Category: Literary Features

Driving East at Christmastime

My father is outside the car, hugging the guardrail on the I-35 bridge. Cars are honking. He’s under a lot of stress, Mom says, like we haven’t noticed this festering since Thanksgiving. We’re driving home from Fargo. The sun blinks through pregnant clouds, melting snow on the shoulder. Stay here, Mom says, like there’s someplace we can go. The car idles.

 

Hey, fag. My older brother, Kyle, punches my shoulder. I twist to return his blows, and he spits a Skittle that strikes the bridge of my nose. I swing at his face, but he ducks and pounds my thigh and yells, Charlie horse! My brother, Kyle, only fifteen, already a hyper-masculine caricature of his younger self, the Kyle who only a year ago planned D&D campaigns with me, whom I once believed would protect me from anything.

 

I can see Dad’s shoulders heave. Mom crouches next to him, rubs his back. Whispers into his hair.  Kyle unbuckles his seatbelt and climbs over me and into the driver’s seat, kicking at my face.

 

I ask him what he’s doing.

 

Getting away from you, he says.

 

I catch Mom’s eye, and she winks. It’s going to be okay, she’s saying, to all of us, to everyone on the freeway. My mother, the steadfast. Unfazed, as always. It’s going to be okay. I climb into the front passenger seat.

 

Dad is yelling at the clouds. Under stress. This all began when Grandpa—Mom’s dad—died. We were packing for the annual trip to visit Dad’s family in Wautoma when Mom’s phone rang. A stroke. Seventy but healthy. So of course, plans change. We head west instead of east. In Fargo, Dad called the office and said he wouldn’t be in on Monday. On Monday, they said come in or don’t come back. And, of course, he couldn’t. And he said as much, but they wouldn’t back down. So then there’s the stress of holidays plus death plus, now, what we can and can’t afford. He said we’ll need to cancel our summer vacation. That Christmas might be leaner this year. And Mom doesn’t even blink. A rock, always.

 

And then there was the flat tire on his motorcycle. The car broken into, the driver-side window smashed (still covered with fluttering plastic and duct tape). All this in the last month. So of course, after he received pity money from his widowed mother-in-law; and traffic has been stop-and-go for four hours; and at last there’s a respite, a sigh of collective relief: finally, let’s floor it; and then brake lights re-emerge like angry fireflies—of course he was going to snap.

 

It began with yelling, with cussing. And Mom whispering sternly: Jeffrey. And then he started smacking the roof, the dashboard. Alternating open palm and closed fist. And Kyle and me in the back seat, silent for once. And then he stormed onto 35 and left the door hanging open; 35, packed with its slow and stopped cars and Minnesota plates and Minnesota Nice yelling and honking, and he’s on the guardrail letting God know.

 

Cars begin veering around us, the gap between their fenders and our bumper shrinking with each pass. Kyle engages the emergency lights like he knows what he’s doing. He’s quieted, and the space in the car seems endless. I’m startled to feel lonely, to feel nostalgic for the times these trips weren’t so miserable, when we would lean our heads together and he’d read from The Two Towers or Dune.

 

I crack the window and press my face against the cool glass. Dad hasn’t moved. A cop pulls behind us on the shoulder, lights flashing.

 

Good afternoon, sir, Mom says. He’s just stressed is all, just stressed. You can understand. The cop’s stride is measured, and he hasn’t said a word. He tips his cap. My brother is holding his breath. There’s tension in the car I can’t grasp. It’s all above me, like I’m submerged beneath the Mississippi. But I’m buoying toward the surface, about to break through: Kyle’s hands are on the wheel. Everything registers at once like oxygen flooding my lungs. My parents on the shoulder. The cop, mid-stride. The car casting its long shadow across all lanes of stagnant traffic. The smell of a warm winter, of exhaust fumes and evergreens.

 

This is what will happen: Kyle will put the car in gear. We’ll jolt forward, the pedals unfamiliar beneath his adolescent foot. He’ll swerve, smash the taillight ahead of us. And we will be rear-ended by the impatience behind us. And the cop will ticket everyone, and traffic will crawl and crawl and crawl, and my father on the bridge will call a tow truck.

 

But first, the cop approaches my window. He instructs Kyle to turn off the vehicle, to please remove the keys from the ignition. But first, the sky sears open and heavy raindrops spill down. And my father, this large, aching man screaming at the sky, feels he has rent the heavens. He releases the railing and sits on the shoulder. He begins to laugh. It will be okay.

Share

Winter Solstice

Disruptive storms gather from and to
Even at the bottoms of eternal sequoias;
Hungry-lunging waters, numb-thumbed, virtues
Strongly up-lifting,
Strong spiritual boosts
Upon a time. The discerning solstice empties
The full tank of Morning without fading beam
Of overcast mauve, when the sky brightens to
Its generous gift. —Halt! Ever more chatter reveals
The only solstice of the renewable milky way.

Share

Beta Males

Share

After the Poetry Reading, a Condom

 

 

 

 

 

 

We publish an extra poem this week in celebration of the arrest of a suspect

in the murder of four people in the Seminole Heights neighborhood of Tampa, Florida.

Gianna Russo wrote this loving picture of her neighborhood, and we accepted it,

before these murders began. We hoped that the perpetrator would be found

so that the casual vivacity of the area could be restored before we published

the poem. Today we hope this nightmare has ended for our friends in Tampa,

and we celebrate the joie de vivre of that area with Russo’s work.

 

I stepped away from the bar at Ella’s where the din is handcrafted and foams up to a roar,
 as the famed poet served us his lines succulent and Southern.
With his Rhett Butler accent, the poet summoned Old Uncle Walt.
So Whitman came among us with his taste for bacony bodies and sweat-odorous men,
draped his arm over the poet and reached for the jalapeno poppers.

 

I stepped away from the cherry martini that had me teetering
on those heels I hardly ever wear anymore since they kick up my bursitis,
 but I’d put in my contacts, too, so what the hell.
I stepped away from the wine-rinsed laughter and the joke I told
—if a place could have its pants down, this one does—
this mugshot of a neighborhood where I live
 with its one long avenue stretched like a nekked leg.

 

And what about that woman in the towel once, right there across the street,
three a.m., outfoxed by the absence of a bathtub and her mislaid name?
Of course the cops were called and they folded her like a burrito into the back seat:
 just another Tuesday night in Seminole Heights.

 

The night was just three beers along when I left the julep-voiced poet
 singing of Lincoln Continentals cruising the side streets, their flopping mufflers.
I walked into the after-rain on Shadowlawn Street.
Twilight sorted its lingerie in the leaves, rosy and white,
and I tottered down the block toward my car, while in all the yards,
confederate jasmine mounted the fences, bouquets on the bridal veil bushes shuddered
 and the magnolia tree came inside each mammoth blossom.

 

Then just as I leaned to unlock the door, I looked down at the old brick street
and saw it lying flat in the dirt, the deflated jellyfish of lust:
 used, tossed over, open-mouthed, smiling,
it was the remains of someone’s poem, or at least the start of one.

 

Share

Witness to a chain of bursting

balloons filled with chirping finches.

I liked to make things up in the dark, bright

 

yarn spider webs, name your electric

mood disease a super-power. Instead,

 

the nightmare of your mania:

constant smell of burning feathers,

 

last year’s untouched dinners. A ghost

now buried in moss, now gone for days

 

in the snow, coked up and knocked up,

your exquisite moth chocolate eyes,

 

mimesis of a child who was a little prone

to trouble. I could hardly remember you.

 

I learned to sow the medicine, delicate,

and learned how someone doesn’t die

 

but fragments into hydra,

rakshasa or Ophelia,

 

minister of mystic meth-trips

down the silver-tunnels of the soul.

 

Sister, the day you walked out of

the labyrinth and into the kitchen

 

was not a day, but years of impossible

breakfasts. We used to joke about

 

you breaking dishes. What marvel

made apocalypse stormed through

 

you, what storm always in you,

what storm you

held.

Share

Bootleg

Just for laughs, me and my cousins grab one of Violet’s wigs and we dress baby Matty up like Elvis Presley. We’re on the back porch—smoking Violet’s dope, drinking beer we bought with Charles’s fake ID—when the B-52’s come on the radio. Everybody gets caught up in Private Idaho. We forget all about tiny Elvis. He takes a nosedive out of the porch swing and starts to wail like a wounded bobcat. Charles and his younger brother, Clay, head for the woods at the first sign of trouble.

 

Matty reaches out and hollers, “Budger, Budger!” It’s Matty’s word for brother, which is what he calls me even though I’m really his uncle. I pick him up. His lip is busted; there’s blood on his face and his Elvis-do is sideways.

 

Behind us, the screen door opens and slams shut. My big sister, Violet. She’s skin and bones. A red bandanna covers her bald head, and her eyebrows are painted on with a pencil.

 

“Give him here,” she says.

 

“I got him,” I say. “Go back in and lie down.”

 

“Let me have my boy.”

 

I hand him over but he’s too heavy for her so I help her sit on the steps.

 

“Run and get a bottle of Mercurochrome and some cotton balls.”

 

I don’t move. I stare at the tree trunk we use for a table and the ashtray on top. It’s overflowing with butts and roaches. Beside it sits Violet’s medicine bottle. It should be filled with weed, but it’s every bit as empty as the Old Milwaukee cans scattered around the porch.

 

“Go on. Run.”

 

I go, but for a time I stand on the other side of the screen door watching Violet rock Matty and sing to him. She doesn’t really sing so much as she just hums along with Have You Ever Seen The Rain, but it works and Matty stops crying.

 

I’m rummaging through the medicine cabinet when I hear mini-explosions coming from the woods. Charles and Clay are setting off cherry bombs. They sound like little cannons. I close my eyes and imagine one of those Civil War battles we’re always hearing about in school. Everybody likes to say it was brother against brother. I see Charles and Clay dressed in matching uniforms. Even though they’re on the same side, they still fire their baby cannons at one another because they’re such assholes.

 

Charles always has a pocket full of fireworks. Black Cats, Silver Foxes, Smoke Grenades and M-80s. Every night when we’re walking out of the woods, he drums up one last bottle rocket—like it’s a big surprise—and hands it to Clay. He hands Clay his lighter, too, and lets him fire off the final one of the night. It’s always the best.

 

I spot the Mercurochrome. It’s buried in the medicine cabinet. Stuck on a shelf in the middle of Violet’s painkillers. I pull it out and put it in my pocket, then I study Violet’s medicine, picking up one bottle after another, reading the labels and staring at the pills inside. They’re shaped and colored like freaky planets from an alternate universe, and they’ve got outer space names to match: Percocet, Darvon, Elavil. Useless against Violet’s pain. It’s weed she needs.

 

Charles knows a guy. He sells bootleg and fireworks. Other shit, too. Like weed. His name is Commodore and sometimes this Commodore will make a trade with you if you’re in a bad way. Last year in eighth grade, Tommy Larkin got a box of Roman Candles for a busted-up Zebco rod and reel. I calculate the value of a day spent on Planet Percocet, or an afternoon rolling around in the purple haze of a distant galaxy called Darvon. I come up with one million dollars. I convert that number to an earthly sum fitting an ex-con named Commodore who lives with his one-legged mom in a rusty trailer at the dead end of a dirt road on the other side of Lively Creek. I figure a dime bag, two at the most.

 

But I need Charles to get to Commodore, and King Charles doesn’t need anything from me. What stands between us now is a bicycle, beat up something awful with most of the green paint flaked off and a chain that won’t stay on. But it might as well be a brand new Cadillac for all the weight it carries between me and Charles.

 

“You two will be just like brothers.”

 

That’s what Violet said the day she told me Charles and Clay were moving in.

 

I said, “He’s already got a brother, thank you very much. And so do you.”

 

“Now, don’t be that way, honey. You’ll see, you two will be just like Dad and Uncle Willis.”

 

We keep a picture over the mantel, of Dad and Uncle Willis with their arms around each other. They’re both wearing mirrored aviators, t-shirts and dog tags. It’s the day they shipped out. A Pall Mall hangs from Uncle Willis’s lips. Dad is smiling.

 

Uncle Willis did all right. He made it out. He came home. Dad didn’t. After Uncle Willis got back he started drinking and running around with married women. He finally got himself shot and killed by Tanya Clark’s husband, Hoyt. Charles and Clay shuffled around a lot after that. They went up north and lived with our old lady aunt who was rumored to be a Catholic. Then down to Mississippi to a foster family who raised baby goats. Last year they came back to Georgia and moved in with me and Violet.

 

Charles showed up wearing Uncle Willis’s aviators and his dog tags. “You’re every bit the spitting image,” Violet said. Then she said it again, “Every bit.”

 

I decided I didn’t much care for the looks of him. What right did he have? Showing up looking like that and talking like that? Telling his stories about that fishing trip on Nickajack Lake when Uncle Willis let him drive the boat, or that one time when they went to Atlanta to see the Braves play and spent the night in a Howard Johnson’s with a swimming pool. And Violet hanging on every word. I never said anything about it, but that’s what I thought. What right did he have?

 

I cram Violet’s pills in my pocket and head back to the porch. Matty grins and reaches out. Violet’s taken off his wig and fixed his hair so he looks like Matty again. She hands him over. I doctor his lip and he starts to wail. But I walk him around the yard, and we count the lightning bugs that are starting to shine.

 

In the woods, Charles fires off the first bottle rocket of the night. It barely makes it above the treetops, and it’s nothing more than a flicker against a sky that’s just beginning to fade. But when I point it out to Matty, he laughs and he claps, then he reaches for the empty sky and hollers for more.

 

—

 

The next morning we’re sitting there in our underwear eating Pop-Tarts when Clay starts in. “How come I can’t go?” he wants to know. “I’ll mind you. I won’t talk back.”

 

Charles ignores him. He licks his saucer clean, then walks over to the sink and tosses it in. I get up and follow him.

 

Clay won’t let it go. “Is it because I sassed you yesterday? Is it because I sassed you in front of Hub Grant and all them?”

 

Charles still doesn’t answer. He turns on the water and goes to town on last night’s supper dishes. I cooked—Beanee Weenees and Tater Tots—so Charles is supposed to clean. That’s our deal. But he barely finishes his own saucer before he shuts the water off and turns to look at me.

 

Wearing those aviators, and with that smirk on his face, he’s every bit the spitting image. All that’s missing is the Pall Mall.

 

“Explain your brilliant plan to me one more time, Einstein.”

 

I say, “I reckon we could trade the pills to that guy you know. We could get a couple of dime bags for Violet. We could trade our goods to Commodore. We could do it for Violet.”

 

“Our goods? You’ve been watching too much Starsky & Hutch.”

 

He’s leaning against the sink with his arms folded and his legs crossed. The pills are on the table.

 

Clay picks up a bottle and gives it a shake, but Charles snaps his fingers and points to the table so Clay puts the pills back. Then Charles tosses him the dishtowel and Clay heads to the sink. He lays into the supper dishes while Charles crosses to the table and sits down. He opens up each bottle, dumps out the pills and runs his hand over them like they’re a pile of rock candy.

 

I take a seat across from him.

 

“You don’t know the first thing about it,” he says. “Commodore sells fireworks and bootleg. What makes you think he’d be interested in this big load of bullshit?” He picks up a hand full of pills and lets one or two spill through his fingers. He looks at me, but all I see is my own twisted face reflected in his aviators.

 

Then I think about that bicycle. Lately, I’ve been thinking about that bicycle a lot. Every time I look at Charles, that’s what I see.

 

The fight was over a year ago, soon after Charles and Clay moved in. At the time, I walked away from it feeling good about things. After a while, it hardly ever crossed my mind anymore, and when it did, I was convinced that I got the best of Charles. Then Violet got sick, and I found myself recollecting on a regular basis. Me and Charles rolling down the stone steps on the back porch, the pain in my wrist when I fell on it and broke it. The feeling of satisfaction, even joy you might say, when I jumped up and swung my other arm and made contact with Charles’s lip. His aviators flew off and in the middle of it all I stood there trying to remember if I’d actually ever seen his eyes before. I was sure I had but I just couldn’t recall. That pause gave Charles the upper hand and he was on me again, then we were both on the ground once more. I was on my back, and Charles, the same age as me but a lot bigger, was on top of me with his fist pulled back ready to do some damage. But he didn’t slug me. Instead he started to cry. He put both fists against my chest, and I couldn’t move. He held me there, dripping tears and blood all over my face.

 

I push my chair back and get up from the table. I walk over to the sink where Clay is almost finished with the dishes. Then I walk back to the table and sit down.

 

“What makes you think Commodore wouldn’t be interested?” I say, “You don’t know. Bootleg’s no better than pills. Especially to some loser shacked up with his mom in a rusty doublewide. You don’t have to be an Einstein to figure that one out, Einstein.”

 

“What about me,” Clay hollers from the sink. “I’m part of it. Don’t forget about me.”

 

We ignore him.

 

Charles says, “And tell me this, what do you plan on saying to Commodore? Howdy Commodore, pleased to meet you, would you like to buy some dope off me and my cousin?”

 

We sit there cussing and trading Einsteins while Clay finishes the dishes.

 

Soon as he turns off the water, we hear it. It sounds like the dishwater leaving the sink, but it’s not. It’s Violet breathing in the other room, low and gurgly. It keeps going long after the dirty dishwater has gone down the drain, and Clay is standing by the table with the dishtowel in his hand, waiting for a word or a look or anything from Charles.

 

Nobody says anything.

 

Violet sucks in a fast and deep breath like she’s been under water, then she coughs.

 

“Yuck,” Clay says.

 

“Don’t be a dick,” Charles tells him. Then he says to me, “Well, put your shoes on, asshole, unless you plan on going to see Commodore in your bare feet.”

 

I go to my room and throw on yesterday’s smelly t-shirt and a pair of tennis shoes, then I sit on the bed.

 

I guess you could say the fight was my fault. Like I said, Charles and Clay had just moved in. It was summer. We were on the back porch. Clay was playing Superman. Or maybe it was Batman. I just remember he was wearing a towel like it was a cape, and he would jump off the side of the porch, again and again, with his ratty-ass cape flapping behind him.

 

I was shelling corn for the chickens. Charles had wandered off someplace. He was supposed to help with the corn. That was the deal. The last thing Violet told us when she left for the flower shop that morning was to shell all the corn in the crib. “All of it,” she said. “I mean it, boys. Don’t burn down the house. Don’t kill each other. And finish shelling the corn. Besides that, I don’t really care. Is that too much to ask?”

 

But soon as Violet left so did Charles, and I sat there shelling corn by myself. The kernels were hard and dried. Perfect for shelling. By noon I’d half way filled the oil drum at the end of the porch. I got up to walk to the corncrib for another bushel, that’s when I saw Charles. He carried a greasy chain in one hand; with the other he was pushing a piece-of-shit bike up the drive. It used to be green, now it was mostly rust. I figured that’s why whoever owned it had tossed it, or why they wouldn’t much care that Charles had come in and stole it right out from under their noses. He wheeled it up to the porch and stopped, held out his arms in a big, showy gesture, with a shitty grin on his face that said, Now I’ve got a bike and you don’t.

 

I went to the barn, filled up my basket and hauled it back to the porch. Charles occupied himself with the bike chain, Clay kept jumping, and I shelled my way through the rest of the corn.

 

By dark, the oil drum was finally full. I got up to go to the kitchen for a glass of tea when Charles said, “Hey man, while you’re up, how about bringing me a Coke?”

 

I stood there watching Clay jump and watching Charles mess with the bike chain. I bent down and picked a kernel up off the floor. It was shriveled to the size of a BB. “Hey man,” I said, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”

 

It wasn’t planned. I’d never thought of it or practiced it. The words just came out in a perfect imitation of Charles’s voice.

 

He stood. He didn’t come at me. Not at first. It wasn’t exactly a smile that played around his lips. It wasn’t a smirk either. He wasn’t the spitting image anymore.

 

He shrugged and started to turn away.

 

It came as natural to me as baiting a hook or wringing a chicken’s neck. The kernel flew from my fingertips like it had been fired from a slingshot. It hit Uncle Willis’s aviators on the upper right side by Charles’s nose, and it barely made a sound. One small speck of mirror is all. Damage the size of a fruit fly. It was nothing. But to Charles it was something.

 

A few days after it happened, Hub Grant came by to pick up the oil drum full of corn. He works at the Co-Op. He grinds the corn into chicken feed for us.

 

Violet was at the flower shop. It was hot, so Clay was trying to work up a breeze in the porch swing, fanning himself with a Frisbee. Charles had wandered off again. I helped Hub load the drum into the back of his truck as best I could with my messed up wrist. He asked me what happened to it. I told him I fell. He didn’t ask me anything else about it. He got in his truck to leave and stuck his head out the window.

 

“Hey buddy, I meant to ask you, how’d you like that bicycle?”

 

I was standing on the steps; the truck was parked a couple of feet away.

 

“You know … the one your cousin fixed up for you. It used to belong to one of my boys. Charles found it in the shed behind the Co-Op. Said he wanted you to have something nice. We made a trade. I’m gonna raise some hogs on that piece of land I own behind the post office. I need a fence. Charles is over there right now, creosoting the fence posts and laying them in the ground. Lordy, can you imagine? In this heat? You ask me, I sure got the better end of that deal.”

 

I still didn’t say anything.

 

“Well, you boys stay out of jail now.”

 

“We’ll try,” Clay said from the porch swing. “Come back and see us.”

 

“I surely will.”

 

He drove off.

 

It wasn’t in the tool shed, or in the corncrib, or anywhere else in the barn. I walked across the pasture and down to the little holler where everybody dumps their broken shit. It wasn’t there either. I stopped at Tommy Larkin’s house. They weren’t home but I looked in their carport anyway. Tommy’s older brother Hank steals stuff. Even from people he likes. Tommy calls it a friendly five-finger discount. The bike wasn’t there. It wasn’t anywhere. I looked until dark. Charles never brought it up again. Neither did I. I kept waiting for him to tell Violet what an asshole I’d been. I figured I see him riding the bike one day, popping wheelies and showing off.  None of that happened. Then Violet got sick.

 

Now I worry over Violet’s life and that fight with Charles like they’re the same. When I’m not thinking about one, I’m thinking about the other.

 

I get up off the bed and go out to the living room. I pull a chair up to the couch and hold Violet’s hand. She’s sleeping, and Matty is sitting on the floor with Clay. They’re pretending to play checkers, but mostly Matty just likes to stick the checkers in his mouth because he’s teething.

 

I tell Clay, “Don’t let him swallow one of those, do you hear?”

 

He doesn’t answer.

 

“Do you hear?”

 

“I hear you, I’m sittin’ right here. I’m not retarded.”

 

Charles comes out and says, “Don’t be such a dick, Clay.” Then he grabs the pills off the table and goes out and waits for me on the porch.

 

I hold Violet’s hand as long as I can. It’s as light as air, like a quail feather or a June bug. Something that could float away as soon as I let it go.

 

Charles hops off the porch and heads down the drive towards the main road. When he crosses the highway and steps into the woods—woods that are as thick and overgrown as any jungle anywhere—when I lose sight and sound of him completely, I finally let go of Violet’s hand, and get up to run after him.

Share

Tesseract

We admitted we were powerless

FORECASTING THE DEVELOPMENT OF A FEW STRONG
TO VIOLENT LONG-TRACK TORNADOES

this is called visitation.

 

I made a family of the towers. The one with a heart in her center and the pointed tips of a hat, the mother. In the summer weeks that were his we rode in the car for an hour, backpacks with coloring books and dinosaurs, quarters for vending machines.

 

We followed the power lines out to the river, past signs for evacuation routes. Gas stations with tanning beds, boiled nuts in greasy bags, bathrooms we weren’t allowed to go in. We pretended to work, typing newsletters on typewriters, wearing headsets not connected to the phone.

 

I want to be involved in raising the child/ren.

*

We came to believe

THEY WILL RAPIDLY BECOME SEVERE WITH THE POTENTIAL

 

Only her mother could talk about him in a natural way

 

*

 

Restore us to sanity

THIS IS A PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION

A straight line is not the shortest distance between two points

 

I believe visitation is in the child/ren’s best interest.

*

 

We made a fearless moral inventory of ourselves

STORMS WILL SHIFT

 

“Just what was your father’s line of business?”
“Some kind of scientist, wasn’t he?”

 

*

 

Another human being

THE POTENTIAL TO PRODUCE

 

“When would you go, if you could time travel?”
“I’d go back and see my parents when they were younger.”

 

*

 

We’re entirely ready

THE MOST INTENSE STORMS ARE EXPECTED

 

I woke up when a man in a black cowboy hat got into the car parked next to ours. The familiar. A slamming door. My sister, asleep in her car seat, a slow drip of apple juice, crushed crackers against her legs. The sign from the building made a pink blur on the back window. Hours later, my mother returned. She smelled like someone else.

 

I have a safe place for the child/ren to stay during visitation.

 

*

 

To remove

A HIGH RISK

 

My mother asked about my dog. A name of some vague relative.

 

She would be happier in the countryside, without fences, away from the apartment with two bedrooms and twin beds.

Years later I learned she was bred, litter after litter. When I was sixteen, my mother pointed out the house as we drove by—a fence and a chain, the grass worn away.

 

*

 

We made a list

PORTIONS OF
MUCH OF
ALABAMA NORTHWEST GEORGIA SOUTHEAST MISSISSIPPI SOUTHERN MIDDLE TENNESSEE

 

*

 

To do so would injure them or others

STRONG LOW LEVEL AND DEEP
LAYER VERTICAL SHEAR

You and the child/ren will know when you can spend time together.

 

She knew that if her father could not get her through
the wall
he would stay

 

*

 

We continued to take

MODERATELY UNSTABLE

 

I will support the child/ren as ordered by the court to the best of my ability.

*

 

To carry that out

LISTEN FOR LATER STATEMENTS

The court will send you a letter

 

“Do you think things always have an explanation?”

 

 

*

 

To carry this message

FUTURE FORECASTS MAY EXPAND

 

This is not a fairy tale.

 

I swear that I am able

to take care of the child/ren
listed above.

I am

a fit and proper
person.

 

Works Cited
Alcoholics Anonymous: Big Book. 4th Edition. A.A. Grapevine, Inc. 2001. Print.

 

“Figure 1. Single circuit (a) and double circuit (b) transmission line towers for 154kV.” ResearchGate.www.researchgate.net/figure/269101284_fig1_Figure-1-

Single-circuit-a-and-double-circuit-b-transmission-line-towers-for-154-kV

 

“Form PS-06: How to Ask for a Visitation.” Rev. 8/08. Alabama Administrative Office of Courts. eforms.alacourt.gov/Do%20It%20Yourself%20Forms/ Petition%20for%20Visitation.pdf

 

L’Engle, Madeline. A Wrinkle in Time. New York : Square Fish, 2007. Print.

 

NOAA. “Public Severe Weather Outlook.” NWS Storm Prediction Center. Norman, OK.

0423 AM CDT Wed Apr 27 2011. www.spc.noaa.gov/products/outlook/ archive/2011/pwo_201104271035.html

 

NOAA. “Particularly Dangerous Situation (PDS): Tornado Watch 235.” NWS Storm Prediction Center. Norman, OK. 145 PM CDT Apr 27 2011. www.spc.noaa.gov/products/watch/2011/ww0235.html

 

Hartley, P. “HVDC Transmission: Part of the Energy Solution?,” James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, Rice University, May 2003.

 

Siemens. “Typical Transmission Line Structures for approx.. 2000 MW.” www.energy.siemens.com/br/pool/hq/power- transmission/HVDC/applications-benefits/benefits-hvdc-4-b_463.jpg

Share

Dirty Old Man’s Ode to Secondhand Smoke

Secondhand smoke does for him
what madeleines did for Proust.
At the carwash he lingers near
a woman puffing on a cigarette

waiting for the conveyor to disgorge
her SUV. He’s back at his house
with his chain-cigar-smoking father
and chain-cigarette-smoking mother

and all the windows closed because
the air conditioning is always running.
He goes over to the woman and asks
her, politely, to blow smoke in his face,

the way Bette Davis does in the movies.
She looks at him, mutters something
and walks away, taking his house
and his mother and father with her.

Share

Salvio: A Short Story

Mary Margaret Makepeace Bonifacio, age 82, passed from this earth December 13, 1974. Mary-Maggie was know for her rapt affections for crewelwork, Perry Como, houseplants, and public television; and for her marinated five-bean salad. She leaves behind her only child, Salvio Bonifacio. No services will be held. Please do not visit Salvio, or call him on the phone. Please.

 

Salvio had wrestled with the wording of the thing, composing it in his mind even as the ambulance, red swirling lights turning the early morning frost hibiscus pink, carried his mother away. He had held her hand while he dialed the emergency number, feeling its coolness and knowing she was gone, wondering when it would turn wooden and stiff, wondering why he was calling at all for help, why it was necessary to involve the authorities, wondering if any droplet of her being remained inside the failed body, evaporating, condensing. Knowing he owed her this rightness.

 

He typed the obituary onto lined mint green paper that he found in the drawer of her vanity, wrote the required two-dollar check, and put both in an envelope, addressed to the newspaper, care of Deaths and Notices. Please. He did not want to shake hands with weepy, old strangers, did not need flowers brought to the house, did not want visitors perched at the edge of the yellow sofa, offering to do anything at all that might help him through this difficult time, laying out cold cuts (slices of dead bird rolled tight like fingers), sweating cheese, and knuckles of raw cauliflower on the sideboard.  Please, he had typed.  Please. Don’t.

 

One stamp in the desk drawer, one crack beneath the front door, just enough daylight for sending his message to the moon.

 

—

 

Three months gone, Mary-Maggie, one quarter of a year like a wedge of pie left malingering on the countertop. On the living room rug mail accrued, vomited through the tiny brass mouth, an ever-expanding peninsula of bills and notices and Chinese food menus, beneath those a reef of condolence cards.

 

Milk bottles festered on the porch, small, foamy stalagmites. For a time, neighbors had brought lasagna dinners and foil-shrouded banana loaves, setting them on the welcome mat when he declined to answer the door. Gleeful raccoons gorged, then mice upon the leavings, and roaches upon the final, microscopic remains.

 

Then: there was no more light, no electricity for the television, the can opener, the toaster. Cans of frozen orange juice loosed long, sticky tongues down the front of the Frigidaire. Fish sticks grew green fur. A group came, church folk, with rakes and garbage bags and pruners. One of them turned on a car radio, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, whistled along, and hosed rot from the porch.

 

Another rang the doorbell, dark suit, bolo tie. Salvio, wrapped in the living room curtain, watched the man’s mustache, how it did not move while he talked, more than ninety days, your mother’s remains, not claimed, next of kin, Mr. Bonifacio you must answer this door, the mustache a bumper on a car, the guardrail on a terrifying curve. You have abandoned her, sir. Salvio stayed there, swaddled, until the dark suit went away.

 

And then Salvio took to his mother’s bed. He bid sweet sleep, as ever, to her jar of Pond’s cold cream, the green glass bottles of pills, the arrested clockwork of her oxygen tank, the porcelain shepherdess lamp (dim, but smiling).

 

He slept the kind of sleep that felt like falling into warm gravy, like a journey to the farthest place he could fathom, Saudi Arabia, or Tibet, like swimming all the way there and all the way back. Dreams grabbed at his ankles, slowing his strokes: faraway sounds of telephones, doorbells, bewildering questions from men in plaid suits and paisley ties, in striped suits and bowties the doorbell again, fists thumping against wood, Salvio, are you there, open the door, Salvio, I never promised you a rose garden, a droning near the front of his skull—then the sensation of being touched, of his mother’s thumb melting a blessing around and around into the skin of his forehead, Salvio, honey, wake up, a hovering that brought him to the surface, opened his eyes, lifted his hand to his brow.

 

She had touched him, he felt it.  Then he remembered.

 

The ambulance, the neighbors peering out through their bedroom curtains, my good golly it’s Salvio, he actually came outside, it’s been years—decades, maybe, that poor man, I’d forgotten he lived there, how old would he be, fifty-five, sixty years old, the paramedic shaking his head, I’m very sorry, sir, the unhurried departure to—where? What had the ambulance driver said, where did she go? Morgue, mortuary? Mars? If not his mother’s hand, what, then, had he felt?  Salvio sat up, fingering crust from his eyelids, wiping drool with the sheet’s embroidered edge. The only other being in the room, save Melinda Lee, his mother’s prized philodendron, sat atop a half-eaten cough drop, flexing its wings with some distress.

 

A bee, a honeybee (Apis, he recalled, mellifera, tatters of school Latin). Lucky he wasn’t stung, he thought, looking around the bed for a magazine to crush the pest. Finding nothing, he put his feet to the floor. Then he looked more closely, leaning over the bedside table. Pulsing its hind end, the poor thing labored to release its feet from the gummy Sucrets lozenge, each outsized effort producing a minute kazoo sound. Salvio had to respect the creature for trying so hard, for its frazzled industry. He admired the tidy subdivisions of its wings, the mustardy gold tucked into its leg sacs. Its banded abdomen reminded him of his mother’s hair, dyed dark molasses brown with bright, brassy stripes.

 

Free it, he decided. I will free this bee.

 

He found his mother’s magnifying glass, the one she used for crosswords back when she could still sit upright, and studied the problem. Force would sever its legs. He wanted to avoid that throbbing stinger, and not damage the wings. Submersion seemed unwise, as did melting the lozenge over flame. Dissolution, he theorized—yes, that might work.

 

Salvio mixed soapy water in the saucepan and borrowed a dropper from his mother’s ancient tincture of Merthiolate. He drizzled a gentle wash over the bee’s feet until, one delicate limb at a time, the little beast found liberty. The bee traced an astonished spiral above his head, finding a perch, eventually, upon one of Melinda Lee’s hoary leaves.

 

Tingles of comprehension passed through Salvio—the blessing on his forehead, the brown-and-yellow hairdo, the affinity for exotic foliage and throat remedies—his mother had not in death delivered to him a herald, a solemn, comforting seraph, but a smaller, less conventional envoy. She had sent a bee.

 

I understand, Mama, he said to the ceiling.  I understand.

 

Bees lived in groups, in colonies. It would need to find its family, could not survive alone in this house, this he knew. None of the old Queen Anne’s windows opened, except the tiny attic porthole at which Salvio knelt as a child, spying as the neighbors around them drank, and gardened, and mated, so confident of their privacy. He could prop open the window and calmly herd the bee, using one of his mother’s head scarves to guide it from behind, upstairs and into the pre-dawn sky.

 

This was the time of day he’d always liked best, no furious lawnmowers, no bawling toddlers, no boys on skateboards riding past, laughing at the Bonifacios’ pigweed lawn, their balding roof. Earlier, even, than the milkman in his belching truck. He climbed the attic stairs, reaching into the dark for the handrail, swatting at cobwebs. Several days’ rain had swelled the wood, so Salvio kicked, hard, again, and yet again, throwing his right knee and shoulder into the place where knob met jamb. He felt bruises, small raisins of pain, germinate along his joints—proud evidence. He was saving his mother’s messenger.

 

When the door gave way, Salvio fell backward halfway down the steps, not from impact, not from relief. It was the aroma (unexpected, pleasant, like opening drawers full of cathedral candles, warm wax and a sweet musk) that pushed him, the novelty of it in a space that usually smelled of mice. Then, balanced once more, Salvio heard the sound: to call it a hum used too few letters—three insufficient to capture the carbonated rise and fall, otherworldly, circular, an incantation made of a million fractal notes. He shone a flashlight. The bee, his bee, his mother’s bee, joined her song to the one in progress, her wings to the turbulence of bodies in motion, thousands of them, fused by some alternate form of gravity around the crystal chandelier his mother had installed in the unused attic years ago. A ballroom, my darling Salvio, is what we shall have. They crawled over each other, obscuring the bauble completely, seeking purchase and contact, some flying free of the scrum to measure its sum total.

 

Their sound swelled and throbbed as he entered the space: let us out let us out let us out let us let us out out out. The huddle seemed to still itself as he tiptoed to the round window. A coterie of bees followed him, one of them colliding with his ear, the nape of his neck, prodding him on, hustle up, move it along, time is ticking (hadn’t his father once cuffed his head so, move it, son, have a purpose in this life for God’s sake). He dared not swat in response. Salvio wiped away brittle webs with his sleeve, swept to the floor a pepper of dead gnats. As his hands met the oak mullions, four glass panes tumbled to the bare dirt below, and the frame yelped wide into the cool morning vapors.

 

Behind him: acceleration, a stirring madness. As the bees took flight, Salvio flattened himself to the attic floor, breathing their collective zephyr. No air traffic controller could have choreographed such maneuvers, he thought, watching them spin lace from atmosphere while following some sort of ancient wiring. The exodus took many minutes and made a vibration he felt in the puzzle of his spine. A few stragglers clung to the chandelier, disoriented, or perhaps too spent to travel. Salvio found a stack of discarded old Reader’s Digests, and using January 1973 as a chariot, shuttled tired bees, one at a time, to the porthole. He tipped the magazine gently to the sill, depositing them in the dust.

 

Where had the hale among them gone? And which was his mother’s ghost? Salvio ran back down the steps to the second-story bay window. There, hanging from the old elm’s least frail branch, assembled in the shape of Africa, teeming and tangling about eight feet above the sidewalk, he saw them. A mammoth snarl turned rosy by a klieg of early sun—the bees looked like grapes, almost edible. He stomach railed. Salvio opened a can of pork’n’beans (fifty-seven left, plus the sauerkraut, the chutney, and twenty-eight jars of okra) with a hammer and screwdriver, grabbed a spoon, and returned to his observation point.

 

A lone bicyclist tossed newspaper capsules onto driveway tongues. Jacob Dilwell, to whom his mother once wrote monthly checks for two dollars and fifty-seven cents (plus a one-dollar tip and a thank-you note for feeding their paper through the mail slot), paused beneath the bees, set one meaty tennis shoe on either side of his green Schwinn, put his hands on his hips, and stared upward, jaw slacked. He took a rolled paper from his bag, lobbing a forehand at a few low-flyers. The mass shifted in shape (like a slumbering, tossing bear, Salvio thought, or an inflating airship). Jacob tried again, jumping, connecting with the swarm’s underside, and knocked a handful of bees a few feet toward the street. A hue and cry, a warning from the dark, changeling blur—less of a peninsula now, more a coiled, taut motherland—every set of antennae pointed upward, every poison dart deployed towards earth, toward the boy, the stupid, stupid boy.

 

Hey, he tried to shout at Jacob, palms flat against the glass hey, don’t, don’t do that, you will hurt them, stop that, stop it now, but all he produced was orange spittle. Hey. Hey, stop! Jacob swung his bike in a wide bend and circled twice before wiping some sweat from his fat neck and pedaling away.

 

Salvio made binoculars of his hands and scanned for casualties. A few bodies languished on the flagstone walk—stunned, dead? Magpies, a pair of them, arrived at the scene and pecked at the fallen. He smacked at the window with his hands and flailed, wheeling his arms to scare them away, a frenzied scarecrow, don’t eat them, don’t eat them, and startled Mrs. Montieth, who had just stepped outside to retrieve her paper. She reciprocated with a confused wave, and adjusted her housecoat’s closure.

 

It was the four of them—Salvio, the birds, and shower-capped Mrs. Montieth—who witnessed, seconds later, the specter of Jacob Dilwell standing atop the pocked chrome of his handlebars, tennis racket held to the heavens, being powered toward the swarm at impressive speed by a skinny-legged accomplice.

 

Just before the racket made contact with the bees, Jacob unthroated a bellow—the deep-belly bray of a Viking at pillage—and leapt from the bike into the elm’s crisp arms.

 

Detonation followed: within seconds a buzzing thickness obscured the houses across Alcott street and darkened an otherwise vivid May morning. Jacob Dilwell, armpit impaled upon the remains of a diseased branch, wore a fuzzy armor of furious honeybees.

 

The screaming, oh, the screaming.  Had Jacob not flailed and thrashed, unleashing one shoe and a sprinkle of blood upon the shoulders of his minion, he might have remained in the tree for quite some time. Mrs. Montieth, who had raised five boys without the aid of their merchant marine father, positioned herself beneath Jacob and called out orders: Kick, boy, kick like hell, you hear?

 

Jacob did. He kicked the heel of his shoeless right foot against the willow’s trunk until, his supply of swear words exhausted, dropped to the asphalt and fainted.

 

Mrs. Montieth removed her shower cap and began wiping the insects from Jacob’s body, from her own arms, from the hills of his cheeks and forehead, batting as they dove and whined, as blood spread around them. Another neighbor (new, a car salesman, rumored to cultivate cannabis) arrived with his garden hose in tow and unleashed its pressure upon Jacob’s form. Mr. Toomey brought clean rags to press against the wounds; his basement tenant, an army reservist, took Jacob’s pulse. Someone dispatched the bicyclist to fetch Mrs. Dilwell, a school cafeteria cook. They, together, huddled over the calamity, hands in frantic concert, calling the boy’s name over and over again, shaking the lumps of his shoulders.

 

One bee, a solitary, wandering velvet diplomat, had visited Salvio, had come in peaceable confusion—and now this doom, this fracas. From the north arrived a keening ambulance, from the south, Jacob Dilwell’s plump mother and a quartet of younger siblings. Paramedics shoved aside the throng and scissored Jacob’s t-shirt away from his distended trunk. One medic hammered at the rising dough of his chest, the other breathed into his tumid mouth. Mrs. Dilwell, hands clasped over her own heart, nodded in time to the rescuers’ rhythm.  On the curb, head slumped to his knees, sat the skinny boy.

 

From the window, Salvio counted thirteen people in his front yard, seven in the street, and four, that he could see, standing on the nearby corner. The number swelled by two when a local news reporter, cameraman in tow, exited a Channel 8 van. Mrs. Montieth courted local fame by recounting, directly into a satellite-shaped microphone, the velocity and amplitude with which Jacob Dilwell approached the tree, the force with which he pummeled the bees. She described his plunge from above, the sound (like a half-dozen stuffed turkeys hitting linoleum) he made upon impact. When asked to describe his current state she said:  Oh, he’s bit half to death, you know, just plain bit to heck.

 

The number of vehicles expanded by one when Mr. Dilwell, a stonemason, settled his Dodge truck atop Mrs. Montieth’s juniper hedge and charged across the street. He bypassed his helpless wife, his son’s beleaguered body, the paramedics preparing for Jacob’s transport, and the reporter with her vanilla-custard hair. He clumped past Jacob’s friend, who (infectious, incurable idiocy, what was wrong with kids these days?) busied himself setting wounded bees aflame. Mr. Dilwell found his way to the Bonifacio’s front porch and threw his football fists against the screen, bellowing for Salvio’s audience: Goddammit, Bonifacio, come out here, come and see what your Wild Kingdom of a dump has done to my boy. Get out here and handle it like a man. I’ll have this property condemned. This has gone on long enough, by God. I know people, Bonifacio.

 

The mob’s energy attached itself to Mr. Dilwell and his demands. Salvio could not see his caller from the upstairs window, but felt in his metatarsals the man’s ire, his broad-backed vim. He did see the faces of at least two dozen bystanders (how the vicarious multiply themselves around tragedy) lift themselves to where he, framed by drawn-back lace curtains, peered right back down at them. Index fingers rose like missiles—the most scrutiny Salvio had endured since boyhood, since his father’s departure.

 

There he is, there’s Salvio, that’s him, his mother, she died around the holidays, I saw the ambulance, was it cancer, helluva thing, who knows, maybe she’d been gone for weeks, bad ticker, could be, ramshackle, destroying home values, strange lot they are, what a family, the father in prison all those years, died there in fact, you remember, the treasury scandal, embezzlement, never quite recovered, heart trouble, bedridden for ages, never let anyone help them out, crazy as billy goats, never mow the lawn, probably riddled with vermin.

 

Salvio backed away from the glass, from the speculations and truths.  He heard the reporter at his front door: Mr. Bonifacio, could we have a word? Salvio, are you a beekeeper? How do you know Jacob Dilwell? Mr. Bonifacio? He feared faces at the parlor windows, at the kitchen door, hands rumbling the doorknobs, picking at the locks. He’d done nothing wrong, nothing at all, he was just a man in a house. Alone. How long before those doors gave way?

 

Sit, he needed to sit, to think calmly, to keep himself safe. He found the arm of his mother’s favorite chair, found the needlepoint seat, the upright comfort of its gilded back, and found those surfaces alive with bees. While he had watched neighborhood theater, a tragedy in three acts, his home had become a hive, a habitat. Across walls, around the phonograph’s mahogany cabinet, traversing a fern, flocking a plaster bust of the Blessed Virgin. Everywhere he could see, or touch, or step. How could so many materialize from one? In the kitchen, they’d found the overflow from a bloated can of corn, an apple core, the dregs of orange juice at the bottom of a glass. In his bathroom, they dabbed dainty feet to the backed-up drains and drank.

 

Salvio walked with care. Bees danced on the parquet floors, bees probed every window, bees sampled toothpaste, the ficus tree, the potpourri. Thousands and thousands of them, each a tiny soul.

 

More children gathered outside to hear the fresh legend called Boys Become Fools, and to bid Jacob’s ambulance swift passage. More parents came to lead them away from trouble, from the possibility of another monstrous swarm. The crowd moved to Mrs. Montieth’s lawn and quieted. Mr. and Mrs. Dilwell followed the ambulance in their flatbed Dodge.

 

Local news writers took photos, climbing through shrubs and over piles of bricks and rubble to photograph the Bonifacio’s home and the sickly elm. Onlookers described the scene to newer arrivals, pointing to the broken, bloodied branch, clusters of bees, the place where Jacob fell, explaining his fondness for dumb ideas and broken bones. The boy finds trouble. Always has, remember when he took a chainsaw to the fire hydrant?

 

By noon, there were no more stories to tell about Jacob Dilwell. Mrs. Montieth promised everyone she would be the point of contact for word of Jacob’s condition. The Channel 8 van departed for more emergent affairs.

 

Salvio watched a bee crawl in and out of his pajama sleeve. The sensation—feathery, benign—reminded him of a kitten he once held. He would not be alone as long as the bees lived here in the house with him. They would surround him with their chatter, their stirred air and primordial rituals. A beekeeper, him: a purpose for Salvio Robert Bonifacio.

 

The bees would need freedom, a fail-safe way in and out of the house. He returned to the attic with a hammer and a bread knife. Where daylight peeked through, Salvio chiseled at plaster, sawed at lathe. He worked a rusty golf club into cracks, and brought decayed shingles down upon his head. Then he stood back, satisfied. Roof and sky shared a generous maw.

 

Bees explored their new convenience and Salvio’s perspiring scalp. He unintentionally squashed one while swabbing himself, earning a stinging rebuke and a blazing, guilty headache. He would need protection to move easily among them. Duct tape strapped a lampshade to his head, and a lace tablecloth, draped over the shade and knotted between his legs, covered his most sensitive regions. He found work boots and tough leather gloves in the furnace room (should it smell faintly of egg in there?), and calamine lotion in the downstairs bath. When he stretched his arms wide, he felt moth-like, made of something holy.

 

As he moved from room to room, lord and keeper of this manor, bees took refuge on his veil. He found himself enjoying the weight of them—one felt like nothing, like the molecular zero of a single hair, but hundreds, together, became a chain mail that both endangered and guarded him. In the attic, beneath his mother’s chandelier, he tested a stiff foxtrot while the bees clung fast. In the parlor, he spun to what Chopin he could hum. He set out saucers of jam, and misted the houseplants with droplets of water for them to drink.

 

At five-thirty, he ate some pickles from a cracked jar, offering tastes to any interested bee. He read to them: excerpts from A Tale of Two Cities, and his mother’s favorite recipes (meatloaf au vin, almost everything au vin). At sunset, Salvio eased himself to the attic floor for sleep. Bees blanketed him with gold.

 

Superficial, childlike dreams followed, a slideshow of sensations and memories. Salvio dreamed of his mother making popcorn at the stove, the percussion of it, then the time he sat, as a toddler, for portraits at Sears (smile, darling, you are my sunshine) and cried at the flashbulb’s rude sparks. Arrows, when he was cupid in a play at school, then hailstones, the tingle of them on his arms, the orange fizz thrown by a campfire, the sparkle of ginger ale upon his chin. He dreamed of shouts that fell like stones, of jeering, of watching from the porthole window as other boys drove cars to girlfriends’ houses. Of his father’s cigars, of Independence Days.

 

He awoke to stars, to war.

 

Bits of brightness, all around—bottle rockets, their burning-candy smell, their small tongues of flame. He heard one scream, watched it duck into the attic through the hole he had made.  Then another, and still more. One landed on his shroud, feeding itself on cotton and starch. Salvio smothered it with his gloved hands. Below, boys (Jacob Dilwell’s faithful) called out dark and vengeful oaths. Salvio stood, and stomped on a dozen eager fires.

 

Restive bees smelled smoke and anger, took to the air, made a sound Salvio had not heard before, like far-off bagpipes, wide and bottomless. He ran downstairs to the bay window, apologizing as he cut through clouds of them. He felt a sting at the back of his neck, another on his thigh. Panic made him enemy, foe.

 

In the street, a mob. Mr. Dilwell, braying, the boys trading playground epithets, feasting upon odium. Light another one, kids, keep them coming. We’ll make him come out face us, won’t we boys? That’s right, it’s about time. Think of Jacob, boys. Think of Jacob.

 

Salvio filled a bucket in the kitchen sink and ran to the attic. Much of it sloshed over the sides and onto the stairs, causing him to slip and blunt his knees. Staggering, squinting, he arrived at a conflagration gorging on boxes of old books and papers, nibbling at his mother’s chandelier. He doused himself with the remains of the water.

 

Fire was loud, he decided, the greedy roar of it larger than Mr. Dilwell’s noise. It was also beautiful, painterly, much more colorful at close range than expected—pale lemon when encountering new fodder, deepening to tangerine, then russet, and finally a violet blue as temperatures crested, as surfaces succumbed. He pressed one gloved hand over nose and mouth, awed. With the other, he drew circles in the smoke.

 

Below: the caw of fire engines arriving, the thin wheedle of squad cars. A megaphoned order to the crowd, desist, disband, though Salvio could not say if the words were meant for Mr. Dilwell’s militia, or for his own nation state.

 

Salvio took to the floor once more. He felt washed pure, thawed to his core. Goodness fell on him from above, amber, and thick. The rotted attic walls released themselves, nectar rained down.  He licked his lips; the taste was sweet.

Share

City of Bridges

 

And groping arms and thick strong legs; city of salmon-pink and dusty-orange buildings; and boats and bicycles and busses; subway cars that climb out of the ground in Gamla Stan, Old Town, to a tangle of crooked, cobbled side streets and the monkfish mouths of muted alleys.

 

Stockholm. City of the brackish Baltic Sea, where bare-breasted women sidestroke the gentle currents of the quiet canals and old men fish for herring near the castle. The city that took me in at twenty-two and refuged me for ten years more: invandrare, in wanderer, legal alien, where I grew a second tongue that struggled with certain sounds that resembled the shh in hush now baby don’t you cry, but wasn’t. Where I grew up, grew teeth; grew a pair; grew snakes from my head—harmless; grew a new heart for every old heart I’d lost under solitary lampposts on the south side of town, near the shops that sold vintage guitars and that cluttered used bookstore, where I found James Baldwin, ex-patriot, queer, who had discovered what it means to be an American, in Paris, in Sweden, in a dog-eared paperback, in English.

 

City of red busses running on time, from Slussen to Hasseludden, to Benny’s house, to every room a view of the sea; where we slept in on Saturdays and woke to white boats ferrying summer tourists and the morning paper and strong coffee, new potatoes in summer, lilacs in spring, and fish stew laced with saffron, heavy on the cream. Then Benny died of that virus and his house caught fire from a bird nest in the wires. An accident, the fire crew said, no one to blame; smoke damage only, the structure remained sound.

 

My city: stalwart, patient, knowing I have been faithful in my absence, knowing I will return one day, after dogwood but before lilac, to seek out the place where I first heard the blackbird sing with a woman who could never be true but whom I loved nonetheless. There, I will take stock of my life outside its city walls, these years of return, the hero’s call come to a comfortable close after all that fuss over umlauts and broken hearts, when all that really mattered were the canals and cobbled streets, the bridges I could never cross over. They were beautiful; they were all beautiful—like the decorative compass roses on outdated maps.

Share

Balance

Mud

 

 

The strange thing isn’t the mud—it’s the formal pose, her neutral, detached expression in this obviously abnormal situation. Her composure is the anomaly, and I have to admit I admire her strength, her ability to transcend the situation, her power over physical discomfort. If I ponder the idea of her long enough I can almost forget about the mud, until I look at the image again and then the central conflict of the photograph pulls me back in, makes me uncomfortable—the tension between my expectations of what a portrait should look like and the messy reality of this photo at odds with each other, as stark as the dark mud, her damp hair and white hoody. Her eyes open wide, unflinching.

 

And yet flinching is what this woman did most of the time: flinched at her boyfriend’s moods, flinched at the judgment of a community that expected everything and nothing from its members. They were trying to live well at a hot- springs resort in a small valley, where it rained almost every day in the winter. The dampness seeped into everything. So, one day, when the rains became Biblical, the river crested the walls of the bathhouse; when the waters receded, a foot of mud covered the walkway, filled the claw foot tubs.

 

She pitched in, like everyone else—wielding a shovel, grunting at the weight of the mud. Her boyfriend took out his camera.  To show her team spirit, her upbeat attitude, she smeared the muck across her face, though they found out later it contained poison ivy. She dared not smile or the mask would crack. It’s the only photo where she looks the photographer straight in the face without grinning a self-conscious, lopsided smile. The earth highlighted her eyes, made of her a figure that simply exists in the world without apology.

 

Balance

 

 

Did you ever really see her in person? The woman in her sequined leotard leading the bedazzled horse into the ring? Did you hear the muffled roar of spectators, smell popcorn and dirt and elephants, feel the dusty light spear in through gaps in the tent flaps?

 

Probably not, but you feel as though you perched ringside as this woman stepped toe-first along the perimeter, one arm unfurled in a gesture that said, look here, prepare to be amazed! At first she simply vaulted in one smooth motion onto the horse’s bare back, rode the creature into a loping gallop, then, quick as a blink, stood up and balanced on the horse’s spine. Smiling, always smiling, the ta da! of her arms and the crowd roaring in approval. She cartwheeled into a handstand and then dismounted, running alongside the horse, both of them barely breaking a sweat.

At home you balanced on anything you could find: the sidewalk curb, tiptoeing one foot in front of the other, swaying first to one side then another, or the retaining wall of the eucalyptus bed, or even the back of the couch. You pretended to defy the laws of gravity. You reflected the light of many suns. Your skirt billowed in the wind of your flight.

 

Did you ever think to be afraid? The time you climbed over the crib railing and down the hall to your parents, dragging your leg braces behind you. Scrambling up the bookcase or the oxidized poles of that second-hand swing set just because you could. Your tricycle became a vehicle for daring—perched on your bare feet or careening around the corner on one wheel.

 

Years later, when your life tilted off-balance, you climbed the chalky limestone cliffs high above Lake Travis and gripped the edges with your toes before plunging into the lake far below—only to climb up and jump again, no crowd roaring in approval, no horses, or popcorn, or elephants. But the water did sparkle like sequins, like flint.

 

Schoolhouse

 

 

We loved school. We loved being with each other. We loved the chalkboard, the eraser, the scent of dust rising from old books. When we were young, we loved our pencil cases: the way everything aligned there, each sharpened point facing in the same direction. It zipped closed easily, opened easily, was clear enough to see what was what. Everything a person could need fit inside that pouch. We loved naptime. We loved the sound of other bodies near ours, breathing, all of us pointing in the same direction.

 

We loved snack. And lunch. And modeling clay. We watched the older kids on the playground: kids who pretended disdain, who called us babies and flounced away. We were babies, but felt so big, every day something new within our grasp: letters, numbers, maps, history. All of it lay waiting in cupboards, innate within the chalkboard, waiting to be revealed.

 

The most important lessons weren’t from maps or books or parent-teacher conferences, or even from every kid’s favorite subjects: lunch and recess. We learned our limits, how to push ourselves, how to find interests, then articulate them, then stick to them, and ourselves, when you find out they aren’t “cool.” How to bounce back—like when I started a new school in sixth grade and sat alone for two whole weeks with no one even coming over to say hi because everyone thought I was a student teacher. Or when I chose to hang out in Mrs. Collier’s room during lunch, the two of us eating in silence while reading together. It never bothered me because I grew up knowing the importance of an education, my family story one of escape from poverty and subsistence farming only because of school, my Grandma Ruth’s first job as a teacher in a one-room, sod schoolhouse her ticket out, the world within her grasp.

Share

The Boy

Two down. Two Greyhound days down, and Texas by morning, so Billy figured. Dallas by noon, and then, who could say? Across the bus’s wide aisle from him, Sam slept, her boy tucked into the crook of her back, the both of them curled against the upholstered plastic of two cruddy seats. Sam cropped her hair high and tight, like a boy’s, like her boy’s, but it had grown out of late, pressing up from her scalp in ragged shoots. Messy. Ugly. Billy sprawled himself over two seats of his own, one sneakered leg thrown sideways from his hip into the empty aisle seat, a single sentence writ across his face: “I dare you to sit with me, motherfucker.” Dallas by noon, and then, a new life to last him for good. Girl and girl’s bastard in tow, but a life of unknown newness nonetheless.

 

Boy and mother turned in dream. The boy woke for a moment and scrambled to his mother’s lap. Lodged against her breasts, the boy folded his feet into the seam of Sam’s legs. Thomas. Small for four, already blessed by thick glasses with brown, gawky frames, the only ones available to the state Medicaid patients. The boy wore a button-up shirt beneath a natty pullover vest, though the temperature had topped eighty the long way across Indiana. Thomas’s wrists were thin. Thin wrists meant a boy would always be small, even when he grew. Like with feet on a kitten, the forever smallness of things betrayed by wrists and feet.

 

Billy held up his own hands. His wrists were solid, comfortingly so.

 

Outside, the last, drab Hoosier fields passed by, Michigan long gone. Corn melded on the pane with the boy’s mirrored, blond head.

 

Billy knew that Thomas would grow up to be an outcast, too weak for sports, too gangly for girls. He pitied the boy, saw how much a problem the boy already was and, from the look of his bones, would always be. High school, where Billy had shined, would be awful for the boy, and there was Billy in that satin-framed future, around to see the whole damn pageant. Unless Thomas someday found the thin-wrested gumption to run away in the steep of night.

 

Billy bent to Sam, to kiss her, but the smell of her made him stop. She’d not had a good wash, anything more than a splashdown from a tepid faucet in a truck stop restroom outside LaPorte in more than a day. He hated Sam’s smell when she hadn’t washed. She didn’t smell like a woman, so he thought, but more like old milk left out on a counter. And he’d done that once, in a Southfield apartment, gone and left a gallon of milk out behind a pile of dirty dishes after he was done eating a bowl of Corn Flakes. Days passed before he remembered, tracked down the faint hissing sound which had plagued his space for days, the sussurations of the sour milk’s vapors in escape from around the cap. The bottle, swollen fat and pregnant, he’d thrown carefully away.

 

Billy fancied himself an expert on scent. Scent was the hook, not looks or money, that really attracted one of a pair to another, nothing but scent. Pheromones, the odors a body produced by the natural order of being a body and which really did it for some other poor sack of blind and groping meat. A part of Billy supposed, maybe, that he should love Sam even when dirty, when awake or asleep, but he could only smell what he smelled, only the scents brought to his waiting nose, what came.

 

Billy also knew that the boy, Thomas, was the real problem between them. Not bad scent. Without Thomas, he and Sam could’ve left D-Town years ago, escaped to warmer nights and better jobs, because Sam wouldn’t have needed her mother for day care and diaper cash. If he’d met Sam before whoever-was-Dad had done, they’d already be gone, years hence, a few short but happy lifetimes ago.

 

Billy thought of Mary Saunders from his twelfth-grade homeroom. Near on five years had passed since he’d sat next to that crazy Mary. Mary Carrie they’d called her, after the movie. While he waited for the first-period bell, she’d make eyes on the pages of her notebook, scores of them, like laden plates of fish-egg bait. He’d never been close enough to smell her to tell if she had good pheromones, but he’d bet not. Sour for certain, full of salt and old cold cream.

 

Sam stirred, pushing against the child on her lap.

 

“My leg’s asleep,” she said, before turning her head to the window.

 

She revolved her body as far away from Billy as she could, and Thomas’s right leg slipped off her knee. The high-top sneaker hit the underside of the seat in front of them with a metallic ping, bounced off a heater grate, and so many miles rolled by, Billy’s head flushed awash in visions. He became lost among visionaries. He was lost already.

—

Dallas was hot that June. The temperature reads they passed in the taxi, going from the bus station to the motel, blared 104, 105 in gaudy florescence, like advertisements for the pleasanter coast of Hell. People outside walked briskly with their shoulders squared and their backs erect, moving as though proud that they were here, swarming in the heat and taking it well.

 

“This is awful,” Sam said. “A hundred and five? Give me a fucking break.”

 

“Dry heat,” Billy said. “You can feel the difference. Ninety’ll break a back in Michigan because of the humidity. Humidity’s what makes heat rough.”

 

“We shouldn’t have done this,” she said.

 

“My great-grandfather,” he said. “You know what he wanted? He wanted to marry a Dutch girl before he came to America. He tried to find the right woman for weeks. Couldn’t do it, but he looked, right up until they loaded his bags on the boat. Still, he wanted a girl from home, so you know what he did?”

 

“Gave up?” she asked. “Got on the boat by himself like a grown-up?”

 

“He went to a brothel, right there in Amsterdam, asked if any of the girls would marry him. ‘Somebody wanna marry me?’ he asked. ‘Get up right now and I’ll pay your way to America.’ So my great-gramma, she stood up and said she’d do it. She came with him.”

 

“Great,” Sam said. “I’m thrilled. It’s still too hot.”

 

“They were married fifty-seven years,” Billy said, nodding. “We could be like that, you and me, if you got a better attitude.”

 

“So if I get a better attitude,” Sam said, “I can be a whore. Bought and borne for your stupid ass.”

 

Though Billy searched her for intent—jest or wrath—he saw only the long lines of her face gaping back at him. Her eyes were closed, her mouth thin-lipped, her arms held close to her chest. Her body braced, all of her an oracle of nothing, a fount of excommunication.

—

They bought a room for the night, one with a single bed, wood paneling, and no AC. Sam cracked the lone window as far as it would go, three or four inches, before the painted-clogged jamb stopped its slide dead. She craned her neck askance and put her face into the crevice. She grimaced, scrunching her features shut and strained. Billy could swear her face pinched and shrunk, as though trying to slide out between the frames.

 

Thomas sat on the corner of the bed, rummaging through his tiny, hard plastic suitcase. The contents were limited, only a shirt or two and a pair of swimming trunks. Sam had wanted him to have something to carry, to train him a little with some responsibility, but he had nothing that couldn’t be replaced if he left the bag behind in a gas station bathroom. From somewhere deep within the case, a pocket that Billy couldn’t even see, the boy pulled out a stuffed animal he’d ferreted away on his own, a toy ghost come all the way from Detroit.

 

Billy frowned. “What the hell is that?”

 

“Super Banana,” Thomas answered.

 

“Oh, leave him alone, will you,” Sam said from her window. She lay flat on the sill, fanning her face with a Mexican take-out menu someone had left on the peeling Formica countertop in the ‘kitchen,’ just a nook on the far side of the room that couched a sink and a battered, broken stove.

 

“He is a boy, isn’t he?” Billy asked.

 

“He’s four.”

 

“So he can still be a four-year-old with some balls.”

 

Thomas ignored them, flying his stuffed, man-shaped banana around the room. The toy had arms and legs made of rainbow shoestrings. Machined, white leather hands and sneakers. As he dragged the toy across the end table beside the bed, which held nothing but a single lamp and an ashtray, one of the toy’s legs caught in the ashtray’s cigarette rest, and, as he flew it by, the boy pulled the ashtray off the table and across the bed, still attached to the banana. Leftover, metal-gray ashes spilled out onto the ivory sheet. Billy stared at the pile, on his side of the bed. He let out a long sigh and stood immobile.

 

Thomas stopped playing and tried to tug the toy loose, but the leg was wedged in good. A minute and the boy whimpered, then softly cried.

 

Vacating the window, Sam came to him. She cradled his shoulders and removed the toy from his hands. Gently, she pulled the leg free of the ashtray.

 

“Maybe I should cry, too,” Billy said. “Until somebody helps me. It’s my money for this palace. My job quit. My ass in the ashpile.”

 

“Don’t,” Sam said, hugging her boy.

 

“A place like this won’t change the sheets twice. You know that as good as me.”

 

“Please,” she said.

 

“Lucky they were clean in the first place.”

 

Billy could feel the ashes already. They pasted themselves, cold and slippery, against his back. His night would be a sleep on shoreline dirt, the absent tide gone and not coming back.

 

He slumped into a tattered armchair in the corner and tried to rub himself free of the slick mess he swore was on him, but he couldn’t.

 

This was a mistake. His life was a mistake, everything that had followed the doctor’s slap and his first heaving breath.

 

Even if he brushed the ashes away, they’d have worked their shitty fingers into the cloth, buried themselves in the fibers. They were waiting for him, and him alone, and once they hopped aboard his skin, he would never be rid of them, not of a single mote, and he’d wake up in the morning as dirty as a mule, every morning, ever after.

—

By Wednesday night, when the travel money was gone, Sam started in on a nonstop cry, one lugged up from a bottomless well in a broken pail, one that slaked the room’s thirst with nothing wetter than a woman’s constant regret. Her eyes were inflamed, the lids pinkeye swollen, the whites tarnished with windshield cracks of red.

 

Billy pulled off his shirt and tossed it on top of the pile they’d grown in the corner beside the chair, because they hadn’t yet found a laundromat close enough for walking.

 

Sam gripped the Mexican menu in one hand, fanning herself. Eight in the evening, the temp ninety, more than ninety. She was pallid; she looked boiled. In her other hand, she held a rolled-up Vogue, stained by irregular shapes on its back cover, an ad for a fancy perfume.

 

“Cockroaches, now, too” she sniffled. “I’ve been after them all day.”

 

Billy looked closer. Carcasses speckled the wall behind her.

 

“I would’ve cleaned,” she said. “But, you know. If you turn your back.”

 

Her skin looked blue with dirt, her hair like a helmet of grease. Billy wondered if she’d been in the shower since they’d arrived.

 

Thomas dangled off the edge of the bed, at practice in the tying of his shoes, pulling one loop around the other with repeated circles of motion. Billy sat down beside the boy and showed him the right way, once again. Billy’s fingers moved quick and sure, and maybe just a little too angry, so when he pulled too hard as he unknotted the left shoe, Thomas looked ready to tear up again himself.

 

Billy refused to comfort him. The world was hard. The boy was so different, different like someone else’s child.

 

“There’s a kitty outside,” Thomas said, watching Billy’s hands as he started on the right shoe. “He eats everything, even pretzels.” The boy giggled, indelibly amused.

 

Billy nodded, remembering the animal from when he’d gone job hunting that morning, a scrawny stray with orange tiger coloring and two torn, Tom’s ears. The cat looked mangy, and had an unnatural lump on its back the size of a golf ball.

 

Billy double-knotted the sneaker. “You can’t have pets here,” he said.

 

“Someone should report us to management, then,” Sam said. “Got us a number of violations racked up.”

 

She whacked the wall, loud enough to make the neighbor next door pound back and yell in his familiar, throaty Spanish. When she pulled the magazine back, a new squash appeared beneath it on the wall, gleaming brownly in the light of the table lamp.

 

“No comprendo,” she yelled. “No comprendo, la cucaracha.”

 

“Fine, then,” Billy said. “Five damn days before you gave up.”

 

He rose from the bed, leaving Thomas with one shoe still untied, and threw open the screen door. A horde of moths flew up towards the square-domed light above the room number—14, with the four hanging upside down.

 

Billy stood in the doorway, feeling the heat on his chest like the press of stones beneath an unmade plea. The fight was already long over, the field long deserted, the battle lost. Nothing left out here but the maimed and the dead.

 

He came back in, but left the door open. He fell backwards onto the bed, let himself go limp as he fell so that his weight bounced Thomas off onto the floor. The boy landed somewhere out of sight in a tangle of elbows and knees. Billy could feel the old, flattened ashes beneath him, cool and oily against his skin. He ground hard against them.

 

Sam unrolled the magazine and pretended to read, sniffling again. They all ignored the open door as though a cloud of mosquitoes wasn’t drifting in, and a crush of heat, and after a minute, the scraggly cat, which appeared in the jamb. It stepped across the threshold. Thomas ran to it and pulled it into his arms. The animal allowed him the expression of love without reservation.

 

Thomas took the cat to the chintzy corner chair and sat with it crushed against his lap. He petted the cat with a furious hand, petted as a man might sand a board. The lump on its back was a different color than the rest of its back, pinkish and lighter, where soft fur from underneath showed through. A tumor, then, of some sort, but Thomas didn’t care, rubbing the cat’s back and shoulders, squeezing its angry and tolerant face.

 

Billy got off the bed and brushed at his back. He made the motion a second time, rubbing and scratching and trying so desperately to remove the ashes, but they simply wouldn’t let go. He could feel them, tarnishing the skein of his innermost wants. He walked across to Thomas and swatted the cat out of his arms, stamped his foot once to frighten it, and the animal bounded, jangling claws on the linoleum by the door, absenting itself off into the nightdark.

 

Billy slung his arm behind his back, felt the sharp blade of his protruding shoulder, and scratched, dug, churned. He could feel the ashes, surely. Surely. He marveled as his arm came back out into the vacuum of space before his eyes. He watched the slow-motion arc of the arm of another man, another man with less patience, another man with less hope left alive inside, with less weight in his pants and his heart. This other man’s arm came flying off from his own dirty back, and the hand, that bad, that bad, that so bad hand, it slapped the boy, once, just a single time, backhanded him across the face.

 

No one moved in all the room, or spoke, or took in a needed breath, and the all of them remained frozen for minutes that were really hours, hours that presented time enough for thought, and reflection, and the sheer thrill of wonderment.

—

In the morning, the door still hung open, Sam and Thomas long gone into its sunborne frame.

 

Billy, woken alone upon the bed, regretted his loss with a vagueness more appropriate to a missing set of keys, and in truth, he couldn’t properly identify the source of all his grief, wasn’t sure, was it the slap, or the dirt, or Dallas itself which had burned away all his possibilities, all those supposedly first-class and everlasting years which his mother had once told him lay ahead of all good boys.

 

Across the room, the cat slept on the floor beneath the armchair. Beside the cat, a pile of old potato chip crumbs drained oil into the shag carpet at the chair’s foot. Bites, from fleas or mosquitoes he couldn’t say, dotted Billy’s arms and chest. They itched, and he tried not to touch them because he knew that if he let go on them, then the wounds would really want.

 

The bites stared up at him like myriad eyes, and he thought of Mary Carrie Saunders for the second time in a week, creating an audience in homeroom. Sometimes, she began the eyes with a series of dots, pinpricks of her ballpoint, and she’d come back later and circle them. She always drew them quick, was resolute in moving on, as if she knew that completing an eye gave it the power of true sight. Other times, the circles first, and then the dots, slammed home with vaccination stabs.

 

Sam had left him the magazine, para las cucarachas.

 

Billy got up, then sat in the chair where he’d hit the boy. Three cockroaches scurried across the far wall, bold now, running sprints. The cat woke, found Billy, and crawled into his lap. So, then. He was forgiven.

 

Billy looked down at the cat, a precarious bird perched on his legs, each of its scraggly paws made into a pinpoint of balance. The cat lapped at his arm hair with a long, coarse tongue, a pink fire, living and alive. After finishing with his arms, the cat stayed in his lap, settled and kneading, and then spreading out flat across his thighs. A chorus of fleas squirmed in its fur. The animal cleaned its face, tonguing a front paw and passing the wet limb over the lids of its eyes. He could picture Sam in Southfield, leaning back on a green plaid sofa and telling her mother what a bastard he was, how awful a summer in Texas could be. But that was okay. He knew better. If it weren’t for her boy, she would be with him still, be here, be contented, pulling down a beer from the 7-11. Laughing. If it weren’t for her boy.

Share

Five Poems from Atopia

I like to photograph old signs 
when I drive along the Emerald Coast.
“Florida Hotel: American Owned” and
“Rachel’s Restaurant” I dreamed 
a beautiful poem up by the sea but
forgot it by morning; Make America 
Great Again vs Occupy Wall Street.
We talked about extreme weather 
and the stock market in the Gulf,
the water fluctuating around the sun
and pelicans, text message alerts
for tornados and when I got home 
I googled sinkholes and clicked on
the interactive map—14 by 12 foot,
8 by 6, 1 by 1, and read the warning 
signs, maybe the doors to your house
don’t close, maybe there are cracks
in the walls, maybe there are depressions
in your lawn, now imagine a bed
and furniture instantly falling into
the lawmaker’s hand holding up a piece
of limestone talking about an amendment
which will outlaw fracking in Florida forever 
“I’ve changed positions,” she says, “Look
at this limestone. It’s fragile. It’s porous”
and wishing I remembered my dream
of the sea by the sea, the dream enclosed
in the bulb of the sun, my body
covered by seawater, “It was almost
like there were colored rings around
the sun” your dad, the archaeologist, said
and driving home, the eye-level pelicans
and their prehistoric flight, seemed
calm, the bridge both flowing into
and forged by the metallic clouds
—
Philomel, lost cause, not quite, operatic as doves
 the oatmeal is cooking this morning and it will be a long
hurricane season from June
 to October, that season of hell as we approach
 an apocalypse, as showers fill the heart unable

 to process what is happening.
 Alone in your cabin, the outside world
 has a tongue, has words, scrolled
 and scrawled along the ridges of the bleak sky. 

 Oh Philomel, I have no pictures to post, no landscapes
 to paint, my song is sung in vain, and it is composed 
 of rubble. Fear not, Philomel.
			
Now the oatmeal burns inside its weeping pot
 and revenge is its own constellation of anguish,
 its own pattern of swallows moving across
 the luxuriant atmosphere.

 Personal history? What can we really
 make of it after so many years? 

 The metal bends, the apartment saturated with ash.
—
Our masters shift; this is the definition 
of domination
Still, Esmerelda, if you would like to take 
a dip in the filthy lake, I’m game 
and if you still have the impulse to be mesmerized by love,
I’m down for that too

I can even transform into a nude before your very eyes 
I promise
I can become just like a painting of paradise from the olden days

We could do this for a little while
before we have to go back to work again

inside the impenetrable flesh factory
where the meat screams

even though it is already dead
I’ve never known why this is 

Why does it scream night and day?
Maybe because it has no identity 

Esmerelda, they want our blood because 
they must know how sunny it is

how, long ago, we fed the horses and wept and sang 
by the fireplace; they must know

that we had such intense passions, 
that we thought the grasshoppers

eating the yellow fields were beautiful

and we looked at both the creatures
and the fields with a kind of awe

Our masters did not like this and our passions 
had to be held down
by a corresponding cruelty

the formal laws of the state
O the networks
of subjection are infinite
—

Read of an ICE raid:
men, women and children sent
to a detention center
in Crawfordville, Florida

Turn the page

Bought erasers, pencils and summer
workbooks for my children

This is a cell
All living things are made of cells

This is the earth
The earth is always changing

If lyric poetry is cruel, I am forlorn
at the loss of our wilderness

There really is an “anti-parks”
congressional caucus whose aim
is to shovel the plants and rocks
and trees into black plastic bags
and throw those bags into the sea

It is important to stay safe in Science
How do we stay safe?
Follow the rules and use the right tools 

The goddesses of Sunday welcome you
We bring you this bowl of peaches
and serve you with our porcelain fingers

Here is a napkin
Here is a knife

Your wife and children
are welcome too
— 
Glandular fever punctuated by tropical storm Cindy which
was a dud; many weeks of rain, the lymph nodes swollen, many weeks
of wind while my children play inside the supernova-like sinkhole,
Green tea and raw honey even though bees struggle for survival, Alex
searching for climate-controlled storage spaces, I yelled at everyone, the black
diamond and rattlesnake rattle fell upon me, I could tell you were trying
to communicate, I suspected it was your fault, seizure like substance
of air turned to current, maybe I blamed you for my illness, I knew
you were the one taking me down through this amber realm,
this dream space, fragile, filled with neurons, jammed with signals
signals from the dead, then the realm spilled into the black hole
of the summer solstice and out of the storm; O Angel, you were born.
Share

the crossing

we are building a viaduct

because we decided

this time,

we will not  travel

underground, live in the great dismal,

drag our bodies through the marsh,

hide in the cattails.

in the plain view of daylight

above the gorge,

as high as millau in france,

our railway.

 

once we perfect the art of brick making,

you can decide how many are needed.

that woman over there, maybe she can

decide how many tons

our spillway can hold.

this old one with the braids

like a hive,

i hope she’ll teach us about

about steel.

she knows how to reduce

sulfur from iron to keep it strong.

look at her hands.

look at her crafted shoulders,

but do not touch unless you

are invited.

 

darlings, there is a job

for us too.

ours might be the gathering kind.

talkers sing like brave birds.

poets plow the top soil

dancers paint with perennials.

 

we will call all hands.

hurting hands are beautiful.

photographers shoot

for our annual day of remembrance.

we can alternate hosts.  I’ll sign up for that.

we have all agreed, no borders.  no borders.  no borders.

Share

Sister/Brother Poems

My Sister Sings Reba at Forty-Three

for Shawna

 

To worship the earth, we barefoot down

to the water because we have never been

clean, and for this dirty mercy, my sister

 

kneels in her wet suit to the smell of surf

wax at 7 AM, kneels to the car key stashed

in the wheel well and the first open eye

 

full of ocean, and yes, Lord, no way around it,

my sister, today, will accept a broken nose full

of the granite reef handed down to her

 

by the gods of the southwest swell. By blood,

by green, by mud, by tide, my sister will be

held under by the world, but because she swans

 

back to the surface punched out of breath

but having survived, my sister kneels

to pray in the key of steel guitar and sunshine

 

to the ripped-down posters of old rodeos,

to the wet way of hay on a boot heel, to the tush-

push and the electric slide and the wide

 

mouthful of wild she finds while surfing

the hot highway home in the back of a golden

Ford F-150. My sister survives, and you could call

 

my sister the breeze these many July mornings,

but my sister does not soar like a sky on nights

when beneath the weight of the pistol

 

in her waist she serves with a police badge of shine

across San Francisco, for my sister must know

how a kid’s face caves in on the Fourth of July

 

after a firework has flown half-way through it,

and my sister must kneel to find a dead father

in the street on the double-yellow line,

 

to find a runaway daughter, to survive

a man standing in a creek at midnight, firing

a rifle at God. My sister knows the trauma

 

as water, the song as rugged, the body as sinking,

so, Lord, thank you for saving my sister who sings

with what it means to be the bull and the rider

 

and the war paint melting down the face of a rodeo

clown, what it means to chase a smile around

a filthy ring, yes, Lord, to chase the next wave,

 

or the next dance of tight asses in Wrangler pants,

or a next of kin, or the last long finishing note

of the evening before loading up the truck

 

with loneliness and heading home because, finally,

Lord, in the filthy bar, here we are, and, finally,

Lord, here before us rises my sister like an ocean

 

beside the microphone while muddy lights crumble

down dirty upon the black cowboy hats of the country

band, and by brown bottles of California mud, here, the filthy

 

chords are about to start, and my sister saunters up

in the armor of a leather jacket, of purple lipstick, of steel teeth,

of burgundy boots, and you who are listening should hold

 

your breath because my sister’s got a tattoo

of a bull on the wave of her back, and she’s going

to buck you off, and she’s going to elbow you down

 

deep because my sister knows how long to hold you under,

and how to save you, and how to kill you, and how to tell you

someone you love is dead, someone you love is still alive.

 

 

My Heart Is a Time Machine

 

Another brother’s funeral has ended,

and I must take my body back

to May of 1999

to stop the sunshine,

must begin again in our hotel room

with the girl

too drunk on Wild Turkey

to stand, the girl

hoisting a full keg

of Keystone Light

up onto her shoulder,

the girl grenading the keg

through the coffee table,

the girl leaping up onto the bed,

the girl taking three fan blades

to the face

that send her somersaulting all the way

through our hotel window

and onto the sidewalk outside.

I’ll forgive you for laughing

as my friend, Devon,

and I

and the whole room are now

because my friend, Devon, and I

are twenty-five

and high

on the same pills

which will in seven months

in a different hotel room

in a different town

whisper him into a permanent sleep.

Now that we are here,

I promise to tell you the truth—

on this night

in May of 1999,

you cannot tell anyone in this room

in these bands

with these ukuleles in their arms

and these floating festival feelings they have

put into their mouths

to stop. You can never tell anyone

to stop

anything, friends, so you must forgive us,

forgive them, forgive the drunk girl

who stumbles back into the room

and waterfalls down

another slug of Wild Turkey,

the drunk girl who only wants the drummer

to love her, and you must forgive

the drummer who never will,

forgive Devon and me

so deep into a conversation about Roger Waters

we don’t notice the anger

the drunk girl gathers in her elbow

which becomes the shining purple mountain

over the drummer’s eye,

forgive us for not noticing

when their story ghosts like a landscape painting

silently into the background

of darkness

inching toward light.

Forgive us for not laughing anymore

because is this hello or goodbye,

because it is almost morning, and I’m still

uncertain, because what do Devon and I look like,

now, leaving the broken window behind?

Dawn seems to have eased out of us

something as tender

as a full head of long hair,

and I believe we are whispering

about the opening guitar solo

of the Wish You Were Here album, now,

or the album is playing

somewhere, now, and we are

sneaking so quietly

through the courtyard, Devon

and I, as the soundmen

breaking down the festival stage

wind up their cables

like kind fathers

tying their daughters’ shoes,

as the drunk girl snores

on the drummer’s lap in a pool chair,

and Devon walks in front of me

with the almost finished bottle

of Wild Turkey in one hand

we are passing between us.

There is a joint for the both of us I am licking,

and when we round the corner and stare straight

into the Pink Floyd sunrise,

forgive me, friends,

there is always an instant

every time I am telling this story

when I get here

that I want to be the one disappeared

by light who never was

because no one wants to be what’s left over,

and what’s left of this morning?

Hello or goodbye?

I seem to be saying both,

we are almost finished, and forgive me

again for going back so often, my friends,

but I need you to squeeze inside

my blood and help me remember this

final sunrise in which Devon

is taking off his shirt

and letting down the blonde rainforest

of his hair and dancing

to the music that is only in his head,

and one-by-one the waking people

are coming into the field to join him,

a flock of musician women and men

dancing barefoot circles in the dirt

to “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”

playing only in my friend’s head,

and my friend Devon is spinning around

silently in the center of all of us,

playing the bottle of Wild Turkey

like a saxophone,

like a last photograph,

like a parting metaphor,

like a sentimental machine

which is in very few moments

of monumental pressure

strong enough

to stop time.

 

 

Please also see our review of Sommers’ first book, The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire. Continue reading “Sister/Brother Poems” →

Share

Some Imaginary Conversations

These single-panel comics are part of a larger series of Imaginary Conversations. Another, “Comfort,” was published in the 40.2 print issue of The Florida Review.

 

 

 

 

Share

Poems

Elegy with Bats

                                   Austin, Texas

 

They poured out from under the Congress Street Bridge

as twilight came on, first a few, then like a dam bursting

 

dark figures plumed through a darkening sky,

bits of ash billowing up—to thousand the air,

 

as Dante would say—like memories of our sister

swirling around us.  She too had darkened in the last years,

 

so we strained to recall all of who she was,

her quick mind, her fearless missions, fierce beliefs,

 

teacher and human shield—before stroke stole her thought,

and she became for us not unlike the bats, half-seen,

 

swarming in jittery clouds.   My sister, so quick

to fix a problem, fluent in Kierkegaard, Sartre,

 

Spanish and French, on her last visit had shrunk down

to opinion’s endless sputter of self,

 

wanting the last piece of toast, first cup of wine,

the talk focused on her, annoyed by a tree out front,

 

insulted by sunflowers next door.  Stupid, stupid, stupid,

she stomped past those bright yellow petals, bonnets

 

brimming each round face.  She hated the ones slumped

like dying Christs on their stems.

 

Pathetic! she said, as if anger were the last ember of self,

now without sonar, flitting, aimless, amok—

 

until at the end, my niece said, she was silent, her gaze fixed

on some unknown world no one else could see

 

any more than on that bridge, as the bats dispersed

into the deepening night, we could discern

 

when the last one had flown.  Still, we lingered,

our eyes adjusting to shades, densities of dark,

 

as if we could see where a last breath, a life goes,

a soul cut loose from the body’s tether.

 

We stood in a crowd of others, locals and visitors

like ourselves, lingering in the summer night,

 

the heat of the day finally gone down with the sun,

which had, I reminded myself, not gone down at all.

 

It was earth that turned.  And there, on the bridge,

the crowd thinning, I had to grasp the rail for balance,

 

as the thought filled me: the earth actually spins

day after day in space, no visible string, no pedestal,

 

or base to hold us, nothing but that turning,

and the weight, the sweet pull of other celestial bodies.

 

Heritage

Our grandfather, had he still legs, would be here

on the shore in Point Pleasant, New Jersey,

photographing footprints in dunes.  Had he a mouth,

 

he’d make a joke and laugh.  Had he ever sat with us,

he might have named the stolen horses that rode

our family across the channel, Cork to Scotland,

 

and then to the North, newly sober and starched.

We might know what ships and when and why to America.

Likewise, my grandmother, had she still hair to unpin

 

in our presence, might have softened her face,

and had she walked with us along the shore, might have

named the shells we loaded into sagging swim caps.

 

As to our father, had he lived into the 1960s,

into Bull Connor and police dogs, might he have rewritten

the letters disparaging all colors and faiths not his own?

 

Knowing our family heart, its failure and early blight,

can we at least hope that between clutch and stop, death

had time to work—death’s horses and ships, its lenses,

 

hairpins, its hammers and lathes, its endless waves

out there in the North Atlantic, making the water rise

and fall in place, until where we stand near shore

 

it snags, tumbles, throws itself like dice, like bones,

boxcars, snake eyes, chips of quahog, moon snail, tar

aswirl at our feet, tugging the sand out from under.

Share

Two Poems

“With Affirmative Action and All”

There is not enough silence in all of Pittsburgh
to explain the quiet in that room

 

between the two of you, not the televised silence
of a Steelers’ riot on mute; not the stillness

 

of the Duquesne Incline failing to scale
Mt. Washington and rise above the grime

 

of steel mills. Not the muffled gasps of black boys
kicked and dunked by whites while lifeguards

 

look on at the Highland Park pool, summer ’31.
Not the dampened blast of the Lower Hill, razed

 

to pave a parking lot and build the Civic Arena,
with “no social loss” in bulldozing homes

 

of immigrants and blacks. Not the stifled sobs
of teen August Wilson fleeing Gladstone

 

when his teacher accuses him of plagiarism.
But Pittsburgh, why bully you, City of Bridges:

 

steely with pride, grappling with all your histories?
Why choose you, and this old horse I ride

 

repeatedly, haphazardly, backwards through time—
why choose you, when, in any given American

 

town, there is a room inside a room inside a room
where thought shapes word shapes action—shapes

 

memory, shapes history—where synaptic gaps
deepen, now, into fissures, into canyons.

View-Master Virtual Reality Starter Pack: Mortality Reel

1.
A canyon of memory floods
as the zip line slips: first bike,
first dance, first kiss. Broken bone.
And more: first love, wedding cake,
two kids. Soft spot pulsing
on each newborn’s crown. And you,
in the blur of greenery and river
and craggy rock, you release
every spring, pulley, or counterweight
that ever held you back.

 

2.
Slammed by a PAT bus. Mercy. Swift
and painless. Seven angels gasp
but you are unperturbed, descending
with a steaming non-fat chai tea latte
into the counterflow lane from the curb.

 

3.
One moment you leap and dance amid
a snow-topped mountain cap backdrop
and the next, without notice, you huddle
in bed, doting spouse dropping one perfect
tear upon your furrowed brow. Somewhere
afar, a sitar twangs and wails. A mysterious
virus. Rare injury. Lightning seizing
your whole and healthy spine
when you least expect it. No
choreography for grief: an entire troupe
of sequined mourners, it seems,
will fail to bring you back.

 

4.
Legs crossed upon a mat in the dusty outpost
you attain such enlightenment that time slows,
giving you full minutes to regard the smooth
cartridge hurtling toward your chest. It makes
of the air a gel. A web. A balloon stretched to snap.
Welcome to bullet time. You were never so much
in your life as you were around it: observing it,
remarking on it. Given this moment of dead time,
you can at last see from every given viewpoint.

 

5.
Overpriced vintage fountain pen
pokes through your bag, piercing
your backside. Infection follows
and you fall to sepsis, bringing credence
to claims that, daily, writing involves risk.

 

6.
Pitch darkness. Silence. Pure emptiness.
A familiar voice in the distance.

 

7.
The truth is, you don’t see it coming even there
in the wrinkled bed for the sixth—or is it seventh?—
visit that season. Your beloved covers a bowl
of canned peaches, the only taste, nowadays, that
appeals. You want to save it. You plan to eat it
later. You wait for your children to arrive
at the bedside as they always do, exhausted
and deeply happy to see you still there, still alive,
bright-eyed but—they know—shrinking. Your face
is fuller now with fluids your kidneys retain
which helps them forget that your legs, under
a stack of sheets and blankets, are nearly fleshless.
You know the doctors by name and they, you.
You know which nurses will glide in to usher
each dumbstruck family member from the room
hours after you’ve passed to the next world,
hours they’ve spent sobbing, wondering,
and pleading, your chest still rising and falling
in rhythm endlessly, it seems, as though
the only barrier between you and them
were the blissful sleep of recovery, a dream
of being lifted with love and carried home.

 

Share

Family Cookbook

Beans

Because they’re cheap and good and always last longer than the government checks that boil away in the Pyrex pot that sits on the flame building pressure and steam to slow cook the garlic and salt and bay leaves to a river-brown broth that soaks to the bones that bloom from the cactus of your mother’s garden to fill up the table like supper.

 

Tortillas

Which you love more than bread but never get right with an ingredient missing from the salt shortening flour that sticks to your skin with a white you can’t wash so you form instead an imperfect round ball rolled into the shape of a ghost ship from Iowa where your father came from before he sighed through the curtains of a hospital room to fill your house with a silent moon on a cast iron comal you watch through the window of a telescope lens at the end of a tunnel where you wait with a plate the size of the hole in your stomach.

 

Enchiladas

Rolled up tight or laid out and layered like your mother’s whole family in the back of the Buick on a bed of quilts as warm as onions and cheese while they drive from Los Corrales to Los Angeles to Los Corrales again so Carlos can paint enough wartime ships to fill the mouths that sleep through the desert with road stripes stabbing like forks and knives to pull them apart before they’ve even arrived.

 

Milk

The pint-sized shadow you watch over your shoulder from the junior high quad where Chicano boys launch cafeteria bombs to stain the blond pages of history books drying sour as promise while you try to adjust the misplaced target that hangs on your back.

 

Hamburger Meat and Fried Potatoes

Filling the pan like a family reunion in your grandfather’s yard for the cottonwood shot of Uncle Mike and his Schlitz and Tony’s Dean Martin sheen and Georgina’s Rita Moreno smile and your mom’s “Nixon No” eyes and your Creedence Clearwater bangs and everyone mingling like salt and pepper made moist from the steam and sticking together to come undone like a mismatched salad of crispy and soft that feeds you like nothing else can.

 

Chilindron

Because you never eat turkey on Thanksgiving Day since your mother adopted stray ducks geese and owls and planted a branch of dried cedar in a tub of rocks from the Rio Grande where the Christmas tree stood and said “Being different is good” and if you really want to know the truth she’s more Basque than Latina and made of garlic and red peppers and ham and chicken and lemon juice and white wine and olives and tomatoes that retain their own flavor while still remaining whole and isn’t that the point of sustenance anyway?

 

Smothered Steak

Your deceased father’s favorite pounded soft with a mallet until the muscle breaks down and the fiber gives way and the Gold Medal ash is forced into the folds and served up with brown gravy and drowned Southern-style like a history you don’t know and a family you can’t name and a serving you can’t swallow no matter how hard you chew.

 

Frito Sandwich

When the fridge is a warehouse of forklifts and crates and your sister spoons filling from a cherry pie can while your mother draws bones on a university canvas and you sprinkle corn dust on a heel of bread to convince yourself that the salt crumbs are sugar.

 

Oatmeal

With warm water and chicken bouillon cubes because your dogs will eat anything when they’re hungry enough.

 

Chile

Red like the sand of the Jemez Mountain stream where you swim to escape the chlorine eyes of the North Valley rich kids and sleep in the sun on a saucepan boulder sizzling with oil and water and salt to make a paste from the grains that dry on your skin and fill your pockets with an ember glow that warms your belly and fires your lips until you fan your face and hold your breath and try to smile to extinguish the pain.

 

Betty Crocker Cake Mix

Any flavor any kind when the first check comes and the grocery cart fills and you pick one treat to carry you through from one Friday to the next from Lost in Space to All in the Family with a silvery glow in the darkened room that you just might find by licking the spoon.

 

Posolé

Steaming the kitchen windows in red amber and green through the Christmas Eve boil of pork hominy garlic you see your own face staring in from outside like a ghost on the ditch on the way home from school with his hand raised hello like the dreams of your father who was born on this day and now waits in a box of photos in the closet to swallow the moths of memories that pass like the snow drifting down into paper bag candles filling with feathers of light.

 

Cinnamon Bread

Because it wasn’t as bad as it might seem and sometimes you walked through the kitchen door to find your mother at the counter with white flour and brown sugar making from scratch a kneaded loaf with a yin-yang eye curling toward a center uniquely its own to show what she said and what you try to believe that yes being mixed can be good.

 

Chile

Green as the cottonwoods above your bed and the water in the acequia behind your house and the horizon in the morning as you leave for good and the taste in your mouth that won’t go away and the cans you open 1,000 miles east and the bland you swallow when that’s all there is and the image emulsion behind your eyes and the roasting drums in the parking lot and the capsaicin smoke that writes your name across the sky that lets you know that the burn you feel is real.

 

Beans

One more time at the end of the month when the glass bowl rises like a mesa on the llano with shoulders to carry the whole damn family to an aquifer you swim with both hands wide to reach the roots you use as a spoon to drink the broth that fills furrows that reflect the clouds that that pulls the rope along the highway that draws you home.

Share

Eli’s Ships

A couch was to the left, the bed place to the right;
my writing desk and the chronometers’ table faced the door.

—Joseph Conrad, “The Secret Sharer”

 

 

We’d been talking at the bar for a while when she finally told me her name, Angela. “It’s Angel with an extra A, for attitude.” She heaved forward in a laugh, a dark sheet of hair whipping over her face. Silver jewelry glinted in the blur.

 

“Great mnemonic. I learned a lot of them on the Tammy Sue.”

 

“So was the trip worth it? Research-wise, I mean.” She arched one eyebrow, as dark and precise as a swoop of calligraphy.

 

I wasn’t sure what to say.  Already, my experiences aboard the Tammy Sue—the tense silence of the night watch, the sudden squalls, the odd sense of being outside of time when we were on open water—seemed on the cusp of dissipating, as if they’d never occurred. I’d recorded extensive notes, but I had trouble capturing how close I’d felt to Conrad, how oddly serene I’d been as rain pelted my foul-weather gear. This sensation, I’d noted at the time, was like that of a man in possession of a beautiful idea, impervious and even invigorated by the inevitable cascade of doubts. But now, back on land, I could hardly remember the feeling.

 

“It was extremely fruitful.” I lowered my voice in an effort to sound more certain. “I understand Conrad’s work much better, especially his use of his first command, the Otago, as a metaphor for time, social class, the body, relationships—”

 

“You know what? You’d love my son Eli’s work.” She handed me a pamphlet from a box at her feet.  Sun-faded and curled at the corners from humidity, it featured a smudgy watercolor boat and a photo of a dark-eyed young man staring at the camera through a ship-in-bottle held up to his face.

 

“He does them all. Galleons, barkentines, schooners—he’s crazy about boats. Go to almost any harbor on the East Coast, if there’s a sailing ship hauling tourists, you’ll find Eli’s ships in the gift shop. She reached over and unfolded the pamphlet. “Just read the description. He’s a true artist.”

 

Serenity Ships: Sail into Your Dreams!

Each Serenity Ship-in-bottle is custom handmade work of art, precisely scaled, using only the finest authentic materials,
including teak, steel, brass, copper, fiberglass, sisal, hemp, and a number of exotic woods upon request.
The bottles are hand blown and every ship sails forever on a sea of diachronic glass, which sparkles with the dynamism of sun-streaked waves.
We can create any ship—from miniatures of real vessels to fanciful ships seen only in the mind’s eye—
and bottle their aesthetic and emotional power for evermore.

Look in my bottles and feel yourself swayed by the light chop of dreams.

 

When I looked up, Angela was arranging several ships in bottles along the bar. They were small—no bigger than my thumb—and each was attached to a silver chain.

 

“You’re going to love what I brought today, Simon,” she said to the drunkard at the corner of the bar, sliding a bottle toward him. He pressed his eye to it and made swooshing sounds to mimic waves splashing on the tiny boat. “Damn, it looks just like my uncle’s old shrimp boat, Lorilei. How’d Eli even know—?”

 

A heavy-built tattooed woman let the door to the kitchen swing closed behind her and headed toward us. Angela turned to me and whispered. “Check it out. She’s famous for insulting customers.”

 

The wall behind the bar was jammed with crude hand-painted signs, full of boozy epigrams and boasts. The largest sign—Gloria Be Thy Name!—was surrounded by dozens of caricatures of Gloria, all depicting her as a spiritual figure—sitting on a cloud with a cocktail shaker, plucking a feather off her angel wings to garnish a drink, anointing a drunk with a whiskey bottle. A poster of a man with missing front teeth had a small sign beneath it: Snapped his fingers to ask for a refill.

 

“What’s this?” Gloria slid over to us, leaning over the bar, taking in the lined-up bottles then fixing her eyes on me. Her head was shaved except for a bleach blond swath drawn up in a high ponytail.

 

“Gloria, meet Julian. He’s a scholar and a sailor. He was just at sea, part of his research.”

 

“At sea. Of course. Looks a little wet behind the ears —”

 

“Gloria,” Angela cut her off. “How ’bout a Briny Squall for Julian?”

 

“A fine idea,” Gloria said. She came back with a large glass, swirling with dark liquid and what looked like flecks of gold. The rim was salted and garnished with a single desiccated lime. It spilled as she plopped it on the bar.

 

“The world famous Briny Squall.”

 

The drink rolled down my throat as if it were a syrup vapor, like nothing I’d ever tasted. I hardly needed to swallow and a full one-third of the drink was gone.

 

“Please. Just have a look,” Angela prompted, sweeping her hand above the tiny bottles on the bar. I picked up the closest one, the Golden Hind. I expected a crude plastic jumble, but the ship was so finely detailed and scaled that I thought at first it was a line drawing pasted to the back. As I turned the bottle, the shadows of the sails and spars moved across the deck.

 

The hull was constructed of the thinnest slivers of wood, bent and notched and shaped into an uncanny replica. The sails resembled silk, with edges that appeared finished—though I could not detect a single stitch of thread. All the lines of a real galleon were there, but they were cobweb-thin and translucent, only manifesting when the light hit a certain way. A crow’s nest, smaller than a ladybug’s shell, was dark and swirled as if shaped from the smallest piece of burl wood. A jagged pattern, like the profiles of faces, edged the bowsprit. The galleon sat in dab of blue glass so pale that I could see a deepening field of bubbles.

 

I pulled the bottle away from my eye. All the shapes around me appeared huge and undefined, as if I were peering through a smudged telescope. I blinked twice and everything returned to normal proportions.

 

“Amazing? Am I right?”

 

“They are…” Tiny winches, portlights, locker latches, even the compass cards were rendered with exquisite accuracy. I could detect only one tiny flaw when the boats were level on the bar. Each horizon was askew. Not one of the boats floated on its proper plane. Old Ironsides tilted slightly forward; Pride of Baltimore listed to port; the clipper Flying Cloud was weighed down unnaturally in the stern. Somehow this small defect made the ships even more alluring.

 

“Oops, one more.” Her focus shifted to the smooth crease between her breasts, where several silver chains terminated in the neckline of her plum-colored dress. She pulled one of the necklaces over her head and handed it to me. The bottle on it still held the warmth of her body. I lifted it up to the light to get a better look. It was the barkentine Otago, Conrad’s ship, the name clearly stenciled on the bow.

 

“Amazing…” I muttered as I stared into the bottle.

 

“Is that the one you were talking about?”

 

“It is.” Like the others, it was rendered perfectly—and it floated, only slightly cocked, on a perfectly still sea. I could almost sense the slow, almost imperceptible heaving under her hull as Conrad and his crew drifted on the windless South China Sea.

 

“All his ships are completely authentic. Even the interior stuff that can barely be seen with the naked eye.”

 

“It’s a beautiful rendering of the exterior.” I said. “But I hope you’ll forgive me for saying that no one can faithfully recreate the Otago’s interior plan, at least not when Conrad sailed her. This I know for sure.”

 

There exists only one good photo of the Otago, a blurry image of her under sail near Australia. Her salvaged helm adorns a museum ship in London, and what is left of her hull lies rusting in New Zealand, but the interior arrangements of the Otago have baffled Conrad scholars for years. My mentor, Dr. Marvin Kendricks, long maintained that the labyrinth of rooms and passageways within the Otago helped shape Conrad’s notion of human psychology. In fact, Kendrick’s unpublished paper described how the stowaway “secret self” in the “The Secret Sharer” was actually Conrad’s id flitting around the frontal lobe, trying to avoid discovery.

 

“Well,” Angela stirred her drink. “You might be surprised. Eli’s ships are like nothing else you’ve known—flawless, and not a detail left unfinished. Maritime museums all over the world have his number on speed-dial. I bet he knows the Otago inside and out.”

 

I took a sip, not wanting to offend her with my skepticism. And, of course, it was possible Eli had stumbled on some obscure maritime records, information that might guarantee my dissertation would leave a mark. I’d heard stories—Kendricks sometimes told them—about scholars who would find paradigm-shifting research in the most unexpected places. Interviews with elderly neighbors of a canonical author. Old letters hidden in a barn loft. Brilliant marginalia languishing in a box of deaccessioned books. The fact that she had a replica of the Otago could be a sign.

 

“You should come meet Eli. He works a boat show in Jacksonville every Monday. I can take you there tomorrow.” She opened the chain in her hands and leaned forward, placing it over my head. “It’s meant to be worn.”

—

A heavy after-rain fog hovered in front of me, cleaving as I walked to the waterfront park across the street. I relieved myself behind a bush and teetered a bit when I zipped up my pants. The St. Marys River was calm and empty—just like the sea Conrad describes in “The Secret Sharer.” I tried to picture the Otago in the grips of such stillness. I pulled the miniature out from under my shirt and held it in front of my eye, lining up its hull with the real horizon behind it. The ship was luminous against the moonlight, each of its filament lines lit up. My vertigo transferred to the boat, which began to bob in its glass swell. A small yellow shape flicked up out of the crow’s nest. The tip of my thumb slipped into a small divot in the base of the bottle as I turned it to get a better look.

 

Startled by footsteps from behind, I turned to see the silhouette of a man, no bigger than a toddler. The next thing I saw was his pipe—a wild squiggle of burlwood with a hot coal pulsing in the bowl. A fine mist of what smelled like seawater—salt, fish, seaweed—burst forth with each puff. He stepped into the moonlight, illuminating his yellow sailor’s suit and the metal eyelets of his leather, lace-up boots. His face was cramped, wizened; his crow’s feet ran down his cheeks and pushed up against the accordion folds of his smile-lines. His irises, as he met my eyes, were a shifting shade of blue, turning from nearly white to deep navy as if they were portholes to a sea behind him.

 

I reached out, but he jumped back and gave a tsk-tsk motion with one finger. There was something familiar about him. I blinked once, expecting him to vanish, and it hit me. He was a color version of a woodcut I’d seen in a book titled Legends and Superstitions of the Sea. He was a kobold, a sprite of German folklore meant to assist sailors at sea. How curious, I thought. Just another specter of my thesis research, conjured from whatever chemicals circulated in my nervous system. The sea-going kobold had a special name…what was it?

 

The kobold coughed and small iridescent flakes issued from his nose. A few landed on my hand. Fish scales. He drew a piece of gray netting from his breast pocket and wiped his nose.

—

“Orange garbage bag by a mile-marker sign. Gets me every time.”

 

My body was shaking as I awoke. The side of my head was resting on the passenger window; the thick glass vibrated and blurred my vision. At first I thought I was still on the Tammy Sue, waking up for early morning watch, but then I saw the mirror of the Volvo and a slice of moving highway in its view. Angela’s voice startled me when she spoke again.

 

“See that orange bag? State-issued. Makes me think of this guy I dated, Owen.”

 

The sun was just edging above the clouds, and a bright glare from the west intermittently blasted out the view through the windshield. Auroras blurred the edge of my vision. I dropped my head and rubbed the back of my neck as Angela explained how she and Owen met on a highway cleaning crew. They’d tried to stab the same fast-food bag with their trash pickers, met each other’s eyes, and laughed. “And that’s how the whole Owen mess began…”

 

She hit the accelerator and swung into the passing lane. Every few minutes, something along the road would remind her of another man who’d come and gone from her life. A billboard for a Christmas décor depot reminded her of T.J. and his cat, Glinda, who needed emergency surgery for eating tinsel—something Angela had to pay for, the mooch. I nodded, trying to follow, but her voice soon faded out. My worn copy of Norbert Sherwood’s seminal Conrad Adrift was lying open and face-down on the floor. I flicked through the pages, causing Kendricks’ accusing marginalia to shudder and twist like a flipbook cartoon.

 

“And then guess what Crater did? Just guess?” Angela voice got louder and higher, and it seemed perilous not to follow what she was saying. “He left me for Uma Kline, that meth-head farmer.”

 

“You had a boyfriend named Crater?”

 

“Yes. Suited him. The asshole.”

 

“I’m sure Eli understands. You might have made a few bad choices, but no one is perfect,” I finally said, trying to respond to the main theme of Angela’s story—how each one of these failed father figures had driven Eli deeper into his ships-in-bottles, and further from her.

 

“Shit, AC’s out.”

 

Angela went quiet as she turned the car’s blower knob, cocking her ear toward it, as if trying to unlock a safe. I was glad for the break. That morning, I’d awakened to the sound of Angela knocking on my hotel room door, with no recollection of getting there. One of a dozen rooms in the clapboard hotel next to the bar, it was a small, slightly grimy space stuffed with antiques apparently plucked from the curbs of St. Marys. I’d never blacked out drinking before, and the morning felt like a fragment chipped away from the rest of my life.

 

“I look forward to meeting Eli,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “I’m sure Kendricks would like to hear about him too. And if he knows as much as you say he does, he’d get a prominent mention in my acknowledgements, at the very least.” I checked my watch, four p.m. London time. “Do you mind if I call Kendricks?”

 

My cell phone worked poorly ever since leaving the Tammy Sue—the captain said the salt air wreaked havoc with circuitry. Kendricks was inscrutable face to face, but 4,000 miles away through a salt-soaked phone, he was barely intelligible. He’d just presented a paper on Conrad’s “Chance” using babushka dolls as an organizing metaphor (“The dolls are stories in stories. The dolls are repressed selves within repressed selves. The dolls are meta.”) It had gotten a cold reception.

 

“Oh, so now every carnival barker thinks he’s a Conrad scholar,” Kendricks sighed when I told him about Eli’s Otago, “as if the field wasn’t already crowded with clowns and charlatans.”

 

Kendricks was in one of his moods, I could tell. It was probably best to save talking about the Otago until he cooled down. I changed the subject. Kendricks had an encyclopaedic mind for sailing folklore, so I told him about the kobold in my dream. The line was silent for such a long time that I thought I’d lost the connection.

 

“How well do you know this woman, this…Angela?”

 

I glanced at Angela, who was picking at something in her teeth.

 

“I met her at The Eagle’s Nest, a sailor’s tavern in St. Marys. She’s great.” The words were out of my mouth before I’d realized what I’d said. Angela smiled, ever so slightly, but kept her eyes on the road.

 

“A bar? The fishing boat stint was your chance to get a true sense of the sea. Now you’re talking about toy ships and bar floozies and a damn Klabautermann—that’s the kobold you’re describing, by the way—and I don’t hear a word about your dissertation’s progress. You’ve got to stay focused. Remember what happened to Nathan? All it took for him to abandon his work was Sherwood leaving that singed puppy dog on his doorstep…You’ve got a target on your back now.”

 

I’d heard all this before. Whenever Kendricks was upset, he’d talk about Nathan, his lost superstar student. Nathan had become so involved in caring for a burned puppy that he dropped out mid-semester to work at a pug rehab center. He never came back. Kendricks maintained that one of his rivals—Sherwood, he assumed—had planted the maimed puppy on Nathan’s doorstep to ruin Kendricks’ chances of having a star protégée. I hated when he brought Nathan up. It made me think that he was the true nadir of Kendricks’ mentorship, and that I was just a pale second act. I shook away the thought. Kendricks was just tired and upset.

 

“Everything is fine, Dr. Kendricks. I’m fine. Wait until I tell you what I saw on the Tammy Sue. The boat had a rope ladder just like the one in the ‘The Secret Sharer,’ and it made me think about how Conrad disorders his narrator’s perceptions—”

 

“Just be careful. Don’t leave your drinks unattended. And call me if anything… goddammit.” A sound of shattering glasses and a chorus of cussing and voices overwhelmed the line. Kendricks came back on, panting. “Goddamn cheap limey glasses! You can bleed in a bar over here and no one cares! Hey, Redcoat, can I get a damn rag?”

 

The line went dead.

—

Traffic piled up as we approached Jacksonville, and the Volvo kept stalling out as we idled, creeping forward every five minutes or so. Up ahead, cars were slowing down and stopping as they reached the margins of a growing traffic jam. Angela hit the brakes suddenly and swore as the back of a pickup truck seemed to rise up to meet us. Cars in the left lane whizzed past us, then slowed and stopped.

 

A green sedan idled in the right lane, its window lined up with mine. At first, the car seemed to be empty except for the driver, a harried-looking church matron with a grim, forward-facing expression. But as I gazed in the car, the muted leopard print of her cardigan swirled and resolved into the kobold’s small, hunched body. I blinked and the kobold’s face was pressed against the window—mashed, really—as if he were some kid mugging for his friend. The window flattened his lips as he rolled his face to the side so I could see him wink. Then he ducked from view.

 

A small square of fabric slowly rose up in his place.  A thin wooden stick followed; it was a small flag divided diagonally into two colors, one half yellow, one half blue. I immediately recognized it as an international maritime signal flag, but I had to think for a moment before I could identify which one. It was the Kilo flag: I wish to communicate with you.

 

The flag lowered and the kobold’s face appeared, his eyes on mine. His blue irises curled up like an old Japanese print of a wave, his pupil tucked in like a surfer. His face was wan and his smile lines loose. I nodded, since he seemed to be waiting for a reaction.

 

Now he lifted a simple blue flag with a white cross above his head and wiggled it. Not one I recognized. I reached toward the back seat, grabbed the maritime signs and signals book from my bag, and flipped through it, my hands shaking. Stop carrying out your intentions and watch for my signals.

 

The line of traffic shifted and we shot forward. I put my hand to my chest and took a breath.

—

You have reached the voicemail of Dr. Marvin Kendricks. I’m not here right now, because there is no ‘here’ and there is no ‘I,’ since this is simply a digital reverberation of my voice in an infinite temporal loop. Leave a message or not.

 

“Dr. Kendricks? Call me back, okay?” The gas station doors slid open, and Angela strode out, flicking her hair and turning as if the laconic glances of the old men smoking by the ice machine were flashbulbs. I hung up the phone.

 

“Here you go. Red Alert Gatorade. Fixes everything.”

 

I’d told her that I was feeling sick, and hoped that’s all it was. A fever. Too much stress. A rare variety of delayed-onset seasickness. I shook the Gatorade and suddenly thought of Kendricks’ warnings. I stared at the thin plastic filaments that joined the cap to the no-tamper ring.

 

“Mind if I have a sip?” Angela grabbed the bottle and opened it, taking a long chug. I looked around the gas station. Everything looked normal. I felt normal. There was no need to assume anything was terribly wrong. An old man passed in front of the car, scratching his paunch and turning toward us to flash his yellow teeth at Angela. He climbed into a pickup with mudflaps of busty reclining women, a sticker of Calvin peeing on a Ford insignia, and a pair of metal testes hanging from the trailer hitch. I tried to come up with a clever comment about trucks as loci of American machismo, some comment to restore normality, when one of the mudflap silhouettes curled upward, as if the woman were doing a sit up.

 

As her knees moved toward her breasts, the black shape melted into a profile of a small figure, her breasts now the brim of a hat, her legs folding over to become the kobold’s nose. The black silhouette of the kobold’s face then spread out and pixelated, resolving into a red and white checkerboard flag. This one I knew—any sailor would. It was the Uniform flag: you are running into danger. The flag rippled before it blinked to black and seeped, like batter in a pan, back into the shape of the busty woman.

 

I grabbed the door handle and pulled. The handle swung loosely on its hinge.

 

“Did you need something else from the store? The passenger door gets wonky, you can’t open it from the inside sometimes.”

 

“Let me out. I’ve got to get out of here.” I jerked the handle several times then

mashed the power window buttons. Angela grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward her.

 

“Hey, Julian. Calm down. What’s the matter?”

 

“Something’s really wrong with me. I need a doctor, or something. I think I’m hallucinating.”

 

Angela put her hands on my shoulders, turning me to face her. She leaned forward so our eyes were only inches apart. The heat of her presence and her smell—overripe and hot, like composted berries—made me woozy.

 

“Eyes look fine. No dilation.” She moved her hand down my arm, pinching my forearm hard and then looked down at my skin. “Normal refill and color.”

 

I felt the heat of her skin and the thin cool swaths of her silver rings as she took my wrist in her hand. She watched the dash clock and counted under her breath.

 

“Pulse 73. Healthy range. You’re fine, Julian. Don’t panic. Long car rides can have weird effects. Motion sickness, low blood sugar, tricks of the light.”

 

“You’re not a doctor.”

 

“True. But being around so many users and drunks made me an honorary paramedic, practically. I know when someone’s about to crash, and you’re not.” She was still holding my wrist, still locked on my eyes. “Can I just say something, Julian? Thank you for listening to my whole sob story about Eli. I’m really glad our ships crossed.” Angela leaned forward then scooted upward, pressing her lips to my forehead. Her t-shirt slipped open and I could see that her nipples, half obscured in shadow, were pale and pointed. Something about their shape, their pinkness, made them poignant to me. Innocent. Angela finally pulled away, squeezing my wrist.

 

“I think your heart is working fine.”

—

“He’s probably just taking a lunch break,” Angela said, rising up on her tiptoes so she could scan past the crowd and the few dilapidated trailered boats. She sipped from a tropical cocktail she’d purchased at the entrance.

 

The “boat show” was nothing like I imagined. It was more of an ad-hoc flea market in an abandoned mall parking lot, with some booths seeming to be official—all with the same sized black fold-out tables—and some completely makeshift, like the man sitting in a director’s chair with a single Rubbermaid container of jumbled hardware at his feet and a hand-painted sign that read “All Offers Considered.” Even the more formal booths were basically selling junk—dirty old chains, ripped sails, waterlogged old chart books rife with countries that no longer existed.

 

Eli’s booth was striking in comparison. A blue velvet cloth covered the whole table, serving as padding for a large, beautifully made display case. Beneath the glass, at the bottom of the case, stretched a sea of bunched blue satin, subdivided by a grid of small docks, coated white like the soft rind of Camembert cheese. There were dozens of miniscule ships in the display case, each neatly aligned in the scaled down marina slips, each held in place by hair-thin docklines hooked on silver cleats the size of earring backs.

 

Strangely, only a few of the ships were in bottles. A small sign noted that Eli would place the ship in the bottle upon purchase. The strain of performing this final act before an audience, I reasoned, was what caused the skew of each horizon. A wooden box, filled with impossibly small but recognizable tools (screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers, even a hammer the size of nail), lay open, next to the pile of pamphlets. Each tool sat in a velvet compartment, as much works of art as the ships.

 

Angela suddenly put her drink down and rushed forward. “Eli,” I heard her say, as she hurried toward a young man who walked with a slow gravity as if each step constituted a separate decision. He wore a loose pair of multi-stripe harem pants and a plain yellow t-shirt, the kind one would buy in bulk. Angela reached out as if to hug him, but he held up a hand and the two spoke for a few moments, occasionally glancing at me before walking over.

 

“Eli, this is Julian. He loves your boats. He’s a sailing scholar! And a good man.” She linked her arm with mine. I blushed, flattered and surprised.

 

“Julian,” Eli said, moving his mouth as if the word were a delicacy. He looked like Angela, but his face was wide and blurred, his small features submerged in baby fat and stubble. Dark hair hung past his ears in a tangled fringe like seventies-era drapes. He moved toward me and looked me in the eye, cocking his head and squinting as if my face were fine print.

 

“It’s nice to meet you, Eli.” I put out my hand, and Eli’s hand alighted on my wrist like a bird, his fingernails lightly perched.

 

“You’ve been at sea,” he murmured, lifting his hand and looking upwards as if he could see Tammy Sue cutting through the clouds.

 

“Yes, Eli, Julian had just come ashore when I met him. Enlightening and educating a fishing crew, in fact.” She squeezed my arm as she said this. Enlightening a fishing crew? That’s how she saw me? Warmth rippled through me.

 

“Eli, your ships are exceptionally rendered. I’m especially curious about the Otago.” I released myself from Angela’s grip to pull the bottle out from under my shirt. “If you don’t mind, could you share your sources?” I held it up to the sun for Eli, but when I did all I saw was the kobold, mashed into the bottle, blinking a large eye at me, the blue iris swirling like a funnel cloud. I dropped the bottle, feeling suddenly weightless and distant, an outside observer looking in.

 

Eli stared at my sternum where the bottle rested and raised his eyebrow. “Ah, my friend, the kobold. What a surprise.” He glanced at Angela. She was obviously pleased.

 

“You see? Julian gets along fine with the kobold. That’s how I knew.”

 

Fine? Kendricks was just a call away—911, too. But it was as if I was paralyzed and the phone in my pocket miles away.

 

“No, no. Let me tell him,” Angela was saying. She reached for the bottle, looked briefly into it, then let go. It hummed against my chest. “Julian, I have to explain something. You are perfectly fine. The kobold isn’t a hallucination. Eli has conjured—.”

 

Eli held up a palm to Angela’s face. “Summoned.”

 

“Summoned, yes. Eli, because he is such a caring soul”—she glared at Eli, droning the last bit like a teen employee reciting corporate patter—“has summoned for me a warding spirit.”

 

“Better.”

 

For the next several minutes, Angela spoke, with Eli breaking in. Men who fell in love with Angela saw the kobold, a sea troll … no, a protective spirit, a Klabauterman. Each one of them eventually left her, and a few of them lost their minds … absented themselves from Angela, thereby giving her a chance to grow. Freddie disappeared after having a square-rigger tattooed on his calf because the kobold told him to. J.J. broke into an electronics store to steal a white-noise machine to try to drown out the kobold’s voice. And Crater? The love of her life? The most corrupting of corrupting souls. Crater saw the kobold sitting in the sidecar of his Harley, right next to his black lab and drove off the road. … no, it was a yellow lab. For seven long years, the kobold had wreaked havoc on her life … if by wreaked you mean prevented.

 

“Prevented,” Angela pronounced the word slowly, just as Eli had. “Maybe so. Especially if it led me to Julian,” she said, squeezing my hand.

 

Eli rolled his eyes.

 

“Eli! You said yourself that a good man, a man who could see inside the ships, would not shrink from the kobold. Well, I’ve found that man.” Now Angela dug her nails into my palm. She began to give off a heat, and a sour smell wafted from her. “It’s over, isn’t it? Please, Eli. It’s time for the kobold to leave.”

 

“Your Julian looks unsettled,” Eli declared. “He’s just another imposter, and the kobold toys with him.”

 

The floor swayed and I took a deep breath, hoping it might help steady my feet. But all it did was draw Angela closer. The sweat on her hand mingled with mine. Warding spirit? It was insane talk. But they’d seen the kobold’s blinking eye just as clearly as I did. Was there such a thing as a shared hallucination?

 

Kendricks would know. I had to talk to him. He always told me to interpret Conrad’s sea stories as if only his narrators were real. His theory was that Conrad’s art mimicked the trickster mind of a sailor on night watch, conjuring whole worlds to avoid confronting the featureless darkness of a calm sea. “Becalming,” Kendricks had said, “is worse than any storm. In a storm, you’re preoccupied with keeping your ship afloat. In a calm, anything can take hold.” Could becalming happen on land? In the mind?

 

Angela turned to me, speaking in honey tones. “Julian, can Eli look into the bottle?”

 

I felt myself reeling back, my hand on the bottle. At that moment she and Eli seemed no more real than the kobold. And only the kobold, with his semaphore warnings, seemed on my side.

 

“I’d better go—”

 

Eli lifted his hand. “Wait. Don’t be afraid. Let us just see what the kobold has to say.”

 

Angela lifted the bottle over my head, and the motion was so proprietary—as if I were casually hers—that I was too surprised to react. For a moment it got snagged around my ear, and I felt her fingers press my earlobe to free it. Eli took the necklace from her, walked around the booth and came out with a jeweler’s loupe. He looked into the bottle, turning it under the sunlight and squinting.

 

“I can’t find him.” He muttered. “Not in the berth, not on deck, not in the galley, not in the bilge….” He rattled off nearly every part of a ship, then looked up. He turned the loupe around and peered through it at me, his face cocked if I could only be apprehended in the peripheral. “How strange.”

 

“Really?” Angela said, turning to me. “That’s wonderful.” She looked relieved, though I felt more unbalanced than before. I put my hand on Eli’s table to steady myself. Angela touched my shoulder; a tracer of sensation trailed down my back and petered out. I could feel the same undertow that I’d experienced beside the St. Marys River pulling at me again.

 

“I’ll get you some water, Julian. Don’t go anywhere.”

 

“I’m fine. I just need to step away and…” I managed, but she’d already disappeared somewhere among the other vendors’ tents. Eli was suddenly in front of me, holding the bottle at eye level. He raised his soft voice to an announcer’s volume, though somehow still in whisper.

 

“Did you notice? I hope you did. The ship you were wearing is the rarest version of the Otago. I’ve only made three.” He frowned. “Crater, that idiot, smashed the other two.”

 

I put out my hand to brush the bottle away, but I couldn’t resist one look.

 

The Otago had been transformed. It now floated absolutely straight on the horizon, almost unnaturally balanced. And the topsides were gone, cut away so that the cabin, as depicted in the map, was fully exposed. As my eye followed the L-shaped cabin that fascinated Kendricks, it twisted and fragmented into a labyrinthine jumble of more L-shaped cabins, mirror images within mirror images. My eyes seemed to be capable of focusing on smaller and smaller objects as they moved into the ship, so that the indistinct blurs of details too small would blossom into clarity the more I looked. There were infinite sleeping bunks and infinite dinners of soda bread and infinite broken sextants the captain had laid out to fix, and as my eye continued to move deeper into the cabins, I noticed that each new one had a small detail out of place, a different colored blanket, an unlaced boot on the floor where in the last cabin it had been laced, and so on.

 

“It’s spectacular,” I murmured. I looked up and the light had shifted. Angela’s abandoned cup had sweated through to the tablecloth, and her cocktail umbrella had sunk into her melted drink. How long had I been looking? How long had she been gone?

 

“Wait until you see the very center,” Eli whispered.

 

I looked back into the Otago’s bottle, following the cabins from the beginning, half hoping I might see the sprite again. Just as the last cabin opened before me, and my eye seemed to brush the curtain from the sleeping quarters inside, I felt my phone buzz in my pocket. Kendricks—I was sure—but let it ring. There, in the bunk where the murderer from the “The Secret Sharer” had been secreted away, lay Angela’s sleeping body. She wore the same striped dressing gown that Conrad described. She opened her eyes, and I saw my own face, gasping in astonishment, reflected in the blue sheen.

 

“Can you see her? It’s the smallest, animatronic replica.” Eli breathed.

 

“Yes…”

 

“My masterpiece. I think it’s time to finally show her.”

 

The figure turned with a small mechanical ping. My eyes settled on the curve of her shoulder, which shifted as if from her breathing. I reached out to touch her but found myself pulled in again, inward and inward, until the fabric of the dressing gown filled my view. The threads expanded then loomed like I-beams; a single fiber widened into a constellation grayed out by too many stars. Feeling my knees weaken, I willed myself back up to the main deck, thinking perhaps the kobold might yet be hidden among the anchor rode. Nothing stirred.

 

I turned to look for Eli, but could not pull myself free of the ship. An orange sun trailing light through the clouds blotted out the sky. The horizon line crumbled and what I had interpreted as a sunset was now a mass of color, a circular pattern moving across my visual field. The bright wad pulled away with a squeak, revealing a blurred and massive hand and Eli’s head—a distant monument. I stood on the teak deck of the Otago and watched as Eli polished the sky from the outside with a chamois the size of a thunderhead. I leaned over the rail and my glasses fell to the glass sea below, skidding and spinning before going still.

 

“Angela?” I called. Her name rose up and pinged around the bottle, echoes begetting echoes, compounded by the bottle’s sudden motion. Eli’s fingers, like some kind of stretched-low and ominous moon, draped the sky. He nestled the bottle into a dark pouch, into the depthless velvet pile, into the miniature slip. The silence was beyond a hush; it shrunk every sound. The sunlight diminished to a tenuous thread. Faintly golden, it illuminated the fish scales I coughed up every time I laughed or screamed or called her name.

Share

Watching You Sleep on the 5th Day of Your Life

The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart.

                                                ~Michael Chabon, Summerland

 

 

1.
Son, fathers fuck up. Fucking up is what fathers do. I’ve spent my adult life trying not to be my father—a man who loves quickly and leaves even quicker. But I see him in me—his chin, his nose, his long dangling earlobes. You have his chin, his nose, his long dangling earlobes. My hair is thick and black, like his. Your hair, even when you emerged into the world, is thick and black, like fine spun silk. I see my father. In me. In you. One day you will look at me and think, My father is a fuck-up, like how I looked at my father five years ago, waiting for me in the lobby of a Bangkok hotel after a two-year absence. I stayed hidden, spying him from behind a column, noticing how age had had its way with his body that sags and slouches, and thinking, I love you, but you have fucked me up. At that moment, anger turned into pity. “Let pity, then, be a kind of pain…,” Aristotle wrote, which makes me think his father fucked up, too. When the time comes, son, do not pity me. Let me apologize now, when you are asleep and dreaming, I hope, of whatever makes you love. And forgive.

 

2.
Son, you came into being like a Florida thunderstorm—quick and hard. Elephant rain, your Thai grandmother likes to call it. You announced your arrival through your mother’s screams. The commotion out of her mouth was your commotion. Her anguished face was your face. The midwife and nurses could not find your heartbeat, that rapid little sound I loved to listen to during prenatal check-ups. It vanished. I knew something was the matter. I knew by the organized chaos in the room—the fifteen or so nurses buzzing around, everyone doing something. And then, in the midst of this hectic-ness, you came out. “He’s arrived,” the midwife said. Arrived with the umbilical cord wrapped twice around your neck. There was a forever second of silence until you cried. And then I cried. That night, at the hospital, I could not sleep. I hovered over you, as I do now, checking the rise and fall of your chest, the twitch of your tiny fingers, making sure you were breathing and alive.

 

3.
Son, when you become a father, time will lose meaning. Your mind will propel you into the future, your child grown and happy. You hope you are responsible for that happiness. Or, you will imagine the unimaginable, and it will knot your jaw, and it will fist your hands. Time for a father is not linear. I have seen you through college, seen you married, seen all your successes and regrets. I have gone backwards, too, when you did not exist, when I did not exist, witnessing this lineage of fathers, who strayed. My past is your past, son. Time intertwines like a suffocating weed. It is not measured by light, but memory, which is timeless and unpredictable. Where, I wonder, will this memory of your sleep be thirty years from now? What will harken it? At my death, it is this memory I want to slip into and carry with me into the next life.

 

4.
Son, a few days before your arrival, a man entered a nightclub and extinguished forty-nine lives. When news broke, I shut out the world. I wanted you to enter a happy world, in a happy family, in the arms of a happy father. Happiness, however, is illusory. The truth: the world hurts. Six hours before your arrival, I finished Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir, Between the World and Me. In it he writes to his son: “I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.” There is so much that I want to shield you from, so much I do not want you to witness. But I wonder if you already know the world is broken. Sometimes you furrow your brow in your sleep, like you do now, a look of someone betrayed, and I think we all begin our lives with a cry, our first breath the beginning of suffering.

 

5.
Son, your mother worries people will not know you are hers. You have inherited all that is Thai in me. She fears, when you look at her, you will not see a mother but a simple white woman. But she wanted this. “I hope he looks like you,” she said. “I hope he looks like you,” I said. You look like this country. You were born from a yellow man and white woman, who wakes you with kisses, who holds you so tight fearing you might evaporate. Son, love your mother. Son, love her more than you love me. See yourself mirrored in her eyes. But do not forget your father. He will be there. He promises. He promises so many things.

 

 

Share

binding we

…originally published in 40.2 of The Florida Review.

 

you have declared war on our bodies, and our bodies

have fallen on each other in piles

along the gravel and the wood

and the tile of a dance floor

and these holy spaces have become our graves

and the sidewalks our pyres because we are burning up

from our no and our why and our no more

 

we, our breasts, our bodies,

in all their shapes and sizes are heaving

in piles on one another, breathing

the force of love enough to hold the parts of us we do not

recognize, enough to stretch the parts we hold dear

Share

Drew Ex Machina

…originally published in 40.2 of The Florida Review.

 

July 2, 2004

Pulse opened in Orlando, Florida, when I was nineteen and Drew had just turned twenty. We had met the first week of college, eleven months prior.

 

Drew danced like a maniac. Sometimes he would pull you up to him and slam his body against you. It was the same way he hugged. And tickled. With loving force, one might say.

 

We didn’t go to Pulse the night it opened. Instead, we spent the weekend in Clearwater with my family. We played Dance Dance Revolution at the mall, talked about doing a semester abroad in London, and danced in my room to Drew’s favorite song of the moment.

 

“Murder on the Dancefloor” by Sophie Ellis Bextor.

 

October 10, 2004

Pulse was remarkably non-Orlando-esque, according to Drew. Since I had only been to gay clubs in Orlando and Tampa, I didn’t have much basis for comparison. But I trusted Drew when he told me this was what the clubs in bigger cities were like.

 

Our favorite was the white room. He described it as “…rather miraculously immaculate. You’re not quite sure if the walls are windows, mirrors, or projection screens. Hoorah for ambiguous decor!”

 

I loved the whimsical way he would describe things.

 

April 13, 2005

“Club partners for life!” we screamed at each other on the dancefloor that entire night at Pulse. And then the next night at Firestone. Whenever we were together, a ten-foot wall couldn’t have kept people from wanting to spend time with us.

 

That’s the way we liked it.

 

Drew was like a soul-brother to me. Maybe it was because we were both Geminis (and he would swear to you this was exactly the reason). Maybe it was because we both had endless amounts of energy. I didn’t care what it was. I could have gone out with him every single night.

 

That year, it seemed like I did.

 

April 23, 2005

We attempted to crash Grad Nite at Disney World.

 

We talked about it for weeks. We would join up with the group from my high school because they had extra tickets. It would work out because we both still looked like we could have been in high school.

 

It failed because my friend on the bus never answered her phone. I am a terrible liar, but attempted to pretend that Drew and I were separated from our group. The manager took us to the Grad Nite ticket counter and once they looked up my high school, our plans were thwarted. He was laughing hysterically while I was on the verge of having a panic attack for lying and nearly getting caught.

 

We talked about crashing Grad Nite every April. We swore that one year, we would finally succeed.

 

We had infinite chances, right? We would look seventeen and eighteen forever, right?

 

May 1, 2005

From Drew’s journal. Gemini’s horoscope: You’ve never understood people who refuse to try new things. In your mind, even if you give something a shot and it doesn’t work out, it’s still better than being bored. That attitude is about to come in plenty handy, thanks to an interesting new friend who’ll bring you the opportunity to broaden your horizons. If your passport isn’t current, better see what you can do about that. You may end up with an invitation to travel.

 

A song lyric from one of his favorite bands, The Pet Shop Boys, comes to mind. We were never bored because we were never boring. Using the past tense still hurts.

 

November 6, 2005

Another excerpt from Drew’s journal. I told him he should write a story about this. How right and how wrong he was.

 

I imagine the end of humankind not to be in the form of a nuclear winter, a massive AIDS virus, or the evaporation of natural resources. Instead, I see the men and women of this earth reaching a quiet, still end.

 

Terribly, suddenly, all women would become infertile. At first, there would be a race to find a cure. All the scientists would rally together around this one cause — the fight for the survival of our species.

 

But eventually, hope would dwindle… the young would grow old, the old, older. Nightclubs and coffee shops and college campuses would close down, religions and governments would grow quiet. There would be no war or famine. The last remaining people would lie down in silence, no one watching. The end of humankind would be gone. In a whisper.

 

The future wouldn’t have much meaning to this sort of people. The only thing left after their departure would be the good things, and bad things, that humanity has done. The only way they could find peace would be to make amends to the world.

 

I’m not sure that they could.

 

I’m not sure they could, either.

 

April 30, 2006

Something I remember about Drew is that he was always down on himself. About his looks, about not fitting in with “the gay community.” I often felt similarly. It was hard to finally find a community, but to feel like you didn’t necessarily belong to it.

 

I wish he knew just how beautiful he was. I think he found that after college.

 

“Do not wish to be anything but what you are, and try to be that perfectly” was his personal motto. He did do it perfectly, however painful or awkward it may have been.

 

November 16, 2006

Diva Invasion was a huge drag show put on by UCF’s GLBSU every year. I was one of the event planners and had convinced my mom to join us.

 

I remember watching her laugh while grabbing one of the drag queen’s boobs. She said it was unfair that they were nicer than her own.

 

The after-party that night was at Pulse. My mom bought all of my friends a round of martinis. While Drew and our other friend, Christopher, were busy dancing with my mom Night at the Roxbury-style, my girlfriend and I snuck off to make out in the bathroom because it was a safe place to do so.

 

April 16, 2007

The Virginia Tech shooting was something that felt so close to home, yet so far away.

 

How? Why? These were the questions that kept popping up. These were the questions we would continue to ask for years to come. How could someone do this? Why aren’t there tighter gun laws?

 

Drew wrote: I’m feeling kind of shaken about the events at Virginia Tech today. I didn’t find out until I got home from class and went into the office. At first I didn’t really understand what was going on. Now I’m feeling like I could cry about it.

 

It’s hard trying to find a balance between caring and understanding (how could we?), and distancing yourself from the situation, passing it off as just another 32 bodies; as lifeless, heavy sculptures, as silence.

 

But, are we even supposed to try and find a balance? Are our emotions honestly constructed so mechanically?

 

[The] bodies weren’t enough. The implications of this could be so much more.

 

Sociologists will be happy. Not since Hitler has a mass murderer given so much fodder to disassemble and analyze. Maybe we’ll get inside the mind of a killer, but at what cost?

 

January 20, 2008

“You’re already in New York! All you need is a monkey and a popcorn machine!”

 

That was Drew’s response to my mini-existential crisis while I was deciding between psychology and writing graduate programs. After graduating from UCF, I’d packed up my entire life and moved to New York to live with my family for a while before figuring it out.

 

Instead of figuring it out or becoming a street performer per Drew’s suggestion, I fled the country and backpacked through Europe for six weeks.

 

Sometime in 2010

I had finally chosen writing for my graduate degree and stayed in NYC to pursue it. Sometime in 2010, Drew and I had a falling out. I don’t remember the specifics because this is how juvenile it was.

 

He was a die-hard anti-Apple Android fanatic.

 

He bought an iPod.

 

I made a joke about him buying an iPod.

 

That turned into a heated argument. He told me my “literature” “made his eyes bleed.”

 

I told him that a therapist should be more sane than his patients.

 

And we didn’t speak for several years.

 

June 2011

Every Monday, I would meet my New York friends at either Stonewall or Duplex. We would drink on the cheap at both places and play Guitar Hero at Duplex.

 

It was odd to think about drinking and dancing at a place with so much historical context.  In fact, I’m not sure I even thought about it at the time. The Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street is where the riots started that set the tone for the entire LGBT movement. But by now, as at Pulse, we felt safe there.

 

When we played Guitar Hero, there were a few times that I thought of Drew. I remembered, very vividly, a photo of him, Christopher, and our other friend Andrea. They were sitting on my couch the night of Christopher’s twentieth birthday. Drew had just bought him the game.

 

I thought about it, but I didn’t reach out. Twenty-somethings can be like that.

 

September 6, 2014

After pacing back and forth through the Barnes & Noble on Colonial eight times, I sat down in the cafe and pulled out my phone. I had moved away from Orlando six years prior. I lived in New York, Alabama, and was now living in Denver.

 

I had just gone through my usual series of unfortunate events post-breakup:

find a rebound,

rebound,

be hurt by the rebound,

regret breaking up with my original girlfriend to begin with.

 

I hated that I was in Orlando. Somehow, the humidity made the hurt feel worse. Somehow, it made me feel more stuck.

 

Drew was the first person I texted. He and I hadn’t seen each other in a couple of years because of the iPod debacle, but had begun speaking again from our respective parts of the country. He texted me back immediately, and just-so-happened to have been in the same shopping center.

 

“Fair warning: I look like shit,” he said.

 

“Fair warning: Same,” I responded.

 

We sat and talked for two hours before deciding to head back to his apartment. He lived around the corner and wanted to show me his place and force me to play Dance Dance Revolution with him—something I hadn’t done since college.

 

That evening, it felt like no time had passed. We talked about all of our silly college inside jokes, read the DSM, watched a bit of Eurovision, and took some photos together.

 

He still had the mug I made him for his birthday, years prior. It showcased photos of us from the evening we tried to sneak into Grad Nite at Disney in 2005.

 

After I left his apartment, I got a text message: “You left your sunglasses here!”

 

I responded for him to hold on to them. I’d get them from him the next time I saw him, which would, we hoped, be sooner than several years.

 

We were better at staying in touch, but didn’t see each other for a year and a half because I was living in Denver and he was still in Orlando. I had no idea how, of all of our friends, he was still the one to remain there. He always talked about moving but never pulled the trigger.

 

May 29, 2016

After spending two days texting back and forth about plans, Drew and I finally agreed to meet for brunch on Sunday. I finally got to meet Juan, the beautiful boyfriend in all of his photos.

 

We met at International Plaza in Tampa and went to The Cheesecake Factory for lunch because I couldn’t make it to Orlando. We, of course, made fun of ourselves the entire time. I think “Tampa’s finest!” was the caption on the Snapchat I added to my story. That afternoon was the first time I’d seen him in over a year. He and Juan were so cute together. It looked like they shared a wardrobe, which I found out­—they did. Drew seemed more calm. Way more calm than I’d ever seen him.

 

He still hugged me too hard. He still made an “mmm” sound when he did it. The way he hugged made me feel like he was hugging me with different senses. Can you taste a hug? I bet he could.

 

He felt older that day. We felt older that day. And not just because I had just turned thirty-one and he was about to turn thirty-two. Another thing we had in common was what some would call a “Peter Pan Complex.” It served us well. On my thirtieth birthday, he wrote to me saying, Welcome to the first day of the “wow, there is no way you’re actually 30!” club.

 

Before parting ways, he gave me back my neon green sunglasses. He’d held onto them for a year and a half.

 

June 10, 2016

How about the weekend of July 8th? We can go to Global Dance Festival at Red Rocks!

 

This was the last discussion I had with Drew. I was about to buy my tickets for the weekend-long dance music festival in Colorado. I had already begun planning out our entire weekend; all the vegetarian restaurants and breweries I’d take them to, a beautiful hike or two, and, yes—a gay club.

 

I warned them when I was sitting with them drinking strawberry lemonade in Tampa: If you come to visit me in Denver, you’ll end up wanting to move.

 

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Drew said with a smile.

 

June 12, 2016

The morning of June 12, I woke up inundated by text messages and missed calls. I defaulted to text messages, even though three of the missed calls were from my mother.

 

“Oh my god, I am so so so sorry Sara” was the first one I read.

 

“How are you holding up? I am so sad to hear about Orlando.”

 

“My thoughts are with you. I can’t believe what happened.”

 

“Have you heard from Drew?!”

 

Eight hours earlier, I was sleepwalking. My dog barked to go out at about one in the morning, and I sleepily walked to the door, put his leash on, walked down the stairs, and walked him around the block. A neighbor screamed my name, and I distinctly remember telling her I was sleepwalking.

 

That’s the thing about sleepwalking. Much like hypnosis, you are somewhat cognizant of what you are doing, but you can’t control it. I waved to her and kept walking around the block.

 

I came home, took Baxter’s leash off, put my sandals back where they belonged, and got back in bed.

 

At that very same time, one of my best friends from college was lying on the floor of Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. At that very same time, he and forty-eight other people—his boyfriend, Juan, included—were being shot by a madman with a military-style assault weapon. And killed.

 

After reading the text messages and not having a clue what anyone was sending me condolences about, I opened Facebook. There were several more messages waiting for me there. But the first thing I saw when I opened the app was Drew’s mother, Christine. All over Facebook. All over the news. She was in tears. She had heard about the shooting right after it happened and, while Juan was already at the hospital being treated for gunshot wounds, Drew was still nowhere to be found.

 

I was hoping, like many of the rest of us, that he was just in shock and hiding somewhere. But for him to not check in on social media or answer his text messages? Unlikely. I sent him a text message at 8:57 a.m. MST: “ARE YOU OKAY?!?!?!”

 

That would be the last text message I sent him.

 

I didn’t know what to do. All I knew was that I couldn’t be alone. A week prior, I had begun dating someone new. And as soon as she woke up, she asked if I needed her to come over. No questions asked.

 

So she did. She lay in bed with me while I obsessively checked my phone, texted with my friends from college, and took phone calls from my friends and family. They were looking for answers.

 

I didn’t have any.

 

Twelve anxiety-inducing hours went by before anyone had any information. All day, I spoke with other people from our college friend group. My friends called me crying. As the hours dragged on, my hope that Drew was in shock and hiding grew dim.

 

All I could think about was the heat and humidity and the bodies. The blood all over the walls of the white room at Pulse. The couch that we used to sit on and take photos. I couldn’t believe they would take so long to remove the victims, considering the weather conditions.

 

Then I thought about how maybe it was a homophobic issue. How maybe they had to take extra time because it was a gay club and it was gay blood and, even though we are in 2016, there are still laws barring gay men from donating blood.

 

This is the way my anxiety thoughts work. These are the things that scamper across my brain constantly.

 

I couldn’t do much that day besides stare at the one police scene photo that was on every news story. The blue and red lights together created this amethyst, purplish color.

 

It somehow felt better than blue and red.

 

June 14, 2016

I went to the vigil in Denver that Monday. Besides the rainbow over the park, I found absolutely no solace in being there. I hated every moment of it. The executive director of the LGBT nonprofit I used to work for made it all about him.

 

All about his experience.

 

All about Denver.

 

All about a community who didn’t know Drew. All about people who had never been to Pulse. All about people who may not have ever even been to Orlando.

 

I felt selfish for thinking this way, which triggered more anxiety. I texted my other best friend from college, Christopher. He was at a vigil in Houston. I assumed he was feeling similarly.

 

Pulse Nightclub was a place in Orlando that I went to every week in college. Sometimes twice a week. Oftentimes with Drew.

 

When it was time to light the candle at the vigil, all I could do was watch the wax drip down. All I could do was feel the pathetic fallacy of the rain and hear the pitter-patter of the raindrops against umbrellas and ponchos.

 

I still didn’t cry. I felt like I was still sleepwalking.

 

June 15, 2016

I spent the day trying to make travel plans for myself and Christopher because he was working in the clinic all day.

 

The city of Orlando came together in a huge way that week. Several airlines donated flights and many hotels worked with the city Chamber of Commerce to help those who were grieving.

 

I booked our flights and hotel, completely free of charge, while on a hike with my friend Becca. She convinced me that getting outside and climbing a mountain would help.

 

When we got to the top, we sat back to back on a rock and looked out at the wilderness below us. I couldn’t help but be terrified about the next few days and how they would play out. I had only been to funerals of people who lived full lives. Who died of old age.

 

And still, I sleepwalked down the mountain.

 

That evening, the new girl I was dating came over and sat with me while I made bracelets for my friends. They said THEDRUPROJECT, which was Drew’s Internet handle for everything. I didn’t know how else to keep busy. I didn’t know where to put this sad energy.

 

It was as if he created the memorial for himself while he was still alive. He was always working on himself. He was always a project in progress.

 

June 16, 2016

When I arrived at the airport and checked in, I tried to muster the words to thank the people who worked for the airline who flew us for free.

 

Instead, they thanked me. They told me how sorry they were. They walked me through the airport. They gave me a voucher for food and drink. They put me on the airplane first.

 

I was sleepwalking then, too. I was moving through the airport, nodding my head, saying the words back that seemed like the words I needed to say.

 

I don’t remember any of them.

 

I remember landing at the airport in Orlando. I remember getting my bag. I remember getting in my friend Ashley’s car and her driving me to the hotel.

 

But it was all a blur. I felt as though I was peering through the eyes of someone else. Someone who was grieving. I wanted to extend my sympathy to this caricature of myself.

 

When I got to our room, I hugged Christopher for a good five minutes. Resting my head on his chest felt right. It was the first thing that had felt right in days.

 

June 17, 2016

The morning of the wake, Christopher and I walked across the street to the memorial set up at the Dr. Phillips Center.

 

There were photos of all forty-nine victims. Tons of flowers. Rainbow flags. Emotional support dogs from Alabama, even. People from all over the country were there, paying their respects.

 

I hung one of THEDRUPROJECT bracelets on the photo of Drew.

 

We went to lunch. Slowly, people came to meet us. Slowly, we made our way through the day until it was time to go to the wake.

 

“Will you walk up to the casket with me?” Christopher asked. “I need to see him. It’ll be some sort of closure.”

 

I agreed, but felt funny about it. I had never been to an open-casket wake or funeral. I wanted to be his support, though.

 

The wake was a procession of friends from my past. I hadn’t seen most of these people since graduating. We all sat around, watching the slideshow of photos from college. We shared Drew stories.

 

I hugged his mom for as long as I could. I had no idea how she was smiling. How she was comforting other people.

 

Christopher and I waited until the very last second before walking up to the casket. The wake ended at 8:00 p.m. and we approached at 7:30. The second I looked, I finally broke down and cried. Because looking at his body in a casket—the first body in a casket I’d ever seen—was like visiting a wax figure museum and seeing a cheap knockoff of a celebrity I once loved.

 

That was not how I wanted to remember him.

 

After the viewing, I went and got a tattoo of a phrase I’d been thinking about for five or six years: deus ex machina. The literal meaning is “machine from god.” In literature or theater, it is a plot device–a random character is dropped into the story to guide it to a happy ending.

 

I sent a note Drew had written to a friend of mine who does lettering for a publishing company. She pulled out all of the letters to create the phrase just perfectly.

 

He’s my Drew ex machina now.

 

June 18, 2016

“You and Drew were my first friends in the gay community.”

 

“You made me feel safe to come out.”

 

“The way the two of you welcomed any new friend into your group had such an incredible impact.”

 

“Thank you.”

 

A lot of people came up to me at the funeral or the days leading up to it to tell me versions of that. I had no idea that’s how we were viewed. I had never even thought about it. I’m sure he hadn’t, either. We might have been self-conscious and felt like we never fit in while in college, but nobody would keep us from being our authentic selves—whatever that was.

 

I don’t remember much from the funeral itself. Being inside of a church made me rather uncomfortable, if I’m being honest. It was a Catholic service inside of an Episcopal church, but what difference did it make? When it was time to take the cracker, neither my mother nor I knew what to do. So, two Jews went up to the altar and had a snack.

 

It was disgusting. The cracker, death, being at a friend’s funeral, the lack of gun laws, all of it.

 

July 17, 2016

Today, one day short of a month since the funeral, was the first day that I forgot to wear my THEDRUPROJECT bracelet.

 

I noticed I had forgotten it as I was walking to my car, but didn’t stop to go back because it would have made me late. It did make me pause, though.

 

It made me pause like so many moments in the first month post-Pulse. Like the moments where I had panic attacks in enclosed public spaces because I was afraid of being shot. Like the moments where I thought of something I wanted to tell Drew and couldn’t. Like the moments where I paused to reflect on how Congress could have turned down four common sense gun law initiatives while contemplating even one of the 200+ pieces of legislation that were proposed to discriminate against the LGBT community.

 

When will we, as a country, stop sleepwalking and do something? Remembering is simply not enough. Remembering is what we do.

 

I will never receive a too-hard hug again because we haven’t done enough. I will never be able to send my friend a song I know he would like because we haven’t done enough. I will never be forced to watch Eurovision or play Dance Dance Revolution again because we haven’t done enough.

 

We need to do more than just remember.

 

August 12, 2016

Another anniversary. It’s been exactly two months. It somehow simultaneously feels like two days and two years and it feels like a Sisyphean nightmare where I finally feel like I am okay before a find out a new detail or something reminds me of him or I just do that thing I do where I spend an hour looking at photos of him and I have to go chasing after the boulder as it races back down the mountain. Call it sleeprunning.

 

I know it’s not productive.

 

But neither was trying to eat 63% of a container of melon the other day. His mother posted on Facebook that his heart weighed 250 grams. No mother should know that. Nobody should know that. But now I knew, and it was a matter of time before something triggered me into needing to find out how tangibly how much that actually is.

 

The thing ended up being a container of pre-cut melon I bought the other day. I took it out of the fridge to have a few pieces and when I was putting it back, I noticed the container said 680 grams. I stopped everything else I was working on or doing or thinking about and stared at the container for a good several minutes before delving in and trying to eat as much of it as I could. I needed to have exactly 63% of it. Because then it would weigh 250 grams. And then I could feel what Drew’s heart felt like.

 

I couldn’t force myself to eat enough of the melon, so I took it out of the container.

 

I stood in my kitchen and held the container.

 

And immediately felt shame. What a morbid thing to have done. All I can wonder is when I will wake up or the boulder will just stay put long enough for life to feel normal again for more than a few days—for the anniversaries not to seem like every 12th, every Sunday, every day.

Share

Where Do All the Dead Names Go?

…originally published in 40.2 of The Florida Review.

 

Three days after the shooting, I walked into my therapist’s office. She said, “Talk.” I didn’t know what to say. What do you tell people, after something like that? Do I tell them how when I was nineteen and barely out, I walked doe-eyed into Pulse with X’s on my hands and the hope that a girl might ask me to dance? Do I tell them that I felt safe to be myself for the first time, that we were all there for the same reason—to be open and unafraid? That we were all untouchable, then, and even though I left without a dance I understood that this was a place I could always go.

 

Do I tell them that people like me are more than twice as likely to be victims of violent crimes? Sometimes you forget that there are people out there who want you dead. They want you to die. Every day I am alive is an act of defiance. What do I tell people?

 

How do I tell them what it was like, waiting to hear from friends who’d gone out that night? Answering messages to let people know I was alive. I was not there, but God, I could have been. I could have been with friends on the dance floor, sweating to music, spilling the secret that I had a crush on a friend who was dating another friend, rushing out to the patio bar to avoid a girl I slept with once who never called me again, stuffing dollars down the briefs of a young dancer. Ordering a vodka and cranberry. Admiring the shot girl’s legs. Dancing so hard that I got hungry and stumbled across the street to order fries off the value menu at Wendy’s. I could have been.

 

In the days after the shooting, I had an older gay woman put her hand on my shoulder and tell me it shouldn’t have happened. That she and others marched and protested in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s so that now people like me would be safe. It should have been us, she said. Not you, not you.

 

How do I tell them that my brother was one of the first responders? That a man’s bullet came for his skull but instead got his helmet. That he came home with blood on his boots. How do I tell them how much he cares? Would he run into the building again, knowing a bullet was coming for him? A thousand times over. I want them to know him, to know that his hair curls tight like mine, that his favorite film is The Empire Strikes Back, that he’s a vegetarian. He’s my brother. Those first few days after, I had to prove to myself over and over again that he was still alive. I felt like I had to protect him. I’m part of the Pulse community, but also knit into the world of law enforcement. I don’t think about what should have been done. Did the police take too long? Did they not want to go in because the people trapped inside were queer? No. No. Maybe people don’t remember the UpStairs Lounge arson attack. Thirty-two gay men burned to death in 1973 at a gay bar in New Orleans. A man’s charred remains were visible to onlookers hanging from a window well into the next day. Press was minimal, jokes were made on talk radio. The police called them queers. No one was arrested. The case was eventually closed. Pulse was not the UpStairs Lounge. This is not 1973. Things are not how they were. This was not the UpStairs Lounge. My brother, and every single one of his fellow officers cared. At least that much is different. At least I know that.

 

When we were alone, finally, I laid my head against my brother’s chest and listened to the beat of his heart. Every steady pulse saying I’m still here, I’m still here, I’m still here. I listened to the pulse I almost lost, remembered the Pulse I did lose.

 

And later, alone in my room, I sat in silence and mourned for the forty-nine heartbeats that no longer were. The heartbeats of my other brothers and sisters. I repeated their names, struggled on pronunciations and felt the syllables twist my tongue, and now those names live forever in the spaces between my teeth.

 

How do I explain?—I want to know where all the dead names go. I want to know who swallows them. I cannot. I want to ask, when will it okay for me to move on? How do I carry these ghosts on my back? I can’t imagine putting them down—I’ve already promised to hold them forever. They are mine now. I carry their heartbeats in mine. I wish I could say I am not afraid, but there are days I am terrified. I have been practicing being unafraid since the moment I cut my hair and took the hand of a girl I loved on a crowded street. I am starting to understand that is something I will have to practice all my life.

Share

Dancing in the Dark

…originally published in 40.2 of The Florida Review.

 

The headlight fell off again. It’s a little sooner than expected, but I’m not altogether surprised. When it rains, water creeps under the packing tape securing it to my car, gradually weakening the adhesive so that over a few days it peels off completely, leaving me driving ten MPH under the speed limit and dragging my front left headlight down the road by its cord like a stubborn dog that’s got its own ideas about where we need to go, which currently is the nearest CVS and quick.

 

I’ve been making excuses for not fixing it for the past six months, since I lost control of my steering wheel at a Pollo Tropical and careened into the white picket fence bordering the restaurant’s friendly front doors, bulldozing a family of shrubs along the way. Seated in the wreck, I counted down the seconds wondering when someone would emerge from the building to ask me if I was okay, or at least scold me for driving with headphones on, but no one seemed bothered. Unsure of a proper course of action to take and growing more annoyed that no one had as much as pointed and laughed at me, I stepped out of my car and tip-toed toward the fence to survey the damage. No harm done. The shrub had simply been pushed to a lean, like it had clocked out for its smoke break and would be back to work in a minute. Except for the fallen headlight, my car, too, seemed blithely unfazed by the accident, so with no one to answer to, I went on with my day, driving to work savoring my stale Get-Out-Of-Jail-For-Crashing-Into-a-Global-Conglomerate card.

 

Ever since, it’s been all “You’ll fix it with your next paycheck” and “It’s not like the light doesn’t work. At least now it has character.” Even more dumbfounding, my stepfather is a former mechanic and I have a close friend who recently repaired my taillights who would be delighted to help with the headlight problem, yet I don’t ask either of them for help. Part of me believes I deserve this headache, as if by getting away with crashing into the Pollo Tropical, I owe it to the universe as cosmic penance to be burdened with this slight inconvenience.

 

It’s not just the Pollo Tropical. Three years earlier my legacy of driving into things that are not roads began when my right front tire collided with a curb on a side street outside of Pulse, the Orlando gay bar with the least accessible parking, almost all next-to-impossible parallel spaces. Inspecting the damage with my fingertips and feeling the rubber only barely dip where it had scraped the concrete, I thought, “Idiot. You are such a lucky idiot.” Add to my cosmic debt the time I almost drowned in the community pool in my uncle’s apartment complex when I was ten. When I got a flat driving home from school and my car skidded down a six-lane road and glided neatly into a ditch. Being rushed to the emergency room after donating blood and fainting just steps outside of the Big Red Bus in full sight of a team of nurses. And being gay, because—despite the rush of revolt I get when I put on my patent leather boots and silk floral blouses in the morning—I am often confronted with the irrational idea that I’ve survived being gay. Irrational because surviving being gay seems like such an antiquated notion. My generation doesn’t survive being gay. This is 2016. My mother watches Ellen. Ellen watches Modern Family. A drag queen has a single on the Billboard dance charts. Even so, when I got the call from my best friend that a man had walked into Pulse, our Pulse, and used his gun to do what guns do, I was again thrust into acknowledging the harsh truth that I have survived being gay.

 

I don’t want to ask myself what I would have done had I been inside of Pulse between 2:02 and 5:15 a.m., yet I still do. “Would you have made it?” I find myself wondering while doing the dishes, surrendering to my pesky ego. “Would he have looked at you and seen something worth sparing?” In these moments of selfishness, I am the universe’s incontinent pet and it is shoving my face into a puddle of my urine, trying to house train me by asking, “Why do this? What are you going to learn from this mess?”

 

A coworker, a classmate, a woman at a garage sale noncommittally perusing through a copy of Atlas Shrugged all are interested: “Did any of your friends die?” Each time, my face is pressed back down to the floor. “Why do you ask?” I want to know. “Do you really think this is going to get us anywhere?” Each time, I could say no, thank you for asking, and maybe attribute my apparent sudden weakness to something else, perhaps a potassium deficiency, anything that would give me a valid reason to grieve when none of my best friends are dead at Pulse.

 

In the chaos of the first few days after the shooting, when there are still phones inside of Pulse ringing, a nagging pang in the back of my head follows me wherever I go, questioning my certainty that everyone I know is safe. In describing this doubt to a friend, I tell him that I feel like Catherine O’Hara in Home Alone. I am at the airport running towards my gate, already late for my flight, when suddenly it hits me: Kevin. The people I love the most are accounted for. My best friends are safe, I believe, but what about Kevin? Am I forgetting Kevin?

 

I remember a night at Pulse several years ago—the same night I rammed into the curb. It’s the week of my twenty-first birthday and I’m electrified by the power of gay spaces, partly because I can finally legally order a drink at Pulse. I rush home after the club to write in my diary, still buzzing from too many well cocktails and schmaltzy after some of my first public flirting with being a gay man. I recall a vow I made with myself that I would only drink one beer so that if my tire was deflated by the time I got back to it at the end of the night, at least I would be sober, and how I promptly broke that promise when I ran into my ex-boyfriend inside the club. Given the choice between being drunk on the phone with Triple A or lucid at Karaoke night with the guy that broke up with me over text message, I opt for an all-you-can-drink wristband and fall in love with the first cute guy I see. He’s a blur with a blond Mohawk and he’s punching at the air a few feet away from me on the dancefloor. Even in the dark I can make out how white his skin is, as if all the lights in the room have conspired to make him someone important. I’m not even beside him, but I’m already imagining us reading back to back in our country home in Connecticut and laying my head on his chest. I don’t introduce myself but I do Charleston a few times in his general vicinity which is just as good anyway as long as my goal is to drive home alone on a bad tire. I never get his name. All of my best friends are safe, but three years later, I worry about Kevin.

 

I could stretch the truth. Yes. To those who are curious if anyone I loved was there, I could describe the night I met one of the victims, not exactly a friend, but someone that I used to know. I could catalog the drinks it took me to grow the balls to walk up to him that night at Savoy, the gay bar popular for its aging go-go boys and $3 beers, the bar with the shotgun behind the counter that one of the bartenders once told a friend of mine is always kept loaded “just in case.” I could feign wonder at how despite not quite being drunk, I still found myself serendipitously falling into him, pretending to catch myself on his pleasantly toned arm that barely seemed to register the new weight of me. I could admit that the mixture of a recent breakup, liquor, and a tough pop song about life after love had me diving wholeheartedly into my own private rom-com. I could say that when I kissed him, silhouetted against the lurid neon lights spotlighting our half-empty glasses of booze, wrapping my body in his like this is what my arms were always meant to do, I thought, “Finally! So here is why it’s all been worth it.” I could recall his mouth, soft and sticky with cocktail syrup, so that when I took a step back to get a better look at him, late 20’s, with an impish grin that made him seem like he was keeping a good secret, I could still taste the lingering sweetness of him on my lips. I could tell them he had a boyfriend back then, watch their faces closely to see if that changes what they think about him now that they know he’s not perfect—this is a real man who is now gone. It wouldn’t matter, really. Either way, they would just be glad that I’m safe, that it wasn’t me, that I survived being gay.

 

The inquisitive woman at the garage sale who wants to know if any of my friends has died asks me for help piling her second-hand loot into the back of her car. “I’m so proud of your generation,” she says, handing me a trashcan designed to look like an antique apothecary jar to stow in her trunk. She looks at me warmly, adopting me in the way true parental spirits take in all stray children, and drives off satisfied, convinced that she has nothing to worry about. I would have never been there, not her sweet, chaste, not-that-kind-of-gay son. It’s almost like it never happened at all. But her story is wrong. She is too eager to get back to her daytime soaps, and her picture of me, of us, is not complete. It has been sanitized like the tools of the apothecary that inspired her fun, new trashcan.

 

Flashes of bad times come to me, too. A time, for instance, when I find myself in front of Jarred—from a year ago—with a half-naked twink in a full Rambo getup.

 

“Hey,” Jarred says. He turns to his friend and whispers loudly in his ear, “He’s friends with Michael.”

 

His friend appraises me up and down. “That would make sense.”

 

“Edgar’s an apathetic blogger,” Jarred goes on.

 

“I’m an apathetic blogger,” I say, testing the role out. I run MarthaStewartVEVO.tumbler.com.”

 

“You’re short,” the friend says out of nowhere.

 

“I found your underwear under my bed the other day,” Jarred says.

 

I try to hide my disgust that he only just found the old briefs I abandoned in a whirlwind after we hooked up more than twelve months ago. “Congrats!” I almost say.

 

But Jarred isn’t finished. “I almost texted you, but I wasn’t sure it would have been appropriate.” They both giggle and elbow each other and roll their eyes.

 

“What do you do for a living?” Rambo asks.

 

“Nothing,” I say. “I’m not alive.”

 

“Cute.”

 

“Did I upset you two?” I ask. “Because I don’t understand why you’re trying to be mean to someone who has done nothing to either of you.”

 

“I’m just a cunt,” the friend says, so genuine it hurts. “You have pretty teeth,” he adds.

 

Friends of mine have joked about how the catch-all slogan of late—Orlando Strong—sounds like a 5K marathon, disguising the unquestionable homophobia motivating the shooting with a baffling motto that sounds like a quote from The Incredible Hulk. “Orlando Strong!” The Hulk would bellow, tearing his lab coat to smithereens before growing three times his size and pounding on the bad guys. Erased is the queerness essential to the LGBTQ lives lost, replaced with generic calls to action to be McOrlando McUnited as if acknowledging our varying sexualities, genders, or authentic stories would make our lives any less worthy of reverence. Of representation, civil rights activist and author Audre Lorde wrote, “The visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.” I want to make myself visible. I need to be strong, not just #OrlandoStrong.

 

When I am fourteen, I wade into the full potential of my power when I tell my mother I am gay at a Saks Fifth Avenue. Even so, I prepare for this moment like a breakup, doing it in public in the hopes that she won’t make a scene. When I am sixteen, my history professor asks me to prove my worth, instructing our class to debate whether gay adoption should be legal, a debate in which I am the only student who believes I am not inherently a bad role model. At twenty-two, my best friend is sexually assaulted at another gay bar in Orlando. I am almost handcuffed for “disturbing the peace” after screaming at the officers called to the scene to stop laughing. For years, that is what being gay has felt like: disturbing everyone’s peace.

 

I have stripped off my mesh tank top to dance in midnight foam parties, undressed in cars tucked deep into parking garages with strange men I met on the internet, had my first kiss with a boy folded inside the lush red velvet curtain in sophomore drama rehearsal, a kiss so new and strained it felt like banging cutlery. Alongside all of this, I have survived being gay. Never tragically—always magnificently, absolutely fabulously. Still, I would be lying if I said I’ve gotten away with it unscathed. My queerness has, in fact, had its toll on me, a price of admission I can only imagine many closeted LGBTQ youth are skeptical of paying in the wake of so much hate. Even when it doesn’t get you, death snags you, tearing off your outer layer like in a horror movie where the virgin outruns the masked villain, leaving him behind clutching her crumpled cardigan, knowing they are destined to meet again in Act 3. But the real world isn’t a horror movie. In the real world villains have Sig Sauer MCX assault-style rifles and their stories are echoed in today’s pop hits, cleverly concealed in the lyrics to Foster The People’s deceitfully mellow “Pumped Up Kicks” blaring out of the stereo system at The Gap. They doff their corny masks to reveal centuries of support backing their hate: doctors declaring us mentally ill, legislation banning my friends from donating our tainted blood, preventing us from holding jobs, turning partners away from visiting each other in hospitals, expelling our transgender brothers and sisters from bathrooms, conveniently forgetting to hold our killers accountable in countless, nuanced ways.

 

Days after the shooting, gun sales in Florida double—people thinking that if they had weapons of their very own, they would have made a difference, or else worried that this will be the last straw, the deadliest mass shooting since Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook. A Florida congressional candidate announces a contest on Facebook to give away an AR-15 rifle. Now that we’ve seen the worst of it, surely gun legislation will tighten. Better stock up while we can.

 

However, this fight is not entirely unfair. We, too, are more powerful in disaster. Even when we are killed, we cannot die. We are like the mythological beast Hydra—cut off one of our heads and three will rise in its place. Stop our Pulse and our hearts will beat three times as strong. We are faeries, they tell us, and I believe them because we are nothing short of magic. I have witnessed our enormous political and social power first hand. The morning after the shooting, lines at blood drives wrapped around blocks—our indomitable, mighty dragon’s tail. At vigils, swarms of us gathered so tightly in grief that in the rooftop images splattered across every major news outlet we resemble the shadow of a fantastic beast hovering just out of sight. More than all of this, though, I am most overwhelmed by our power over death at every Orlando gay bar the week of the shooting, packed with the fiercest of activists bouncing along to our favorite queer anthems, my comrades in revolution singing along to three different versions of “Born This Way.”

 

Three years ago at Pulse, I am in trouble. My best friend has ditched me for a one-night stand and my ex-boyfriend has teamed up with a drag queen to openly debate whether I qualify as being short, yet a moment on the dance floor redeems it all. That night, I write in overly romantic prose, hoping to trap the moment like a lightning bug in a jar: I’m finally 21 and I’m alone on the dance floor flailing around to the tune of “MMMbop”, alone and engulfed in a swarm of gay guys. They are anything but apologetic. They have a few drinks in them and are at their most honest. They push when they are intruded on and shout when they have something to shout. You’ll never see a gay man so political as when he’s dancing to Hansen.

 

Looking back at that night, it’s easy to imagine that I’m still in that crowd on the dance floor, singing along to the nonsensical words of a cheesy ’90s song, alone yet part of a tribe more powerful than any dynasty I’ve ever heard of. It’s hard not to laugh at myself for ever feeling bad about a drag queen calling me short when all along the only thing that truly matters about that night and every night since is that there was a drag queen at all, that I got to be at Pulse in the first place, just as it doesn’t matter that there aren’t really words to “MMMbop” as long as in my memories there will always be music to dance to and a gay space to lose myself completely in. I can’t help but think of anyone who has ever been to Pulse or any other gay club as my friend, my clan, in the truest, most authentic sense: Who else will you allow yourself to unapologetically sing along to Hansen with? Where else could I have ever learned to take my first steps toward love? As last call pulled everyone away from the dancefloor, I remember feeling my best friend grab my hand. He did not leave with his one-night-stand after all. Together, we make our way to my car a block away from Pulse. Lo and behold, the tire did not deflate. It’s looking a little rough and is featuring a brand new gnarly war-wound, but it will be fine.

 

Back in the CVS parking lot, again I find myself patching up my car. I reinforce the headlight with a fresh layer of packing tape, securing it into place and testing it to make sure the light works. It does. Despite falling off and being dragged through two hundred feet of pavement, it’s still burning bright. I know it’s dangerous, if not altogether stupid, to not get it professionally fixed, but I can’t help but dismissing it as yet another thing I’ll get to eventually. Right now, I have to get to work and there is so much work yet to be done. It’s only for a little while longer, anyway, I tell myself. It’s a rough bandage, but in a bind, I can trust it to help me see where I’m going.

 

Share

Vanish

…originally published in 40.2 of The Florida Review.

 

In Italo Calvino’s version, the world began at one point, and Mrs. Ph(i)Nk_0—with all of her love, she made noodles for the boys—and then, like that, stars appeared. Land, the moon. Ocean waves, curling and releasing. Doves. Palms.

 

In my version, I am not as pivotal as Mrs. Ph(i)Nk_0, and I may never be, but I made noodles for the ones I loved: The woman I was dating, and the man who asked me, softly—“Can you teach me how to put on makeup?” And I said, without hesitation, “Yes,” and the woman I loved—she helped, too. I remember this: We went to the drug store, and I pretended the makeup was for me. He chose red, plum—the colors of autumn. And then we drove to my rental room, and Douglas sat on my bed, and Anna did too. I made spaghetti. We opened tubes of lipstick, palettes of eye shadow.

 

In the time it took for a woman’s love to become the land, tell me—did the sky stretch and open? Did the boys press their hand­s to its boundary, cupping each burning star? I’ll never fully understand the journey from one point to many, but I can tell you this: Every day we create worlds.

 

And in my rental room, on my bed, Douglas and Anna and I—we navigated a world that felt new, its boundary moving outward like a wing, or like oak leaves fading, then deepening, into umber.

 

If nourishment is the link between our true selves and the stars, then I wonder what can ever be their undoing. Bullets, golden and sparkling. A false map that says: Love is not love is not love.

 

The night of the massacre, music played, humans kissed. Queer humans. It was Latin night. Douglas, Anna and I stayed home.

 

With one bullet, the land and sky caved in.

 

And another, and another.

 

This is not the story of finding oneself. This is the story of how the universe became one stone.

 

Sometimes poetry is not enough to bring us comfort.

 

Sometimes, not even the language of the human heart can cup autumn’s colors, hold them dear in their becoming.

 

Sometimes we tell stories of love, of how one kiss can fill a soul with abundance.

 

Sometimes we go to sleep, and when we wake up—so much has vanished.

Share

All Their Awful Particles

I am calling up the dead—the dead of my family.
I pull them out of the earth by their hair, by the fistful.
I scrutinize their bodies, green as acid, for traces of mine.

 

How can I stop looking at them?
At their faces?

 

Their bones strung together
are the beads of a necklace
I wind around my neck.

 

Their lives pour into me through a silver faucet
I cannot turn off. Their deaths, too—

 

suicide, suicide:
the familial sickness.

 

Surely it has congealed within me,
all their awful particles.
Surely I have been marked.

 

If I were the firstborn, mystical or clean
like a sheet of cotton twisting in the wind—

 

No.

 

I am a piece of slate stained,
scarred with footprints of the dead.

 

Are they confessing what they’ve done
to make me?

 

They lay their hands on me
like strips of seaweed.

 

When I place my mouth at my feet,
unable to speak,
I feel their malformed sadness run through my hair like a comb.

Share

Trap Door Out of the War

While higher-ups gave the suspect a spirited drubbing,
the guard stood just without, encroached upon
by a nebulae of false assassins.

Flailing until a handled door lay exposed,
he tugged it open, entering an under-earth oasis
of tropical cocktails, hula girls, a certified financial advisor
with fingers pressed together in a smart-seeming way.

Vibrant drinks clogged the soldier’s thoughts,
leaving behind a ghost-colored mustache.
Letters of endorsement reached him by certified mail

and he wondered what fate he was being commended for.
The hula girls drifted around with such absent-minded
dexterity they often were confused for weather.
The war prattled on somewhere upstairs.

Wristwatches were being synchronized in far peninsulas of the earth
and eighteen different people, at that very moment,
were voicing displeasure over the spearfish flambé.
Share

Moonlight & Roses

1.

My mother loved crooners—Andy Williams, Perry Como, Jerry Vale. Especially Jerry Vale. His voice has a curvature, a rounding of the Rs that made him sound more Midwestern than like a guy from the Bronx, and a higher pitch than the others that added yearning, and maybe hope.

 

I know she liked his looks. Short, with lustrous black hair and sparkling brown eyes, Jerry had a smile that covered the bottom half of his face, his teeth gleaming and strong. He looked nothing like my tall, stooped, blond, green-eyed father, whose dentures came out the minute he stepped inside the front door, who sang “Waltzing Matilda” when he sang at all.

 

My mother listened to Jerry Vale as she did housework—“The Impossible Dream” while scrubbing the bathroom, “Two Purple Shadows” as she washed windows, and always, she sang along, a clear, trilling soprano, trained in the church choir. She even accompanied Jerry in Italian—“Amore, Scusami,” “Al Di La”—note for note. She pronounced pasta as “paste-uh,” but Jerry guided her effortlessly through the language of romance.

 

His calm tenor confessed love of the most resonant, enduring kind, and enunciated it so slowly and clearly, his sincerity couldn’t be doubted. My mother, with her faraway blue eyes, wiped a rag slowly over the bathroom mirror as she and Jerry admonished their hearts to “Pretend You Don’t See Her,” to instead smile and pretend to be gay. When I mocked the songs—there were so many good lines to ridicule—my mother looked hurt, and usually said something on the order of, “Just wait, honey. Someday, you’ll see how true these songs are.”

 

That idea brought me up short later, when I was alone in my room. When had my mother picked the April rose that only grows in the early spring? Whose fingers had touched her silent heart and taught it how to sing? My father? His fingers were yellow with nicotine, and the rose bushes he planted in holes in our lawn all died before eking out a bloom.

 

With their absolutes and abstractions, Jerry’s songs glorified relationships I deemed unhealthy, songs in which the beloved was the singer’s reason to be living. While my mother swooned at the implied subservience—If they made me a king, I’d be but a slave to you. Your kiss is all I need to seal my fate. You’re my everything. Love me with every beat of your heart—I worried about the all-encompassing nature of this love, which seemed like a beast ready to swallow one’s life whole. In the songs Jerry sang, even a chance encounter ended with the lovers at first sight being in love—and staying together—forever.

 

The songs I listened to created more troubling particulars—romantics hiding behind bottles in dark cafes, or solitaries driving the snowy turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston as they bade goodbye to the moonlight ladies. Nobody’s love was undying or encompassing. Even the most buoyant tune conveyed love’s trepidation—The dizzy dancing way you feel gave way to love being just another show, from which your final responsibility was to leave ’em laughing when you go, and if you care, don’t let them know.

 

And gosh almighty, baby, yes indeed—sometimes the terms were laid out right up front: You and me will only see tonight.

 

2.

The flat truths and bleakness of the songs I loved, my mother found depressing. “What about the moonlight and roses?” she asked once, near tears, as we argued our conflicting soundtracks. I was, at most, sixteen, and if not completely inexperienced, then close enough—a fact I tried to hide with a knowing smirk.

 

She said my ideas about love were all wrong. Someone brought you the roses, arranged with ferns and baby’s breath in a crystal vase. You admired them in the moonlight streaming through the tall windows of your hotel room, in Paris maybe, listening to a tinkling piano from the next apartment, while you sipped champagne—with someone. Someone was the key to your happiness. Moonlight and roses simply set the stage.

 

I probably turned sarcastic, asked when she’d ever been to Paris, had roses delivered, sipped champagne in a hotel room? Maybe she said, Well, not Paris, but Stuttgart, that time your daddy and I went to a banquet there, and stayed overnight. And I would have snapped back, Oh, that time you fell on the stairs and broke your ankle? Was that because of champagne? I was under the impression that you were drinking bourbon that night.

 

Her “someone” picked his nose at the dinner table, walked around the house in his boxer shorts, left his dirty socks balled up on the floor for her to pick up and throw in the hamper. He kept stacks of Penthouse and Playboy magazines on his bedside table, beside an ashtray filled with cigarette butts that she’d empty the next morning when she made their bed. He got angry with her over trifles, called her stupid when she did something wrong. Sometimes he introduced her as “my first wife.” When the other person looked puzzled, he’d explain, “It keeps her on her toes.”

 

I don’t know why I couldn’t let her have her fantasies. I’m not sure what I got out of making her feel sad, unless it was a tightening of my own precarious grip on a world that I’d barely tested—and that had barely tested me. She knew I laughed at her plastic flower arrangements, her treacly music, her bedside copies of The Daily Word, the musicals she watched open-mouthed on TV, weeping as couples sang their devotion. I laughed when she periodically broke into song, sometimes just a single line—Starlight looks well on us! Moonlight becomes you! Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars! So much moonlight you’d think my mother carried a beast inside her that yearned for lunar liberation.

 

3.

It’s a warm June evening, a full moon hanging above the blue spruce—the strawberry moon in this hemisphere, but the cold moon down below. Trees and bushes encircle our small backyard so that at night, it feels almost like a room with a wide door at either end, the occasional breaks in the foliage like windows onto the alley. I like just to sit out here and feel the night weighing in around me with all its mystery and substance, all its scents and secrets. Sometimes I hear small disturbances in the underbrush—rabbits, the neighborhood possum, an elusive groundhog the size of a small dog that’s lived around here for years. Sometimes I hear an occasional, abbreviated birdcall, as if some parent bird’s reassuring a nestling. Sometimes people walk down the alley, quietly talking, and I watch them, motionless and invisible in the shade of my neighbor’s hemlock hedge. The moon casts shadows that seem clearer cut than those in the day—a literal black and white demarcation on the grass.

 

But this night, my husband and I are dancing under the full moon. Blood on the Tracks plays from my iPhone—the same phone I used minutes earlier, to call him down from his study, to lure him into the backyard to see the moon. Damp grass cool against my bare feet, long cotton skirt swaying against my ankles, I’ve had way too much wine and my husband is cold sober. I’m not sure how one is supposed to dance to “Tangled Up in Blue,” but we give it a shot, holding hands and jouncing around the yard, laughing.

 

I like to think that whatever illusions we had about one another vanished years ago, victim of daily familiarity and perceptiveness. We’ve been together nearly forty years, married for most of it. Marriage is not a straight line, it’s a wheel. During one declension, my husband told me that if he had to make a choice between his work and me, he’d choose his work. He knows if the boat was sinking and I could only save one person, it would be our son. We have hurt one another deeply. We have helped one another vastly. He brings home champagne for special occasions. We’re the best of friends.

 

Only four of the twenty-nine rose bushes in our yard were here when we bought this house. As we twirl around the yard, I point out how the white and pink roses shimmer, almost phosphorescent in the moonlight. Their scent hangs lightly in the summer air.

 

The song ends and my husband says, “Let’s hear it again before I go back upstairs.” He’s working on a poem. Having hammered all day on a story that won’t give, I’m letting off a little steam. This time we slow dance, moving with awkward familiarity. “Stop trying to lead,” my husband says, as he does each time we dance. Of this song, Dylan remarked, “You’ve got yesterday, today, and tomorrow all in the same room, and there’s very little you can’t imagine not happening.”

Share