’s no such thing as a happy ending. It’s a shock to see her, the unhappy sixteen-year-old girl, and realize she never imagined that you’d get so old or that you couldn’t go back to being that young. You can say now that the beautiful boy you wanted so badly when you were sixteen didn’t matter at all, but you were so anguished then. Maybe it would have helped, if there’d been a beautiful boy. And now you’re happily married to a beautiful man, you have a beautiful son, but you worry about them. Are they healthy? Are they content? What if this or that disaster occurred? Life pushes you forward when you’d rather linger, but you really have no control over the accelerating pace or the final destination, coming so much faster and sooner than you ever expected. You’re getting closer every day, whether you like it or not.

 

Let’s say you accept that. Let’s say you don’t. Let’s say there’s a point where imagination fails you. But you haven’t reached it yet. Let’s just say.

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Tiniest Champagne 

Nick Mandernach

 

For no reason I was cruelest to Mom. I groaned when her hearing got bad, forgot birthdays, stole thirty-four thousand dollars. I knew I’d make it right, but didn’t know how. When she got her mouth cancer, I jumped on it. Makeup work dried up, so I left my apartment and boyfriend to be caregiver for the last months of her illness. Mom bought my ticket, set up a room in the back house, died the morning before I got there.

 

I loved my mom and want to tell you something about her. I want you to know how she fought with Spirit Airlines in the fall of ‘98.

 

The two of us were set to do Easter with my grandparents in Tulsa. Mom never got along with them because she wouldn’t walk in the light of God and faith saved my grandpa from cigarettes. The computer said our flight was delayed, which wasn’t a problem until they undid the delay and we were late by being on time. Mom downed two Fruit Roll-Ups and slammed her minivan into an airport lot compact space.

 

We ran in with bags smacking our thighs. Lateness put me on the edge of crying. Sorry to say, I called Mom dumb bitch. When we got to check-in, the guy said my rolling suitcase was too big and I’d have to tag it. Mom said fine. With both arms she tossed the bag at the high counter. It didn’t land the edge, so she tossed it twice.

 

“That’ll just be twenty-one dollars,” the guy said.

 

Mom asked how that was.

 

Spirit had a surcharge for baggage, the guy told us. His hair spiked so sharp it would spear blood if palmed. I’d do anything for him. I was lost from a young age.

 

“Just twenty-one,” Mom said.

 

I squeezed her hand.

 

“Fuel costs,” he said.

 

“Just twenty-one. Why’d you say just?”

 

He raised his hands. “Just the price.”

 

She lost it and pounded the desk. Just Just Just. Mom informed the man of her marital and financial status and called him a traitor. A traitor to what? An announcement came over the intercom: they were boarding for Tulsa. The bag check guy lifted his neck like he was listening to a dark omen and we should too. I slapped her elbow. “That’s us,” I said. The first time I betrayed her. She bit her lip and handed a card over. Mickey Mouse waving at the stars.

 

Mom didn’t look at me when we loaded on the plane and didn’t help me when I struggled with the seat belt buckle. Once we reached altitude the steward rolled the aisles with drinks. Me, I ordered Sprite, mostly for the ice. I loved the tube kind the planes used. I’d stick my tongue in the cold hole and blow in them and roll them around my teeth. I’ve seen that ice nowhere else. The steward asked Mom’s order. She groaned. “I’ll do the champagne.”

 

“Great,” the steward said. “That’ll just be nineteen dollars.”

 

I checked seats around us for an air marshal.

 

Mom reached for her buckle and unlatched it, then dug her wallet out from her back pocket.

 

“That’s fine, thanks,” she said and handed over her card. He gave her a tiny bottle with a short Styrofoam cup. Whatever you’re thinking, half it.

 

She unwound the wire from its neck, tore the foil top, and dumped the shot of champagne. She drank it for ten minutes. Every sip crackled against her upper lip. She looked at the desert under us, wondering who knows what.

 

Finished, she put the little bottle upside down in the cup. Instead of putting the cup in the pouch in front of her, she stuffed it in her crowded purse. A stewardess came by with a trash bag, and Mom flagged her down. “Hi,” Mom said. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t get a champagne I ordered.”

 

The lady apologized and brought another little bottle. Mom gave her a thumbs up and undid the wire ring and tore the foil. She took out the SkyMall magazine and looked through the magic items. Digital clocks with holograms, inflatable movie screens, an encyclopedia with the whole world on one CD. When she finished her drink, she put the bottle upside down in the cup and clacked it all in her purse.

 

Mom hit the attendant button a few times, and the first steward came back. “Hi,” he said. “Never got that champagne.”

 

“Didn’t I?” The steward looked us over. I had visions of prison yards. Maybe Mom and I would share a cell. He went through his little receipts when the plane jostled, and mom’s purse tipped, knocking a bottle out. The steward looked, but I covered the cup with my tiny feet, like I was stretching out. Growing girl. He shuffled to the back and got her that little champagne. Yes, he did.

 

When mom poured this one, she offered me a sip. The foam sharpened to liquid in my mouth and burned my cheeks so bad, I thought the meat was coming off.

 

“Ma’am, minors can’t have alcohol,” the steward said.

 

“Grand Canyon!” Mom slapped my arm. The majestic gap filled the whole window. Red and brown rock cut away, and we saw miles into the Earth. I tried to imagine what could make something like that. Time, maybe. If you haven’t seen the Grand Canyon, I recommend it. One of nature’s wonders in my opinion.

 

There was just a big article on Spirit. The court ruled against bag charges in a class action lawsuit. “Junk fees,” the Attorney General said, also “exploitative.” Mom never got to read that. I was up for a piece of the settlement because of a shoot I did in Atlanta. The lawyers made me fill out an online form. Eight million they owed us, but the check came in six dollars and twelve cents.

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Elegy Ending with a Slice of Sour-Cream-and-Raisin Pie

Joe Wilkins

 

A boy wants to break
the world in half and put it
in his pocket. All through the eulogy

 

I thumbed a cracked mussel shell
pulled the day before from the shallows
beneath the bridge,

 

the shell’s interior curves so perfect
and slick I could almost feel
the mother-of-pearl—

 

lavender and rose, cream
at the thin, crumbling edge. My collar
itched. I didn’t like the golden

 

corduroys I had to wear,
hand-me-downs from an older
cousin, and still my only pants without

 

mended knees or a patched ass.
The priest needed the cup,
so I held it up. I didn’t know the man

 

who died. He was my grandfather’s age,
which worried me, but not enough
to slow me down

 

(wasn’t my first funeral, wouldn’t
be my last). I shucked
my starched vestments faster

 

than all the other altar boys,
and so was first in line
for a chipped-beef sandwich and pie.

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UPON GOOGLING AN OLD BOYFRIEND AND FINDING HIS OBITUARY

Terry Godbey 

 

Eleven years ago 

he checked outta here, 

dead at 58, 

just as I emerged 

from a cancer chrysalis. 

 

No mention of a wife 

or children, 

and no more chances 

for me to apologize 

for stomping on his heart 

40 years ago. 

 

The absence of kids 

stings a bit 

since his mention early on 

of having little Terrys with me 

was what sent me running, 

still a little Terry myself. 

I wasn’t expecting a man 

to want to stick around. 

Even I didn’t care that much 

for my company. 

 

I don’t remember 

breaking up 

or explaining anything. 

I just stopped  

answering my phone, 

heard his motorcycle  

stirring the summer night 

outside my apartment 

where I was kissing my new man. 

We ran into each other  

at the newspaper where we worked, 

wound up at the same parties 

where his eyes followed me everywhere 

and I accepted his cocaine 

but nothing else. 

  

He moved to D.C., where I heard he crashed  

his motorcycle, struggled with a brain injury, 

but in his 20s he was a sun-burnished god, 

all muscle and quick to smile. 

Good with his hands, he had built  

his own catamaran, and we sailed 

on the Banana River 

and in the Atlantic  

amid pods of dolphins. 

 

His sister left a cryptic online remembrance: 

Unfortunately, he took the wrong path in life. 

So many questions 

and no answers. 

See, here I go again, making it all about me. 

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