Category: Literary Features

The Girl in the Boat

The nurse presents my second daughter, but my eyes are still trained on my first across the room—too silent and large and blue in the hands of the doctors. My boyfriend shakes his head. I say: We’ll get through this. He kisses Lily, sticky and swaddled in my arms, stares at Daisy as she takes her first uncertain breath, and leaves. Two days, the doctors say. Two months. Two years. And then, we honestly don’t know; she could go at any time. The girls and I live with my parents. When Lily comes home from school, she watches TV with her sister, helps feed and change her. Nobody can reach Daisy like she can. Seems to laugh at her funny faces, seems to watch her color and finger paint. Everything is “seems to” because who can be sure? Both girls have my brown-speckled blue eyes but few would see a resemblance beyond that. Daisy’s head is abnormally large as if somebody had stuffed a globe inside, warping her brow, her nose, the space between her eyes. And like a globe, the inside of Daisy’s head is largely empty, occupied by only a small cephalic ocean.

—

On the girls’ fifth birthday, Daisy is brought to the emergency room in a Koala onesie after seizing during cupcake time. Born with only a brain stem and a hint of the cerebellum. Never to be voted the nicest, the most stylish, the leader of the pack in a yearbook. Never to go to school or fulfill a dream. The doctors say probably a lot. She probably hears but we don’t know if she can understand. Her eyes are fine, but there’s nothing to process images with.

 

I know she can recognize me, I tell them again.

 

In the waiting room, Lily eats Funions from the vending machines and builds a Lego pioneer wagon on the ground. Her grandparents buy her an ice cream from the cafeteria and a bear from the gift shop. She asks me if her sister is going to die.

—

Whenever I bring home Daisy from the hospital, which seems like every week for the first couple of years, I carry her everywhere. Already, we have beaten the odds. There is a fold-up playpen in the bathroom, in the kitchen, and in the basement next to the washing machine. Lily, though the same age as Daisy, has had to grow up fast. She asks me to look at what she did at school—a macaroni necklace, the Valentine’s Day cards she got in her construction-paper mailbox—but I only know about these things because I see them days during a rare moment of rest. My father lumbers to the dining table every morning and gives Lily the comics from the paper while he works on the Jumble. My mother wishes I would let them watch Daisy more, so I could take Lily out. “The poor girl doesn’t know what to do with herself,” my mother says.

 

“When Daisy gets better,” I say. “When I get a full-time teaching job.”

 

My mother waddles around the table, trying not to put pressure on her gout, and whispers into my ear: “Andrea, she’s not going to get better. We love her, but you can’t keep living like this. We can find someone to help.”

 

“She needs me. Besides, where are we going to find the money?” I point to the stack of unopened bills on the table. 2nd notice. 3rd notice. Envelopes from collection agencies. I am afraid if I leave Daisy for too long, what little spark resides in her will disappear entirely.

 

“She doesn’t even know who you are.” My mother holds her hand to her mouth after the words leave, wishing she could take them back. She picks up her bowl still half full of oatmeal and begins washing dishes.

—

At school, I set up a playpen in the corner of my first class. Daisy regularly has check-ups at the university children’s medical center, so it saves me the trip back home. I have managed to secure three sections of composition this semester as an adjunct, which means I might be able to pay the minimum for some of the medical bills. I have gotten used to the looks—the “I’m so sorry” look, the “you poor woman” look. One girl says she’s adorable. Another girl asks how old she is. Only one boy directly asks “What’s wrong with her head? Why’s it all big like that?” The girl next to him shoots daggers into his eyes. “What?” he says. “That’s some straight alien shit.” But I’m not angry. And I know it’s true. I haven’t talked about my daughter to anyone outside the family before. And, frankly, I’m sick of hiding. “She was born with a rare condition,” I begin. I want them to understand. Here, unlike the grocery store or the park, they have to stop and listen. And after the first class, I pack up my books and collapse the playpen. I drape a blanket over the stroller without even thinking about why, and rush to the next class to introduce my daughter all over again.

—

At Lily’s fourth-grade parent/teacher night, Daisy sits on my lap while Mrs. Lee, floating around the room in a floral muumuu, talks about student projects. Daisy is wearing jeans and a My Little Pony sweat shirt a size too small. Her eyes scans the room as if she is seeing for the first time. The other parents smile awkwardly. Daisy’s drool has created a large, dark circle on a shoulder of one of my three decent work blouses.

 

“Every student completed a portrait of a family member. They had to capture what they believed to be the essence of that person—their job, their personality, their hobbies, their favorite food,” explains Mrs. Lee.

 

The parents circle the room, browsing the brightly colored bulletin boards for the work of their children. I put Daisy in her wheelchair. Fireman, doctor, someone who likes spaghetti and meatballs, construction worker, and at the far end of the room is a portrait of a girl with a large head wearing a pink dress under a rainbow. The head takes up most of the poster board and inside it, Lily has drawn a stick figure girl in a boat on blue waves. No sail. No oars. Simply adrift.

 

“She said her sister is lost inside of herself,” says Mrs. Lee, standing behind me. “She’s a special girl, Lily. To think like that. She loves her sister very much.”

 

“She does,” I say. But I know it’s been hard, that at times Lily wants to hate her sister, the musty fold-out bed she shares with me, the way I rummage through Goodwill bins before the school year and during Christmas.

 

“And this must be Daisy. I was hoping I would get to meet you.” Mrs. Lee opens her mouth and pauses before leading me to the hall. “A close friend of mine had a daughter years ago. Cancer. She was eight.”

 

“I’m sorry,” I say.

 

“The reason I’m telling you this is because I saw what an illness can do to a family. I can see it some days with Lily. Like she’s still processing something that happened. My friend went to a support group down the street at the Lutheran church. She said it helped.” Mrs. Lee hands me a pamphlet for the group, squeezes my hands, and returns to the classroom.

 

I imagine myself in a dimly lit church activity room, sitting in a circle and saying my name. Hi Andrea, they would say in unison. A few years ago, I would have dismissed the idea without a thought. I examine the pamphlet with a photo of unreasonably happy people holding hands in a circle before putting it in my purse.

—

“Wish she wouldn’t parade that girl around town. I don’t know how much longer we can survive this. What if something happens to us?” Mom loves to talk dad’s ear off in the kitchen after she thinks everyone has gone to sleep. I tiptoe to the edge of the kitchen door.

 

“Don’t talk about her like that,” he says.

 

“You don’t think I care? It’s just that maybe we all would have been better off if she hadn’t beat the odds.”

 

“But she did.”

 

I spend most of my day thinking about that girl—how to keep her comfortable and safe and happy. I dream about a life she’ll never live: Daisy is flying a kite. We are fighting and Daisy storms out the door because she can’t go to a concert. She’s kissing a boy I don’t approve of. In this alternate reality, she is lithe and athletic with a competitive streak in contrast to Lily’s bookishness. She wears her hair in a pony tail tied with brightly colored scrunchies. And, oh, how she loves to laugh.

 

I wake up smiling when I have these dreams, and the weight in my chest suddenly evaporates. I want to believe for a split second that all of it was true. I look at Daisy, hooked up to a monitors and an IV, and think, I want to hear you laugh.

—

One summer weekend, I drop off Lily to a birthday party. These are the few glimpses I get of the kind of family life I once aspired to. The parents who throw parties live in tony neighborhoods with manicured gardens and joggers in spandex running beside yappy dogs. Before the door opens, I try to straighten my hair, yank out the wrinkles on my shirt with my hands. Usually the invitations include Daisy as a courtesy, but I’ve never taken up the offer. But on this day it is raining hard, so I walk Lily to the door with our lopsided umbrella. “Welcome, welcome.” The parents shuttle Lily into the family room where other kids are playing video games. They see Daisy in the car and insist we come inside.

 

Around the island in the kitchen, the parents mingle—talking vacations, people I do not know, summer camps that Lily would love. We are sitting down on the periphery and after everyone has introduced themselves, it seems like we are forgotten. Every so often, the hosts checks on us, says they are so glad we could be here. Right. I force a smile, take a sip of a mimosa. When one of the children runs into the kitchen and sees Daisy, she gasps. Her parents mouth a feeble sorry. And this is my cue. I thank the parents for having us, tell them I’ll pick up Lily later in the afternoon, and promptly leave.

—

Waiting in the dark hall of the Lutheran church, I watch the parents, the single fathers and mothers, file into the only lit room, as anxiety fills my veins. I am alone for the first time in recent memory. They all know each other: How are things? I’m so sorry, I just heard. Let me know if there’s anything we can do. I practice my introduction: My name is Andrea. My ten-year-old daughter Daisy was born without most of her brain. I don’t know if I’m just nervous about being new or speaking, or if it’s having to confront the realities of others on top of my own. Support groups are supposed to help, right?

 

“The free doughnuts help,” a young Indian woman approaching the room says. “First time?”

 

“That obvious?” I answer.

 

“It’s my third month. But I remember lurking in the hall. Marched right back to my car the first time.”

 

“And you’ve been coming back, so—”

 

“A lot of us have been going for years. Talking helps. But that doesn’t mean I want to listen to all of it. I come for the doughnuts and just being next to people who understand. I’m Diya, by the way. Shall we?”

 

I nibble on a cruller the whole hour and choose not to speak. There’s a man who lost his son to leukemia ten years ago, a couple with a daughter with cerebral palsy, and Diya, who talks about her son with autism and how something so seemingly small like asking for orange juice brought her to tears. “It’s the little things,” she says. “When you have children like ours.” Everybody nods. After the session, Diya invites me and the girls to join her and her son at the zoo the next weekend. She is smoking, and I ask for one more out of camaraderie than anything else. “I have these free admission vouchers,” she says. “I know we just met, but it might be nice to see someone from here outside of that Sunday school room.” After I had the girls, most of my friends slowly disappeared (maybe we did). We get birthday cards, a Facebook like. But not much else.

 

“Fuck ’em,” says Diya, referring to anybody who gawks at us walking down the zoo’s paths. Lily leads the way, skipping far ahead while Diya occasionally has to pull her son, Alok, back to the fold. Daisy, in a lion-shaped stroller, seems to be quietly enjoying the Serengeti. At the giraffe exhibit, Diya hands me a feeding ticket for small bucket of leaves. I struggle to carry Daisy out of the stroller and with Diya and Lily’s help, hold her up against the railing, so I can guide Daisy’s hands to the sky.

 

“We’re going to feed the giraffes, sweetie,” I say. I place a few leaves in Daisy’s palms and curl my hand over hers. “Look, here it comes!” I tilt Daisy’s head up. The giraffe leans in close, examining us. And for a moment it seems like the giraffe is studying Daisy, like it can sense something just out of human perception. Daisy makes a gurgling sound. And with his long, purple tongue, the giraffe slurps the leaves from our hands. Diya snaps a photo. A few feet away, Alok seems to be having a good time. One leaf, two leaf. The baby giraffe leans in and lingers just long enough for his hands to stroke its face. No leaf. And Alok begins screaming and kicks his bucket across the wooden walkway. Diya pulls away Alok from the exhibit, as people begin to stare and whisper to one another. Lily is still feeding, and I call out to her to catch up.

 

“I still have leaves,” she says.

 

“Now,” I say. I see her mumble something before leaving her bucket on the ground.

 

At the cafeteria, I thank Diya for the day. “We haven’t been able to treat ourselves to something like this in a long time,” I say.

 

“Same,” Diya says. “But you need to try. Makes you feel normal. Getting you those chicken wings for example. It’s always Alok, Alok, Alok. And that’s fine. But you forget to be decent to everybody else including yourself. Think that’s why my husband left.”

 

I don’t know what to say to that. Just like most people don’t know how to respond to Daisy.

 

“You’re lucky you have your parents,” Diya says.

 

“Sometimes. I don’t think my mother really sees Daisy like I do.”

 

“Like a person.”

 

“I don’t want to be that harsh. But, yeah.”

 

Diya pulls out her phone and shows me the photo of Daisy and the giraffe. It looks like Daisy is laughing, staring right back at the animal as if they are in on a big secret. If I told anybody about this day, about what I thought the picture captured, they wouldn’t believe me. Doctors would say possibly, but really would think I’m seeing things in my daughter that aren’t there. But, for me, the photo is proof that there is a girl on a boat on a tiny ocean inside of her, trying to make it to the shore.

—

Before I know it, I become one of those people in group who have been there for years. I measure the times I can’t bring myself to talk in the pastries I stuff in my mouth. It’s half-price admission today at one of those hands-on science museums, and we’ve made plans with Diya and Alok. I’m getting Daisy dressed, pulling a sweater over her head, when I feel her tremble. Her seizures usually don’t last longer than a few moments, but this time the shaking continues. I hold her tight as if she would crumble apart if I let go and call out to my father to get the car. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. I’m here. I’m here.

 

At the hospital, Daisy is sleeping, and I realize that I had dozed off, too, when a nurse walks in. My parents are in the waiting area, but I told Diya to go on to the museum and to take Lily. Outside our room, I see a bald little girl walking around with her family, holding a stuffed bunny rabbit almost as big as her. She waves. I wave back. I’ve become accustomed to the children’s ward here—the hope, the lack of it, the sounds of parents sobbing behind curtains, the fantasy castle wallpaper that is supposed to transport the patients to a happier place. But I need to hope for Daisy. I need to want something for her apart from my need for her to be alive. I flip through the television—another school shooting, a young protestor talking about their student loans and food stamps, a strike at one of the colleges I teach at. Fair wages. Child care. I think about the hospital bill when the nurse comes in and checks the IV.

 

Support Group Meetings: Bear Claw, Eclair, Sugar Glazed, Cherry Fruit Filling.

 

Daisy is still in and out of the hospital a month after her last bad seizure, and my parents have taken out a second mortgage to keep us above water. “Just throw our ashes over the Golden Gate Bridge or something,” my dad says. My mom says little, and I’ve learned to be okay with her resentment—I understand it, even. I have only received one class this semester, and have started to apply for other jobs—Target, Starbucks, anything I’m vaguely qualified for on Craigslist. The strike continues at school. Part of me wishes I could march with them, but I can’t afford to lose money. They carry signs that say “Education Not Administration” and “Support Your Teachers.” When I cross the picket line, my coworkers, many who probably know me as the woman with that kid, do not shame me.

 

When Diya finds out that I need to dress up as a lusty Statue of Liberty for a mattress store as part of their Memorial Day sale, she suggests helping me start a GoFundMe campaign. She comes over one day with a video camera, and helps me and Daisy dress up.

 

“You want to look good, but, you know, not too good,” Diya says.

 

“What are we supposed to say?”

 

“Just talk about Daisy’s condition. And I’ll splice that with some music and pictures of her growing up. Talk about the struggles you have as a mom, the medical bills donations will help with.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “It seems weird asking strangers for money.”

 

“Lots of people are doing this. If people want to help, let them.”

 

We shoot the video in our backyard with the sun behind us for angelic effect. Daisy is sitting beside me in her wheelchair. When Diya says action, I begin reciting the lines we rehearsed, but I feel like a carbon copy of Suzanne Sommers in those Save the Children commercials. For only five dollars you can really make a difference. We start over. “Let me tell you about a girl in a boat in the middle of an ocean. She has no oars, no sail, and the sea is calm. On a good day, she can see land, and there’s a glimmer of hope that she’ll make it, although she never will. Let me tell you about my daughter who was born without most of her brain.” I talk for longer than I imagined, as if I were teaching a class on Daisy. This is who she is. This is what she has. This is our life together. This is what the doctors say. And this is what I know to be true.

 

Within a matter of minutes, a Facebook friend of Diya’s donates twenty-five dollars.

 

“The first of many,” Diya says.

 

By the end of the month we have thousands of followers on social media. I’ve connected with other parents dealing with hydranencephaly, a young woman taking care of her older brother with MS, a young man with Down syndrome who lives with his best friend. For them, Daisy is more than just a good cause but a symbol of hope.

—

When Lily goes off to Oberlin on a full ride, it’s like part of the shore inside of Daisy has broken off. She is less responsive when I talk, smiles less, and is throwing up her food more than usual.

 

“Stay out of trouble,” Lily tells her sister. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

 

“You’ve earned this,” I tell Lily. “Look ahead. We’ll be fine here.”

 

“If anything happens,” she says.

 

“Go,” I say, starting to cry. She grew up and I missed it.

—

I hire a part-time home aid with Lily gone, and decide to stay home more, grading tests online. Mom and Dad, of course, are getting older, and I’ve been begging my mother to let me take her to the doctor to check out her fainting spells. She says it’s nothing, but I’m certain she’s lying. My dad thinks so, too.

 

“I’m old,” she says. “I’m supposed to be cranky and falling apart.”

 

“Doesn’t mean we can’t put a band-aid on whatever is wrong.” She shrugs me off whenever I prod her and tells me to mind my own business, which honestly pisses me off. And if it were just her being stubborn, maybe I would let it go. But she’s been different with Daisy, too. She rolls her granddaughter next to her while she watches The Bold and the Beautiful. Most of the time, they just sit there. But occasionally, my mother will turn to Daisy and talk to her.

 

“That one is having two affairs,” she says. “Her husband is a bore, so who can blame her?”

—

I don’t go to support group nearly as much as I used to. Tonight, Diya isn’t there, and there’s no one else I recognize, but I talk anyway. It’s probably one of only a handful of times I’ve opened my mouth in group: “Daisy has helped a lot of people see their children,” I begin. “And I think my mother has finally seen my daughter.” And maybe that’s all any of us can for hope for: to be seen with clarity. That’s all I’ve wanted for her.

—

It’s nearly midnight when my father and I hear the crash. I can see my mother’s legs on the floor as I approach the kitchen. A shattered glass kettle, her frail body, the coffee mug Lily painted in the first grade.

 

“Mom,” I yell. “Mom. Wake up!” But she remains still. My father’s hands are shaking on my shoulders. I rush to her, trying to clear away the shards on the ground. I can feel glass digging into my knees, as I lean over her, trying to remember the CPR training I received as a summer lifeguard when I was a teenager. Tilt head to clear airway, breathe, compress. I turn to look at my father. I hear my mom’s ribs crack beneath my hands.

 

“I’m here,” he says.

 

“Call 911,” I say. “Now. Dad, wake up! Mom needs help.”

 

“Nine-one-one,” he repeats. “Right.” He shuffles into the living room and returns with my phone, offering it to me. “I don’t know how,” he says.

 

At the hospital, the doctors say it was an aneurysm. Quick, unexpected, supposedly painless. The kind of death Daisy probably won’t have. We’ll have a small memorial over the summer when Lily returns, although I haven’t told her the news yet. This morning, I picked up her urn. Mom sits on the night table next to my father, and for every night after that night at the hospital, Daisy and I have slept at his side.

 

“She loved her, you know,” my father said after the doctor gave us the news. “Called her a beautiful child.”

 

A few days after the memorial, Daisy and Lily are in the living room watching movies like old times—Goonies, Mean Girls, Bring It On. It is the eve of their nineteenth birthday, and Daisy is having one of her better days. To date, the longest someone has lived with her condition is until their early thirties, but that’s a rare case, and I’m not necessarily hoping for that. Lily is dating someone but is being mysterious about the details, although she whispers things about a boy named Dave to her sister. We eat cake in the afternoon, and Diya and Alok join us for a trip to the planetarium’s family day. We’re all reclined back, looking at an ancient night sky. Our guide zooms in on a star that goes nova, washing the room in the purples and reds of a nebula. He talks about how this expanse of gas and dust and rock is the birthplace of planets, of new stars, and of us, how the iron in our bodies are remnants of stars. It’s strange how something so bright could flicker out and yet have meaning billions of years later, creating life on a planet so drastically different from another. I turn to Daisy and point her hands to the Little Dipper. “That’s you, Daisy,” I say. “That’s me.”

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Two Poems

Nocturne

No one’s drowned in the boarded up well out back in a century. When I pry up the nails to let in some sky, the voices the moss maintained rise like a cloud of bats from the mouth of a cave. Hungry to be heard, as any static thing, I say to the dead you are lucky to be so permanent, so practiced at loneliness, so close, so goddamn close to journey’s end. Maybe they’ve had enough of this living forever. Maybe the mystery has never been the where or how, but why this need to be forgotten. There are many ways to scream so no one hears, and each sounds just like a child alone again in a night-heavy farmhouse, making monsters of his shadow and friends with his dead, running wild out into the dark with only a hammer and his silence;  a door he can’t remember opening slamming shut behind him.

The Animal

All the cruelties are different, but there’s something familiar in carrying our children safely through the world by our teeth. In pressing an empty mouth up to the only part of us that nourishes. Sometimes, with winter at its deadest, in eating our young and starting over again in spring. It’s spring, thank god, and all we have is an open pasture of half-broken foals. A rusty cage for the chronic wild. A spindle-legged wire fence wrapped in teeth separating one neighbor from the next. When it comes down to it, son, I don’t think I’ll ever eat you. But here I am, telling you things you already know about love.

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Enough Sealant to Pool the Concavity

March 12th

Most evenings I go for a short walk around the neighborhood, my route always the same. I take a right on 1st, another right on S Street, uphill three blocks to where it Ts with 4th, east two blocks on 4th along the Calvary Cemetery, then back to 1st via U Street. Last night was my first walk since Bree’s death, and I wondered: why such a cemetery-centric route? My route could just as easily rectangle or staircase south towards Reservoir Park, where students from the U play Frisbee and parents admire their kids from playground benches.

 

Here’s how Wikipedia describes the grid I call home: “First surveyed in the 1850s, the Avenues became Salt Lake City’s first neighborhood. Today, the Avenues neighborhood is generally considered younger, more progressive, and somewhat ‘artsy’ when compared to other neighborhoods. Many young professionals choose to live there due to the culture and easy commute to downtown. It is also one of the most important strongholds of the Democratic political party in Utah.”

 

I used to think about death constantly—that was during my religious teens… I was going to insert a quotation from the Bible here, something along the lines of “Always keep in mind your last days, and you will never sin,” but those memories are so distant and the internet is so choked with sin and warnings about sin that even Google’s divine algorithm is powerless to help me find the verse. I saw my classmates doing what teenagers do, and I couldn’t believe they could just ignore the punishment in store. Even if they didn’t believe—wouldn’t they at least be wise enough to acknowledge the chance that the fire was real and gamble on the side of avoiding it? As those fears gradually then suddenly receded, as I realized that disbelief could be active rather than passive, I experienced an unexpected side effect: my new certainty that everything would go black when I died alleviated my fear of death rather than intensifying it. There was nothing I could do about its inevitability, so it wasn’t worth thinking about. And at least there was no punishment in store.

 

Even these brief thoughts risk flashbacks I’d rather avoid—I admit I wouldn’t be recording them if not for my employer-prescribed grief therapist’s insistence. Or that neglecting to do so would suggest that I’ve inadequately grieved my daughter’s death. I keep myself very busy, and I’m not sure that time off work is really going to be beneficial. I haven’t had time just to sit and think in years—and that has suited me fine.

 

During my walk yesterday evening, I noticed for the first time the abundance of crack sealant on 4th. The other roads in the Aves are not so heavily sealed (I had to check), making me wonder if 4th is more heavily or less heavily trafficked, better kept up or worse. I took these pictures today.

 

Some metaphor was nagging my mind, the sealant as intestinal or labyrinthine, but it escaped my articulation until I passed by T street and saw painted on the asphalt what I momentarily mistook for graffiti. Since I couldn’t read it, I found myself tilting my head, then walking around the graffiti so that it would be north of me, thus, said my logic, legible. Strange logic since the Aves reads bottom to top, 1st being the southernmost street, a grid radiating outward from Temple Square.

What appeared to be ornate black writing highlighted in white turned out simply to be the coincidental crossing of street sealant with the strip of white paint notifying drivers where to stop for the stop sign.

 

Writing, it occurred to me. The street sealant is just like a type of writing.

 

I mean, the white line is certainly a type of writing. Although I don’t think I’d ever consciously acknowledged this feature of roads’ communication with drivers, it says “Stop here” just the same as the white letters on the red octagon. I looked at the black sealant lines more closely.

The beginning was a mess, a snarl of capital Rs and As and Ys. Then a sort of W or M, a cursive R and the number one. A zero with a slash through it (Greek phi or theta), a T, an A, a P. Trailing off into maybe a Z at the end.

 

No, these marks are meaningless flukes. It’s not much like writing. Not like the actual graffiti I discovered on my fence returning home.

MOST timid tagger in the city. I think I’ll leave it there.

 

I think my anxiety over starting this journal, of writing something for the first time since a college creative writing class, something that doesn’t have to do with projecting city water supply, must just be causing me to see writing everywhere. Not just the names on tombstones, which—for the first time in all my walks—were those of human beings, not just those dashed dates that were the most different of all the days McNeil or Duddshuh or VanWaggoner called their lives, not just the giant U on the side of the hill that here could stand for University or Utah or Utes… The power lines themselves seemed to sag and crackle with communication that only my dimness kept me from deciphering.

 

Today I got a few strange looks for photographing the asphalt, particularly because I have a dumbphone and the only camera I own is a video camera that also takes stills.

 

March 13th

Last night, my route was disrupted by the presence of a stranger headed north on U Street. My feet just started following him. Along the eastern edge of the cemetery, I tried to stay far enough back that I wouldn’t arouse suspicion, but close enough that I might get a look at his face when he passed under the streetlights. I wanted a face to paste on my absurd fantasy. There was no reason for my heart to be pounding so hard, for me to feel the thrill of the hunt. He entered a house and was greeted, I saw through the window, by a kitchen-full of twentysomethings holding cans of beer. Hanging back, I wondered what the reaction would be if I knocked on the door, asked if it was an open party. I had never visited this section of the Aves by foot.

 

March 14th

I set out again last night searching the dark streets for Bree’s lover. It’s crude to think this way—my daughter’s death as a liaison—but my mind ignores all pleas of decency.

 

I know that my chances of encountering Bree’s lover are slim, but it wouldn’t be the most remarkable coincidence this month. I brought along my camera even though I’m not sure if it would work in the dark or what I’d do if it did. My ears were even more alert than my eyes, filtering the night’s noise for a sound that’s familiar even though I can’t remember ever having heard it. Suctionless unstoppering. Metal that’s heavy.

 

As I walked by the cemetery on 4th, I noticed a little neon light that someone had used to decorate a loved one’s headstone. It was a meager flare in the night: red to purple to blue to green to yellow to red to purple to green to yellow to red to purple to… A depressing sort of vigil, and I found myself thinking: if I’m to be remembered thus, I’d rather be forgotten. Regarding my cremated remains, my instructions will be Dump wherever. I’ve always liked Zion National Park and could see my ashes borne from the peak of Angel’s Landing. But it’s such a popular destination that there’d be people all around who’d get bummed out. Also—I thought before realizing the thought’s absurdity—I’m afraid of heights.

 

Above the cemetery, the letter U luminescent on a hillside, blinking: red red red red red red red… My mind transformed it into “you.” Zoom out even a miniscule distance (proportional to the cosmos)—the grave’s little light and the bombastic U would be equally invisible.

 

March 15th

I told Rich in our session today that boredom is not helping with the grieving process, and he suggested that I take up a hobby or two. We decided on Nintendo and piano, both of which have been sitting inactive in the house since Bree’s death. I used to play piano, but I never really got into video games. Also, whereas the musical instrument is unchanged since the last time I’d played it (and for two centuries or so before that), the new WiiU system Bree’d brought into the house had evolved into something radically different than the gray console on which I’d last chased a one-up mushroom down a bottomless pit, much to my young daughter’s delight. The hulking controller alone threatened to overwhelm me. It had its own screen, and everywhere I looked there was another button or joystick. The first game I fired up was called ZombiU, not quite the type of therapy Rich would approve of, I’d imagine. It took me hours to get past the game’s intro, a weaponless character fleeing zombies through a subway to get to the “safehouse,” following the instructions of voice that identified itself as “Prepper.”

 

The safehouse contains 1) a metal locker where you can stow weapons and ammo and health packs that you pick up on your missions across embattled London, 2) a work table where you can add modifications to your weapons, 3) a computer system that provides you with surveillance of the game’s various districts, 4) a generator you have to refill with fuel every so often, 5) a bed where you regenerate as a new character when you die—I find it’s best not to get too attached to any single character, and 6) a manhole cover you lift off to reveal the entrance to the sewers. ZombiU inverts the sewer system into a place of speed and safety, allowing you to warp at loading-speed between the safehouse, Buckingham Palace, Brick Lane Markets, etc. The surface overrun with verminous versions of homo sapiens, the previously proximal space between civilization and its subconscious has become a haven for what traces of humanity remain.

 

 

March 16th

The presence on Bree’s desk of this vintage toy:

The goal is to negotiate a ball bearing from the START alcove around a maze of plastic partitions without allowing the ball bearing to fall through holes in the surface that represent a variety of hazards: Haunted Mountains, Black Mountains, Blood Lake, Man Eating Plants, Poison Desert, Tiger Valley, Sargasso Sea, and so on. I spent twenty-three minutes playing it before finally reaching the FINISH. Tucked within that right angle, the ball bearing is away from hazards but doesn’t know what to do with itself. It rests in an infinity of safety and boredom.

 

March 17th

Today Rich asked how my grief documentation is going, and I told him that I have nothing to write about.

 

He told me there’s always nothing to write about. I’m not sure how clever he was intending to be.

 

I’m auguring snarls of tar sealant, I told him. I’m stringing Bree’s status updates on telephone lines. I’m reading everything I can find about the Well of Souls.

Not a natural cave per se, but a chamber beneath the Foundation Stone, where Abraham purportedly attempted to sacrifice Isaac and/or Ishmael. But cave-like—but inside–a chamber further interiorized by the Dome of the Rock. Pierced Stone. Wikipedia: “Jewish tradition views it as the spiritual junction of heaven and earth.” I tried curling into a ball in the deepest corner of my unfinished basement, but it isn’t the same.

 

March 18th

In an effort to learn how to better use the controller’s touchpad to navigate post-apocalyptic London, I stumbled across a ZombiU promo video online that demonstrates the various functions of the touchpad. The hands holding the controller get increasingly twitchy as the three-and-a-half-minute video progresses. The viewer is not sure why. At the video’s conclusion, the arms’ veins and arteries blacken, its flesh molders, and—if that isn’t enough—an off-camera screech testifies the game’s ability to infect those who would dare play it. It’s a clever marketing scheme—and accurate in different ways than I think its creators foresaw.

 

March 19th

Bree’s birthday. I don’t drink very much except tonight. Made the mistake of going on her Facebook page and scrolling through the birthday wishes and her last posts. In my current disbelief system, the continued persistence of her Facebook and Twitter and Instragram and Pinterest pages are the best approximations of a soul and the afterlife that we can attest to. The first step in the science fiction scenario of being able to upload our consciousnesses and live forever.

 

I unfriended the friends who wished Bree a happy birthday without realizing that she’d plummeted to a lonely death. Now only 21 people like her “suicide” post, down from the initial 42. Police and logic eventually ruled that her death was not suicide. It was an unlucky night, and sometimes you just happen to vague-book right before you die of incredibly natural causes: Wikipedia is heaven when you don’t want to remember anymore.

 

Lo, Google informs me I’ve been quoting Bree quoting Nick Cave. Sweep me away for an hour or five, Wikipedia, you means of discovery and forgetting to which I return again and again. Give me discography, give me Murder Ballads, by God give me personal life.

 

March 21st

One infuriating aspect of the ZombiU is that, when your character dies and you regenerate as another character with another name and former occupation at the safehouse, you lose all of the resources that were in possession of the character who died. That zombified character’s location is marked with a skull on the sewer map, and if you want your weapons and ammo and health packs back, you have to go to that location—now armed only with a cricket paddle, a handgun with six rounds, and whatever you were wise enough to stow in the safehouse’s locker—and kill the character you’d been trying so hard to keep alive. If you die again before doing so, all those supplies are gone.

 

Discomforting, what comforts us.

 

Not only does my bedtime get pushed back further and further each night by my urge to meet just one more of the game’s objectives. Just one more, just one more… But the game’s content, graphics, and geography are corrupting my daily perception. I begin grafting the face of Arthur, my daughter’s lover, onto the zombies I clobber or shoot or incinerate. I bring a crowbar on my patrol one night. I imagine access to a sonar map of the Avenues in which I am the locus of radiating pings and my daughter’s boyfriend is an elusive red dot. Manholes, too, are marked.

I begin expecting the infected to pop out at me, and I scout for escape routes. I see a section of the fence around the graveyard that has been displaced, and I gauge whether or not it’s enough space for my character to fit through.

 

I love how the post topples in segments, in super slow motion. The way wrought iron gives way to chain link. The mysterious symbol on the third block from the bottom.

 

In ZombiU, I would scan this symbol with my gamepad and it would provide me with a clue to a clue to a clue that would lead me to Arthur, my daughter’s lover.

 

March 22nd

We are infected—piano has taught me that. Twenty years ago I taught my hands a Chopin mazurka, and these past two weeks my hands have taught it back to me. It’s so strange how much knowledge lives on in us unacknowledged, atavistic/instinctual or just part of our daily ballet. I reached a level in ZombiU called “Ron Freedman’s Flat,” which includes a room where you have to pick off zombies that have been lulled to the nepenthe of throbbing bass and black lights. Even though they’re not technically alive anymore, their bodies remember actions they performed during life and respond automatically to stimuli.

 

I put my wallet in the toaster today.

 

Trying to memorize the Chopin, my brain will alert me to a difficult series of upcoming measures. I’ll be fine now, fine now, but I’ll feel the approach of chord or ornamental figure that I know will trip me up. And it will trip me up, and I will go back to one of my bookmarked measures and start again. But that chord or figuration is not content to simply remain resistant and rotten; it will spread its clumsy amnesia backward to meet my oncoming fingers. I will greet the dementia a measure earlier than before, rewind again, get tripped up two measures before the first time. More and more of the piece will fall into darkness until I end up admitting forfeit and bringing the sheet music back out so the whole mazurka isn’t engulfed.

 

I worry that all memory works this way. For example, I’m confident in my general memory of our “therapeutic” family trip to Zion the year before the divorce, or Bree’s reluctance to move back in with me when she didn’t get accepted anywhere but the U. But then I try to recall something specific from those scenes—the words of a conversation, what we ate for dinner—and my inability to do so taints the whole year of life with such unreliability that I’m left wondering if it ever really happened.

 

March 23rd

This morning I awoke to find the city workers applying sealant to the section of 1st right in front of my house. Behind their truck they pulled a giant orange tank streaked with tar and dirt, and I wondered about the similarity in temperature and consistency of this sealant compared to the tar used in the defense of castles in the Middle Ages. Google: tar or pitch, along with stones, hot sand, molten lead, and boiling water were dropped on enemy soldiers from “Murder Holes,” holes in castle ceilings, barbicans, or passageways. Google: tar is more or less fluid, depending upon its origin and the temperature to which it is exposed. Pitch tends to be more solid.

 

My mind moved to treasure seekers combing the beach sand with metal detectors as I observed the workers trace their wands over the asphalt in cryptic glyphs. Wikipedia: “The simplest form of a metal detector consists of an oscillator producing an alternating current that passes through a coil producing an alternating magnetic field. If a piece of electrically conductive metal is close to the coil, eddy currents will be induced in the metal, and this produces a magnetic field of its own.” No, the discs at the end of the wands were more like the spongy proboscis of houseflies, trailing a line of black blood instead of lapping it up. Google: labella.

 

The workers chatted about an overly affectionate cat that had disrupted their workday, about the prospect of giving it a black stripe of sealant, about an episode of Pepé le Pew remembered from childhood. For half an hour they discussed where they’d eat lunch. One of them was in favor of Whole Foods, the other Wendy’s. After they’d moved on, I stepped outside to examine their work. The newly laid sealant was a blacker black than old sealant but glistened gold in the sun, veining the dull asphalt with light.

In places, the sealant pooled in shallow potholes like miniature versions of the tar pits that trapped dinosaurs and preserved their bones. Wikipedia: “Most tar pits are not deep enough to actually drown an animal. The cause of death is usually starvation, exhaustion from trying to escape, or exposure to the sun’s heat.” Wikipedia: “Over one million fossils have been found in tar pits around the globe.” Wikipedia: “‘The La Brea Tar Pits’ literally means the the tar tar pits.” I was bothered by places where the workers had not dispensed enough sealant to fully pool the concavity. It seemed like they’d missed an opportunity to clear a wound of dirt.

No, I realized, not clear the dirt. I wanted infection. Containment of today’s irritants, a burying again of the meager portion of planet that sees light and feels the wind. Perfect infection. It seemed unfortunate to me that tire tracks already dirtied the tar in places, an irrevocable and inevitable tarnishing given the tar’s consistency. Wiktionary: “tar” and “tarnish” do not share an etymology. Even if they did, tar can be tarnished—and the more dust that sticks to it, the more it’s pressed down by tires, the more that it’s weathered by sun and snow, the less likely you are to notice it. Unlike the usual tarnishing that stands out as a defect—like a stain on a shirt or a crack in a dish—tar is tarnished into invisibility.

 

HOT CRACK SEAL diamond-shaped signs warned drivers, and I had the urge to test the substance. I found it quite cool and pliable.

My fingerprint held its shape for longer than I cared to watch.

 

(Stepping back out an hour later, I was relieved the divot was gone.) As there were many more cracks in the asphalt than the workers could possibly have filigreed, I wondered what their system was for determining that this crack was fine for now while this other needed attention. Rich, what’s yours?

 

It’s true: at Whole Foods you can accidentally spend like fifteen dollars on a salad.

 

March 24th  

The cemetery by my house was brought up as an option when Bree’s death forced Gail and me into conversation. She suggested it might be difficult for me to live in such close proximity to Bree’s grave. I thought it was a hilarious suggestion, but I didn’t laugh.

March 26th

It’s one month since Bree’s death, and I could tell at our session this morning that one month is Rich’s milestone for tiptoeing the concept of forgiveness into the conversation. A difficult homily to a man who walks the streets for hours every night looking for blood. I didn’t respond well at the session, but now I have a moment to consider what makes forgiveness so difficult in this situation. I’ve tried to imagine him (I’ve imagined him a him) generously, someone beaten down by society, someone sick and poor who met the wrong prophets at the wrong time. I imagine him ignorant of his actions’ consequences—or, knowing, bereft. A story of the Aves and the Ave-Nots. I imagine him as Arthur, a tenant I evicted from my Liberty Park rental a few years ago. I’ve had to evict tenants before when they’ve fallen behind on payments, promised they would pay me back if I could just give them more time—but Arthur was the only one who I believed and evicted anyway. It’s a stupid, impossible fantasy, just my attempt to imagine some kind of scenario in which I deserve this misfortune. (I never attempt to fit Bree into this equation of who deserved what.) Once I imagined Arthur’s face on the shadows I screened for, it was locked there and I couldn’t shake it. Recalling his last name, Stenger, I imaged him the timid tagger MOST, signing his name on the wreckage of my household as an elaborate work of revenge art.

 

When I imagine forgiveness, I imagine someone kneeling before the one he or she has wronged, a benevolent hand eventually placed on the shoulder or head of the wrongdoer. Rays of sunlight. But forgiveness is especially noxious in my situation because he might not even know he’s wronged me, wronged Bree. He might have experienced none of the setbacks in life that I’ve imagined. Forgiving someone who has not asked—does not even know they require forgiveness—someone who might right now be continuing to enact the potential need for forgiveness from any number of strangers… Perhaps the person and the guilt we’re forgiving is always a projection, but in this case what I’d be forgiving would not be an actual human, but something in myself. And, currently: no.

 

March 27th

This heart on a telephone pole in my neighborhood:

What’s the first thought this cheery decoration inspires? The violence of a screw through the heart’s heart. My mind these days.

 

March 28th

I haven’t sat down at the computer in my home office for a while, but today I was feeling particularly anxious about Kenneth’s ability to deal with my work responsibilities in addition to his own. Taped above my computer, I saw and remembered, is a printout of the fake email I wrote under a pseudonym that got me in so much trouble, the leaking of which—coinciding with Bree’s death—led to my mandatory leave.

Free speech has its limitations; the most frequently cited example is yelling drought in a desert. Shortage during a shortage. Double sacrifice, career and daughter of Senior Analyst, to mountain gods appeased. It’s barely stopped raining since the funeral.

March 30th

With nothing else to do, I drove two hours today and visited the Spiral Jetty for the first time in my life. Surrogate brain: “The sculpture becomes submerged whenever the level of the Great Salt Lake rises above an elevation of 4,195 feet (1,279 m). At the time of Spiral Jetty’s construction, the water level of the lake was unusually low due to drought. Within a few years, the water level returned to a normal level, submerging the jetty for the next three decades. In 2002, the area experienced another drought, lowering the water level in the lake and revealing the jetty for a second time. The jetty remained completely exposed for almost a year. During the spring of 2005, the lake level rose again due to a near-record-setting snowpack in the surrounding mountains, partially submerging the sculpture. In spring 2010, lake levels receded and the sculpture was again walkable and visible. Current conditions fluctuate.” That’s either from Wikipedia or the ether, but I searched current conditions fluctuate moments after copying, pasting, navigating back—and the phrase was cut from the entry, edited away by a stranger. Current conditions do not fluctuate, apparently. It’s our confident knowledge that’s suffering a constant erosion.

 

I walked the length of the Jetty to the center, my sneakers collaborating with its entropy. Back to my car, however, was a straight line.

 

A young couple Bree’s age pulled into the parking lot with a kayak on top of their car, apparently failing to anticipate how far the lake had receded from its usual shoreline. I call this washed-out photo “The End of a Relationship.”

It was very sunny.

 

A couple hundred yards south of the Jetty are the lithic remains of an oilrig from the 1950s.

Oil seeps from the lakebed where the petrified forest of old dock posts juts skyward.

 

Texture-wise it reminded me of a tree on 1st Avenue, the barky carapace of slow spillover where the trunk takes root at the corner of lifting sidewalk slabs.

 

The oil, you can play with it.

 

And, like tree bark, it eats irritants at glacial pace.

 

March 31st

Today I added a paragraph to my fake, all-too-real e-mail to SLC residents:

 

April 1st

Today I started learning a piano piece just because I like the name, Debussy’s prelude La cathédrale engloutie (The sunken cathedral). I’m starting to remember why I had to finally give up trying to relearn the piano years ago. I always told myself starting back in that my life would be enhanced if I could just play, say, that one Chopin mazurka I love so much. But then my usual human affinity with the number three would make me want to learn two more pieces, perhaps become a Chopin expert of sorts. No, I would learn one piece—or three pieces—from all the major movements in old music: baroque, classical, romantic, modern. Pretty soon, one hour of practice a day would become two, three, and I’d again recall that I seem unable to just dabble in piano.

 

Wikipedia: “This piece is based on an ancient Breton myth in which a cathedral, submerged underwater off the coast of the Island of Ys, rises up from the sea on clear mornings when the water is transparent. Sounds can be heard of priests chanting, bells chiming, and the organ playing, from across the sea.”

 

I’m also remembering that the more you try to channel passion or sadness or joy from your real life into your performance, the more you tend to botch it. Your mind must be like the driver on a highway whose exit is coming up pretty soon.

 

April 2nd

At night I’ve made it a habit of walking on the street rather than on the sidewalk, mainly because so many of my neighbors have motion sensor lamps with the wattage of a prison guard tower spotlight—and/or hyper dogs who don’t know they live in the Avenues. These streets are quiet at the hours I walk, but I’m always alert for cars, especially since I’ve been dressing in darker and darker clothing in anticipation of meeting Arthur. Tonight—I guess it’s last night technically—I heard the sound of a car approaching me from behind. I stepped aside, but something was different than usual. Then I realized: the car didn’t have its headlights on. Then it did—its red and blue strobes as well. Even as my heart quickened, I reasoned that it probably had nothing to do with me, and I waited for it to pass.

 

But a cop got out of the car and began to approach me. Backlit, her features were indiscernible to me even as I was blasted with light for her.

 

“Sir, may I speak with you for a moment?”

 

“Is there a problem, officer?” I delivered my line.

 

“Can I ask if you have any weapons on you?”

 

I told her that I had a crowbar, if that counted as a weapon, and I set it down on the pavement. Yes, that is my only weapon. This bag contains a camera. I handed her my camera bag. She unzipped it and gave it a fleeting inspection.

 

“What are you doing out here tonight?”

 

“I’m just out for a walk.”

 

“Why are you carrying a camera and a crowbar?”

 

I didn’t reply.

 

She continued, “There have been reports of a suspicious man walking around the neighborhood, filming. And we’ve had a problem with theft of sewer covers in Salt Lake City recently, including in this neighborhood. Would you know anything about this?”

 

Again, I was in possession of such exact answers to her questions that I struggled to articulate them. She seemed to interpret my silence as resistance.

 

“Do you live in this neighborhood?”

 

“Yes,” I said, “I live on 1st Avenue. The man with the camera is probably me, but I haven’t been shooting video, just taking stills for this project I’m working on.”

 

“Project?”

 

“The theft of manholes is why I’m out here. Like the neighborhood watch.”

 

“It seems that the neighborhood watch is worried about the neighborhood watch.”

The sign was disconcerting to me as a kid; I thought the watching-eyed black figure was the neighborhood watch, rather than a caricature of the type of man the watch wanted to scare off. (I’d imagined him a man.) I never liked the straight line from the tip of his hat to the small of his back. I never liked how the forbidding red bar obscures any tapering of his midsection, as if his gumshoe hat is the peak of a crooked mountain. His hat spins like a top when he’s excited; I’m not sure why, but it does. I still can’t figure out the slice in the side of his head. If it’s a leering grin, then the letch has an eye at his ear region or a mouth on his cheek. Is that the collar of its trench coat or the jut of a bottom jaw? I guess maybe he’s talking out of the side of his mouth? Psssst…

“Why do you have a crowbar with you?”

 

“Why hasn’t the city installed locking manhole covers?”

 

“I’d like you to come down to the station with me just so we can clear a few things up. Are the photographs you’ve taken still on this camera?”

 

I didn’t want to get taken down to the station or even sit in the back of her car while she sorted things out.

 

So I told her.

 

April 3rd, 2015

TAKE SHORTCUT

X

Venn overlap of tragedy and comedy. Our cities are pocked with holes—but as we drive through the rainy night, we trust that the covers will be in place. Rather, we don’t even think about it. Maybe tomorrow, but no hole will open in my life today or today or today.

April 5th

Rich asked me at my session this morning if I think I’m making any progress. I wanted to tell him that the question is stupid and canned. I’m not sure if progress would look like grieving less or grieving more.

 

But I realized today that I am making progress. Just one month ago I was asking road sealant to form the letters of the Latin alphabet. While I continue to be suspicious that all things visible and invisible are a form of writing, I’m beginning to understand that they speak to us each in their own distinct languages, and that any attempt at augury—inevitably biased and imperfect—requires transcription. Maybe this is what separates artists from the rest of us.

 

Desperate our clinging to this crust. Fragile our traction. How utterly dictated by coincidence is all life on this planet, even more so the circumstances that impossibly collided to make me this creature here and now rather than someone else some other time, some worm, or continued nothingness—all the possibilities of existence and non-existence in the infinite combinatory of life. So maybe I can stop holding court against one tragic coincidence, zoom out and count the heap of flukes that endow me with the love and sorrow and language to name them. Maybe I can start a new grief journal that grieves my lost daughter instead of myself.

 

Two dots in time and space wretchedly intersected. That is all.

 

And when we’re gone, if we’ve failed at our mission to eradicate life on planet Earth, how long before there are no traces we were ever here? Cosmic time, proportional to our brief tenure.

 

In my dream I must have gotten a job as a city utilities worker, because I’d taken the liberty of bringing home some equipment. The tar tank had a pull cord and started like an outboard engine. My first line of black tar was reserved for her laptop. I coated the keys, the screen, the speakers, the mouse, the hinge where it closes. I sealed the line between her mattress and headboard, headboard and wall, all along her pillow. You’d need a knife to open her closet and chest of drawers after I’d finished with them. Her alarm clock was no good anymore.

 

Internet: the Jewish tradition of covering mirrors during the ritual of Shiva is of uncertain origin, one theory being that—since humans are created in the image of God, and since a human’s demise represents a rupture between living human and living God—the image of the Creator itself shrinks with the death of its creatures.

 

I covered the mirror in Bree’s bedroom—then all the mirrors in the house. The task of containment felt incomplete, and I applied a line of sealant all around her doorframe, my dream-physics causing it to stay put and not drizzle down the face of the door. Following some alterations, my upright piano featured 36 black keys and 52 black keys. My cell phone and camera were encased where they sat. Let the windows be shut upon them.

 

Still dissatisfied that some therapist or third dot might disturb our hard-fought solitude, I applied a gag and blindfold—so that, should I ever make it back, I would never be able to betray the route to friends or enemies.

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Three Poems

EMERGENCY: I FLING

open the call box—
the black phone handle, barraged
with red fire ants.

 

LONELY COUPLE

Hugh and I started a band called Lonely Couple
and wrote a song by the same name.
We only performed it a handful of times, in Boston,
where were undergrads. I was the lead singer,
I thought though, looking back, we harmonized:

Wilfred Bourgeois, you’re part of us
And this is a song for you

So I guess I was simply a singer without an instrument.

Our friends have left us all alone
At this lonely table for two.
Wilfred, would you marry us?
It’s the hardest thing to do…

I played the accordion and keyboard
but we didn’t own either. Hugh strummed a guitar
with a colorful strap from Guatemala. He’d make
me dinner at his Kenmore Square apartment—
usually spaghetti with ketchup
that he thought was the same thing
as tomato sauce. I didn’t have the heart to tell him
there was such a thing as jarred Ragu, and besides,
it actually tasted good. This was what marriage was
about in the abstract, learning to love another’s innocence
and quirks. He was dreamy as he played his chords,
but we knew he was headed for the Peace Corps
and I for grad school. Wilfred Bourgeois,
my uncle, had visited us and made quite an impression,
so much so that we put him in a song.
He had lost his wife when she was young
and never remarried. Maybe we saw him as a romantic—
and that Hugh and I would love each other more
if we weren’t together forever. But it occurs to me now
how smart we were not to pin each other down,
how we drifted on without too much drama.
We populated our band with classmates, theater
or music majors, who came and went.
Some would later become famous
for sex addiction or Wall Street banking.
One of these guys had a girlfriend in cosmetology school
who teased my hair with a tiny pronged comb
so I could more resemble Kate Pierson from the B52s.
I knew how to shake on stage, but grew stiff
if someone tried to take me home after the show.
I wasn’t married to Hugh and never would be,
but we had loyalty and respect. I’m remembering him
and all this, which I’m surely remembering
at least partially wrong, because I found the lyrics
of our one and only original song
in Hugh’s perfect penmanship. It was folded
in the laminated menu of an Indian restaurant
where we apparently performed once
for a samosa and dal.

 

ODE TO THE AMPERSAND

& what one reviewer calls
the “sly female squiggle”
in reviewing Julie’s new book
which is full of ampersands
& magic that makes me see
the ampersand’s tilted hip,
one leg folded up & sat upon.
The Latin curvy cursive,
& her French cousin, the treble clef,
were my favorite symbols
to draw as a kid. How easy it was then
to conflate words & music. The &
folded one leg atop the opposite
knee, a calf draped below,
a foot hooked, dangling a shoe.
The appeal of all that coiling
& twirling, notes & script—
one definition, I suppose, of verse.
O, ampersand, you bring
two names closer together
than even the word “and,”
which, according to the Writers Guild,
simply means that those credited
worked on the same screenplay
but quite possibly at different times,
maybe one even rewriting
the other’s work. An ampersand
between writers’ names
means that the two
were in the same room, collaborating
side by side, & though technically
I write this ode alone, it is really
with Julie Marie Wade (poet)
& Sarah Sarai (reviewer)
who make me remember
how much I loved to draw
the ampersand & treble clef
& play the keyboard
which I learned from Mr. Solek
who was a member of a polka band
called The Happy Bachelors,
& he did seem happy
as an adult who wasn’t part
of a Mr. & Mrs. or a Mr. and Mrs.
The Dating Game was big then.
“Bachelorette Number One,
if the whole world were listening,
what would you say?” The cover
of the Bachelors’ album was pink
which didn’t imply anything
to me at the time, but now I wonder
if those bachelors were gay—
Mr. & Mr. or Mr. and Mr.—
or simply young & hetero
& capitalizing on their single status
like boy bands do now.
The Bachelors recorded together
in a studio, twisting horns
& button accordions,
the “sly female squiggle”
a part of all creation. I listened
to the album on my parents’
record player & imagined
all the kinds of adultness
I could possibly one day inhabit,
all the associations of sound & symbol
& word. I thrilled at the polka music
that lived inside the polka dot,
the pulsating bouncing ball
in the “Sing Along with Mitch,”
the seed that would one day blossom
into karaoke. Yesterday
the Supreme Court
struck down DOMA
which meant a lot of celebration
& yet this morning we read
that the ruling won’t help couples
in the 35 states that have laws against
gay marriage & sometimes an “&”
feels more like a “but.” “Bachelorette
Number Two, if you could live anywhere,
where would that be?” I download
the actual ruling & am soon adrift
in legalese. Nothing & everything
has seemed to change this 27th day
of June in the year 2013.
My sister & her husband celebrate
their 32nd anniversary
in Florida, where two women
in love can’t wed. I’m in Portugal
where transportation workers,
fed up with austerity measures, strike,
but those who can afford it
flag down taxis, the drivers of which
are happy for the extra work.
One tells me about his memories
of the Carnation Revolution
&, because he was a kid
when it happened, how
he thought every conflict
from there on in would be solved
with flowers in rifle muzzles.
I feel the same nostalgia for
Roe vs. Wade &, since I was a kid
when it passed, I am dismayed
Wendy Davis had to filibuster
two nights ago in Texas.
“Bachelorette Number Three,
if you could travel back or forward
in time, what year would you visit
and why?” How easy it is for me
even now to conflate words & music,
memory & fact,
& that one simple afternoon
when I wrote my first song
in the book Mr. Solek
gave me, the pages lined
with staffs, & I made my ornate
treble clef, & writing
was writing, & marriage
was in a far off key
I could barely hear, & then I made
an ordinary sandwich
& read the liner notes
on The Happy Bachelors’ LP sleeve
& each ampersand flipped
to become shoulders & arms,
hugs between each musician’s name.

“Ode to the Ampersand” references Sarah Sarai’s review of Julie Marie Wade’s book Postage Due (White Pine Press, 2013) in Lambda Literary.

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What the Bats Say

… an excerpt from A Million Fragile Bones, out later in April 2017 from Twisted Road Publications. A Million Fragile Bones details the beauty and peace of Alligator Point, Florida, before the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico spewed an estimated 4.9 million barrels (210 million gallons) of oil, affected 68,000 square miles of ocean, and washed ashore along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and Florida. Connie May Fowler had spent sixteen years in the haven of Alligator Point before being immersed in the year-long nightmare that was the Deepwater Horizon spill.

 

 

We are one decade into the new century and spring is glorious on the sandbar. All manner of new life—winged, finned, footless, and four-footed—is emerging on land and in the sea. The estuaries and marshes are alive with activity as birds mate, lay eggs, tend to their young. The water churns with promise: baby fish, newborn dolphin, tiny sharks. Life below and above the surface is abundant. It’s as if my known world is throwing a party.

 

The frog that lived in my shower all winter has moved to my garden. The banana spider (AKA “Banatula”) is spinning a splendid, huge orb just outside my living room window. In the early morning it shimmers with dew diamonds. Cedar waxwings were here for one delightful day, ascending and descending in balletic perfection from the pines towering above my studio. Purple martin scouts arrived three days ago; their families will soon follow. I dig in the dirt on the kitchen-side of the shack and discover a cache of pearly white, oval eggs the size of my little fingernail. So, it seems, the lizards are doing their part to keep up with the promise of spring. A rat snake has taken up residence on the back deck. The dogs keep their distance. Wrens fly in the house, swooping, darting, as they hurry to find the perfect nesting site. A pair of mating osprey obsessively brings sticks to the platform at the top of the osprey pole where they are engineering a very messy, large, but functional nest.

 

Nearly everything out there in the deep blue sea is heading my way.

 

Embattled, overfished blue fin tuna are spawning. We’re only one of two marine nurseries on the planet that host the blue fin. They favor the Gulf’s northern slope, which is a critical habitat for them. Indeed, as the Gulf goes, so goes the blue fin tuna population.

 

Gag grouper, other species of grouper, snapper, and spiny lobster are also spawning. And all their babies, over the course of the next few months, will migrate to the estuaries and marshlands of the northern Gulf where they will find safety and nourishment. They will grow. Life abundant will happen. Again.

 

Brown shrimp are at their reproductive best April through May and September through November. Their eggs float through the Gulf, eventually turning into larvae. Plankton is the larvae’s manna. As they grow stronger, nourished by plankton, they, too, travel into the northern Gulf along with their seafaring cousins. There, amid the nutrient-rich estuaries and marshes, they will begin to resemble shrimp.

 

Bottlenose dolphins, full-timers in the Gulf, are giving birth right now: March, April, May.

 

Oysters, the beleaguered lifeblood of my zip code, are spawning in the waterscapes of my front and back yards.

 

Some sea life remains in deep water as they trek northward, but those requiring oxygen, such as sea turtles and the twenty-eight species of dolphins and whales that make the Gulf home for at least part of the year (twenty species are full-time residents), necessarily spend much of their time near the water’s surface.

 

To celebrate the Gulf’s bounty—its vibrant cycle of life, life, life—nearly every coastal village and hamlet hosts seafood festivals. There seems to be one close by every weekend. Oh what I would give to be crowned Panacea’s Blue Crab Queen! But I’ll settle for a T-shirt and the knowledge that nature’s delicate balance appears steady, prolific, bountiful.

—

In the midst of all this new life I, too, have given birth of a sort. How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly, my seventh book, is winging its way into the world. This inevitably means I have to follow it out there to places far from the sandbar. I hate leaving the Point in the spring. And I also still feel very much like a newlywed, which makes sense given Bill and I have been hitched only a few months. So I bop back and forth, spending as little amount of time on the road as I can, always hurrying home so I can measure how much progress the jasmine has made (a lot), if baby mullet are jumping yet (yes), if the baby osprey are flying yet (no), if we have any crabs in our traps (sometimes yes, sometimes no), if Bill’s blue eyes still make me shiver (yes).

—

Bill doesn’t waste any time. As soon as I hit the road for my book tour, he takes it upon himself to paint the interior of the shack, put up new shelving, and renovate the kitchen, including the addition of recessed, built-in shelves. I call him from a central Florida hotel room that smells like wet swimsuits and stale beer.

 

“I miss you,” he says in a southern drawl that confounds me since he is a Midwesterner.

 

“I miss you, too.”

 

“I love you.”

 

“I love you, too.”

 

“You sure do have a lot of things.”

 

“What do you mean?” I thought I lived the life of a frugal hermit.

 

“Your altars. I’m having to disassemble them so I can paint.”

 

“Oooooh.” I imagine my poor husband collecting all the bits of bones and shells and dried flowers and spell books and feathers and more, gathering them into assigned portions of the kitchen table so he doesn’t lose anything, so the altars can be reassembled just the way he found them.

 

“Pile it all up and I’ll deal with it when I get home,” I say, sensing his unease at the responsibility he feels for the ephemera of my life. But I also know the painting, the building, the renovating: It’s his way of nesting, of making the shack ours, not just mine, of him working his way into the mysterious nooks and crannies of married life and paradise.

—

The newlywed in me has decided to cook a five-star worthy dinner every night, using homegrown ingredients whenever possible and creating every morsel from scratch. Though it looks like I’m cooking (and I am), I’m also casting spells. I whirl through the kitchen, seeking spices and solutions. Heart, home, love. Heart, home, love. Heart, home, love.

 

I’ve just finished kneading my dough for tonight’s dinner bread: Cuban bread complete with a palm frond down the vertical length of the loaf. My whole body—crown of my head to tips of my toes—is dusted in a thin layer of fine flour. I think about working my way up to pain de campagne, a daunting recipe in Julia Child’s Baking with Julia. It requires “capturing and nurturing airborne wild yeast” which floats in the air only after many days of tossing yeast about as part of the bread-baking ritual. I’ve never had the nerve or need to “coax wild yeast and bacteria and harness their energy.” That sounds like a job for a physicist. I sneeze. Flour, if not yeast, flies through the air, resembling dust motes. I catch my reflection in the mirror that hangs on the wall closest to the living room. I appear painted, ready for battle. I study the birdfeeders hanging from the rafters of the deck. A bevy of hummingbirds sup. My back aches. My hands hurt. Why didn’t I just pick up a loaf of French bread when I was in town? Who am I trying to impress with all this homemaking mania? He’ll be home soon and I’ve got to get this place cleaned up … oh my God.

 

I tiptoe over to the door, snowing flour as I go, trying to make less sound than the wind. Perched at the same feeder are a rose-breasted grosbeak and a blue grosbeak. The blue grosbeak could easily be mistaken for an indigo bunting, but the grosbeak is larger and has broad, cinnamon wing bars. I don’t think there is any other bird one could mistake for the rose-breasted. Its deep crimson shield glimmers against its white belly and black head.

 

These, like the avocets, are two birds I thought I’d never see—individually or together—unless I move to Mexico where they winter or the Great North where they breed in the summer. Once again, I experience the thrill of living on the edge of the world, a cusp where water and forest meet, a dynamic wonder-ground.

 

I do not take lightly the responsibilities of living at a migratory crossroads. Seed in the feeders. Parsley for the swallowtail caterpillars. Milkweed for the monarchs. Bee balm and hibiscus and honeysuckle for the hummingbirds. Clean gourds for the purple martins. Bat houses for the bats. Seashells placed in the birdbaths so butterflies can drink without risk of drowning.

 

It is April 20, 2010, and all seems right with the world.

—

The following day, April 21, as the sun descends into the Gulf’s blue horizon, washing the cumulus-slurried sky in ribbons of purple, gold, aqua, and radiant hues as yet unnamed, Bill and I are enjoying what we call “bull bat hour”—cocktails amid the bats newly emerged from their slumber, mammals on the wing feasting on mosquitoes and no-see-ums.

 

Out here on the sandbar, twilight shimmers. Dragonflies stir the air with the metallic thrum of transparent wings; they hover and flit, dive and ascend, resembling tiny bursts of tumbling stained glass, occasionally resting on a stem, a limb, a blossom, my hair. Purple martins pierce the jasmine-laden breeze, competing with the bats—the former eating supper and the latter breakfast. Seabirds return to their roosts. Overhead, terns chatter so raucously my dogs bark at them. As the birds glide out of sight and earshot, the dogs exchange satisfied glances. I believe they think their barking drives away the noisy aviators. My favorite pair of great blue heron plaintively squawks, their voices calling each other home to their nocturnal rest in the sentinel oak at the edge of the harbor.

 

If one is lucky enough to be on the water at bull bat time in a calm wind, you will hear the creak of the pelicans’ wings as they skim the water on their way to the western end of the Point where they gather in a great feathered conclave, on a beach populated only by ghost crabs and what the surf brings in—star fish, sand dollars, sea urchins—until daybreak when they take to the sky again.

 

But it is the bats I watch. Their scientific name, chiroptera, means hand-wing, surely one of the more appropriate and poetic designations ever made by science.  Evolution has gifted these animals to the point that it is only a minor exaggeration to say, physically, bats are exquisite wings attached to tiny faces.

 

I have had many close encounters with bats, the first being when I was perhaps eleven or twelve. It was a blistering August evening and I was watching Sanford and Son with my mother when I happened to look down and see a saucer-sized bat resting atop my sweaty bare foot. I said, “Oh, oh!” instead of “Holy shit!” because my mother was the only person allowed to cuss in our house.

 

Fear spiking, I was trapped in a quandary: stay hidden and still while hoping for the best (translation: maybe the bat would just fly away) or run into the world—visible, shouting, flailing (translation: risk the ridicule of my mother and all humanity). Inaction versus action and its attendant but unknowable results is a puzzle that confounds me to this day.

 

Mother, steeped in her own time zone, laughed as Redd Foxx grabbed his chest and delivered his classic quip, “Elizabeth, I’m coming to join you!” With her cigarette bobbing between clenched teeth, she glanced at the bat—the whites of her eyes flashing with Bette Davis flair—and muttered out of the left side of her mouth because the right side was in charge of the cigarette, “Son of a bitch! Goddamn it. Don’t move.”

 

She marched into the kitchen—I remained immobile, fearing any movement would inspire the winged Fury into a feeding frenzy—and then returned with her pine-handled broom, which she held aloft with fierce conviction, her pose reminding me of the Joan of Arc prayer card I kept hidden in my top dresser drawer beneath a nest of fading underwear.

 

I was terrified Mother was going to beat the bat to death and, in the process, reduce my foot to pulp (she swung a mean broom), but instead she simply proceeded, her cigarette fashionably akimbo, to chase the bat out of our roach-infested rental, screaming “Out, out, you bastard!”

 

Fearing my foot might be infected, I dabbed it with what was left of my Coca Cola (the boys down the street had told me Coke could take rust off a radiator, so surely it would fizz bat germs from flesh). I looked up. Mother was back, her hair on end from the struggle with bat and broom and screen door.

 

“How do you think it got in here?”

 

“How the hell do I know?” She tilted the broom against the doorframe, flopped onto the couch, lit another cigarette using the ember-end of the old one, and that was that: my first bat encounter.

 

But it would not be my last. Indeed, walking at twilight remains hazardous. Bats simply don’t see me. When foolish enough to take an evening stroll, I bob and weave in an attempt to avoid head-on collisions, looking as if I’m performing a spastic imitation of Mohammed Ali’s graceful ring dance.

 

My theory (untested and probably without a shred of scientific merit) is that the bats’ echolocation bounces right through me, rendering invisible my corporeal self, this being a result of low blood pressure (mine, not theirs; I’m not even sure if bats possess blood pressure).

 

And, yes, surely there are other explanations: the bats are drunk, having feasted on fermented fruit; a rabies epidemic; they just like to fuck with me. I don’t know. I’m sticking with the low blood pressure-echolocation theory because it makes a good story.

 

But the plot thickens. On a sultry summer night in 1996, I walked to my downtown Nashville hotel after a book event. I felt pretty full of myself. I’d given a good reading and signed lots of books. The storeowner was delighted. Even the sales rep who’d made a surprise visit seemed appropriately satisfied. So I might have had a bit of a swagger. I might have even caught my reflection in a skyscraper’s plate glass window and not recognized myself. In short, I was happy.

 

As I approached the civic center, which was a mere two blocks from my digs, chaos splintered the placid evening. People driving home after a production of Carmen honked and cut each other off and made obscene hand gestures and behaved, generally, the way folks normally do in a traffic jam: as if their very lives depended on them being the ones to lead the elephant parade.

 

The cast and crew milled about on the sidewalk, waiting for buses to take them to their next tour stop. Their hump-backed equipment, scattered hither and yon, resembled brooding prehistoric snails. I noticed most in the gathering were male which, probably due to anthropological reasons, made me both fearful and excited. When this realization tumbled to the front of my brain—poof!—Confident Connie was gone, and in her place stumbled a gal haunted by her past, riddled with self-conscious angst.

 

No longer buoyant, I threaded my way through a Gordian knot of noisy masculine chatter—all of it in Spanish or Italian, I wasn’t sure which, maybe both—bodies and shadows in motion, cased musical instruments, suitcases, props. I felt unmoored, as if the night had suddenly been infused with a bad case of buckle your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

 

Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a dark shadow glide through the air and then felt it unfurl in a soft embrace against my neck. It fluttered, gentle and feminine, in the light Southern summer breeze. An image of Isadora Duncan (whom I desperately wanted to be once I got over the shock I would never, ever look like Sophia Loren no matter how many hours I lay in the backyard dirt while slathered in iodine-laced baby oil) wafted through my consciousness: Isadora dancing through life, a fabulous long scarf floating in her wake. One of the men—they were yelling and wildly gesturing—must have tossed into the Tennessee Williams night a crepe paper streamer.

 

In addition to hoping the paper was yellow or pink so it would complement my pale linen suit, I did what my mother taught me to do when men acted the fool: I ignored them.

 

But it didn’t work. Their catcalling escalated. Still, I marched on. Don’t you dare look at them, you little heathen.

 

The crepe paper caressed my skin in a rhythmic beat normally reserved for something with a pulse. Since when, I wondered—my fear nebulous, unfocused—did crepe paper possess cadence? I grabbed at my neck, took hold of something soft and warm—the men screamed—gazed at my hand, and delivered (at least in my emotional mind I did) a shriek that scarred the night.

 

In my very own hand—a hand that only moments prior felt very ordinary—I held a small bat. Or rather, it held me. The creature clung to the fatty rise of my palm, pinching my skin with something tapered and sharp. Fang or claw? I did not know. I flicked my wrist as hard as I could. The bat’s talons—or were they teeth?—dug deeper. Its wings fluttered in black vampire perfection against my chunky, yellow Bakelite bangle. The goddamned bat, as my mother would have said, wasn’t letting go.

 

The teeming mass of male humanity shouted what I assumed was advice. I did not speak their language because, though I made As in high school Spanish, I retained very little knowledge except that one should never develop a crush on the new guy, at least not while he’s still new and untested.

 

Clueless as to the meaning of the men’s swift phrasings, the rapidity of their words in all likelihood fueled by fear, I continued to vehemently shake my arm. I could not bring myself to pick off The Creature of The Night, which was unfortunate because no matter how hard I shook, flung, or gyrated, this demon seed of Dracula remained attached to me like a black diamond wrist corsage.

 

There, amid the heat and wavering light and cacophony of male counsel, I brought the bat closer and inspected, faintly fascinated, and praying I wasn’t bleeding.  Its little face resembled that of a wee dog with giant ears.

 

The bat looked at me as though I was a mere curiosity and it held all the power. The good news: It had not fanged me. The bad news: I realized bats possessed tiny, powerful thumbs crowned with flesh-ripping claws.

 

I am superstitious. Of this, I am unashamed. After all, I was raised by a woman who believed she spoke to demons. How could I not believe in signs, ghosts, spells, Barnabas Collins, and the possibility that all bats are secret goatsuckers? I didn’t need a refresher course in the occult to know a clinging winged rat was not a good omen.

 

Panicked to the point of nearly losing control of my mind and bodily functions, I flicked my hand so violently I distended my wrist. The bangle flew off, ricocheting into the tangle of men and equipment. Pain radiated up my arm and fissured in the maze of my elbow and shoulder. The bat, possibly suffering from thumb distension or shriek-induced deafness, did, however, release me, promptly disappearing—a shy apparition—into the chaos of moon-filtered chiaroscuro and city bustle.

 

Before I could begin to track down my Bakelite or worry myself into a frenzy over how many agonizing rabies shots I would have to endure, a young man jumped in front of me, danced an agitated jig, and said in a thick accent, his eyes wide with what I interpreted as both fear and wonder, “No worry, ma’am, no worry. Bat good luck!”

 

What the hell was wrong with this guy?

 

“It was a fucking bat!” I said, rubbing my wrist, the sensation of the creature’s claws and wings haunting my neck and hand. I triple-checked: no broken skin, which I was pretty sure meant (a) I didn’t have rabies and (b) I remained an outsider among the ranks of the vampiric dead.

 

“I know, I know!” His feet slowed as did his speech, and he repeated himself, allowing the syllables to hang in the air longer than necessary, each vowel oozing into a viscous slur. “Noooo wor reee.  Baaaat goooood luck.”

 

Fourteen years and many trials later, I stand on my back porch, testing fate again, wondering what sort of luck I would have had without that bat encounter. Bill hands me a glass of wine as I watch the evening’s first wave of chiroptera flicker though the gathering twilight—black silhouettes shattering a prism sky. I take stock. Was life a series of mistakes and trials interrupted by small moments of joy? That would suck. Was it a mixture of luck and fate, good karma and bad, depending on a cosmic roll of the dice? Did cataclysmic things happen to decent people just because? Did the Old Testament God occasionally wake from his eternal slumber and screw with people simply for shits and giggles?

 

A bat swoops within a foot of me. I don’t flinch.

 

“That was close,” Bill says, bringing his Jim Beam on ice closer to his chest, as if he suspects bats have a proclivity for brown liquor.

 

“Do you think Job deserved those boils and plagues?” I ask, slapping at a no-see-um.

 

“Absolutely not,” Bill says, keeping his gaze pegged to the sky that is now quite crowded with winged creatures. I think Bill is about to expound on what he thinks of God’s treatment of Job and it probably isn’t complimentary of the Lord Almighty, as a faded relation of mine oft refers to Him, but our attention is snagged by a thread of conversation emanating from the house. We had, like poor earth stewards, left on the TV.

 

A CNN talking head reports that overnight in the Gulf, gas, oil, and concrete from something called the Deepwater Horizon oilrig exploded up the wellbore to the deck, where it caught on fire. Eleven platform workers are missing. Rescue and recovery operations are underway. A Coast Guard petty officer insists there is no sign of a leak.

 

“A rig exploded and there isn’t a leak? How can that be?” I ask Bill. I gaze out at Alligator Bay, worry mushrooming through every corpuscle in my body. I can’t survive the destruction of this pristine estuary, this amazing ecosystem where if you are a fish, a marine mammal, a land mammal, an insect, a bird, a mullet, you’ve found one of the greatest places on the planet to birth babies. Or, if you are a grown woman with a painful past, you find solitude and grace, states of being that if you’re lucky lead you down the path toward forgiveness and new love.

 

“They’re lying again,” Bill says, a matter-of-fact nonchalance lacing his words.

 

One of the herons glides to its roost in the big tree. It lands amid gnarled branches and squawks—a warning, an avian sigh, an issuance of old pain, a call to its mate (I’m home. Where are you?): Which one I don’t know. But I fear Bill is right.

 

I rest my head against his shoulder, watch the winged world feed, my memory flashing on a horrific ingrained image: oiled birds dying horrendous deaths in the wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster, and I find myself praying to whatever is out there. Please, dear God, no.

 

Then I voice a hope that makes no sense, at least not to my husband. I slip my hand into his and say, “The sky is full of good luck tonight.”

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Refrigerator Girl

Truck leaned in for the kiss. Nabi tried not to flinch, but how could she not when her principal stood ten feet away, her fourth graders running to the buses? It was 2:30 on a Wednesday, the air thick with humidity, the branches heavy with leaves. Truck had once again shown up at school, unannounced. On any other occasion Nabi would have thrown her arms around Truck, but her tight tank top and her leopard-spotted hair just screamed need, determined to provoke a reaction. Why was Truck always trying to test her?

 

“Well, hello to you, too,” Truck said. “So much for a little sweetness and light.”

 

“We’re at school, babe. I told you. I have to be careful.”

 

“You wouldn’t even know what love was if it smashed light into your mouth.”

 

“What?”

 

Truck was already storming off to the car. Now they’d spend the rest of the afternoon in silence, Truck slamming kitchen cabinets, seething, until Nabi gave in with a question. How was Nabi going to survive Truck? The truth was she’d never been attracted to most of her previous girlfriends. They had blonde hair while she was drawn to dark. They were earnest and sincere while she was excited by black humor, irreverence, the possibility of danger and surprise. The refusal of her deepest urges seemed to be the foundation of these relationships. She could have sex, yes, cozy, pleasant sex. And she could take delight in conversation, that gorgeous, underrated thing. But with Truck? In the six months since they’d been together, Nabi had lost sixteen pounds. She’d had to buy all new pants, toss out her old wardrobe, and though she was mesmerized by the sensation of getting to know her body—who knew that the back of her neck wanted to be probed with two fingers?—she honestly hadn’t slept well since the night they’d first fucked. People at school were worried about her. The hollow planes of her shoulder blades—they were always asking if she’d been eating, and what could she say? Oh, I spent the last eight hours fucking, and I should feel like a porn goddess but honestly I’m in this state where I could take four naps a day.

 

How had Nabi become this kind of person? She loved sex; she’d always loved sex. She could not walk by another beautiful woman without sending out a dart of focused intensity through her eyes before the performance of looking straight ahead. The other woman would do the same thing, as if she also knew that a body was trouble, too easy to lose. Occasionally someone pushed through that reserve, through grit and determination. Inevitably that someone turned out to be a person she couldn’t fight with, couldn’t even disagree with—though the two of them had great sex–at least for a while. People threw around words like boundaries. For some, that metaphor had physical, pictorial significance, but not for Nabi. All she knew was that whenever she attempted to fight with Truck, she had the awful suspicion that both of their souls were in danger of implosion, and that implosion would damage them down to their cells until they were done.

 

When Nabi was seven, she spent afternoons with Harris and Lily Carr, the brother and sister who lived just down the street. She did not exactly like Harris and Lily, their finicky taste in sweets, their hands sticky with jam, but their mothers were friends, and there was never any question they’d spend the days after school together. When the mothers were off to the swim club, the children shut the door in the bedroom, where brother and sister put Nabi through various tests. She didn’t know why she agreed to these tests but she was eager to be a good student. First they asked her to take off all her clothes. Then they held a struck match to her skin, not just to her face but down to her private parts—their words not hers. Over the course of an afternoon she took part in a series of tests that went from extension cords to light bulbs. These rituals did not faze her because she could at least see was impressing Harris and Lily—she could see the respect blazing in their hard little eyes. But when they started clearing the top shelves of the refrigerator, she knew it was time to get out of the house. They had already talked about shuttering her up between the bread and the milk, and that was definitely enough. She’d once heard of a girl who had almost suffocated in such a refrigerator, tumbling out on the floor when the door opened, her face ashy and blue.

 

Nabi walked straight out the Carrs’ front door.

 

She still thought of that girl twenty years later, though she wasn’t always sure why. The refrigerator girl was both talisman and warning, and when she looked at her lovers she still saw the faces of that brother and sister—she still knew she could escape them. No one, on the other hand, was better at taking a test than Nabi, and perhaps Truck had intuited this all along. She sensed too well that Nabi hungered too much to succeed and would never let you get a rise out of her as hard as you’d tried.

 

The beach was more crowded than usual, the tide line nearly reaching the lifeguard stand. Nabi and Truck unfolded their blanket up near the dunes. To their left was Maureen Keating, the mother of one of her fourth graders. Closer, to their right, were the Artmans, old friends of her parents. All around them were people she knew, people she had some connection to, either through school or yoga, and maybe that was why Truck stood up, started digging the hole close to the blanket. She looked so gorgeous and strong as she pitched the shovel into the sand, her arms striated, muscular, sleek, tan. Why had she brought along such a serious shovel, the kind you’d use to plant shrubs? The people around them were probably asking a similar question, but they appeared not to be distracted by it, as they ran back and forth to the water or tossed footballs. The hole before her deepened. Every time Nabi asked Truck why she wasn’t going into the ocean, Truck would not answer; she remained silent. Which might have been why Nabi’s stomach was in distress. She pictured herself running up into the dunes and throwing up a little, but when she thought of her fourth-grade class, the faces of her students attuned to her, depending upon her calm to make them feel safe, the feeling passed.

 

Truck stood before the hole in a posture of deep accomplishment. “Get in,” she said, in a voice of purest love. She was playing of course–Truck was always playing–but this time there was something darker beneath the theater.

 

“Truck?”

 

“Get in,” Truck said, more gently now. “It’s for you. I dug this big and beautiful hole for you.”

 

The hole was as wide as it was deep. Too close to people: What was Truck thinking? And how could she get back to the car, leave for home without Truck running after her, wrestling her to the beach, chafing her wrist? Nabi imagined herself on her back, Truck filling in the hole around her until she couldn’t move. She thought of her private parts packed with cool sand until the itch was unbearable, the blazing sun on her face parching her lips, making her woozy with heat. On the other side of the dune, not so very far away, a baby cried. They were over. And as if to prove that to herself, Nabi kicked Truck’s keys down into the hole and waited, just waited.

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I Want to Know You All

I was listening to this sort of ignorant blowhard
go on about how teaching is a dumb profession
and I did this thing I always do, which is feel smug
about how smart and sophisticated I am, but
my smugness is a little compromised lately
by how I do almost nothing all day besides have
an affair in my mind and then wring my brain
over what a divorce would do to my daughter,
who heretofore has been lucky to have a happy,
close family, not even too far off from how we
pretend to be in public. So I just kept listening
without my hackles up so much and also was
bemused about how alike we all are, admiring
some people, judging others, thinking we’re so
special, and this guy had some good stories.
One time a history professor in college told him
to go hang himself after he wrote 500 words
about pheasants in the French Revolution.
He said he must have mentioned those fired up
and pitchfork-wielding pheasants a dozen times
in that paper. That exasperated historian screaming
peasants in the margins always reminded him
of his dad, who does probate, which is basically
a ton of archival research into plat maps and deeds,
birth certificates and death wishes. There are no
secrets when someone contests a will. His dad
once told him, “You wouldn’t believe the number
of cross-dressing farmers there are in Missouri”
which made me laugh at first at the hypocrisy
of this place, but then realize it’s actually tragic
how alone those farmers must feel. It’s ruthless
out here, I know. All the longing we till under
and to let such a secret slip—probate means some
cousin or sister or brother described the dress
in front of a judge who considered it fit evidence
against a claim. I laughed because I can’t imagine
who you are—the man in coveralls who mocks
the foamy fern I like poured onto my latte,
the one who calls me “hon” that condescending
way? Could you be the man always with the sign
in front of my doctor’s office or the neighbor
who mows the waysides of our country road
down to stubble? Maybe you don’t come to town
if you can help it anymore either. I want you
to know, whoever you are, as someone hungry
for variety in the human condition, most especially
my own, cross-dressing farmers, you light up
the fields for me. I hope you walk into those
soybean rows some nights and your flowered skirt
swishes your legs in a way that feels like falling
in love when you didn’t think you ever could,
or maybe you feel rooted, belonging to this soil
that made you. I don’t know what’s better, but
I want for you such happiness and every last acre
your bigot of a father left behind to go with it.

 

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Two Poems on Florida

Hurricane

Naked, floating face down in the tv room
filled with seawater seeping from glass doors
he had duct-taped against the hurricane,
the room a dark aquarium, his white body, bobbing
—he must have been asleep on the couch, exhausted
after a day of battening down the house
when baysurge beached in a swarm of seaspouts
churning up the mangrove swamp, the great wave colliding,
breaching doors, collapsing walls, wallowing, then
tumbling back out as winds shrieked off treetops,
sea slosh sucking up drowned frogs, broken snakes,
skinned pelicans, dragging leaf muck, sparkles of
shattered glass, lawn chairs, rolling a dead manatee,
slopping back through tangles of trees, impaled boats,
to the seesaw bay sizzling with rain, leaving him
rocking in a kelp of curtains, arms outstretched
towards something in the green cloudy water.

 

A Miami Moment

Just home from work, he’s sitting
by the patio pond, watching the koi
write their slow signatures.

Beside him: The Miami Herald 
gathering humid air, a glass of wine,
and the cigar he left last night.

A flock of parrots mutters
in the seagrape tree. The ylang-ylang
has put on its evening perfume

and soon the yard will smell like Chanel.
Inside his daughter is baking cookies
and his wife is taking a pre-dinner snooze.

He jumps up screaming.
Inside, they yell “What? What!?”
and run out to see him pointing up

at maybe fifty vultures circling,
wings underlit by the setting sun
in a swirl of slow turning light.

The magic in the realism
never far away.

 

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Manpower

Abuelo was the picker. Apá was the packer. Alex and I took turns harvesting grape and carrying the heavy boxes of fruit down the row to our father. We had started out a group of seven, but the foreman said the group was too large. So tío Rafael, who was an exceptional packer, was asked to form his own group with tío Ramón and Juvenal, our cousin. That made sense since that was also how we split up between two cars to get to the fields. We came together as a family again during lunch hour but the rest of the day Alex and I had to stand opposite of Abuelo, who reprimanded us at every turn. We worked too slowly. We talked too much. We left the grape too shiny. Since his hearing wasn’t very good, we learned to whisper and to catch the words through the dusty leaves, over the sound of the squeaky hinges on three pairs of scissors.

 

“What are you going to do with your first check?” Alex asked. This was a question my father had asked us almost every day that first week on the job. It was his way of encouraging us since we were going to give up most of our summer to farm labor. Abuelo had already made it clear we were not going to be allowed to vegetate in front of the television when school was out. “Al fil,” he said. To the fields. Like every other kid who, at fourteen, was old enough to work.

 

When the task became tedious, when the heat became oppressive, we threw that question out as a way to keep going. No one was going to stop us from dreaming.

 

“I want to buy a pair of dress shoes that aren’t made of plastic,” I said.

 

“Plastic?” Alex said, pausing for a second.

 

“You know, fake. They make your feet sweaty and stinky. I hear that the ones made of leather keep your feet fresh.”

 

“Okay, but what do you want leather shoes for? You’re not going to the prom. You don’t go out on dates. You have no girlfriend. You don’t dance.”

 

“Neither do you,” I countered.

 

“So what do you want them for?”

 

I wanted to say that I wanted to feel like a man for once, but I didn’t really know what I meant by that. I had seen pictures of Abuelo in his youth, his mustache so black and preened to perfection, showing off the tattoos on his forearm. He was wearing dress pants and a pair of shoes that shone so clean and new they made him look respectable, despite the tattoos. During Apá’s days as a musician, he was also pictured with bright shiny patent leather shoes. All the glamour of their pasts was on display in the footwear. Their present was dirty sneakers and work boots. That was my present as well. I wanted to claim my moment of glamour.

 

“Take that box out,” Abuelo barked. He was only visible from the waist down, but I could see how he pointed to a full box with the ends of his scissors. I imagined his mustache punctuating his severe expression underneath that hat he always wore when he stepped out of the house.

 

It was Alex’s turn, so he crossed underneath the vines. The rustling reminded me of rain. An odd image to invoke in the near hundred-degree heat, the sand around my sneakers growing warmer by the hour. Another desert deception, like a mirage.

 

As soon as Alex was out of earshot, Abuelo began his griping. “I’m not sure what your brother is thinking, skipping school and running off with your good-for-nothing cousins. Without school he’s going to end up here, with us. He thinks this life is easy, well, he’s about to find out.”

 

I knew by now that Abuelo did not want a response, just a listener. I let his words dust each bunch in my hand as I inspected it and determined that it was ripe enough to pick and place in the box. One thing I did admire about Abuelo was how he dropped a bunch so fearlessly from as high as the vine, confident that it wouldn’t fall apart, grapes bouncing off in all directions. When I asked Apá about this he said that it was decades of skill. “And he doesn’t give a shit anymore,” he added. “He knows the packer has to clean it before it’s packed.”

 

Abuelo kept on: “And your father, running around with that woman, as if he were a teenager. Even you boys don’t bring us that kind of trouble.”

 

Trouble meant that Amelia, Apá’s soon-to-be wife, was pregnant. I didn’t particularly like her, but I liked Abuelo less, and I didn’t appreciate any poison coming from his mouth, no matter where it was going. He voiced these things to me, to Abuela, but to no one else. He was cowardly that way.

 

“I need to use the toilets,” I said, and walked away.

 

At the end of the row, Apá stood at the packing table, shifting his weight and shaking his leg. I knew how painful it was for him to stand all those hours from 6:00 a.m. to quitting time, sometimes as late as 2:00 p.m. He saw me coming and smiled. His dark skin looked even darker with that red shirt he was wearing.

 

“Where’s Alex?” I asked.

 

“I told him to bring me some water. And I’m thinking why don’t you go get me some water too.”

 

I pursed my lips. I knew the code. It was my father’s way of letting us stretch our legs, and to give us a break from Abuelo.

 

As I walked out into the dirt avenue toward the water truck, my body ached just watching people bend, then stand still as they picked grape on the hot soil, the long sleeves of their flannel shirts covered in sulfur. My eyes became moist. I felt sorry for Abuelo and Apá and everyone else who had to do this an entire lifetime. I was not yet out of high school, but I was already certain this would not be my fate. All that talk about colleges in my homeroom got me excited, though I had not yet revealed to my family what my plans were for the near future. I didn’t want anyone—especially Abuelo—to get in the way. But I wasn’t too sure about Alex’s fate now that he had dropped out of school.

 

“Save me some,” I said to him as I approached.

 

“It tastes funny,” he said.

 

“Everything tastes funny here. Even saliva.” I poured water into the paper cone. In a few hours, when the cones were exhausted, there would be a single dirty cup sitting on top of the tank. At that point nobody cared about hygiene and passed the cup from mouth to mouth.

 

“And what are you going to do with your first check?” I said.

 

“I don’t know. Save for a car.”

 

“A car? With the little money we’re going to make? You’re going to start with a tire?”

 

“Or maybe a fucking bicycle, okay?”

 

I didn’t take his snapping at me too personally. The heat gave all of us short tempers.

 

We each filled a cone of water to take to our father. We already knew where his paycheck was going—to the new baby.

 

“What kind of car?” I said, as a way of assuaging Alex’s hurt feelings.

 

“A convertible. I want to ride with the top off.”

 

Alex with his baby mustache that would never grow beyond chicken scratches was only fifteen but he already knew how to drive. I wasn’t sure how this came to be since I was a year older and I had never even practiced getting behind the wheel of car. Driver’s ed was still a semester away.

 

“Where would you go?” I asked.

 

“I don’t know. I’d just go.”

 

And I realized that this was his way of dreaming about leaving. I had been plotting my escape as well.

 

My father took the cones and threw the water into his mouth. He crushed them and dropped them at his feet. They looked so out of place there, white crinkled paper over a small graveyard of discarded fruit not good enough to pack. He smiled. My father had a handsome smile but I resented it because he never got me braces and my crooked upper row embarrassed me. When I was younger I kept pleading until he finally shut me up by telling me that they would straighten themselves out naturally. “My teeth used to be uglier than yours, right Apá?” And Abuelo agreed from the couch, complicit in the deceit.

 

When we took our places at the grapevine again, Abuelo was gone. Our respite from his supervision was extended.

 

“He hates to work, doesn’t he?” I said.

 

“Yeah, and so he takes it out on all of us.”

 

Usually it was Abuela who worked in the fields and Abuelo stayed home to cook. But his younger brother, tío Justo, had come to visit from who knows where and he wouldn’t stop teasing his older brother about how he had become the woman in the marriage.

 

“You should lend him your aprons, María,” he called out, and no one dared laugh. Tío Justo cackled at his own jokes for all of us.

 

Even my grandmother wasn’t amused. She stood behind the stove, making faces, bothered that Abuelo had asked her to do the cooking, which she didn’t like to do. Nor was she much good at it. We couldn’t stand Abuelo, but we sure did appreciate his skills in the kitchen because Abuela’s dishes were usually inedible.

 

Tío Justo was the only person who could shame Abuelo. He ridiculed Abuelo’s belly, his bald spot, his lack of gold jewelry and flaccid muscles, and the fact that he didn’t pay attention to young women anymore. At the supermarket tío Justo would goad him, elbowing him whenever a pretty young girl walked past them. Abuelo looked so awkward trying to keep up with his brother’s ogling. The entire theater of masculinity was mortifying to all of us because my father never acted like that and neither did he expect us to.

 

And so here Abuelo was, trying to prove to his brother that he was still a man by coming to work and forcing Abuela to stay home, and I knew that neither of them was happy about the arrangement. It almost made me feel sorry for him, until I saw him walk back to his spot.

 

“Remember when someone we know bought exercise equipment to impress someone else we know?” I said to Alex. The mischief in my tone made me blush. We had reached that part of the day when we started making fun of Abuelo.

 

Alex giggled. “I certainly do. I still use it. All he did was remove the packaging.”

 

“If you’re ever that mean to me when we’re old, Alex, I promise you I’m going to kick my nice leather shoe up your ass.”

 

“And if you’re as ridiculous as they are when you get old, I’m going to run your ass over with my convertible.”

 

We couldn’t contain our giggling. And it wasn’t until Abuelo told us to cut it out that we slipped back into the coma of the hot weather.

 

At quitting time, we weren’t as relieved as everyone because our car was parked the farthest. This was one of Abuelo’s bright ideas: to show up before everyone else so that we could nab the best parking spot on the side of the road. Sometimes it paid off because the work route took us toward the road and we were the first to reach our car, but if the route took us away from the road, we had the longest trek to Apá’s precious blue Mustang.

 

Sure enough, we were the last to leave. And just as we settled into the hot vinyl seats, another heartbreak: the car wouldn’t start.

 

“Now what?” Abuelo said. He wiped a ring of sweat underneath his hat.

 

“I don’t know,” Apá said. “We have gas. Let me check under the hood.”

 

As my father went out to inspect the problem, Abuelo went at it: “What does your father know about cars? He’s always buying these useless pieces of junk. He never has any money to invest on something that’s not going to leave us all stranded in the middle of the desert. And now with another mouth to feed on the way, he’s going to be broke for the rest of his life.”

 

Wound up by his own anger, Abuelo got out of the car to join my father.

 

“And what the fuck does he know about cars?” Alex said.

 

We were getting too sweaty in the backseat so we got out as well, only to find Apá and Abuelo arguing as one pulled on this wire and the other yanked on that cable.

 

“This is a piece of shit car,” Abuelo said.

 

“You’re not being very helpful, Apá. Why don’t you go back inside?”

 

Abuelo grumbled but he did just that though not before calling the obvious: “And keep your eye out for anyone passing by, maybe all we need is a jump.”

 

“Do you want us to walk to the main road, Apá?” I said. And that’s when the tears started welling up in his eyes. So he smiled as he wiped them away.

 

“Dude,” Alex said.

 

“I didn’t do anything,” I said.

 

But I had done something. I had reminded him of what was upon us: Alex wasn’t doing well in school, Apá was expecting another child with a woman I didn’t want to accept as my future stepmother, Abuelo was inflicting his insecurities on all of us, and I was about to leave forever, though no one but me knew that. Or maybe my father did know—a parental intuition that told him he was about to lose his son. But at the moment, here we all were, stuck because my father bought the cheapest car he could afford. We had worked close to nine hours and now he had to watch his sons beg for help from a stranger on the side of the road.

 

“This is not the kind of life I wanted for you,” he said, weeping with his hands flat on the car.

 

The raised hood kept us hidden from Abuelo’s sight, but neither Alex nor I knew how to comfort our father. We were not used to gestures of affection. That was not manly behavior. Alex kept knocking on my elbow with his fist, as if encouraging me to make the first move. But I didn’t know what that move should be.

 

“Stop crying, Apá,” I said. “Don’t let your father see you.” I couldn’t help but blurt out a phrase my own mother had said to me many times when I became too emotional when my father was nearby. It felt useful but not right. “Alex and I will get help,” I continued. “You wait here in case anyone passes by.”

 

Apá’s sniffling was the last sound we heard as we made our way to the main road. It was going to be a wait because these were the grape fields and it was past harvesting time. Even the stragglers had made it home by now. Our best hope was one of our kin, an undocumented alien taking the back roads for safety, or a driver who had made a wrong turn somewhere. The nearest payphone was miles away at the closest gas station.

 

“What do you think is going to happen?” Alex said.

 

“Oh, don’t worry, a truck will come by and give us all a lift to the gas station.”

 

“No, I meant, about Apá.”

 

“Oh,” I said. I looked behind us. Abuelo was looking our direction as if that could make us walk any faster. We were hungry and thirsty, and I knew Alex’s legs were as weak as mine at the moment.

 

“I think he feels bad he left us with our grandparents after our mom died. And now that Amelia is pregnant, that means he’s never coming back or even coming to get us.”

 

“So that’s it then.”

 

“Yes, that’s it. And Abuelo is pissed because he knows Apá will be asking for money from him and Abuela.”

 

“What a shitty father,” Alex said.

 

I didn’t want to ask if he meant Apá or Abuelo or both. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t care. I was sleepy suddenly and I began to fantasize about the college dormitory room I remembered from the brochure that awaited me in a year or so. It would be the first time I would have my own bed.

 

When we exited the blocks of grapevines we were met with a breeze. It was refreshing and liberating. But there was no movement as far as the eye could see. And not much sound, except for the vibrations of the telephone cables above us.

 

“So what are you doing with your first check?” I said.

 

Alex smiled. “Buying my dad a car so he can get our asses to work. You?”

 

“Same thing.”

 

“What about your fancy shoes?”

 

I shrugged. Fancy shoes seemed so useless all of a sudden. But a bicycle would have helped. I let out a laugh.

 

“What’s so funny?” Alex asked.

 

“Nothing. I was just thinking that maybe you weren’t wrong about the bicycle after all.”

 

“I told you, stupid. You and your fancy ass shoes. Where do you think you’re going?”

 

The answer was complicated: I was going to leave eventually. I was going to leave him. But that didn’t seem like the right moment to tell him. So I simply said, “Nowhere. I’m not going anywhere yet.”

 

“That’s right, Turrútut. Like it or not we’re stuck here together you and me.”

 

I had the strangest sensation that Alex was trying to tell me something, but I was too brain-dead. Or maybe I was reading too much into his words. Our father had abandoned us, but my leaving was not the same thing. And not for a few more years. Perhaps all he needed was reassurance. Especially after seeing my father break down in front of us.

 

“Hey, listen, Alex, it’s going to be okay. I’ll always be here for you. I promise.”

 

Alex looked at me intently. We had to try to read each other’s minds. Unlike Apá, he was not one to let his defenses down. We locked eyes for a few seconds and then he turned away. We slipped into silence again. That was all the sentimentality we were going to manage between us.

 

No car passed us by for an additional thirty minutes but we didn’t have to wait any longer because the blue Mustang came speeding out of the dirt avenue kicking up dust. My father honked the horn and our bodies jumped with excitement.

 

“We got a jump from the foreman,” Apá said. “He was making one last inspection and your grandfather spotted him.”

 

Abuelo raised his chin slightly, acting like the hero of the story.

 

I patted Abuelo on the shoulder in gratitude. “Good job, Abuelo!”

 

“And don’t you dare stop anywhere, Apá, in case the car won’t start again,” Alex said.

 

“Yeah,” I piled on.

 

“Listen to your sons. Listen to your sons,” Abuelo said.

 

Alex and I climbed in and we set off for home. I made eye contact with Apá through the rearview mirror for a fleeting moment. In the back seat, as we sat side by side, a glorious comfort came upon me and I might have held my brother’s hand if it weren’t the least manly gesture of affection I could imagine. So instead I joined the banter and laughter until we reached the freeway, where we blended into the traffic, just one more anonymous unit of Mexicans in the desert. It felt good to be in the company of these men. For once, I felt I belonged to this private world we called manhood, which wasn’t perfect, which was sometimes painful, but was my birthright.

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The Giant

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Two Love Poems

The View from Up Here

by Major Jackson

 

At sunset winter mountains reach
across the page long as a look of love.
Sometimes my hands want
all of your syllables.
I walk in kindness
when you’re around
which is to say I’m feeling Eastern.

I gather myself unto myself
because you hunger
for golden peaks.

Night gently offers its diamonds
which we stash in silent mumblings.

When you speak, I feel unburied
yet hear still the dead of my own house.
No one cares that I count your eyeblinks.
No one cares about all this hard water.
The hours are tall as polar caps,
and I quicken inside your name.

 

On Hawk Mountain, Vermont

by Didi Jackson

 

I am parting with the sun
that like a Greek oracle
descends the temple of mountains
before me. Their silhouette
darkens to Oxford blue,
elides the current of the sky
until I no longer see
crest or peak.  After moving up
from the South, how much should I know
of coniferous trees or of chickadees
who play their winter song of fee bee, fee bee,
the last note toppling an octave from the first
like a softly closing door.

The Northern sky stands so straight,
it uses the largest pines for crutches;
they bend under its weight.

We have a friend who isn’t happy
I’m white.  With him, though, the road
is just sampling the sound of the rain.
So my husband and I hold hands
as often as we can,
each finger erupting a new continent.

But in the early evening,
I worry that if pulled over,
when my husband lifts his empty hands
he is lifting only his blackness.
At this hour a chickadee cries
in staccato: dee dee dee, dee dee dee.
I wonder how it knows my name
before I look at our marriage
in the milky evening light.
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Crepuscle

 

FOR SHANE

I won’t deny it any longer: the man I love
is a horse galloping through my chest.
Only in thunder may I whisper his name.
          *
I tell his mother I am the sort of man
she will never have to think about.
Shame—face of mulch, mouth of black snow.
          *
In another story, the body was a bloodless
moon and it was caught by trees.
Dying—moon inhabits like an animal.
          *
Someday there will be a night in which a boy
survives falling like light across skin.
Memory—small pocketknife tossed into ravine.
          *
I do not believe the world keeps us
rooted in its forest.
He moves through my body like a god.
          *
By crux of dawn I retreat every mile it takes
to let him live inside of me.
Him—my bloodless moon, my swollen bed of stones.

 

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