I have a crush on Science.
I like his no-nonsense ones and zeros way about things.
He’s not always right, but I love his passion to part the fog,
Chase the gray around the classroom until it picks a side – black or white.

Science lives in a world I envy
where 1+1 still equals 2
He hangs out with the Math kids,
He combs spreadsheets and slides down rulers,
He knows the names of all the things
Because he labeled them himself.

Me and my glasses sidle up to Science in homeroom,
Asking, “How was your summer?”
Knowing perfectly well that while I skinny-dipped at the sandpit,
Splashing off bean field dust and hormones,
Blue-tongued from bomb pops and the taste of longing,
He was in summer school studying the birds and bees
That stung me so sweetly.

I saunter by Science in the lunchroom, mustering my best smile
Like the hot dog I am, too cool for school.
When I ask him to dance in the darkened gym,
We are white socks and highwaters, bare feet and sunburn; we are
Life. Science.
We need each other.

We meet in the back seat of our curiosity
Where grace notes and lab notes tumble equally
Through inexpert hands,
Sorting, searching, seeking the gray.

As if poems or petri dishes could ever explain
The chemistry of love
Or the why of us.

It’s red in the west
And purple and deepest blue
That’s almost black.

The wind chimes clang
A warning I choose to delight in -
It’s storm season.

Oklahomans know
When to take cover and when to take
Pics for the news.

The air has a taste,
A zest that seasons each springtime
Memory I have.

Like mowing the lawn
And hearing the frogs in the evening,
It feels like home.

Imagine a piece of bread.
Imagine a pat of butter and three slices of tomato.
Imagine a glass half full of rose
a red lipstick stain
a twist of lemon
a hand resting on yours.

Imagine an uneaten apple and a bowl of popcorn.
Imagine a bow slowly pulling an open D string.
Imagine you can’t hear it.
Imagine you don’t want to hear it.
Imagine a wine glass, empty except
for a twist peppered
with sediment or,
sentiment.

Imagine a shot.
Imagine you fall.
Imagine you split in two,
sputtering blood like watermelon seeds.
Imagine you can’t talk.
Imagine you want to.

Another shot.
A wine glass shatters.
Bread drips blood like butter.
A hand tastes your mouth.
Imagine, you can’t taste it back.

Each day her full life seeps poetry like jelly
from a sugared doughnut, quivers with anticipation
in a meniscus of golden tea held in a white-China cup.
Its wings flutter into pages, beautiful escapees
from painted covers of a packed notebook.
Rarer in my life, it may pour down in sudden
summer showers, astonish like ecliptic shows
of heavenly bodies. And yet, we vibrate in sympathetic joy,
serving understanding to each other after rejections,
ecstasy for acceptances, the sweet treats of success.

We appreciate the solace of the cat, its limned curves,
musical purring, and silken coat. We both love nature,
though from different habitats. She admires my passion
for my garden without fully comprehending how
at the end of a working day, when my hands lock
in the shape of grasped tools, my shoulders ache and
legs tremble with the oxen’s fatigue, and I sleep the sleep
of flung stones, I am happy as birds flying home to breed.

She questions praise songs for gardening as consolation
for the worst life can spawn from its dark abysses,
doubting its succor for loss of loved ones, nuclear war,
or the elephant’s extinction. I tell her that nowhere else
would beckon to me in those bleak times, that even
the immensity and finality of those griefs would be
more bearable from my garden or small greenhouse,
where seeds would still sprout in their multiplicities
of hope and unfurl green courage for a future—
tarnished, diminished, crueler than all rejection.

We were young, they say.
We have died; remember us.
~ Archibald MacLeish

Sitting in the bleachers we used to count her laps
as she “wrote the Australian crawl” into record books.
Her elegant stroke modeled text-book form,
elbows bent high, outlining a mountain peak,
while determined hands paddled water towards her feet,
strong like the motor on a hydroplane in a protected harbor,
or when sailing wings caught the wind
on a sunny day in the Paradise Bay.
She was always swimming forward.

Blessed with a chiseled-goddess face, armed
with a mischievous smile that embraced you
like a full frontal kiss, cloudless skies promised
her a good life in smooth waters
with a gentle yet firm breeze at her back.
Tight coiled hair, thick like her talent, adorned her crown.
When she shaved her head for competition at 16,
we gasped. She was always full of surprises.

Diagnosed after her second child, ALS anchored her
with a dirty bounty, unhinged her attractive body,
made her choke for air through the water
she had once conquered, now flowing back into her lungs.
In her last years she communicated through a computer;
the blink of eyelids beat like delicate hummingbird wings
too fast for us to count. In the end a turtle in a wheelchair,
its shell swirling in a mist by a pool of water.
ALS was a race she could not win,
though she always refused to quit:

I was young, she says. I have died; remember me.

Life//I am of both your directions
She knew then, the blond mid-century explosion, that she
(and everyone, really) was going north/south, east/west
(everywhere, really) at the same time.

There is always bridges…with all those cars going crazy underneath
and she shared this knowledge/this bridge with us
(although, she didn’t know that at the time) on stationery
from the Parkside Hotel in London and in the Record notebook
and the green Italian diary, this knowledge of the crazy underneath

one’s own truth is just that really — one’s own truth….one/is for most part alone.
and she didn’t expect us (but wanted us) to believe her alone,
not project our oceans of fear and desire onto the sewn-into see-through dress

It is a determination not to be overwhelmed
she, who took it all in and twisted herself to be the perfect ________ (we filled in the blank)

Life//I am of both your directions
while underneath it was all up/down, in/out, over/under, /glitter/thunder

The truth can only be recalled
(But what do we) remember—a see-through dress, a blown-up skirt,
that diamonds were her best friends?

it can never be invented
What we think we know is invention. She tried to tell us
north/south, east/west, different directions/ different women,
all at the same time.

(These quotes were selected from Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe, edited by Bernard Comment (Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2012).)

A friend brought me a gift from the sea.
It might be the shell of a channeled whelk,
it’s hard to tell.

You might expect a seashell
offered to you as a gift
to be perfect.

This shell is broken and burnished.
Its graceful internal curve intact
with a few remnants of other shells
and a small stone lodged within its spiral.

How long did it serve as a home
for living creatures? And once abandoned,
how long did it tumble
in the salty sea and sand?

This shell is weathered and worn,
burnished and beautiful
as are we two old friends, and all of us
who live on
in our slowly evolving forms.

the Teddy bear, that one-eyed family retainer
still sits atop the proud brass clock
by the tattered graduation cap, the tackle-box
that opens with a creak, the rocking chair
that squeaks, your first pair of glasses
folded like a lotus

the jack-in-the-box that gave you
tiny heart attacks the pick-up-sticks
the valentines in reds and pinks
the comb you stole from you-know-who
and wished you’d given back to her
you got your kiss regardless in the spring

the cartoon heads that gave you pez
the powdered candy sands of cherry
lemon lime and tangerine
tumble into autumn’s air
turn to ash
and all fall down

Thanksgiving turkeys made from pudgy fingers
drawn from pudgy hands
the octopus of earthenware
from summer camp
a ceramic turtle marches to the end of land

the stained piano sheets
with notes you used to play that rose
and shattered like the winter

the little wristwatch
melting into the table near the place
where your lovely head had slept

The dark doesn’t frighten me.
Evening is the softest word,
A velvet garment for the day’s
Transition into night.

The dark doesn’t frighten me.
Especially with the gloom of rain,
Night arrives as a rowdy
Aunt shaking off droplets
Hurtling apologies.

The dark does not frighten me --
She owns the twilight and makes
Lightning more electric. Thunder
And she are my lullaby.

I wonder when my grandpa cried
I wonder why my grandpa cried
I wonder why he cried all those
times he must have cried
We were on earth together
for twenty years and I
never saw him cry
But I’m sure there were
times throughout his life
when he cried and I wonder
what the things were that
made my grandpa cry

I’m Mrs. Right when everyone else has gone wrong
I am your Peace when no one is getting along
Your safe place when you feel like you don’t belong
A refuge in weakness – I am your strong.

Then I start to fade out

Do you even miss me?
Do you remember how hungry
You were for my help, so damn thirsty?
I’ve always put you firstly, shown you mercy.

Now your thirst is quenched so you good
Cast aside until there’s smoke under the hood
Then you calling me back 'cause you could
Always there because I promised I would (be)

Until you need me to fade out...

I remind you of the demons once inside
I’m like a silhouette to the shadows that reside
Giving you PTSD so instead of seek you hide
For fucks sake I’m human too, don’t cast me aside

I don’t want to fade out.

I know my best quality is generosity but also honesty
So I tell the truth to myself for the first time, I am a wannabe
Living a life of hypocrisy, not what I wanna be
My empathy is not all of me, and I had none for me.

I learn to control the fade out

It took way too long but the haze is clearing
I’m starting to see I’ve never done my own steering
So I’m taking the wheel and commandeering
Keep your eyes on the fog because I’ll be reappearing.

And this version will have no fade out

The sun casts her laughter
over the silvery gravel.

Bare sycamores bow
as the breeze whistles
round their ashen limbs.

Oceans of golden grasses
flutter quietly
as the fields gleam with evening promise.

Nestled on the land
is a pleasant house
where love pours from the panes.

I am home.

In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, World War II Daddies with shell shock wounds were lauded to puffed up heroes. America decorated its winners with proud surface contentment, but far too often let the after effects of war fall on innocent little boys.

In the backyard at 44th and Zenith, eight year-old Peter Washburn plays in the sweltering heat with his brand spanking new bow and arrow set he received for his birthday. But there’s a problem. There’s nothing in the backyard that is okay to shoot at and not enough room to shoot an arrow any distance anyway. Peter looks up at the sky and gets an idea. Thinking it will come down right in front of him, he pulls his bowstring back with all the muscle he can muster and shoots an arrow straight up at the clouds. Unfortunately he isn’t aware of the breeze blowing above the roofs of the neighborhood’s detached garages. Peter sees his arrow drift away, but has no idea where it went. He decides to embark on a fearless one man search party. He looks everywhere an arrow could be noticed - by the blisteringly hot metal garbage cans overflowing with putrid decomposing dreck, through the fly filled weeds in the Larson’s front yard, and even down the steaming detritus cooking sewer drains in the street. After hunting for over an hour, Peter decides to give up thinking that maybe the arrow is caught up in the leafy branches of a tall tree along with his favorite kite he lost last year. Then he sees Mrs. Ryan holding his arrow and staring at him from her front stoop.

“Peter Washburn. Is this what you’re looking for young man?”

“Yes, Mrs. Ryan; I’ve been looking all over for it. Where did you find it?” Peter asks.

“Well, it put a hole right through the middle of my brand new white cotton bedsheet that I just washed and hung on the clothesline to dry in the sun.”

With the sincere sentiment of Beaver Cleaver, Peter says, “Gee whiz, I’m sorry, Mrs. Ryan. I didn’t mean to. Please don’t call my dad. Please.”

“Why don’t you want me to call your daddy?” Mrs. Ryan asks.

“Because he’s really mean to me, Mrs. Ryan,” Peter says softly, hanging his head.

“Oh, dear,” says Mrs. Ryan.

In 1957, people in nice middle class neighborhoods do not call the Department of Human Services on their neighbors. People are inclined to “not get tangled up in another family’s problems” saying they are respecting their privacy, but in truth, they do not want to get involved. Too many children suffer the unimaginable consequences of this code of silence.

“So you won’t call my dad, Mrs. Ryan?” Peter asks.

“I wouldn’t think of it, Peter,” Mrs. Ryan says. “Oh, and here’s your arrow back.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Ryan. You’re nice,” Peter says.

“Well, Peter, I had four children of my own,” says Mrs. Ryan. They are all grown up and married now so they don’t live with me anymore. Say, I made homemade strawberry ice cream this morning and it should be just the right temperature by now. Would you like to join me at my kitchen table for a bowl or two?”

“I love strawberry ice cream, Mrs. Ryan,” Peter says.

“Well you come right in then, Peter. I’ll pour you and I a glass of ice cold lemonade, dish us up some ice cream and we can shoot the breeze,” Mrs. Ryan says smiling.

“I want to eat your ice cream a lot, Mrs. Ryan, but I’m not so sure about shooting the breeze,” Peter says. “I think I’ve had enough of that for today.”

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/sonnet-for-all-the-times-i-ate-breakfast-with-a-lump-in-my-throat/Ghost__Post__65eb91f2255808b090889a71Fri, 05 Apr 2024 21:15:03 GMT

Let all my rejections serve as places to start
being jerked from my mother’s tit, slung
by torn artery into the bosom of a wolf.
The mispelled word that cost me my first
ride in a plane to Memphis, the time I got
popped with a twisted wet towel on bare ass
in 7th-grade gym just because someone
in the group stole another boy’s wallet.
I hate you, Coach Page, for harboring
such a distorted philosophy. The time my
mother caught me having sex with a neighbor
boy and said it would crush my father if he
knew. I was ready to jump out of the box
and look my future in the face. It ends well.

I always wear a red hat
when watering my garden
well before the hour
when mad dogs and Englishmen
go forth in the searing sun
for reasons known to them alone.

I looked succulent and sweet, perhaps,
a monkey flower full of promise,
seen from on high
where hummingbirds hang and grace the air
like poised curved shapes that Calder makes.

She swooped:
a quicksilver streak
hoping for a closer look
daring to meet me eye to eye
primed to be amused
by human nature’s ploys,
inclined to steal a bath.

Whirring quick minute wings,
hovering in the hose’s stream,
toy frame shimmering,
red throat humming fairie airs,
preening just for me.
Fan of feathers, gray and green
overlaid with mercury sheen:
A heartbeat on the wing.

Legend says humming birds were designed
from feathered scraps left behind
when God was done with bigger fowl.
Others claim humming birds to be
spritely messengers, aviary angels
made to soar between worlds miming
the invisible and sowing wordless songs
in the gardens of admirers.

the limb that is broken,
i tried to see
the space
above the treetop
where sky begins

look deeper,
you will see
the veins
on these leaves,
more calculated, more beautiful,
more easily destructible,
and yet,
less human
than the ones on my hands

where do they go,
these lines?
into a vastness obscured
by the very thing
–form–
the realest of all,
and yet the most elusive

a sunlit column of prayer
in the afternoon,
body bent forward
as if waiting
to be kissed,
or bowing the head
in grief

when i die,
and i will die someday,
let the trees mourn
for only they will know
where i am going

Along a narrow uneven trail in a clearing
above a school, I heard in a creak a human cry.
The tree was dead. A dead oak tree with a hollow
halfway up, places where the rough gray bark
looked eaten away, other places raw, lichen pale, spongy
and bare. With broken limbs drawn upward.
From a distance in the late light, it looked like
a jaggedly splayed, coal-colored bouquet
against the sky. A haunted, haunting thing.
But up close, its pulp felt soft as velvet in my hand.
It wasn’t so much a cry as a sigh that someone
had come to see into its deepened space
what was not done blossoming. The crumble
of its rain-soaked, drying wood had a milky-caramel
hue, while the black gash in its chest
made it humble as my father with his open
wound I had to dress for months before he died.
Somehow, he appeared to belong then, not to any earth
but past some distant peak or star, reaching
where he had not yet learned—My teacher,
you’ve been sculpted by the wind as much as by
the night and windless unseen light that opens us within.
And here you take me into your empty arms.

As apple blossoms fall
like grains of rice,
I see fish in the murky water
swimming near the surface.
There’s purpose
in their meanderings,
but I can’t say what it is.
Does spring move
fish and men alike?
I think of dead friends
of dead lovers,
who are now so far apart.
Ah Spring, what wonderful
and terrible things you do
to our poor hearts.

I grew up without neighbors behind me. Because of that, I thought I grew up spoiled. I could suntan in my swimsuit without the eyes of neighbors staring at me. Sometimes if I was home alone, I would tan with only the bottoms on. I could read book after book on the swing in our backyard and not be distracted by backyard neighbors sitting on their porch or yipping dogs barking at me through the fence.

Instead, across from our relatively small patch of sometimes kept but always green grass, was a field. The field as it was lovingly known in our household. The estate was owned by a little old lady that was rumored to be in her 120’s by the neighborhood kids. Mrs. Fehrebach lived alone, in a log cabin with a carriage house, a stable, and two barns. It was the first two-story log cabin in the state of Indiana and the acreage behind it was on historical register. It had not been touched except by the farmers who she bought it all from. Part of the land that my own house sat on used to be the servant’s quarters, and the rest of the neighborhood was just fields corn and occasionally soybean. Supposedly, the deed to the land and the remaining buildings on it, was signed by James Monroe and Andrew Jackson.

When I lived there, the land was mostly comprised of Indiangrass and a little bit of Kentucky Bluegrass. Directly behind our shed, just feet from the fence line, was the tallest tree in the neighborhood that had been struck by lightning not twice, but three times. Eventually so much of the tree had died that my Dad and I cut it down for Mrs. Fehrebach and used some of the live wood for bonfires. At the other end of our fence line was a weeping willow older than Mrs. Fehrebach herself. Across the acre, was a thick border of trees leading into the woods. They were sky high Maple trees and Indiana grown Sycamore trees. Hawks, Blue jays, cardinals, and one time doves that had escaped from a nearby wedding, all nested in their branches.

Mrs. Fehrebach could never tend to her land. The grass would grow completely wild and so did the nature that lived in it. On any given day, if you stood outside long enough, a small red fox would part the grass looking for food. For years underneath our shed we had a ground hog problem, one time a fox problem, and another year to our disdain, a snake problem. We never really minded the groundhogs, but our yellow Lab, Forrest, had a heyday any time they showed their furry little bodies to squeeze in and out of the fence for food.

In the mornings, I would eat breakfast in our glass encased back porch to watch the morning creatures conduct their business as usual. There were always deer, every single morning. The most my dad and I ever counted in the field at once was 18. A few bucks would knock their antlers and occasionally sharpen them on the fence posts of Hannah The Field and The Creek 3 our back yard. We had a crab apple tree until I was 12 and it rotted, just so that the deer would step up to our back fence. They loved those crab apples so much, they didn’t even mind when Forrest would bark at them. We had a path of steppingstones from our back yard to our front yard. The deer knew this and sometimes they jumped both of the fences from the field to the front yard. They were a beautiful, single file line of prancing dancers. The reason why, I will never know. They were just leaving the last patch of untouched nature in the suburb to enter civilization.

My dad would sometimes cut the grass for Mrs. Fehrebach and never accepted payment from her. It was his way of thanking her for owning our natural haven that the rest of the city, that the rest of the world, didn’t get. Because of this, she would let our family, and our family alone, on to the land whenever we pleased. I was climbing a ladder over our fence, over a threshold, into a whole new world that didn’t exist beyond the property lines. The air was cleaner, it was thinner, and the world was quieter. We really weren’t that far from a major city road, but the sound didn’t reach the field. It looked like I had all the room in the world to run free. But I always had to wear hiking boots and work jeans because you never really knew what was lurking in the grass beneath you.

Just past the tree line, and into the sycamores, was an offshoot of Cool Creek Park. It was a small creek, never more than 10-12 feet wide, but once you made your way a little farther down it was a whole new ecosystem I didn’t get to see in the fields. Hannah The Field and The Creek 4 There were crawdads, and frogs, and sometimes water snakes. And we were free to explore it as much as we wanted. We would try to catch the crawdads, the real big ones, as they darted out from under the rocks. We would wade in the currents that were sometimes a little too high when it had been raining all week. And if we were digging around the dirt, you could find an old arrowhead or fossil of a fish or leaf.

But just as the water attracted us, it would attract other creatures too. The deer never were far from the creek, and the coyotes always found it, too. Occasionally a cat or small dog would go missing, and the neighborhood always checked the creek first. Sometimes they would be drinking the creek water like the wild animal inside of them, but sometimes they would only find full-stomached coyotes. One summer, a mountain lion had escaped from the Indianapolis zoo. My dad and I had just come back from a late-night swim meet, and my mom told us how she saw two warm, glowing yellow eyes peeking at her through the fence, just past our shed. She saw the soft and sleek body and heard the tail whipping against the towering grass. She called the dog inside and locked the back door. I couldn’t help but believe her. I once saw a peacock in the field and when he got a little too close to our fence, he saw himself in the reflection of our glass porch. He spread his feathers and started calling to his mate. He didn’t know that it was really just 8 year old me, eating pretzels, reading My Side of the Mountain. I found out later he was visiting the nursing home on the other side of the creek and had Hannah The Field and The Creek 5 just escaped. But the field, the land, was just as magical as it was wild. I never really knew what we would see back there.

When Mrs. Fehrebach died and I was in my late teens, the land was up for sale. My family couldn’t afford a million dollars’ worth of land and the costs of upkeep, but damn did we dream. An ex Colts quarterback bought the land on a whim, for a steal of 600 grand, in attempts to make him and his 4 children “farm people.” They hated the wild grass so they cut it short, so short that it couldn’t grow back. They bought a Bernese Mountain dog in attempts to ward off the coyotes, but all he did was scare away the deer. Without failure, every night a few unlucky chickens would mysteriously disappear from their chicken coop.

I still tried to read outside. I tried to embrace the few moments I had left with the field. But I was far too distracted by the mishaps of the quarterback trying to be a “city farmer.” In the middle of my newest read, the newest John Green love story taking place in my own city, I heard the cry of a chicken. He was hung upside, strung between two trees, and the quarterback had his youngest son, just shy of seven, slit the chicken’s throat and drain it. “Mommy!” he yelled as he sprinted back up the field and into the carriage house. I eventually migrated my reading spot into the back porch. They had bought four wheelers, and their preteen son would drive them up to our fence when he knew that I was outside.

I used to be angry that my sacred haven, the only land of peace I knew in that city, had been desecrated. They didn’t value what it was worth, the land was worth ten times what they had paid for it. They spat in the face of nature and warded off all the creatures that used to call the land home. I try not to think of where they were driven away to. I cannot bear to think of my animals, on the side of the road, or tangled in somebody’s wire fence. That quarterback did to that land what our neighborhood once did to it too I suppose.

I never quite felt the same after that. I felt I knew those deer, and the foxes, and the hawks, and even the snakes. But now, the land is just land. It was taken by humans, but I couldn’t really blame them for it. Instead of preserving the beauty of the natural world, they saw potential for four-wheeler tracks, and a doghouse, and room for a tree house. I suppose they made it easier for me to move away for college. It wasn’t my land anymore, it was theirs. A few years later, after my parents couldn’t take the noise anymore, they made it easier for them to move away, too.

I dream of the field regularly. I hear it’s call to me, as if she’s begging me to come and save her. I wish I could restore her to all of her beauty. The land, in a way, haunts me, as do the creatures I once knew, too.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/untitled-after-plath/Ghost__Post__65eca4b5255808b090889b0cFri, 05 Apr 2024 21:11:48 GMT

At the Ramen place across from my apartment building,
you can buy six bowls of noodles, and get one for free.
What a perfect deal for me!
For I am always eating Ramen in quantities of seven.

I walked back from KGB bar alone, after midnight.
Men congregated outside of Veselka.
Men still congregate outside of Veselka after midnight?
I guess my mother was right.

My mother was tender, kind, and always right.
She taught me to eat candy for dinner and stay up all night.
When at last I learned to read,
She gave me a book of poetry curated by Jackie Kennedy.
But because I lacked a definition of the word curated,
I grew up lauding Jackie Kennedy, the poet.

I think Sylvia Plath was my bisexual awakening.
There was something so erotic about “Lady Lazarus.”
I could not handle the emotional commitment
of watching the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, so I quit.
Isn’t it cool that you can quit when they become too difficult?

Sylvia Plath taught me that.

Flash, BOOM, Craack, the Oklahoma storm has been brewing all day, there have been alerts and a Tornado Watch, no sirens but be ready. The sky has turned from blue to gray to green to gray and then black. The rain has come in waves along with the wind.

The tree was one of three in the front yard when we moved in, fifteen years ago, Christmas of 2007.

The trees made a nice triangle, where I had previously stretched a hammock between two of them and had enjoyed relaxing in the gentle breeze and the sunshine, I had recently constructed a fire circle in the center, and used it twice on crisp winter mornings for warmth and a place to enjoy my coffee.

One tree has a wisteria bush growing next to it, with tendrils intertwining among the branches.

The wisteria is five years old and has not bloomed yet, but I have been hoping that each successive year would be ‘The Year’ of the magnificent show of blossoms.

One tree has a companion garden of Morning Glories at its base, each year they are reseeded from the previous year. The fast climbing vines clambering up a chain in order to display their glory for a season, then leaving the withered vine for the next generation to climb.

You had a new bamboo planter.

It was home to Sweet-peas that never bloomed last year.

An attempt was made to grow MoonFlowers that died in the sweltering heat.

This year was the year for carrots, direct sewn into the soil and sporting tiny carrot tops , staying alive as the weather made drastic swings, hot and dry to overcast and wet.

You and your companions weathered many a storm through the years as you played host to hummingbirds, finches, cardinals, woodpeckers, jays, and mockingbirds. You occasionally lost a branch or a limb to the wind as it swirled during an Oklahoma storm that threatened a tornado but usually produced the equally damaging straight-line wind.

That fateful night there were many of the usual flashes of lightning with their associated claps of thunder, some with a distinguishable lag in between, and some with almost no delay between flash and crash.

Then, in the midst of the torrential rain, flashing lightning, and crashing thunder, there was a long craacck and thud.

The morning light revealed that one-third of you was resting in your companions, like friends doing a Trust-Fall, and the other two-thirds were splayed around a seven-foot-tall stump, like friends who had partied too hard and passed out in the yard.

Neighbors helped dismember the remains and stack it so that the collection truck could remove it to make mulch.

And now there are two...

I lost myself in you
In your ability to give the impression that my dreams were real.
In the beautiful smile that you flashed right before making me promises that would never last.
In your warm embrace that made my heart race.

I lost myself in you
Striving for perfection so you would never want to run in the other direction.
Molding myself into the person I believed you wanted to see, but losing the best parts of me.
Emerging myself in your world so deeply that I forgot to create my own.
Loving you so greatly that I forgot how to stand alone.

I lost myself in you.
So, what do I do now that you are gone?
How do I breathe, when it feels as though you took all the air the day you left me?
Where do I start now that I am traveling through life alone?

I lost myself in you.
Now I have to learn what it means to be strong.
When will the moment arrive where smiling without you stops feeling so wrong?
How to feel with someone new what I once felt with you. What it means to pick up the pieces of my heart now that you are gone.

Losing myself in you was easy, but finding myself without you is destiny.

The road is endless, frozen, and forbidden.
It is calling me.
The city is shrouded in silence, a winter wonderland.
I can go now.
No one is near.
I wrap my dark wool coat close to my body.
One deep breath.
The skis crackle underneath my weight,
bumping and gliding over the uneven surface.
Eager to take me away.
My heart is pounding.
It sends a frisson of excitement through me.
The air is cold, drying my tears.
I have hope.
Except for the glow of light in our bedroom window,
the shadow of him, who will come for me.
Startled, I flinch.
The echo is haunting as darkness overtakes me.

That woman near the bridge
is weeping, in a tirade.
Tears gloss her sockets. Cheeks
wiped raw. Passers-by
avert their faces, quicken stride.
or share a smirk, as she
turns shrilly from her partner
and, hunching slackly
on the railings, whimpers.

I know her. She is fractious, clumsy.
stupid. Two days a week
she cleans my house
badly. She drinks sometimes
and quarrels. So do I.
She plays the radio all day
or telly. She'll never read these lines
nor want to. But here she leans distraught,
her head on forearms, sobbing,
her pain proclaiming her importance
to herself, and pointing out to me
in some part her significance.

At my wits’ end and frustrated with life, I stand up from my wooden chair and stride over to Oyá. In my cobalt blue and white Òrìshàs’ room, the flame of a white seven-day candle burns high, and a small transistor radio softly plays Latin music to keep my Òrìshàs calm. As I lift the lid of the floral and gold-gilded porcelain Chinese enamel ginger jar that Oyá lives in, I say, “Mama Yansan! Are you okay?”

Peering inside, I sigh with relief when I see that Oyá has all that she needs. After tucking a stray loc behind my ear, I whisper, “Àgó, Mama” as I gently pick Oyá up from the bottom until I have both arms around her jar, walk back to the chair and sit down. I am facing my other thirteen Òrìshàs arranged on and around the wood and steel etagere that is their home but focus on Oyá. Exhaling deeply, I lean back and plaintively speak to her.

“I want to drink because I’m tired. I want to drink because I’m lonely. I want to drink because I’m overwhelmed. I want to drink because I feel alone. I want to drink because I feel stressed.

I hesitate, then add, “I want to be free, but I don’t know what freedom looks like.” I pause as I ponder this. I can’t remember being free, I think. Then I mull over the times I feel free. No, I’m free when I’m in hiking the woods and climbing mountains. When it’s just me and the rocks,
the dirt, and the trees. That’s when I feel free.


Clutching Oyá to my chest and crying, I continue,“Sometimes I feel free when I run. But that’s usually when there are no humans around.” And this simple statement brings me back to Then. Then when The World changed colors, The World closed in, and I no longer felt free in my body. Then was when my classmates Vinny R., Kyle H., Brent A., and Jerry B. surrounded thirteen-year-old me in a dimly lit, gray stairwell at Random Parochial School, each trying to cop a feel. Then, they hemmed me in, laughing like the hyenas from The Lion King. It was the first time in my life that I ever felt literally trapped.

As I weep, from the corner of my eye, I see Oyá stride over to me, stand by my side, and begin to wipe my face, my tears, and my body with her skirt of nine different colors. Seeing this in the midst of my loneliness makes me sob harder. As I weep, proud and stately Oyá silently and gently cleans me with the folds of her skirt, tending to me like my mother never did. A smile creeps across my face as I take Oyá’s presence as a reminder that I am one of her children. Because I was initiated as a Yoruba-Lucumi priest of Ògún, I sometimes doubt Oyá’s impact on my life as my second Òrìshà, my ‘mother’ Òrìshà. But when I consider the way I cycle through moods and emotions like a tornado and the ease of my connection to Eggun and ancestor spirits,I know I am indeed also a Daughter of Nine.

When the tears on my face dry, I exhale, lean forward, and decide to have a drink. It’s been two years since I last drank and for a child of Ògún, that is a lifetime. Children of Ògún are known for enjoying a drink…or seven. However, Ògún told me several years ago that I am not supposed to drink, that for me, drinking alcohol is like drinking poison. But tonight, I am weary and tired of following rules. Tonight, I want relief. Tonight, I feel like drinking because it will give me space, room to breathe, and a way to check out.

As a therapist, a wife, and a friend, I am always so responsible and so present for others’ feelings and needs. I am always giving away pieces of myself, using my inner fire to support others’ evolution and healing. Tonight, I am full and want to leave my body, my life, my head, my heart. As my wife sleeps peacefully in our bedroom, I decide to make myself a Coco puff. A Coco puff is a drink that I made up and named after my favorite childhood hairstyle. Rum +anisette + lemon juice = Coco puff. Rum alone is too strong and bitter for me, hence the anisette. But anisette’s cloying taste is also too much, so I added lemon juice to make it palatable.

Even as Eggun encircle me, murmuring, “You’ve been abstinent for two good years!”, I return Oyá to her place on the etagere, and go to the kitchen to make myself a Coco puff. I pull out a heavy, crystal tumbler and splash some Goya Tropical Jugo de Limon into it. Then, I grab a bottle of Marie Brizard anisette and pour in some of that, and finally, I reach for the Bacardi Superior white rum and add that. As the fumes of the drink reach my nose, I accept that my two years of sobriety are shot. Reaching for the glass, there is no remorse or sadness for I know that these feelings will come later.

Fearlessly, I take a sip and wait. It is not until I feel the burn and sting of the drink in my chest that I remember what it was about drinking alcohol that I liked in the past. I liked that burn. That burn signified whatever it was that I was trying to make disappear—even if it was only for a few minutes or hours. That burn that reminded me of Life. That burn that reminded me of the Journey of Checking Out. Once I feel that burn, I begin to remember why I enjoyed drinking.

I take another sip. I rarely sip. Sipping a drink makes no sense to me, for it delays the sensation, the journey of leaving. That said, I sipped the Coco puff, and after a few minutes, I felt That Moment when I was both in and outside of my world. That Moment comes like the flutter of a hummingbird’s wing. It comes like a change in a river’s current. One minute, you’re there, and the next, you’re not. When I feel That Moment, that’s when I know I am drunk. It is the moment that I always strove for when I drank. That moment when I am everywhere and absolutely nowhere. At that moment, I no longer have to deal with my past, present, or future. At that moment, I felt relief, even if it was temporary.

Mother!
After chopping off the heads of Maya (illusion),
The agony, mischief and the other things.
I call upon your gibbous moon
“Please leave my dragon head alone for
His sins and treachery in the first house”.
It’s time to retrograde.

I know,
On the full moon nights,
My reds and whites will be in tandem.
The galaxies will collapse at my feet
Shiva will return to my arms
And, I will be complete.

Notes: In Vedic astrology, when Rahu unhesitatingly assaults the Sun (and KETU assaults the Moon) and is said to swallow it, and to cause the “Eclipse”.

Honking? Why am I hearing honking? I thought, my mind a haze. I struggled to pry open my eyes, but they felt like they were fused together by some otherworldly force. I raised my hand to clean out whatever was keeping them closed, but my hand felt heavy, like I was wearing lead boxing gloves.

My eyes were sticky and embedded with sand, along with whatever unknown bodily fluids the eyes generated during the night. Where am I? How did I get here? These were questions floating around the peripheral edges of my foggy brain. Maybe I was teleported to Earth from another planet? A planet where people honk at each other to communicate? I thought. How did I get sand in my eyes? Oh yeah, it’s coming back to me now. I was at a party at the lake last night. Well, I thought, that would solve the problem of where I came from but not how I got here. But where is that honking coming from? It was like someone leaned on their car horn for a few minutes. The sound went from barely audible to increasingly loud, then back to barely audible. God, I want to boldly go back to a restful sleep filled with wicked dreams of split infinitives.

I managed to get my eyes open to the geometric equivalent of slits. Allowing just enough light to penetrate and make my brain feel violated by the optic nerves. The pain from the overachieving Sun caused them to quickly close again. Once again, into the breech, I thought. I managed to open them to the smallest possible cracks, anatomically allowable. The slits generated a primal Dean Martin there’s-water-in-my-glass-wince. Looking at me from the safety of a 1963 Studebaker station wagon were five children with their noses pressed against the glass and Visigoth faces staring daggers at me. God, it’s the Farkle Family from Laugh-In, I thought.
I guessed from her resemblance to her little no-necked monsters that their mother sat in the front passenger seat with a frown plastered to her face, shaking her head from side to side. It looked like they were all dressed for church. The mom had on one of those little pink Jacque Kennedy pillbox hats. Thanks to my impeccable logic, I surmised that it might be Sunday.

What am I doing lying on the ground beside a car on a Sunday morning? I thought. Well, hell, I don’t rightly know but something deep inside of me is telling me it beats being in that Studebaker with a judgmental posse of do-gooders. Then, it dawned on me, They have me being judgmental now! The Jacque-Kennedy-looking woman rolled her window down and said, “Do you need help young man?”

I replied, “Only with Trigonometry, ma’am.”

“Well, I never,” she spluttered, “Boy, you need to find Jesus.” And rolled the window up before I could respond with one of the appropriate responses all smart-asses want to give when someone suggests you need to find Jesus. So, would it be a) he was here a minute ago but left like Pontius Pilate set his ass on fire when he saw y’all coming! b) I think that’s him in the car ahead of y’all ... ooh, ooh, made you look! or c) I had no idea the old boy was lost. Shucks, I thought, and I was going to go with b) since there were children in the car.

Most of the cars that pulled up beside where I was now sitting on the pedestrian refuge that separated the traffic refused to even look in my direction. Not that I could blame them. I must have looked like I was rode hard and put up wet. I was in my cut-offs and an ancient copy of a James-Dean-looking windbreaker. Every time the light changed, a new line of cars would drive past. Their faces said, “Oh, Lord, don’t let the light change and make me have to stop by this freak.” It is not at all unusual for me to have doubts about myself. But I was starting to doubt my own existence. Goddamnit People! It’s me, Charles. I exist! I wanted to yell. I ain’t no mirage. I am a real live human being standing here, for crying out loud, look at me! I am on this island, visible to the entire world, and you drive by like I am the invisible man. Now, I have to admit I was feeling somewhat disconsolate. I had only been back in the States for about ten days and had been partaking in an unbridled, audacious celebration of life for nine of those days. I was starting to consider that maybe I was in the middle of some wasted psychedelic dream when a car pulled up that I recognized. A familiar face leaned out the window and said,
“Hey, Marine, would you like some candy?

As my friend Dale and I were driving back toward my house, he handed me a lukewarm beer to wash my mouth out. “Damn, old son,” he said. “You smell like the last rose of summer!”

“You’re not exactly a bottle of Chanel, Kemo. What the hell happened last night? How did I end up on that traffic median, or better yet, why did I end up there?”

“Well,” Dale started, “we were all sitting around the campfire getting smashed in a proper Texas fashion when someone mentioned how big and gorgeous the moon was. And you said, “Hell yeah, a great night for skinny-dipping.” Then you stripped down and ran out into the lake with a ski belt and a can of Fosters.” The girls all giggled and said they weren’t stripping down. Well, except for Boogie. She was down to bra and panties and in the lake in a New York minute.” Boogie Wilder was a red-headed, green-eyed, adventurous soul who attracted men like dreams to slumbering minds. “So, the rest of the guys looked at each other and decided to join you and Boogie in the lake. As we were floating around and drinking, you said, I wonder what kind of nonsense the man in the moon is up to tonight. Then you started singing Moon River in Latin. That’s when I knew you were headed to oblivion.”

“When I was in Ms Head’s Latin class,” I said, “I would spend my spare time trying to translate songs into Latin. It helped me pick up Latin a lot quicker, and it was very productive. Now, I am trying to translate songs into Latin to determine the degree of inebriation I have experienced. That old feller in the moon doesn’t always have my best interests at heart. You know, my mom was an emergency room nurse for years. She used to say, You could tell there was a full
moon last night. The emergency room was full.
I never thought much about it, but it did plant one of those superstitious seeds in my brain.” It would be another thirty years before I would be able to look on a full moon as a beautiful phenomenon full of promise. The roots that grew from those earlier superstitious seeds would be jerked out by the roots.

Dale said, “Well, you swam to shore to get another beer. When you didn’t come back for a while, we got worried about you and decided to swim back to the beach to look for you. You had passed out by the fire as naked as the day you were born. All our dates had split, so we figured you had offended their sensitive natures, except for Boogie, who thought the whole scene was a hoot. We spent about thirty minutes trying to get you back into your cut-offs, but you were out of it, old son. Then you would wake up and start mumbling something about No man is an island, blah blah blah, don’t ask who the bells toll for, it tolls for thee blah blah. On the way back to town, the guys thought it would be a great prank to leave you on your own special island. Which we did. We dropped you off around one in the morning. I was going to come back and pick you up in about an hour. I went home and cleaned up, then fell asleep. When I woke up I almost panicked. And drove back to where we dropped you off as fast as I could. I think next time we drop you off, I am going to pin a sign on you that says, I will recite No Man is an Island for a ride.”

“Well, Pard, there ain’t gonna be a next time.”

“You mean I iced down this six-pack of chilly ones for nuthin’?”

“Well, I am kinda thirsty.”

We laughed and started singing, “Call it a night ... the party’s over ... and tomorrow starts the same old thing again."

We have lived here. We live here. We are
all along watching for storms in Kansas.
It’s a legacy. I was here. I am here. My memory

all along in Kansas from a window
as hail fell. Don’t cry, shouted my father.
But my oldest son says water contains

hydrogen, oxygen, in a raindrop all along.
Our sons can safely say. I missed out
on such roaming. I read a waterfall

of facebook posts for blogs about
memory hacks and approaching weather.
A post from years ago, our son said, ghosts

live in ghost towns. I say, come along,
let’s play in the basement as outside
the tornado siren begins its song.

my grandmother said you’ve got Cherokee
blood I was 10 born in Chicago raised
in New York and didn’t know southerners
say that to fashion themselves
inheritors to the land

white southerners that is true or false
my grandmother too who picked cotton
during the depression and lived
in a shack until my grandfather built
their one-room house which fell to the ground
last year uncared for way back in the country
where boars live now and wild muscadine
vines obscure the trail to the river
a cousin willed it to his daughter

she’ll retire there he said and doesn’t
much care what grandma knew she’s gone
he’ll be gone soon me too we can’t name
the Quapaw soul in that land smothered
by rotted wood brittle tar paper pieces
of fabric dusty flour sacks and the metal
pot grandma slid under the bed every night just in case

we are of her Lee and Grant
her parents’ names and
Stinnett her name by marriage
we are of her that history
weeping whose Cherokee
blood underwrites the
stories that disinherit the rest

She steps out into the privacy
of her overgrown back yard
Steps out into the crisp night air
Looks up toward the full moon
beginning to feel its embrace
Steps out of her flowing robe
Her silky silken flowing robe
that silently falls to her feet
in the shape of a continent
She now stands unadorned
Nothing between her bare skin
and the moon’s geography
except eons of unwritten past
She twirls in joy and looks
up again at the moon
spreads her arms wide and
as all else grows silent
begins her full-throated howl

If you give me a second of happiness,
through the songs of birds or the whiff of air,
or your melody cracks through the evening dews,
perches on the petals of roses and blades of lilies,
that dream that keeps you sleepless at night
will rush in through your night window.
Now I am no longer what I used to be,
my dreams were stolen from my mid-day sleep;
and a bunch of cacti deposited at my door,
at the time, my life turned to face its past.
Shadows appeared suddenly everywhere,
and I was like a thunder-pole, a tower,
to intercept the lightning and set me on fire.
When it seemed that nothing could halt this drift,
except looking to the sky for signs of rain,
I began to crave a few seconds of happiness.

I will look to the sky, wearing my body,
as the tree wears leaves and fields grasses,
rivers wear beaches and oceans water.
When darkness paints the walls of my room,
and sunlight departs from the spires of trees;
when the moon splits in two, bloody and weeping,
it will be my finest hour in aeons of ages ago.
I will look to the sky, wearing my bare skin.
When the stars shun the centre of my eye,
waiting for me to bribe it with a smile.
Now I know why I must always face the moon
when rain clouds congregate for a feast,
and not a star, not even a fragment of the sun,
informs me that you’re the centre of the galaxy.

“Number 304865,” the receptionist calls out from where she sits behind the window-paneled glass. Her voice echoes in the room, which is filled only with women. They all sit patiently waiting their turn, abiding by the unwritten rules of waiting rooms, take a number, take a seat, wait your turn.

“That’s me!” a young woman calls out excitedly, revealing her eagerness to everyone else, which is a highly inconsiderate thing to do. She puts down a People magazine she’s only just started reading an hour ago and gathers her designer bag and coat before walking over to the receptionist. All other eyes in the room are on her, some with a look of longing, some with resentment, some with something resembling fear in their eyes. Those are the ones no one understands.

She hands over her little paper slip, which shows barely a dent to her number, unlike some of the other women in the waiting room, whose papers have turned a faded yellow after sitting in their pockets for too long. She turns around and smiles at them like a pageant queen who just won the world title, in clear hopes they’ll all join in on her exciting moment. They don’t. Her mother clearly never taught her any manners.

The receptionist points toward a door on the left, and the young woman walks toward it. She stands in front of the door, as they all do, and looks at the screen above it. Soon, the screen turns on, and a woman’s voice booms from the tiny monitor.

“Stephanie St. Clair, age 23, from Arizona, you’ve been matched!”

Confetti shoots across the screen as all the women watch in half-bored stares. A green light comes on beside the doorknob, and Stephanie turns the handle.

“Come meet your new partner, Drew Womack!” the voice booms in the room.

Stephanie is smiling from ear to ear as she walks through the door. Before the excitement has even settled, the lights turn off, the door slams shut, and the monitor goes black. The room stays silent as the women look away from the door in resignation. Another one is gone, and they’re all still waiting.

Some of them have been in the waiting room for days, while some have been in the waiting room for years. This young one had only been in an hour or so. She was fresh, her eyes still wide with hope, her blonde hair freshly cut and curled to frame her face that would make you think she was nineteen and had never been fucked. The type of girl who didn’t have to wait long.

“This is bullshit,” Margaret says to no one in particular, and there’s an audible sigh from the room. Margaret has been in the waiting room for five years now. Her ex-husband left her after she gambled away their life savings. She spent some time in therapy, traded the gambling habit for smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, and eventually made her way to the waiting room in the hope of finding a new partner who would better understand her wild ways.

But there’s a system in the waiting room, and everyone knows it. They all sign up from the moment they first have a crush, after their first date and heartbreak, the first whirlwind romance and love that leaves you crying on the floor for weeks. They all make their way to the waiting room because this is where you will find your forever perfect match. Sometimes it just takes longer than others.

There are factors to consider here—there always have been. This is a business, after all. They employ hundreds of people each year to help do extensive research and create informational handbooks, rules, and surveys. This is where forever happens. You can’t make that up overnight, and truth be told, there was a lot of groundwork already in place.

There are some factors that can’t be changed, for example, your height, your age, your eye color, your ethnicity, and your background. But there are others that can be, your interests, your weight, your facial construction, your willingness to have children, your occupation or choice not to have one. The factors are what make up your file, and that is how you end up in the waiting room for seven years or seven minutes.

Every time a new woman walks into the waiting room, Margaret stares them down so that maybe they’ll leave, especially the young ones. They usually scour into a corner and huddle together in protection against her. She can’t fathom how her name hasn’t been called, how some men would want a fresh-out-of-the-womb-like girl who’s barely experienced anything, as opposed to her.

She huffs from her chair in a quiet little rage that the rest of the women know to avoid and will soon pass. After all, the women who have been here for as long as Margaret have known what it’s like. They all have their reasons, and they all have experienced enough of each other to understand what each person is going through.

Angelina has been in the waiting room for five years. Her first three were filled with grief. After her husband passed away, she made her way to the waiting room and sat in a corner, crying every time a number got called. No one could quite tell if it was because she was sad it wasn’t her or relieved she got to stay a while longer.

Leah has just returned to the waiting room a couple of days ago, and no one knows how to interact with her. She’d been in the room for two years, and then last month, her number got called, and she left in a gloriously respectful manner. You could barely see the tears that streamed down her face as she walked through that door. A couple of days ago, she walked back in, her head downcast, dressed in all black, and was wordless as she took her new number. She now sits alone in a corner, never interacting with any of the other women in the room. They’re all too afraid to ask what had happened anyway, that whatever it was might rub off on them and ruin their delicate chances of ever being called.

Kathy and Cleo are the happiest of the bunch. A couple of years later, once they realized they weren’t leaving anytime soon, they started reading some of the discarded books left out on the coffee tables. Now, they have a monthly book club and are constantly recruiting new members. They prefer thrillers about women who kill their husbands. It’s a particular group. Samantha and Georgia are horrified when they overhear their conversations.

Samantha and Georgia sit on the opposite side of the room. They’ve only been waiting for a couple of months and can’t wait to get out. They’re both twenty-two, with dark hair, polite smiles, and soft voices, and will happily please you. They like to cook roast dinners, awe at the sight of children, and spend Sundays at service. They won’t have to wait long. Women like that never do. They’re the women in the pamphlets, the ones they give their mothers when they’re still young enough to know nothing about the waiting room.

“304866,” the receptionist calls out. Georgia squeals in delight. Samantha stands with her, and the two girls hug without needing to say much. They know they’ll see one another soon, on the other side, where they’ll host backyard barbecues as their husbands man the grill. The two of them will look after the children, sipping on white wine spritzers and gossiping about ladies like Kathy and Cleo.

Georgia opens the door and turns to wave at all the women before she goes. Samantha beams at her from her seat, smiling ear to ear. She won’t show it, but there’s a part of her that would like to run up to where Georgia's standing and tackle her to the ground, taking her place. Instead, she sits there and continues to plaster a smile on her face, but she’ll be next. They always are.

As the door closes, another one opens on the other side of the room. They all look up in anticipation, but it’s just the afternoon receptionist rotating shifts. David is in his late sixties, never married, and never even wanted to. In his hands, he carries the next batch of files to be processed—the dirty details of each woman held captive and never to be seen by anyone but the men who choose.

The two receptionists hand off each other's paperwork and one leaves while the other remains. It’s the same cycle that happens every day. After many years of the same routine, no one even notices when a single file falls helplessly to the floor in the middle of the room.

Everyone, except for Leah, from her dark spot in the corner. She quietly gets up and walks towards the paper, bending down to pick it up and turning it over as she does.

“What’s that?” Margaret asks from her seat. She holds a cigarette between two fingers and smiles snidely at Samantha, who looks horrified as she lights it.

Leah doesn’t even look up to acknowledge Margaret as she stares down at the sheet of paper, too engrossed in its contents to move. But on a day like today, there isn’t much for Margaret to do, so she sighed and got up from her seat to walk over to where Leah still stood.

“Where did the paper come from?” Margaret asks again as she attempts to snatch it from Leah’s hands. Only now is Leah broken from her trance and clasps the paper tightly to her chest. She has no intention of letting Margaret see what it holds.

“It’s nothing,” Leah mutters before walking back over to her corner of the room.

"What do you mean it’s nothing? Just show me, Leah.” Margaret presses further, and Leah stands firm in her stance, clutching the paper like it’s her own child.

“Just show her the paper, Leah.” Kathy pipes in from the corner as other eyes have now turned to watch the two women bicker back and forth.

“It’s not her paper, it’s mine.” Leah bites back.

"What do you mean it’s your paper?” Margaret laughs, “just because you found it doesn’t mean it’s yours,” she says mockingly.

“I mean it’s my paper.” Leah says.

It’s now that all eyes in the room turn to stare at Leah because they know exactly what she means. It’s no secret that from the moment each woman enters the waiting room they’re given a number, and a profile is created based on the information they provide. One single paper summarizes who they are, their likes, dislikes, appearance, hobbies, future goals, and past accomplishments, and as a basic rule of the waiting room, none of the women are ever allowed to see their own.

“How is that even possible?” Margaret asks, walking over to sit next to Leah in the corner. A small group of women follow, their interest piqued by the paper and its contents.

“The last receptionist who left dropped it as he went out,” Leah answers.

“Well what does it say?” Margaret asks, even more eager now, but Leah stays silent, shaking her head and turning away from her.

“Oh come on, Leah, I would show you mine.” Margaret winks and laughs lightly at her own joke.

Leah turns back towards Margaret now, and quietly whispers so only she can hear. “It’s not good.”

Margaret’s eyes go wide. “Just give me the damn thing,” she says as she rips it from Leah’s hands.

Margaret looks over the page. “A 3.5 out of 5, overall rating! That’s bullshit. They can’t do that. Who gives a person an overall rating!” Margaret yells, jumping up from her seat. She begins to pace back and forth across the room. The other women backed away, knowing better than to interrupt one of Margaret's freakouts.

The receptionist, who is too engrossed in his episode of Succession, relaxes in the swivel chair behind the window-paned glass. He laughs at something Kendall Roy says, tossing a chocolate M&M into his mouth with ease.

“It’s fine, Margaret. Just sit down,” Leah pleads, looking around the room with fear in her eyes. Though she’s not sure what she should be afraid of, the fear is always there.

“Not only do they give us an overall rating. They give us a rating on physical features and then break it down into sections! This is insane!” Margaret yells.

“What else do they rate us on?” Samantha asks, suddenly coming up beside Margaret.

“Intelligence, social status, personality, and CHILDBEARING ABILITIES!”

Margaret crumples up the paper and throws it on the floor. She begins stomping on top of it trying to rid its existence from the room.

“I wonder what mine says,” Samantha mutters and Margaret rolls her eyes, before turning back to Leah. “We have to do something about this!”

“I’m not sure what we can do Margaret,” Leah resigns, now that the paper is pretty much destroyed.

Margaret turns to look at the receptionist, eyeing the stack of papers sitting behind him and smiles slightly. With the swift movements of someone adept at sneaking a tube of lip gloss from the convenience store as a teenager, Margaret walks over to the receptionist desk and takes the stack of files sitting behind him.

The other women in the room watch in shock. None of them would ever dare to think to look at the files, let alone take them. They are in the waiting room. The receptionist doesn’t ever think to watch the files, because there is a clear divide between him and them. He announces numbers, they wait.

“Margaret, what are you doing?” Kathy whispers, running over to the corner of the room where Margaret has now spread out the file folders, just waiting to be opened and consumed.

“What does it look like? I’m taking back what’s mine,” she smiles gleefully. Like a kid in a candy store, she starts handing out files to the ladies in the room.

“Here’s yours, Samantha and Angelina, Danica too.”

Every woman begins to gather around Margaret as she passes out all the files of the women in the room. They all take their paper and read the comments, the little numbers, the overall ratings, and slowly, the fury starts to build.

“Doesn’t appear to have good childbearing hips,” Kathy says before thrusting her paper in front of Cleo so she can see.

“Mine says, beware, the photo may be a catfish,” Cleo shares. “How is this a catfish?” she asks Kathy, placing a near-identical photo of herself beside her own face.

“Is a little too invested in the Real Housewives. What does that even mean?” Danica says to no one in particular.

“Mine seems pretty accurate,” Samantha says, and all the women turn to glare at her. “What?” She asks the room, her innocent blue eyes looking around for a response that no one will give her.

The women finish reading their own profiles before beginning on each other and before the receptionist can even register what has now started. The women start destroying all the files in the room.

Kathy and Cleo rip up the papers and toss them into the tiniest pieces, like the confetti that shoots across the screen when someone’s been matched. Leah smiles for the first time in days as she and Jessica jump up and down on top of a pile of files of other women who have yet to enter the waiting room. Margaret takes out her lighter and begins to light the tips of the papers, cackling as they evaporate into thin air.

“What are you all doing?” the receptionist yells into the group, running out from behind his desk, now aware of the chaos unfolding before him. But he’s too late. As Margaret takes a fireball of papers and shoots them across the room in his direction, the receptionist runs back behind his desk, unsure of what to do.

As the women run about, throwing papers in the air, running across the chairs, and dancing to no sound but their own laughter and voices, the receptionist hides under his desk. He pulls his chair closer towards him as if the women may actually throw him in the air if they had the chance. He quickly grabs the phone from its cradle and manages to press a couple of numbers. It starts ringing just as one of the women bangs against the glass and flashes her boobs yelling, “Free the nipple!” The receptionist turns away, horrified.

“Hello,” someone says on the other line.

“Hello, hi, we need help!” the receptionist yells into the receiver. “The women in the waiting room, they’ve lost it, they’ve gone wild. They’re dancing on chairs and throwing about their belongings. They’ve completely lost their minds,” he yells as the line goes dark.

Indian grass is mingled
among the Bermuda, not yet ready to mow.
Round bales from an early cutting
stand in the southern corner of the pasture
          where I am walking,
seeking remnants of the old house.

In my memory
the ruins had lain just past
a stand of blackjacks and bois d’arcs
across a little creek on the edge of childhood.

Moving parallel
to the abandoned railroad track,
west of the field
          I see
the bright orange flame of Indian Paintbrush
splitting coyote bones
          returning to earth,
the decaying, grey remains of the predator,
fertilizing the wildflowers.

Half a century away,
the unroofed walls once stood
          two-storied
with a crumbling chinaberry tree
pressed to its western wall.
I climbed those limbs more than once
to swing inside an empty window
          and stand
on a delicate fraction of a second floor,
mostly fallen to rubble below me.

June was exploding
as I sat on an unreliable fragment of 1969,
peering into the blue future
          collapsing
faster than the eastern wall
of my embryonic nest among the ruins,
Creedence rocking my transistor radio,
          blasting the summer
like a detonation of distant claymores.

But this June,
fifty years flown,
finds me crossing a dry streambed
          to stand in knee-high pasture grass,
unable to find a trace of the place
that did its best
to shelter my teenage self
from the death and destruction
living in a black and white television.

Even the antique chinaberry has fallen
          into the past.
Nothing remains of my sanctuary.
Only the menace of the twenty-first century
and the bright orange flames
          grown through coyote bones
see me now
still searching for shelter.

I can’t quit
nuzzling your destiny.

It brings out
the best in me,

pilots my nature,
I yearn for serenity.

Where you are going
is where I dream to be.

Reveal your design,
consider my plea,

a nuzzling
nobody

adrift
on the high sea.

My father made me mow the lawn every Saturday whether it needed it or not. When my mom was alive, she let me get away with mowing every other week. Sometimes I felt like all I did was watch the grass grow then chop it down so I could watch it grow all over again. There was nothing interesting about my home town, or the state; and until I saw otherwise, I believed there was nothing interesting about this whole world. The only exciting thing to happen around there was when someone let all the pigs escape at the 4-H auction and the fire truck had to block the road so they could wrangle them. It was more difficult than it sounds because all the roads around the fairgrounds were dirt and it was raining. It was the closest thing that I’d ever seen to mud wrestling, and it was just a bunch of farm boys with their beloved swine.

I was lucky that I didn’t have to raise livestock. My father and I lived in town, right off Main Street, a block away from the only stoplight. We could walk everywhere important from our house—church, school, market, diner. Those places were the entire world for my father and me. He was a math teacher at the school. I mowed the lawn at the church—not because we were devoted church members but because my father felt less guilty about not attending church by making me mow the lawn. We ate at the diner every night because after my mom died, every home cooking attempt ended with flames or vomiting. Sometimes both.

I guess you could say that our little Wyoming town was quaint. It was one of those towns where everyone seemed old. It didn’t matter what decade it was, when I was a kid in the 70s or when I went back to visit as an adult, everyone still seemed old, perhaps just a bit more feeble as time marched on. The town was also very clean, like time stood still after 1957—with perfectly trimmed lilac bushes, bright white picket fences and stoic red barns seamlessly placed on the edge of green pastures. In the summer it seemed to rain every day at noon for one hour. Not a huge downpour, just a light rain to cool things off and make the damn grass grow. I remember sitting on our porch when the noon rain hit and wishing for something exciting to happen. In 1976, when I was 16 years old, my wish came true.

I awoke on a Saturday morning to the unfamiliar sound of a woman’s voice. I hadn’t heard that sound in our house in years. I pulled on my robe, tiptoed into the dining room and peeked around the corner into the kitchen. Sitting at our table was a tired-looking woman with her hair in a bun, thick black glasses and an orange cottony dress. I was shocked at the idea that my father had let a woman spend the night then allowed her to drink coffee in the very kitchen my beloved mother used to drink coffee. Just as I tightened the belt around my robe and marched into the room to cause a scene, a girl came around the corner and slammed into me. She had a plate of donuts and a glass of juice that fell right out of her hand and shattered on the dusty hardwoods below. Just as I bent over to pick up the remnants of the plate, my robe came untied and my discolored cotton briefs were revealed. I dropped the ceramic shards and booked it back to the safety of the Roy Rogers-papered walls of my bedroom.

I failed to slam the door, which is something that every man who just experienced brief humiliation from cotton briefs should do, so I had to endure the sounds of my father’s laughter. It took me a good ten minutes to get dressed and get up the courage to face my attacker. This time I didn’t lurk in the dining room. I strolled directly into the kitchen with my head held high, only to find my father in his torn argyle cardigan sitting alone next to a plate of perfectly cooked bacon. I’m sure my initial question should have been regarding the two females, but I was so shocked to see un-burnt bacon in our house that I had to inquire.

“Is that bacon?” I asked, pretending that the smell didn’t tip me off.

“Yep.” My father replied with his usual lack of zest as he slid the plate my direction.

“Where did it come from?” I asked, taking a bite and nearly crying from the nostalgia of my mom’s Saturday morning breakfasts.

“A pig. You should know that if you expect to survive in this town.” He didn’t look up from his paper.

He knew what I meant and I could tell by the curve of his lips that he was enjoying this dance. “Did that lady cook it?”

“Yes, Sandra, that lady cooked it.”

I wedged a third piece of meat into my mouth and mumbled. “That was nice of her, but don’t call me Sandra.”

He set down the paper and snatched the last piece of bacon from my greasy fingers. “Funny, Richard. You should take your act on the road. New neighbors, Sandra and Cynthia. They moved here from New York. I traded donuts and juice for bacon. When you ruined the donuts they decided to leave and never come back.”

“So they went back to New York?” I grinned.

“They went home to unpack. You will mow their lawn later since they don’t have a mower.” He pointed at my jeans. “And afterward, we’ll walk downtown and buy you some white underwear. I can’t believe we all had to witness that.”

“Had I known I’d be half naked in front of New Yorkers, I would’ve worn something classier.” I sighed. “How come I have to mow everyone’s lawn around here? Am I at leastgetting paid?

“Because you always complain about how bored you are. Your reward will be in heaven.”

“Why doesn’t the bacon lady’s husband mow it?

My father sighed. “Because he stayed in New York. Based on Sandra’s bitterness, I assume he won’t be coming to Wyoming.”

“I’d be bitter too if I had to leave New York to move here.”

An hour later, I finally got around to mowing all the lawns. I finished just before the noon rain and retreated to the porch to drink a pop and read my Mad Magazine. Before I realized she had even come onto the porch, I felt Cynthia sit next to me on the swing. She sat so close that the hair on my arms stood up and I repressed a soft gasp. I could feel my face turning red and I did my best to remain calm.

“Can I help you?” I continued to stare at my magazine and tried to sound annoyed.

She leaned forward and kicked her feet, setting the swing in motion. “It’s Richard, right?”

“Dickie.” I felt so immature when I said it. “Or Richard.” The girl had seen my underpants, I wanted to regain my sense of intrigue.

“Well, Dickie, I’m gonna ask you a favor and I have to be quick about it.”

I turned my face toward hers and our eyes met. My entire body felt hot and I wanted to run as far as I could. I envisioned myself running all the way to the fairgrounds and stealing a rodeo horse and riding off into the sunset. The idea of it made me chuckle. Then I realized she was talking.

“Can you do that for me?” She put her hand on my arm.

I cleared my throat. “Huh?”

She sounded exasperated as she repeated herself. “Okay, you’re not following. Geesh. My dad left my mom for his secretary. This made my mom a little crazy. She tried to find a job in New York to support us but nothing paid enough to live on. So this made her a little angry. One morning she came into my room and said we were moving to the Equality State so that she could stand up for her rights. I didn’t know what state that was so I looked it up. That’s why we’re in Wyoming. Anyway, she’s now on some sort of crazy mission…”

Before Cynthia could finish her explanation, I realized what she was talking about. Coming down the street was Sandra, sporting a giant wig and platform shoes. She was carrying a sign that read ERA, and she was chanting, “Women deserve equal rights!” The rain was making the letters on the sign blurry and her platform shoes were slipping on the damp sidewalk.

I couldn’t stop staring. The wild Wyoming wind was blowing her dress in all sorts of crazy directions. “Yeah. So what was the favor again?”

Cynthia put her face in her hands. “I’m mortified!” She fake screamed and said, “Can you please just ignore her and not let this be a reflection on me? The last thing I need is to start school in the fall and have all the kids call my mom the crazy lady."

“It’s a small town, news travels fast. I think you might be doomed.” I tried to sound funny even though I was being honest.

My father stepped out on the porch and lit a cigar. He took one drag and choked. “What the…” He looked down and saw Cynthia next to me. “What’s your mom doing?”

“She’s protesting.”

“I see.” He leaned up against the house and casually crossed his arms like it was something he saw every day. “And what is it that she’s against?”

“Men.” Cynthia said it with so much conviction that neither my father nor I could defend our gender.

“Fair enough.” My father flicked his ashes into the cuff of his pants and opened the screen door. “You kids want to walk to the diner with me? I think ice cream might be in order.”

We both got up and ran down the steps and up the street, leaving Sandra far behind marching back and forth across her lawn, which seemed to provide better traction than the sidewalk.

This protest went on every Saturday for the next several months, sometimes before the noon rain and sometimes after. Each time, my father would take Cynthia and me to the diner for the appropriate meal. I had grown fascinated with the mother and daughter and looked forward to hearing Sandra rant and Cynthia express her humiliation.

One Saturday morning I realized that the woman might be onto something. I went into the shed and found a couple old boards. I fastened them together, painted them white and secured a handle. When the paint dried, I took a bingo marker and carefully wrote No Pay, No Mow on it. Next I took the sign to the front yard and started marching back and forth shouting, “No such thing as a free lawn!” I found it exhilarating and could tell why Sandra was so passionate about her cause and her persistence.

I was only at it about five minutes when I felt my father rip the sign out of my hands. “Get inside young man”. He said it slowly through gritted teeth so I knew he meant business.

I did as I was told and hoped that none of the neighbors saw this rare act of discipline. The minute the screen door slammed shut my father started yelling. “What on earth are you thinking, boy?” He paced, almost like he, himself, was picketing. Then he stopped and stared out the window for a moment before continuing. “You might think it’s funny, but what you did is disrespectful. That woman is passionate about her beliefs. She may be the only woman in Wyoming doing it, but she is standing up and fighting for things to change. She’s fighting for her convictions; she’s saying she wants things to be better for her daughter’s generation.” Steam was practically coming out of his ears.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think of it like that. I just figured that if she could fight to be paid fairly for her job then I could do the same. It’s not fair that I have to mow lawns for free.” I was being genuine. I really did just want my work to be acknowledged and thought if it worked I might have enough cash to take Cynthia to the movies.

My father stared at his shoes for what seemed like forever. “Richard, I will pay you a dollar per lawn.” He pointed his finger at me. “And not because of what you did today, but because I want you to know that I do respect that you work hard.” He squinted his eyes, which was always a sign that he was serious. “Now I want you to go next door and apologize for being condescending.”

“That won’t be necessary.” Sandra was standing at our screen door. “I like that you stood up for yourself, Dickie.” Then tears rolled down her face. “And Thomas, I really like that you stood up for me.” She pressed her bright red lips against the screen and made a kissing sound. “Dinner’s at seven, boys.”

My father watched her walk down the steps then turned to me and winked. “And that, my boy, is how you win over a woman.” He then danced out of the room while I stood there with my mouth hanging open.

The following weekend, Cynthia and I sat on the porch swing and quietly watched as Sandra marched up the street with her picket sign. A few minutes later, my father came out reeking of aftershave, and wearing a brand new leisure suit with the tags still on it. We watched as he gallantly bounced down the stairs, dashed across the lawn and caught up with Sandra. We watched as Cynthia’s mother and my father chanted in unison, and marched down the street, hand in hand.

After that summer, Wyoming was never the same. The old people still seemed old, but my father was no longer one of them. It was the summer that the perfect little town with manicured lilac bushes caught up with the rest of the world. It was the summer that my father charmed the lady next door and we never had to eat at the diner again

Here I find myself, in this solemn stately pew,
joined by speckled stained glass rainbows, paying their due.
Cloudy ap-parishioners sing a Latin hymn.
Voices echo from the past, through centuries grown dim.

Saints and martyrs gathered ’round; I’m sitting all alone,
near twisting, twirling, swirling, of intertwining stone,
climbing up grey pillars, to golden vaults’ expanse,
with candle chandeliers raining fireflies that dance.

The godly of the decades, hovering in glass,
Silently worship at this sparrow’s Sunday mass.
Small and plain am I, amidst eternal splendor,
overwhelmed with awe for my Author, my Creator.

From the gilded cross there, the Son shines down on me,
while movelessly He strains, to hear each whispered plea,
to wipe each trickling tear, that only He can see -
the Lamb, He loves the sparrow, and the Lamb loves me.

A coating of dust thick as fallen snow obscured the gleaming bronze buddha statue resting, enshrined, on the utmost shelf of the polished oak cabinet. The structure’s vertical frame loomed large in our eyes.

It had been a fleeting fancy. A spontaneous whim of mutual consensus. My eyes flicked to Jayden’s. We both grinned. The trample of feet and the sound of both raised and lowered voices overlapping one another mingled together in a cascade of everyday noise. No one would notice our momentary absence. 

The front yard, a combination of lawn and wood chips neatly divided. Its stark duality mirrored the faces of comedy and tragedy from ages past. Flurries of wind conjured forth spinning whirlwinds of leaves as we ran across to where the shed stood. Its aged, splintering wood and fading paint made it appear almost like a discolored porcupine. 

A cheap and battered padlock remained resolutely in place, hanging off a circular ring above the doorknob. Leave it to the semi-responsible adults to pick this one day to properly lock the shed, of course.

“Nah, they can’t have..” Jayden muttered, grabbing the lock and pulling on it. With a rusty snap, it popped open. “They DID!” He exclaimed, cackling. I grinned. “After you.”

It only took a few seconds to rummage around the cluttered interior. The shovels were easy to find. Lined up against one corner of a wall, they lay sad and dejected. Like sailors drawn to the mythological siren, the dull wood-handled metallic instruments called to us. Helpless to resist, we answered their inaudible summons.

The chills of oncoming Winter had hardened the ground somewhat, so that it took several combined attempts to break through to the softer soil layers beneath. But with single-minded determination we burrowed like rabbits.

Within a few minutes of frantic work, once the hole reached an appropriate depth, in went the buddha statue. Over it, the foot or so of dirt that we had so proudly excavated. To hide our pirated treasure, we scattered handfuls of leaves and wood chips, and then retraced our steps back inside.

It was only approximately twenty-two minutes later that our criminal heist was brought to light, and the two suspects brought in for questioning by the designated authorities. In hindsight, when one attempts to bury stolen treasure of questionable value, it is probably best not to mark the spot where you disposed of the evidence with a giant “X” spanning neigh a foot in each direction.

As we had been the only two individuals not accounted for at the time of the crime, and our alibis were shaky at best, our singular judge, jury, and executioner found us guilty on all counts.

Long indeed was the subsequent lecture on theft, and the theological implications of desecrating a religious and/or spiritual object. As a fairly quiet, unoffending 11-year-old, it probably should’ve been evident that the intent was not to offend Buddhists worldwide. However, our loudly-proclaimed defense, that we simply saw a statue of a fat gold man and thought it looked like the statue Indiana Jones stole in Raiders of the Lost Ark, fell on deaf ears.

When it became clear to our interrogator, Samanda, that she had misjudged the situation somewhat, and that their admonishments had done nothing but confuse and upset us, she left the small room we were sitting in, and called in our favorite mentor, Robert.

Robert’s honey-blond hair and blue eyes perpetually-offset by the raven-black trenchcoat he would wear year-round. In blazing summer heat and biting Winter blizzards, both he and the thick leather coat were inseparable. In the six or so years I had known him, consistency had always been Robert’s most prevalent trait.

A sigh was the first thing that poured out of his mouth as he sat down and evaluated the situation. Robert had hundreds of variations of that one sigh, each one carrying with it a world of meaning.

What then followed was a lengthy sermon on the philosophical and moral implications of civic duty and responsibility. Robert could take even the blandest of topics and, with the wondrous web of masterful oratory, make you want to hang onto every word. It was almost worth the earlier scolding just to hear him speak now.

It only took Robert ten minutes to grasp that his words weren’t resonating with the intended effect. He sighed again, with deepest melancholy, then chuckled self-consciously. He got up and put one hand on the doorknob. “Can you at least pretend that you’ve learned from this?” He asked. We nodded enthusiastically. “Well then, at least I can go back to Samanda with my head held high,” he stated with new resolve. 

We, of course, learned nothing from this. Except that next time we attempted to steal a heavily-guarded idol, it might be best not to scrawl a giant “X” directly overhead.

To this day, I sometimes wonder whatever happened to that singular Buddha statue, to where it was spirited away. I’d like to think some other aspiring pair of adventurers might’ve gotten hold of it again. Or perhaps it’s been tucked away again in that singular unremarkable oak cabinet, accruing new layers of dust, patiently waiting to become the object of spontaneous attention once more.

My father enters aisle nine for the two-hundred and twentieth time. The familiar rows of soybeans, peanuts, and assorted seaweed flank him like a warm hospital blanket. He kneels at the seaweed: my favorite. He recalls the purple packaging of my favorite brand and piles them into his shopping cart. At the soybeans, he squeezes. If a soybean is weak, he puts it back, and picks up another bag. He repeats until he finds soybeans suitable for my mom’s morning soymilk.

This market is full for early morning, its wanderers just as meticulous as my father. I think I see an old friend at the seafood section, but I can’t be sure. I am close enough to the front that I can feel the wind of the market blowing through the occasionally opening automatic doors, and I can smell good meat. The air is warm, despite the frozen aisle at the front. It’s the perfect supermarket, and I don’t care if I can’t go in, not yet.

The line is long. My father went a few decades ago, and it thrills me to see he still remembers us, that he is still stocking up on me and my mother’s favorite foods; it sutures the hole I’ve had in my chest since he went. But, I remind myself, upon feeling the stitches loosen, that’s all just a story I’m putting onto it, and that he could have changed in the past few years. He could be buying them for himself.

In front of me is an elderly couple, ones I am surprised are in line this far back. They hold hands and stand silently and from this angle I can’t tell anything about their lives, or if they love each other.

My mother, surprisingly, is not in line. I hear her from the parking lot anyway.

“Do you see your father?”

“I do.”

“How is he?”

“Getting soybeans.”

She smiles, the same thought probably keeping her chest-hole tightly closed.

The boy behind me taps on my shoulders.

“Do you mind if I go ahead of you?”

He couldn’t be over six, I know it. He’s young, too young to be right behind me, too young to even be in this line.

“I don’t feel too good and need to go in. Can I go ahead of you?”

I feel that familiar hole open in my chest. I stop myself from tearing open by scrunching my nose.

“I don’t feel good either, honey, I’m sorry. That’s why we are here.”

He looks at me, all fifty years of me, hair healthy and face plump.

“You’re sick?”

“I am.”

“With what?”

“Do you see that man in there?” I point to my father’s bald head, his signature cable-knit sweater in eternal slight disrepair.

The boy nods.

“Well, I really miss him. Do you know what that’s like? To really miss someone?”

He nods again.

“Are they in there, too?” I ask.

“No. They’re not even in line yet.”

“Where are they?”

“Back home. They aren’t sick. But I will miss them, when I go.”

“Oh.”

“Do you know what that’s like? To miss someone like that?”

I think about it. Will I miss my mother? Surely. My friends? They won’t be in line for a few more decades, if they are lucky.

“I do.”

The boy starts to cry.

“Please let me go ahead. I really need to go.”

I look at my father, entering aisle nine for the two-hundred and twenty-first time. I see him palming through the seaweed, getting the purple-packaged ones, popping soybeans until red circles are burnt into the soft part of his fingers. I see him remember us. I see his body, his real body, standing and breathing.

There aren’t many people in front of me now, the elderly couple hugging now, saying go ahead of me, I’ll see you in a second and I know now that they love each other. The boy is inconsolable. My mother is still in the parking lot. I don’t know how long it will take for her to get in line. I think about how I will miss her. How she will have to imagine my father picking up soybeans for the foreseeable future.

The hole rips open in my chest and there’s no more chance of repair.

“Go ahead.” I tell him.

As he passes, I fall out of line. Not by will, but almost by force.

I stumble into the parking lot, SUVS and carts whizzing by me. I can’t catch my balance, and I fall on to the concrete. It feels like a soft bed.

I lay and stay there and open my eyes and the sky is bright blue but I keep looking and it doesn’t hurt, because if the sun can’t fill that hole that’s burst open in my chest, it can’t burn my eyes.

Not because you’re going to die tomorrow
(although who knows) or because the downing
Osage orange leaf is throwing hedge balls
at your windshield in the bolt of a breeze.
Certainly not because God is coming,
and boy, is she pissed, exhausted, distraught.

No, God is already here, along with the packrats
making a living room in your unused kayak
because you’ve been too busy to float, row, and haul.
Also here: black-capped chickadees duking it out
somewhere over the rainbow, roof and roots.

Get it in order because it’s a flambouyant mess
of broken chairs and radios (remember those?)
you never fixed despite earnest intentions.
Because ruminating on little lines someone said
or erased in brisk conversation doesn’t mean shit
and needs to go out with the recyclables,
silk shirt you never liked, and swept-up dog hair.

Look, I’ll say it this way: while everything is
a recyclable, there is no house and never was,
but for the sake of being human you need to clear
the high shelves above the sink, the bottom corner
of the closet where clothes that never loved you
dream of escape, even the lost pens in the couch.

You need to walk out to the backyard unfettered
where the husks of milkweed are releasing
—right now—cottony seed too light to fly
that flies anyway.

Night it is once more.  This time the moon

lifts its hangnail profile over the house.

The sky is filled with collapse.  Each fright supposes

illumination of a shadow play

moving under the experience of story,

linked to a cloudy waste of enterprise.

The eyes find broken McCluresque pantomimes

of meaning staked onto a plan that tells you

about whatever atmosphere it wants. 

Lean forward to the void and breathe the turning

emptiness of life.  This too will escape you.

Before the bluish blur of dawn descends

into the heat of day, the albatross

will cross the ship, its looping at a loss.

I didn't know she'd leave so soon
I didn't see the waning moon
Our time was such a fragile thing
An angel with a broken wing
Too soon to hear the choir sing
Too soon to hear its mournful tune
Too soon

Streusel Ingredients:

1 cup all-purpose flour
2 cups light brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon salt
2/3 cup cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes
1 cup rolled oats

Peach Filling Ingredients:
2 lbs peaches, peeled and sliced
1 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons flour
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Instructions:

1. Preheat to 325°F.  Butter a 9” or 2-quart baking dish; set aside.
2. For streusel:  In a large bowl combine flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, and salt.  Cut butter into flour mixture until crumbles form.  Fold in oats; set aside.
3. In a large bowl toss peaches, sugar, cinnamon, flour, salt, and vanilla extract together.
4. Spread fruit mixture into a prepared baking dish, and evenly top with streusel mixture.
5. Place dish on aluminum foil-lined baking sheet to avoid any mess from bubbling over in your oven. Bake, rotating after 25 minutes, and bake an additional 20 – 25 minutes or until crisp is golden brown and bubbly.

Makes 8 servings.

Tooth of the canine
Torn flesh
Tippy tin bucket
Plunk goes the rock

Arms outstretched 
Stomach a cored apple
My own bloodless touch
And the earth quakes underfoot

This city hurts
I cannot return to the cave
You know the one
The one with the comforting shadows

The mime’s cage is locked
And he lets out a silent scream
Pinto beans and sausage
At Pollman’s Bake Shop

The river bench calls
There is no real return
There is no undoing
I am undone.

Open the door step outside, and feel the brisk
morning breeze strike your skin. A chill grabs
hold of your fingers and within seconds it has 
traveled through your entire being.  Take a deep 
breath and the scents of autumn wrap and 
embrace you.  With eyes still closed you see 
the children of the trees lying on the cold damp 
ground.  Some will soon travel away at the hands
of the northern wind while others will wait to be covered
by a blanket of snow.  Trees stand naked bearing their
knots and scars for the world to see as they prepare for
a month's long sleep. The darkness of winter will depart
with the brightness of Spring. Cradles of seeds and blossoms
will sprout upon the once-bare branches of yesterday.
newborn children will grow and the adolescence of bright
green abound throughout the land. Heavens tears will 
nurture their growth, and streams of crystal-clear water will 
also flow.  The reflections of the cycle of life come to 
be seen. The world moves so fast and all that breathes 
will grow and soon the children of the trees will lay
on the ground in wait for what will come to be. 

The long hours and tedious needlework Grandmother invested in sewing a special quilt for her four-year-old granddaughter are unbelievable. Today, seventy-some years later, I unfolded it carefully and, with a tenuous finger, gently outlined a sunbonneted girl swinging on an embroidered rope, her feet trust gleefully in the air. 

The worn quilt boasts multiple girls sewn onto quilt squares, their dresses splashes of varying colors and designs, but all sporting a cheerful bonnet shielding her face from an imagined summer sun. My Grandmother sewed the seams on her trusty Singer sewing machine, but the girls on the quilt squares were hand appliquéd.

I imagine her concentrating on her sewing project in the thin sunlight of a winter afternoon. After washing the supper dishes and returning them to the cupboard, she would don her thimble, pick up needle and thread, and sew with the light of a kerosene lantern. I envision her smiling, rocking in her chair, thinking of how a beloved granddaughter will delight in the imaginary playmates that will soon cover her bed—a warm comfort at bedtime and a cheerful greeting each morning. 

Granddad also had a role in the design and creation of the quilt, for the fabric had an earlier use in commerce. After the Civil War, tightly woven cotton sacks replaced tin containers, wooden barrels, and boxes for transporting bulk commodities. During the Great Depression, 1929-1939, when "waste not, want not" was the norm, patterned cotton bags marketed to women became enormously popular. Industrious women like Grandmother repurposed those bags, i.e., feedsacks, into dresses, children's clothing, aprons, quilts, or anything that would take a needle and thread. Thrifty women wasted no scrap of precious fabric. They swapped patterns sketched on pieces of paper, shared desired fabrics, and engaged in friendly rivalry.

By all accounts, Grandmother was a force to be reckoned with. She would accompany Granddad to town in their Ford pickup, transporting whatever chickens or cows were to be sold at the livestock market. Eggs gathered the previous week were carefully nestled in boxes lined with straw, ready to barter for coffee or sugar at the General Store.

But when Granddad went to the Feed and Seed Store, she was undoubtedly at his elbow, pointing to the exact bag of livestock feed she wanted. No matter if it was the one on the bottom of a six-foot stack. That is the one I want! Grandmother was meticulous in her designs and creativity, and if she needed a particular fabric pattern to complete her sewing project—well, nothing else would do. 

Granddad may have grunted his displeasure, but he and the store's workers would move the heavy bags of feed, for they were accustomed to the vagaries of hard-headed farm women and knew better than to protest.

And I sense that Grandmother, pleased, would have traced the outline of a sunbonneted girl on a swing with a work-worn finger and smiled with satisfaction.

A membrane parts,
widens to receive
air, light, nourishment, touch
Life finding expression
as leaf, bug, bird, girl
What is it to open so wide
The imperative to reach
and welcome
More than desire,
the divine yes

Death rituals and customs in the Arkansas Delta are set in stone. When I was a child, I attended an occasional funeral, and I often accompanied my parents when they went to visitations. The visitations took place the evening before a funeral when people gathered to pay their respects and to view the body of the deceased. The event was usually held in a funeral home, but at times it took place in a private home.

When I did attend a visitation, I was amazed at the floral displays. Large metal screens and wire stands were filled with wreaths of colorful, fragrant flowers. The sticky-sweet smell was overwhelming. I would marvel at the broad satin ribbons, and I wondered how the florist had written in glitter on the ribbons. On the day following a visitation, I often overheard women talking in my mother’s beauty shop about the number of flowers that were at the deceased person’s visitation. They thought that the more flowers that surrounded the body, the more popular had been the departed. My mother’s customers would remark, “There were sure a lot of flowers there. She sure was loved.”

I had a morbid curiosity about the body laid out in the casket. Were they stiff? Although I would sometimes see a bereaved person kiss a corpse or touch the hands of the deceased, I didn’t dare touch a body to find out. Did the dead person have on socks and shoes? I thought it odd when folks would look at a dead body and say, “Don’t they look natural?” I never thought they did. They looked dead.

At the age of eleven, I developed a lump under my arm. I was certain it was a cancerous tumor. I didn’t tell anyone I was dying. I didn’t want to upset my parents. I checked the lump several times a day to see if it was getting larger. I couldn’t tell for sure, but I figured cancer had already spread and it was too late to do anything about it.

I envisioned my funeral and visitation. I mentally planned the event by taking ideas from the funerals and visitations that I had attended. I created fantasy scenes borrowed from romanticized tragic movies when the bereaved would either faint or throw themselves onto the casket of their beloved. Would anyone faint at my funeral or plop atop my coffin? Would there be wailing?

At night before falling asleep, I would create a list of folks that might attend my visitation. Would Tommy be there? Would he cry? I knew that if I did die there would be some people who felt guilty about my passing and say, “I’m sorry that I wasn’t better to Zeek.” Then I would think, It’s too late you mean ol’ idiot.

I imagined having more flowers at my funeral than would fit inside the Methodist church sanctuary where my service would be held. I spent time thinking about what I should wear while lying in the casket. I wondered whether I should pick something out or leave that decision to my mother.

The lump went away. I suspect that it was nothing more than a swollen lymph gland. Even though I had spent many hours planning my funeral and visitation, I didn’t die. While I was happy to be alive, I did think, The town sure missed a good funeral.

10 seconds. That’s how long it takes me to get teary-eyed about HOME or change or seasons of life. I love new things. I love mixing new traditions with old ones. I just seem to get a little sentimental in the process.

I’d like to blame it on age, men, students, hormones or life experiences. But the truth of the matter is–I have always been this way. Questions, tears, long walks, mud puddles…those things help me process thoughts, plans and actions.

I had car trouble one day and had to walk home to get assistance in my nightgown. (I know. That’s another story.) I was crying as I traipsed up the walk to the porch–where my dad stood–waiting on me. As he watched me cry, he shook his head, indicating he hoped he lived long enough to see something happen and me not shed a tear over it.

Needless to say, he didn’t. Bless his heart.

But if he were still here, I would tell him that tears are healthy. Scientifically, they help us release stress, cope and take in bigger breaths of air–which results in a healthier brain. Blubbering, though, is not becoming at all. And, God knows, I have blubbered my way through life at times.

My tears are sporadic. It can happen when Ernest T. Bass is throwing rocks on Andy Griffith or when a friend moves away. It can happen when my husband brings me my daily coffee or when I recall a favorite dance move from my disco days and almost throw out a hip. It can happen when I drink a strong cup of coffee or see a small puppy with big eyes on Facebook.

It can happen when I smell Old Spice and think of my Grandpa Herman or see an old flannel shirt and think of my Grandpa Frank. Good men with good habits and tons of love for their grandchildren.

When did this crying jag start–you ask? Well, let’s see. How far back can I go?

Every summer when school ended in the 1960s and 1970s, I would make plans to head to Arkansas from my home in southwest Missouri to spend some time with my grandparents. I loved everything about it…the land, the horses, the stories, the food, the routines of daily chores and running barefoot in that rich Arkansas dirt. I even loved my job of picking up rocks for short periods of time. I loved hanging out at Jim’s Drive-In in Green Forest for a good burger or heading downtown in the truck to get a Coke from the fountain at the drugstore on the square.

But the truth is, I would cry as my grandparents backed out of the driveway with me perched in the middle. We’d put my suitcase in the bed of the truck. I waved goodbye to my mom, dad and brother. They would stand by the back step–grinning at me like the Beverly Hillbillies. I loved my home and I was scared to death I was going to miss something important while I was gone. I loved to travel–always. But I was equally pleased to get back home.

Little did I know until much later when my brother told me, my family would take bets as to how long it would take that first tear to fall. Usually, it was less than 10 seconds. I would cry sporadically the 70 miles there, sniffling and sobbing and wailing. Once we arrived and I unpacked my things, my grandma would get a little tired of my nonsense and tell me to stop it because “you are scaring the chickens.” She would start counting–expecting me to dry it up by the time she got to 10. I usually did.

Fast forward to May of 2023, I am sitting at graduation in the Aurora High School gymnasium last week watching kids walk across the stage to get their diplomas. About 10 seconds in, I feel the first tear. I pass it off to my seatmates as allergies. I sniffle and clear my throat. (This must stop.)

I took my love, I took it down
I climbed a mountain and I turned around
And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills
'Til the landslide brought me down
Oh, mirror in the sky
What is love?

Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail through the changin' ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?
Well, I've been afraid of changin'
'Cause I've built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I'm getting older too 

Well, I've been afraid of changin'
'Cause I've built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I'm getting older too



 

Oh! I'm getting older too
Oh-oh, take my love, take it down
Oh-oh, climb a mountain and you turn around

And if you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills
Well, the landslide bring it down
And if you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills
Well, the landslide bring it down
Oh-ohh, the landslide bring it down

(Lyrics to Landslide by Stevie Nicks. Performed by Fleetwood Mac. 1975)

The words were sung Friday night at graduation by the Aurora High School choir. “Landslide” was the song choice for the official senior song. The lyrics and slow, up-tempo melody took me back to the 1970s…when Stevie Nicks was topping the charts with Fleetwood Mac. I loved the Bohemian way she dressed and sounded when I was in junior high. I started dressing a little bit like that, crooning at the top of my lungs and reflecting. I haven’t looked back since.

I think about that “child within my heart.” Can she really rise above? Sometimes she can–if you give her at least 10 seconds.

Nicks’ 1973 album with a boyfriend had been a bust. She was in Aspen, Colorado, when she wrote the lyrics to “Landslide,”—which would become a signature tune about life’s seasons, changes, reflections and moving on to other things. She was at a low…thinking her love life and career were both in disarray at the ripe old age of 27.

I always get melancholy at graduation. It is fun to see students transition to that next stage, but yet—adulting is forever. I can’t help but wonder what the future holds for these bright minds.

In the meantime, I found out about a college classmate’s death this weekend. James Reeves was from Greenfield. I had lost track of him through the years, but continued to meet people who knew him. We always shared stories, laughs and anecdotes about his sense of humor and his football playing abilities.

He played football for Missouri Southern. That’s where we met. I was a paid tutor for the athletic program. I would often tutor players in a variety of subjects, such as history, English, economics, business or public speaking. (Pretty much anything but math!) James didn’t need a tutor. He was smarter than any 10 of us put together—but he liked the attention, the fellowship and the camaraderie. Sometimes, we would get the giggles—much like that child probably did in the “Landslide” song. I saw him from across a room when our football program was tabbed for Hall of Fame Honors right before the Covid shutdown. Greenfield had received some honors, too.

Another friend from Republic asked for prayer for a relative on social media over the weekend. This relative once rescued me from a strange situation and made sure I was treated fairly and paid appropriately. I wondered aloud to myself what might be wrong as I sent up a few flares for someone who has always supported me and my family. About 10 seconds into that prayer, a small tear trickled down my cheek.

I glance through my notes from a visit from a pair of local guest speakers last week. Brad Blankenship, the sexton at Maple Park Cemetery, and Jay Lee, his assistant, visited my afternoon classes last week at Aurora High School.

We addressed work ethic, manners, educational backgrounds and priorities during the course of the afternoon dialogue. As the rain fell outside, these two Aurorans had students sitting on the edge of their seats.

Blankenship and Lee both take pride in being Houn’ Dawgs, graduates of Aurora High School and working for the City of Aurora. Both talked about having a servant’s heart, the importance of being honest and how you can never go wrong by choosing to be kind.

When working at Aurora’s Maple Park Cemetery, both men take pride in taking care of the cemetery, which is about 113 years old. They get the opportunity to see people at their best and worst, but they take pride in caring about their jobs, caring about the roles they play during tough times and caring even more about the people they serve. Ironically, there are 9,800 people buried at Maple Park—which is a couple thousand more than the Aurora population sign boasts on the way in and out of town.

Blankenship, who has been with the City of Aurora just over seven years, is a 2002 graduate of AHS, while Lee is a 2020 grad. Their families are local and have a legacy of caring about others and working hard at whatever task they are given. Both men agreed that it is important not to “chase the money.” Both agreed it is important to enjoy what you do and the people you work with on a day to day basis.

Blankenship and Lee both have backgrounds in construction and the lumber business. Lee worked for Singer Construction out of high school and has worked for the city for well over a year.

When students asked them about the importance of being Houn’ Dawgs and what they liked best about Aurora, both managed to work my adage of “All Roads Lead Home” into their dialogue. Ironically, one of our two graduation speakers worked it into her speech, as well, indicating a “wise teacher once told me” that All Roads Lead Home. Oops, here comes the sniffles—again.

I pondered their words Sunday, while I wound my way to Hermann, Missouri, for a little Mother’s Day dinner. I veered off the interstate at Cuba and headed up North 19. I was over 150 miles from home, yet the backroads felt so familiar. I have made this trek two or three times in recent years.

Is home a place or is it the people? Is it a mindset? Or maybe it is a place we romanticize. I had some older folks talk about Heaven as Home. I have always thought Aurora was just Heaven on Earth to me. Then, I think about our hearts. We are so innocent as children. Life, experiences, hurt, shame, blame and heartache sometimes settle in our bones to tame us and season us a little bit. But all it takes is 10 seconds for us to recall a memory or respond to its charm.

We used to sing an old gospel song called “This World Is Not My Home.” The lyrics include a line in the chorus that “We’re just a passin’ through.” I am thinking of those lines today as I ponder the loss of that old friend James. I was so homesick those first few months of college back in 1979. Just like those days from childhood, I would cry leaving the driveway and heading west to my room in Webster Hall. We’d go on walks before and after our tutoring sessions. About 10 seconds into the walk, I would shed my first tear. He always made me laugh because he thought I was “way too serious” for a Houn’ Dawg. “Dry those tears,” he’d say, adding—”You are supposed to be tough.”

Then, this past weekend, I found out about the loss of a friend’s mom from northwest Arkansas. Gladys Dickens Widner was a rural farmer’s wife who raised five kids on the banks of Lick Branch—near Alpena, Arkansas. Gladys made a home for her family and friends–no matter where she was. She could cook, clean and sew like nobody’s business. I made the trek to her farm while working on a project a few years back. She fed me supper and took me outside to look at a big tree. She spoke fondly of her home and even more fondly of Heaven–her ultimate HOME. As I backed out of her driveway–I waved that day and took a breath–counting to 10 before the first tear fell.

So, school is winding to a close. I have a big to-do list for the summer. It will include a few trips away from home, some plans, some actions and some decisions.

But, that’s okay, it’s nothing that 10 seconds, me and Stevie Nicks can’t handle.

Wait a minute. I think there’s something in my eye. It must be allergies, again.

Change.
Seasons.
Tradition.

I am still loving the journey as All Roads Lead Home.

on a clear starry night
indigo skies
give way to
a gentle dawn
held in a whisper blue

I sit with a silken sunrise
trying out my new solstice dawn
light embers 
spread overhead
creating our lake's sky dome 

ever changing 
cerulean blue
and raspberry plum
a true mixed palate
flowing

Wowzer! What a time it has been since our Winter 2024 Issue was released! eMerge pulled a rabbit out of the hat with the first-ever Nikki Hanna Literary Challenge. You can read the top five entries by clicking on the contest tab. But as usual, these contests get me to thinking. Seriously, I do actually sit and think from time to time. It’s pretty much a survival tactic at my ancient age to appear intelligent by sitting and keeping my mouth closed. It usually doesn’t last very long, though. The reason we choose five entrants to be our ‘winners’ is because I have always abhorred literary competitions. Literary contests can be as subjective as a mood ring at a 70’s disco. I mean seriously, have you read some of the books chosen by the Pulitzer Prize committees? Of course, Oprah, Reese, and Jenna have produced a few stink bombs, too. You might even think they are on Penguin Random House’s payroll. Ok, ok, I’ll go sit in the corner and cogitate later. 

Back to ‘winners’ in literary contests. Anyone who sits down and shares a piece of their soul, their very humanity, by putting words into poetry or prose—is a winner. Those who write know this to be true. Writing truly is the loneliest profession. That’s why we offered our writers a critique from the judges and have been sharing some of the comments on our Facebook page. Many of the short story entrants took us up on this. I am thrilled that they did. The fee we charged went to the judges who were responsible for the critiques. The entry fees went to our top five selections. As the contest grows (hint hint) we will split the entry fees among our top entries. I would love to be able to offer five $500 prizes or six or seven. 

Okay, enough chitchat about contests. I want everyone who actually reads these letters from the editor to know that Joy Clark has left us for greener pastures (and no, she’s not becoming a farmer, that is a metaphor for a paying gig). We wish her all the best on her new endeavors and we know that she will be successful at whatever she attempts! We will miss her smile. In the meantime, we have hired a social media coordinator, Chad Gurley. You have been seeing his skills on our Facebook page. We are glad to have Chad on board and his future brainchildren. Cat Templeton continues to be our Web Sorceress and our go-to ‘what-the-heck-does-this-button-do’ oracle. Sandra Templeton, beautiful inside and out, has taken over as art director and provides the beautiful photographs and visuals that’ll make your heart sing, in perfect harmony with the symphony of words y’all create. We are profoundly grateful. You, dear writers, are the pulse of eMerge, a symphony penned with love.

Until Next Time,

I Remain,

Just another Zororastafarian editor searching for the cogitation corner trying not to spill his glass of wine while thinking about winning—no, that’s not it—the election?—Oh heck no…

[TableOfContents]

In our circle of two, we call ourselves Yin and Yang.

Our birthdays—hers a 12 and mine a 21—a shared belief in the spiritual, and our being Northern Babies led an easy work relationship to an easy camaraderie over drinks and long chats over everything and nothing.

Kathryn and her boss, Josh, finished each workday with clementines and conversation. An uptick in leasing and an early project completion allowed me to work with, but not for, him. Later, when Kathryn became slammed in her work, and with her blessing, he asked me to fill in the gaps.

Josh stood in my doorway. “Would you like to join Kathryn and me at four o’clock? I’ll share my clementine with you,” he teased, flashing a boyish smile.

Kathryn’s face peeked over Josh’s shoulder. Her ringlets framed a flushed face, her brown eyes boring into mine.

I shook my head. “Oh, Josh,” I said, hoping to defuse the situation, “that’s Mom and Dad Time. I get you all day, but Kathryn doesn’t see you. I won’t intrude.” Delivered as a joke, the truth was that, like a well-mannered five-year-old, I knew my place in the world and left the grown-ups to discuss things.

I certainly didn’t see myself as a threat. I filled in, wanting to prove my professional worth.

The following day, Kathryn appeared in my doorway. “Fancy a drink?”

I got my coat, and we, Yin and Yang, discussed everything and nothing over a cheeseboard and wine. But not the previous day.

“Hell of a place to run out of gas.” Josh had turned on his car’s flashers and opened the trunk. “Does Gwendolyn have flashers, or is she too classic for that?”

The narrow lane beside the golf course, littered with bronzed oak leaves, had one wide point. Gwendolyn coasted while I prayed the whole way. My beloved Jaguar, nicknamed Gwendolyn, hadn’t run out of gas. That was impossible. She had two tanks, and I had flipped the switch to the second tank. Or had I?

“I’ll open up Gwendolyn’s bonnet, you know, the English way,” I said with a sheepish grin. “I’m glad you stopped.”

Josh pulled on work gloves and reached inside. “Oh, I see the problem. The battery cable jostled loose. Try it now.”

I slid in, turning the key. No results. I flipped the gas tank switch and tried again. Gwendolyn rumbled to life, and I gave Josh a thumbs-up. He walked over. “I’ll follow you, but let me know if you need to borrow my car.” He caught a bronzed leaf between his fingers. “Listen, thanks for the work you are doing.” Walking away, he turned back to me. “If only your car and my employee were half as reliable as you.”

I waved him away but couldn’t wave away the knot in my stomach.

“Kathryn, I can’t send out the letter you wrote. It’s probably,” said Josh, grasping his scalp as if it were ready to fly off, “no, it is the worst thing you’ve ever written.”

Her response was inaudible, but the translation wasn’t necessary.

“What? You sent this, this, piece of kindergarten garbage, to our clients? How am I supposed to dial this back?” I dropped my eyes to the spreadsheet on my computer. Too late. “Next time, if I’m not around, ask her. She, at least, knows what she’s doing.” He turned to me. “You can’t go on vacation with this mess going on.”

Kathryn rose, closed the door, and pulled the blinds facing out into the office. Seconds passed before the online office gossip kicked in. Ping. “What was that about?” Ping. “Did you hear all the yelling?” Ping. “Josh slammed the door.”

I pretended I was away from my desk. After two minutes in a locked bathroom stall surrounded by silence, I scurried further down the hallway to the elevator. As the doors opened on the main floor, the dappled sunlight beckoned, and I debated inventing an appointment before my vacation so I wouldn’t be back. But I hadn’t left an out-of-office message, hadn’t turned off my computer, hadn’t really departed. I’d only escaped.

I slid into the buckskin embrace of my beloved Jaguar. In my mind’s eye, I saw Kathryn’s face, her demeanor crumpling under Josh’s wrath. A pang of pride that Josh trusted me was stabbed by decorum. He shouldn’t have involved me, but he was frustrated. Everyone would get over the disagreement, and work would return to normal.

But I was in escape mode because I witnessed Kathryn’s ego pummeled by the person she trusted the most. I should go back up to my office. And do what? Get in the middle of an office spat?

A sharp rap on the passenger window pulled me out of the dilemma. Kathryn opened the door and slid in. She stared straight ahead. I reached over to pat her arm, but she pulled away, her shoulder nearly nicking her ear.

Well, if that’s the case, what am I supposed to do? I turned toward her, but as I did, her hand moved toward the door handle. I shifted back, and she mirrored my movements. I started the engine, slowly exiting the parking lot.

Opening the sunroof, Kathryn leaned back, tilting her chin. Gwendolyn glided forward toward an unknown point of demarcation – one pointing to a place where my friend would let me in and tell me how I could help. The sunlight highlights her curls, absolving whatever sins might have transpired.

I drive everywhere and nowhere until the sun is at our backs, and, as if by signal, it disappears behind a lone cloud. Kathryn looked over at me and nodded. There have been no words exchanged.

Approaching the office building, I positioned Gwendolyn into a cove of privacy. “I can get your things . . .” I said, but Kathryn’s eyes flew open as I uttered this, and a chill passed into my bones. She slowly turned her head toward me as if I spoke gibberish. A preposterous idea crossed my mind. What if I left my car? Would she follow? What would she do next?

I cut the engine. Hand on the wheel, I turn again toward her. “What do you want to do, Kathryn?” She opened the car door, and I secretly breathed a sigh of relief as she disappeared inside the building.

A tapestry of clattering keyboards was the only noise in the hallway. I slowed as I approached Josh’s office. It was empty. Mustering every fiber in my body to forge ahead, slip into my office, and pretend that the last hour or more hadn’t occurred, I ignored the half dozen instant messages and, drawing a breath, stole a glance at Kathryn’s closed door.

The door opened, and Kathryn stood in the doorway and smiled at me. I half rose from my chair, but she shook her head, and I sat back down, returning to work. A minute later, I looked in her direction, but she, like me, had her head toward her monitor, her fingers clattering the keyboard.

At four o’clock, she rose, withdrew two clementines from her desk drawer, and walked down the hall. Fifteen minutes later, I stepped to the break room to rinse out my coffee cup and cocked my ear toward Josh’s office. From his banter and Kathryn’s light tinkling response, the crisis had been adverted, and peace restored.

As I climbed into Gwendolyn’s driver’s seat and began the drive home toward a long-awaited vacation, inwardly, I congratulated myself for letting Kathyrn be, glad that I hadn’t intruded or spoken negatively.

When I returned ten days later, she was gone.

“She didn’t bother to leave a note,” said Josh, brushing at an imagined stray lock of his crew cut. His blue eyes searched mine. “She would have told you. Why didn’t you tell me?”

I shook my head. She hadn’t texted, she hadn’t called. I was as much in the dark as Josh.

In the three years that followed, I heard nothing about her except through social media. I learned that Kathryn had found a wonderful, patient man. Her posts reflected a life filled with painting and gardening. Her soul had found her song in life.

A finger tapped my shoulder at a ballet intermission. Kathryn was with her lovely man. Her arms outstretched, we embraced as Yin and Yang, assured once again. “Would you like to grab a drink at the Olympia Bar after this? We can celebrate our upcoming move,” she said.

The Olympia’s band played loudly, so I resorted to visual cues as we settled in with our drinks. She was doing the same. “How are you?” she asked. When I said I was doing fine, she put her face closer. “No, really? How are you doing? At work, I mean. Josh . . .”

“Kathryn,” said her lovely man, “we said we wouldn’t bring that up.” His eyes met mine as he spoke, “I’m sorry, maybe this was a bad idea.”

How to tell her Josh has a great assistant and never speaks of her?

“Josh, well, our paths don’t cross. The office has expanded so much, so many new accounts. It’s not like the old days at all,” I said with a bright smile.

But like a festering wound, she began to question and pick at the life she had abruptly left. Josh’s name came up, and her lovely better half quietly but directly stated that they should not discuss that.

Too late.

Like an overly wound-up toy, her internal spring began to unwind, revealing not a soul finding strength in the love of a wonderful man and a supportive family but something far uglier.

With the look I had seen over Josh’s shoulder three years before, she leaned forward. “I had to leave. I lived in constant, paralyzing fear that I would harm someone at work, and I couldn’t live with that.”

With that, her lovely better half yanked her up and, with a curt nod, turned her toward the door, and within seconds, they were gone.

My eyes flashed as the wretched inner workings of her soul continued to reel and spin. I had no idea that she had such hatred for Josh and that he had betrayed her in such a way.

Leaving the venue with my wonderful man, I remarked that I was glad she was moving far away to give herself time to heal.

I thought it was spam, but then I recognized her e-mail address. More than three years had passed since I had seen Kathryn and her lovely man at the Olympia Bar.

The message was cryptic. “Please forgive me. Blessings, Kathryn.”

Yawning, I figured I would have just enough time to send a reply before going to bed.

Dearest Yin (or is it Yang?),

No matter, there is nothing to forgive. I hope this e-mail finds you well and happy.

Work proceeds as it always does with projects to dive into. Our family is well, and I hope yours is too.

Best,

Yang (or is it Yin?)

Reading it over, I decided it was fine. I pressed “Send.”

The sun rivaled the bright emergency vehicle lights flashing in my rearview mirror. I checked the speedometer. “What the hell? I’m not speeding.” Pulling over, I drove Josh’s car to the curb and reached for my license.

The police car zoomed past me, joined within seconds by seven more squad cars. Six more crest the hill. As I turned left to go to my doctor’s appointment, a hive of vehicles clustered a mile away.

After giving my name to the receptionist, I put Josh’s keys in my wallet and recalled our conversation ten minutes before. “Were you serious about letting me borrow your car? I’ll fill it up with gas.” He grabbed his keys and walked with me to where Gwendolyn had refused to budge. “I tried everything, but I will call the tow truck when I return,” I said. Without a word, he had fished me the keys and, with an absent wave, walked back into our office building.

After making a follow-up appointment, I glanced at the television screen on the wall and stopped in my tracks. “It happened down the street about twenty minutes ago,” called the receptionist.

I read and re-read the scrolling headline on the TV. “Suspect kills former co-worker then turns gun on self.”

The news cameras panned the tiny parking lot I knew all too well. In the background was Gwendolyn, my prized Jaguar, whose windows were broken out. A large scratch on the door panel, highlighted by the cameraman, were the words ‘DIE BITCH.’ I clasped my hand to my mouth and screamed.

After being hustled into my doctor’s office and offered water, I pulled out my phone, and an e-mail notification popped up. Through sobs, I said, “Why would she do that? Everything was fine. After she sent me a message, I wrote that there was nothing to forgive. Now, there’s an e-mail from her.”

The doctor’s gentle hand squeezed mine. “You two are or were friends? Have you read it? The message, I mean?” she asked.

I shook my head to both questions, wiping my tears on my sleeve.

“Do you want to read it? Do you want me to be with you?” The doctor’s voice was like a hug.

Wiping tears, I nod, and together we read the message.

Hello –

Clearly, you don’t understand or want to understand the pain you have caused me, but you will soon answer for that. You shirked your responsibility in what happened between Josh and me. In fact, you took advantage, like you always do. Moreover, when I needed you, you stood aside and did nothing.

I wanted to harm someone in the office six years ago, but I had stopped myself. You need to understand that taking action and not taking action have consequences.

Kathyrn.

I sat up straight. There was that phrase—‘I wanted to harm someone in the office’—word for word—again.

Six years after her departure, I realized who the intended target was.

Yin and Yang. East and West.

Troubled and untroubled.

I know everything and nothing.

"The half cadence ends the phrase on a dominant chord, which in tonal music does not sound final; that is, the phrase ends with unresolved harmonic tension."
- Brittanica.com

I am alone in the house, writing the book you always told me I could write--if I just believed in myself—when your mother calls out of the blue to tell me you died. Your name bounces in my head, my mind flipping backward, until my heart conjures a sweet bearded face. I hear only fragments of what your mother says next. New York Presbyterian Hospital… Complications of hemophilia. Memorial service in a few weeks. Lost my boy!

Words of comfort stick in my throat. I do not tell her I still love you.

After we hang up, I call the hospital and ask for your room. The patient has expired the receptionist reports. I want to reach through the phone and strangle that voice. It was you, wasn’t it, making those silent phone calls to me weeks before? How had I not a sliver of female intuition or psychic dream, foretelling me your days were folding?

Why did I not even say your name?

A river of tears flows but does not wash away the fact that I let so much time pass, that I stopped writing, stopped calling.

Thousands of sunsets have passed since you first showed me the ocean on a Cape Cod beach beneath a full moon, as if you had placed it there. The rhythmic dark waves lulled. I remember the cool sand beneath my nimble feet. I feel like doing a cartwheel! I said. You cheered, Go for it! Your mantra. You, who walked with a limp, who had dodged death more than once. Go for it! And I did.

I told you I felt old at twenty and didn’t want to celebrate my next birthday. Days later, you surprised me with a copy of the front page of the New York Times from the day of my birth, rolled up with a pink bow. I’m so glad you were born. Always remember this: the one with the most birthdays lives the longest.

How foolish I’d been back then, when I was beautiful, to fear another birthday. Your tally: thirty-five.

I won.

What to do now with the cards, letters, and photographs growing old in the heat of the attic? I hold your favorite picture--me in a red and black swimsuit, zipper up the front, posing on Nauset Beach. I don’t recognize that slender girl with the delicate wrists—the girl you rescued from the dark wave. My eyes cloud seeing the photo of our fresh faces smiling from atop the Twin Towers, the city unfolding behind us under a sky as brilliantly blue as that future September 11th day neither of us could imagine. Who knew? This is what we utter after earning the gift of perspective that comes from accumulating birthdays. Who knew then that our love would crumble under its own weight, that we would not reminisce in middle age?

Remorse and Regret pierce my heart. Sister emotions, like a musical chord, their individual timbres hard to distinguish. What were our odds of happily-ever-after, anyway? Our youthful rhapsody hit so many wrong notes. Yet we played it over and over, like a favorite scratched record album. For too long now, I’ve lived in the shadow, singing my own refrain. If only…what could have been? A lyric from a thousand sad songs.

Now, after all these years, I feel your sudden presence like a butterfly brushing my arm. I breathe in your whispered words and form a new melody.

Go for it. ~

Twenty-eight glorious inches of snow have accumulated in my neighborhood in the past three days. The trees create enameled ivory frames around the evening’s January Christmas lights. The air is crisp as newly washed sheets and the golden moon takes in all that is good on Earth.

Except for the crunch crunch crunch of my snow boots, it’s a silent night. Why is it that I want to skip and sing “On the Good Ship Lollipop” at the top of my lungs for all the neighbors to hear? Why do my two adored rescue dogs avoid the shoveled sidewalks to instead jump with wild abandon into the mounds of flaky snow? I lay down my cane, drop to my back on a stranger’s pristine crystal covered yard, and make a perfect snow angel. My dogs tear around me like they’ve just discovered an enormous Paleozoic bone. I’m blissful; for tonight, I’m frolicking in my childhood’s snowy white playground.

Is this feeling something that comes from growing up in a place where it snows abundantly every winter? A place where snow becomes just a part of people’s lives and an absolute necessity at Christmas? Heck, I’d rather shovel the sidewalk than be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen by a long shot. I feel mighty and self-reliant when I confidently maneuver my station wagon on snow covered roads to arrive at my desired destination. When doing substitute work in Portland, the school secretaries marveled, “I can’t believe you made it here!” There were two inches of snow on the road. For gawd’s sake!

Yet nothing comes close to the power we kids felt when we hauled our sleds and cardboard boxes to the woods to brave the treacherous sliding hills or accomplished a backward aerial jump skating at the neighborhood ice rink. Injuries were given a dose of mercurochrome and slapped with a Band-aid; then we were good to go. Add the helmetless boys from my elementary school clacking pucks into the goal as they played hockey in sub zero weather and I defy anyone, even Superman, to match that kind of single-minded courage.

How many people get to experience the childhoods my pals and I did? It wasn’t without its challenges and believe me, I know from first hand experience. (My dad was an MP in WWII and my mother loved to push his mean button.) But we were not addicted to burying our faces into mobile phones to the point of running into a tree while walking to school. The only burying we did was when we slipped on an icy sidewalk and did a face plant into a snowbank.

When my British friend came to visit, she determined that we grew up in a “bloody pahk.” And it’s true, our feet skipped and cycled over every inch of our nature-filled park of lakes and hills, towering oaks and Ojibwe paths along the mighty Mississipp.

Lately I’ve been forced to endure the painful loss of some of my dearest friends. I’m not good at it. It’s wounding. I scream and cry and shout “Why him? Why her?” It is unfathomable to me as I knew them when we were young - vital and agile and so alive. Now, after experiencing another loss along with the knowledge that another friend is very sick, I’m beginning to accept that this is how it goes - the freaking circle of life.

In a message to me, a friend wrote, “You know, I remember when our parents began talking about their friends beginning to die. Now here we are - but it came so fast and it’s so sad - so shocking - but now it’s our turn.

Cue: The fierce stomp of one snow-covered boot.

Until it’s my turn, I intend to continue making a fool of myself on the dance floor at the “Gravel Bar'' where we have a place in the Ozark Mountains. Yes, phony metal knees and chubby derriere be damned, I’m getting down when those aging rockers get out their instruments and impress the hell out of this music old teacher. I will always search the skies on Christmas Eve. No, I will “not go gentle into that good night”. I will dress up in an outrageous costume, blast ghoulish dance music, and make my yard a Halloween wonderland for the one hundred local children who ring my doorbell every year. (Last year, one very scary three-year-old witch refused to leave my house along with her parents. She was dancing with euphoric abandon to “Burn, baby burn, Disco Inferno” in my driveway.) I live for this stuff.

Then one night, after the friends I grew up with and I are all dead and gone, a child will take her dog for a winter’s walk. The trees will create enameled ivory frames around the night’s January Christmas lights while the rapturous golden moon croons of tender bygone innocence. The child will stop suddenly and in wonderment turn toward the delightful sounds of mid century children sliding down a snow packed hill and smile.

Grief is a sneaky bitch. 

You can be walking along fine, just trying to get through the day, when suddenly out of nowhere she stabs you between the ribs. In an instant you can’t breathe; you’re sinking to the floor, and all you know is pain. Exquisite pain. With any luck this doesn’t happen in a crowded space. Or if it does, maybe you can find a quiet corner to bleed in. But man, that bitch doesn’t care where you are or when.

Grief and I spend a lot more time together now than we used to. When we first met I was probably about seven and my white and tan kitten, Cuddles, had been hit by a car. My father broke the news to me with tears in his eyes as Grief walked over and promptly slapped me in the face. It hurt, I won’t lie; even back then she had a good arm. But there was only so much she could do when we were so young. 

Growing up there were a series of events that invited her back to use me as a punching bag. Moves, betrayals, disillusionment, lost friends, lost dreams  - all things humans have to deal with at one time or another.  While each loss bruised and scarred a little, Grief always disappeared, slinking back to wherever she came from. And I toughened up, as everyone does. Loss is an inevitable part of the human condition and eventually we all reach an equilibrium, a certain amount of loss that we are accustomed to so it no longer registers as more than just painful. At the age of twenty-seven I learned Grief had seriously stepped up her game.

In the spring of 2007 we discovered our second child was on the way. We had totally not been planning for that, but we were thrilled nonetheless. Our son had just turned two, we had recently moved closer to family; it seemed like good timing. I am one of those insane women who actually enjoyed being pregnant once the months of perpetual vomiting passed, so I was excited. We even had names picked out. 

Doctors say that the eight-week mark is a significant milestone in pregnancies, second only to the four-month mark. Before eight weeks it’s not even a fetus, it’s an embryo, although it does have a heartbeat after only five weeks. I know this because I was able to tell I was pregnant so early on that we were able to make a doctor’s appointment and heard our developing child’s heartbeat.

At almost exactly eight weeks, I woke up bleeding. We prayed it was just a random thing, but two days later I was in the ER feeling all the life drain out of me. Literally. Hospital workers are trained to be efficient, but they all offer a special measure of gentleness to a woman losing her child. Unfortunately, there are not enough warm hospital blankets in the world to thaw the cold that seeps inside. 

I didn’t realize at the time just how much Grief had grown. And she may have hit harder than she meant to because I spent the next month in an emotional coma, mostly numb, only coming out a few times when it hurt so much I couldn’t move. My husband says I was a zombie. I honestly don’t remember. 

After that Grief and I became constant companions. It’s interesting - you’d think she would be hideously ugly, and sometimes she is, but sometimes she looks pretty normal. She’s never attractive, don’t get me wrong; but she’s not always so hard to look at, especially the further out from an “event” we are. After a long time, she will still pinch and poke and prod, but it feels more habitual than actually malicious or ugly. Though she still gets a good punch in, so you don’t start to forget her; she might not be pretty, but she has her pride. And she is always ready for another chance to show off how her skills have grown. 

In the fall of 2009 my mother was diagnosed with cancer. Now, some people love their mothers; some people tolerate their mothers; some people can’t stand their mothers. My mother was hands down the best. When you see me, you see a good chunk of her, too.  

Once I passed the point of her having to worry about making me a viable member of society, we could just talk and laugh and it was perfect. We would make up stupid songs and sing them to each other's voice mails; we pondered deep philosophical mysteries; we argued the best way to kill someone and hide the body - theoretically. 

With the news that cancer had cast its shadow over our family, Grief grew claws and took to raking them across my flesh whenever the fancy struck her. As everyone who has walked the road of cancer knows, the journey can be a long one, which is both good and bad. It gave us more time with Mom, time when every moment was sweeter, even if sprinkled with desperation. It also gave me time to grieve continually, even though she wasn’t gone yet. I couldn't escape the knowledge that Death was sliping closer every day. And with each reminder, Grief took another pound of flesh. 

We had more time than the doctors expected - almost five years; and she had an incredible quality of life until the last four weeks. Most people who didn’t know her didn’t even realize she was sick. She came to visit me six weeks before the end and we had a wonderful time eating ice cream, watching movies, planning all the stupid things we could do at the funeral to shock people. Side note: Dad wouldn't let me do most of them. It was very disappointing. But cancer doesn’t last forever. Eventually Death comes and goes

I drove to my parent’s house in Virginia the day before she passed. I watched her breath her last and held my little sister as it felt like Grief ripped our hearts out with her bare hands. I’ve never seen my father so lost as he was that night. 

I spent the next month with my dad and my sister and Grief. We went through old cookbooks and cried; found our old baby teeth - ew - and cried; walked from the living room to the kitchen and just suddenly cried. Maybe because I expected Grief and embraced her so readily, she didn’t cut as deeply that month as I expected. Or maybe she did, but it was a clean cut, not so ragged around the edges. 

That month was full of tears, but unlike our last major encounter, I was never numb; I remember it well and, shockingly, fondly. My sister and I watched so many World Cup Matches that month, primarily for the Scottish announcer’s accent. We got in the car with our dad, rolled the windows down, and sang “Don’t Stop Believing” as loud as we could. We ate copious amounts of Chinese food. Grief was there, but Joy was also there holding her hand. Maybe Grief just  isn’t meant to be alone.

So many things bring Grief into our lives, you can’t escape her. She walks with us, sometimes quietly, sometimes like a raging harpy. Just last week I was watching something on Amazon Prime and it turned out the character’s motivation for everything she did was trying to save her mom from some disease. Grief stabbed me in the gut, and I spent a good half hour in the bathroom ugly crying. 

No matter what else she is, Grief is a sneaky bitch.

As far back as I can remember, I could hear her. It would start out low, almost inaudible. Like a feeling. The hair on the back of my neck would stand up, goose-pimples would cover every inch of skin I wore, and I instantly knew what was coming. Over the years I've tried everything to ignore it. I've tried putting the TV on full blast, turning up the volume on my stereo, my Walkman with headphones, covering my head with a pillow or 2 or 3. Nothing blocked it out, nothing stopped it from coming. When I was younger I didn't really understand what it meant, not really. I was too small to comprehend the series of unfortunate events that would follow. It seemed random to me for a long while, or perhaps I even suspected it was something I was doing wrong.

The first time I realized it wasn't really a random occurrence I was 15 years old. My Daideo (or granddad) was my favorite man that walked the earth. I spent hours and hours with him down at his shop. I remember watching his grease stained calloused hands fix anything with a motor, battery, or a screen like it was yesterday. Cars, boats, tvs, radios, walkie talkies – you name it and he was either fixing it, had it fixed it already, or saved it for parts. He always had parts at the ready because everyone in Tobercurry knew about my Daideo and his skills. That fateful day he walked me to school because I was running late and Mam didn't like when I walked anywhere by myself, even if I was an almost fully grown Irishwoman. When we got to the doors of the school I gave him the biggest hug and said “What would I be at all without ya, eh?”

We were at recess when it first began. It was so low at the start that I thought it was just the hum of the heating units outside the school. By the time it got closer and of course louder I froze because I knew. It didn't usually happen when I was surrounded by people, or even when it was light outside so I wasn't sure how to navigate it. I didn't make a habit of telling people about it, I didn't want them to think I was completely banjaxed. I mentioned it to my Mam a few times over the years and I had a strong feeling it wasn't the first she'd heard of it by the look on her face. She would catch her expression and go stoic and treat the subject as if it was taboo. Then she'd tell me to quit blathering on and walk away. So there I was, in the middle of recess standing in the grass  surrounded by yelling kids, whirling soccer balls and the sun silently warming me despite the cold in my bones. I did my best to  pretend I didn't hear what I definitely heard. When it was at it's loudest it was so piercing I couldn't ignore it anymore. I fell to my knees and rocked – rather writhed – on the ground, hands over my ears. My schoolmates rushed me, wondering what on Earth was happening to me. “Don't you hear it!?” I screamed. They all looked at me, bewildered, shook their heads and wondered what it was I could possibly be hearing. I knew then I was alone. Utterly and completely alone, surrounded by people. After the screeching passed it's full intensity I slowly got up and tried to shake the ringing from my ears. “It must have been a migraine, I get those sometimes”. Slowly the crowd started to disperse, whispering to themselves but also believing my lie.

Still shocked it's was only me affected, I wondered if I really was losing my mind?  I went back inside and my next 2 classes were uneventful, even enjoyable at times. When I got up to go to my final class however, I saw her, my Mam. I knew from her red eyes and wet face instantly something was wrong. She calmly took my hand and said soothingly “Alannah, come with me now dear.”. The way her demeanor contrasted with her outward appearance frightened me enough to do something I didn't do often, comply without question.

When we got outside she faced me and gently told me that my Daideo, the center of my world, was gone. I couldn't believe it. “He was just here this morn..” I started to say but faltered. Mammy, as I called her when I was just a babe and felt like it again at that moment, held me as I cried. She cried with me as we walked home from school and began the preparations to bury Daideo and honor his life alongside our community. I couldn't help but feel like we were also burying my innocence.

It wasn't until about 2 weeks after that day, when our new normal routine started to set in, that I realized something. The wailing I had heard was around the same time my Daideo took his last breath. I decided against asking my Mam, as grief was something new and unspoken between us since that day. I didn't want to poke at her further when we were all still so raw. I decided it was just a weird coincidence and kept on marching forward as bravely as I could. It seemed easier that way, expected.

I had a best friend for most of my life named Maureen. We did most everything together. She is the only other person who I confided in about the wailings. Sometimes, she was so curious she would just stare and she'd see me shift and her eyes would widen and she'd say “Do you hear it now?” We'd laugh because the answer was always no but she kept on trying. It was like a game to her since the horrors of it were softened by hearing it secondhand, through me. I liked it that way honestly, there was no way I could describe the truth of it to her, I could barely handle it myself.

When we were 21, Maureen got sick. Life can be so unfair because Maureen was always so full of joy, she had a zest for life. She'd zip about, as light as a sprite and as luminous as one – and people would flock to her, like, well, like Faeries to a bonfire. To watch her fight so hard and suffer so often killed me a little inside. When we were 30, I was at Mass praying before service started, and I started to hear it again. This time, deep in my bones, I knew. I rushed out of the cathedral, kicked my shoes in the grass and RAN like the wind! It seemed both like forever and a moment at once, but this time I ran through the noise. It was at it's highest intensity when I got to her front door. It was already open and her family were all inside. They parted the way for me like Moses parted the Red Sea. Maureen was still there, hanging on, barely. As we locked eyes she mouthed “I hear it too” with a slight smile. With that she breathed her last and the wailing started to subside, along with my sense of reality.

“Is the devil at work in me? Am I cursed?!?!” I screamed once I got far enough away. To my surprise I heard a familiar voice behind me say “I'm afraid it's my fault my child”. It was my Mam, eyes all red again. I ran into her arms and pulled away after a few moments, so confused.

“How did you know I'd be here? Maureen is...”

“I know a ghra (my love)”.

“But how could you possibly know?” I started to protest.

My Mam sat down in the lush grass and motioned for me to join her.

Drained of all energy and needing to have answers I once again went against my nature and complied without a word.

“I can hear her too” My Mam began...

“It started when I was a wee lass. Your Nan wasn't open to talking about it, I always thought it was because she was too Catholic for superstitions but now I think it's because she heard it too.”

“So, this is something passed down to me?”

“I'm afraid so my darling. I'm so sorry I didn't share with you sooner, it was just easier to pretend it wasn't happening.”

“I understand that Mammy, I would prefer to ignore it too. But what does it mean? Where is it coming from? Are we in danger?”

My mom took her time before speaking and chose her words carefully.  “We O'Donnell women have been hearing the banshees' cry since stories could be told. Hundreds of years. Banshees do not kill people  a ghra, they just mourn those that are destined already to die. She must have warned you about Maureen because she was like a sister to you.”

“But...” I began. “Maureen could hear her too!”.

“Aye, when the veil between life and death is thinned, those who are open to it can hear it too. Maybe even see her.” This gave me chills but I remember the peace on Maureen's face at her last breath.

“Thank you for opening up to me Mam, I know it's not easy for you but you're not alone.” We held each other for a long time and I was left to myself and my thoughts on the long walk back to retrieve my shoes from the Cathedral lawn that day.

After awhile I decided it was a gift from the Lord, those tortured cries warning me that someone I love was about to die. It was terrifying on one accord and beautiful on the other. From that day on I lived in a state somewhere between a morbid curiosity anticipation and sheer terror that I would hear it again.

In the years that followed I married a beau, I had 2 children of my own (both boys, thank the heavens). Life went on as normal as it could for someone dreading the inevitable, for someone with such a peculiar burden to carry. I was around 45 years old the next time I heard her. My family lived by a train station so at first I thought it was the far off whistle of the train sounding. As it got louder and the hairs stiffened on my neck, I knew. My mam lived a few towns away and I knew it was impossible to run there so I phoned her but no one answered the persistent ringing. My husband came home from work to find me on the floor of my bedroom inconsolable and he didn't know why. When I tried to explain, in between sobs and hiccups, he asked how I knew she was gone if she didn't answer. I didn't want to be accused of blathering on again so I just told him simply “A daughter knows”.

At Mams funeral, I felt utterly alone again, like I did before we shared our secret all those years ago in the grass. I was grateful I wasn't passing this onto another generation but there was something lonely in knowing I was the last one. What would happen to our banshee? Would she go on wailing with no one to hear? It seemed sad somehow. Maybe my death will free her soul to peace? I wasn't sure and I had no one to ask. All I knew is I lived in fear of hearing her crying out again. I didn't want to lose anyone else.

Looking back, I was lucky, I led a blessed and simple life. It was another 30 years before I heard her again. I was really confused this time as my husband was in decent health for 77 and my boys and their families were all well and living nearby. As she got louder I didn't hold my ears. It seemed more bearable this time. I chocked it up to having old 75 years old ears and chuckled softly, slightly shaking the bed. My husband stirred in his sleep and I stayed still and quiet, as not to wake him.

When the intensity of her song reached it's highest, my mind started playing tricks on me. The room felt brighter and seemed warmer and felt strangely familiar. Suddenly, our banshee wasn't just noise, she was there above me, floating, inches from my face. I wish my description could do her justice but it's hard to explain. She was transparent but beautiful and so very sad. The sadness seemed to be within every part of her, embedded. Her tear filled eyes, her moistened hair, her pale fragile hands, most of her – in her wails. My heart hurt for her grief, I wanted to know who she was mourning and to put my arms around her and tell her it would be OK. Of course this was impossible so I just did my best to smile at her and said “Finally, after all these years we meet”. She moved just a hair so I could see above her and I saw My Daideo, strong and young! Next to him was my Maureen, my beautiful Maureen! And Mammy, she was radiant and beaming at me!

That's what the realization hit me, I knew who our sweet, sad banshee was grieving for, who she was here to guide. Our beautiful, haunting, piercing, family banshee - she was here to mourn for me.

WBPC Winner - Pushcart Nominee

Her father was a crop-duster
who would speak in Tongues
And each time he did she would
never remember what happened
next until many years later when
she suddenly began remembering

She would ask boys to
take her out north of town
to look for the Spook Light
It was there she learned
the history of her tongue
It was there she was taught
the language of spies

She loved to talk about
the magic of flat rainbows
and black carnations
while drinking red beer

She’s been gone now for many
years but some day I will
show you the rock where she
carved her initials right next
to those of Jesse James

WBPC Winner - Pushcart Nominee

He can’t see where everyone goes each day
and doesn’t care where they sleep,
but where they dream when they return
to their night place past this place
on the pavement, where he sits against the wall
and reads. He doesn’t need much—like his pants
he sews again and again, and the thin pages
of his Bible, but the psalms don’t wither.
Here he sings in Akan. Here, too, he sleeps.
When he dreams, the clouds open
to water, a mirror of the purest light
where the shadows disappear.
When the rain comes, he soaks it in.
His skin and soul looking for God
glow like God who saw the man he once saw
with a ring of fire around his neck,
consumed by the shrieks into voices
of weaverbirds. After the gang surrounded
the man, Joseph could not breathe
as the man grew unseen. For how long
Joseph did not speak—still that radiance
has not dissolved but lightened
his bones, and some days he just
disappears, leaving the pavement washed.

WBPC Winner - Pushcart Nominee

For the families

Between two storms I walk my dog
after a mass shooting near my home

there is a clinic and a hospital as
helicopters hum above, three hours now.

My god, who pulled the trigger
and who pulls the trigger inside?

Sirens wail as my dog wags his tail
loaded with delight. As we head home

the sun sails in satin pink through the clouds
dripping purple ink into a poem,

or whatever this is. This is no escape. Danger
surreal to itself dust worn and shelved

like a forgotten tome of tombs of names
4 are dead 4 are dead 4 are dead 4 are dead

I cannot forgive myself if I let the sky
between the storms be beautiful

before 4 were not-so-dead.
At home, my love still sleeps,

I see my phone, “update: 5 are dead” –
and I wait for her to wake…

WBPC Winner - Pushcart Nominee

In the botanical garden
orange poppies blaze through the meadow
and peace enters my feet, then slips into my bloodstream
flowing upward to the sun.
There are no words for this absolution,
no words for blessing.
I am votive to wind, to bird calls in the canyons,
to the cactus flowers in whose yellow cups tipsy insects
tumble among their pistils,
and to the giant boulders strewn under the oaks,
Samurai guarding the path.
And to the lost ant crawling over the labeled rings
of a halved sequoia trunk — a sapling in 1150 —
then crossing its rings to the Magna Carta in 1215,
searching fruitlessly for its kind in 1542
when Juan Carrillo explored
the Channel Islands, the ant inching
forward to the Declaration of Independence
and rings tightly yoked by violence together —
death by drought in 2000.
Unaware of its long rite of passage across eons,
the pilgrim finally disappears over the edge
of the trunk into shadows
and the leafy beatitude of home.

WBPC Winner - Pushcart Nominee

Packing up knick-knacks
In six months old
Newspaper
Taping bottoms, up
Of grocery store boxes
Sweeping up the dust
Of an old relationship
Moving out, moving in
More to life, living alone
Consequences too great
Together we clashed
Like polka-dots and stripes
Too loose, or too tight
It just didn’t fit me right
I’m crying my eyes out tonight
But, when I awake
Tomorrow morning
It will be a new day
I’ll be on my way
Footloose and fancy-free
Do what I want and say
What I please
No longer the prisoner
Who packed up these pieces
Of freedom, today
And moved away
In a truck
Without the two men.

WBPC Winner - Pushcart Nominee

A twice poet laureate proclaims that cicada
is a word that writers should never use,
the mere sight of it bringing him up short,
causing him to classify it as cliché—trite
symbol of memory, transformation, rebirth.

But just this afternoon, when I stepped outside,
I, too, was brought up short by cicadas, clicking,
reverberating from their masculine membranes
on their ribbed abs and obliques. These dog-day
choir members, chanting congregational songs,

synchronize their voices, as they bask in glow
of late summer sunshine, send out courting
calls. Just like in a rock band, the drummer
with his wicked sticks always gets the girl,
so these guys resonate their hollow tymbal,

sometimes as much as four hundred eighty
times a second, and girl bugs perched on limbs
of willows and redbuds, play hard to get, feign
disinterest, as they sip sap with straw-like mouths,
waiting patiently, after seventeen years, for Mr. Right.

4 million people call LA home. 4 million stories. 4 million voices…
sometimes you just have to stop and listen to one,
to hear something beautiful. LAPD HQ

Pastel Grey

Against the backdrop
of the subway’s makeshift stage,
her operatic voice blends
into the walls of a busy day
and exists but is taken
for granted much like the avalanche
of birds that descend,
expected to be there in time
to welcome the morning light.
'tho rarely thought worthy
of stopping to feed, even as
their songs feed the spirit.

Rose Patina

One day a police officer,
called into help, finds her
robbed of her violin,
dressed in pigtails
and homelessness.
He stops to record her song
that chokes his heart
with beauty, sends out his own tweet,
on his iPhone, resurrecting Puccini’s
O Mio Babbino Caro, shinning
his flashlight on her, to remind
the world of the splendor of kindness.

I asked my Muslim friend, “Which is worse
to paint a likeness of the Prophet or destroy
that portrait and thus erase His memory?”
“A man cannot erase the memory of Allah
for He resides within our every mind,”
my salah friend replied.
“The Prophet, blessed be He,
is but the mirror in which we see
the truth of what we all believe.
“Break the mirror and truth remains
unshattered, still a whole and clear
reflection that each shard retains
“a portion still divine though broken
a thousand times.” With that my friend
turned back to prayer and spoke no more

except again proclaim “God is great.”
With this avowal of undying faith
entered prayer ihram and discoursed
with me, the infidel, no more.

This poem is from Ken’s latest chapbook, Remember, published by Kelsay Books. Buy online at Kelsay Books.

What is life
If not an eager wait for tulips
Faithful in their return
To unfold their petals to the world’s embrace?

We yearn for the sun’s warm touch,
Its golden fingers on our faces
And the earth’s steady heartbeat beneath our feet.

What is life
but to witness those we cherish,
Thrive and flourish like the ancient trees,
And to cherish their laughter, etched with joy?

This life is meant for authenticity,
For love to flow like a gentle river,
For us to wade in its depths, unafraid.

To be
To honor each passing second,
As a sacred gift, not to be squandered,
But treasured like a rare and precious gem.

What is life
If not a dance of growth,
A journey to shed our limiting shells,
And embrace the truth of our wild essence?

What is life
A grand and wondrous tale.
This very moment, my beloveds, is life!
Live it boldly, without hesitation.

Live it with considerable purpose,
Both fierce and tender,
For life is fleeting, like a shooting star,
And we, mere stardust in this cosmic dance.

Live it well, beautiful ones - Live it well.

The shortest day folds in on itself,
an origami of fog and freeze
erasing all color except the red
shirt on the clothesline, bird
in the cedars barely moving
in the cold the dirt swallows.

Waxwings crescent over the roof,
showing us all is not angles
or the momentary constructs
we make out of time. Light
exhales, pauses as the air thaws,
inhales more length toward spring,
a hard-to-believe notion on this
dark side of the wall.

Back on earth, I dream of canals
bordered by cherry blossoms,
one branch dipping in the weight
of a black squirrel with its flourish
of tail. A car engine turns over,
turtles underground breathe
in the slightest glimmer
all the dark long. So much
we cannot understand in this
time of so much terror, war,
hunger beyond the reach
of curves, blossom, flight.

But the heart can’t help itself:
it wants to find the pocket
of just enough air to lift again.

Stewing Stock Ingredients:

4lb. whole chicken fryer
4 cups water
5 stalks celery with leaves, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 cup sliced carrots
3 sprigs parsley, chopped
2 teaspoon coarse salt
½ teaspoon coarse black pepper

Dumplings Ingredients:

1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon minced parsley
2 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
2/3 cup milk
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 egg, slightly beaten

Gravy Ingredients:

1 cup water
½ cup flour
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon ground pepper

Stewing Stock Instructions:

1. In a 6-quart Dutch oven combine chicken, water, celery, carrots, parsley, pepper, and salt; heat to boiling. Simmer covered 1-1/2 hours or until chicken is tender.
2. Remove chicken from stock, remove skin and de-bone the chicken.
3. Chop de-boned chicken into bite-size pieces; return to boiling reserved stock.

Dumplings Instructions:

1. In a medium bowl, combine flour, parsley, baking powder, salt, and nutmeg.
2. Stir in remaining ingredients; stir just until dry ingredients are moistened.
3. Drop dough by tablespoonfuls into boiling stock and hot chicken.
4. Cover tightly; return to boiling.
5. Reduce heat; DO NOT LIFT COVER.
6. Simmer for 12 – 15 minutes or until dumplings are fluffy and dry.
7. Arrange dumplings and chicken into a large serving bowl; cover to keep warm.
8. Reserve 4 cups of chicken stock; set aside.

Gravy Instructions:

1. In a medium bowl, combine water and flour; blend until smooth and set aside.
2. In a medium saucepan, bring the 4 cups of reserved stock to boiling; stir in flour.
3. Bring to a boil, stirring occasionally; cook until thickened.
4. Add salt and pepper.
5. Pour gravy over chicken and dumplings.

Makes 8 servings.

It was the end of summer and a beautiful morning. Ella woke up early as she usually did, but she didn’t get out of bed right away. After a few minutes, she called out “Mom!”

“What is it honey?” asked Mom.

“There’s a unicorn under my bed!”

“Oh, I see,” said Mom. “Unicorns are good luck, but what is he doing under your bed?”

“I think he is hungry.” said Ella. “He’s looking for something to eat.”

“Well, what do unicorns eat?” asked Mom.

“I don’t know,” said Ella. “I think they eat bugs.”

Ella got dressed quickly. During breakfast, Mom asked her what she wanted her unicorn to do.

Ella thought about it for a moment. “Since he is hungry, I want him to go outside where he can find some bugs to eat,” she said. “Then, I think it will be time for him to go home.”

He did go outside to find something to eat, but, since unicorns don’t really eat bugs, Little Unicorn found a lovely, old apple tree in the garden and he ate two crisp apples. Unicorns love apples.

Then he started missing his mama, so he decided it was time to go back to his home in the woods by the clear, sparkling stream.

Ella decided to follow him because she wanted to see where he lived. She would take her dog, Max, with her to keep her company. They would hide because she did not want Little Unicorn to see them and be startled. She packed a snack and some water for herself and Max.

Little Unicorn soon came to another big garden full of summer flowers and all kinds of vegetables. There were carrots, green beans, pumpkins, lettuce and potatoes. There he met a nice family of bunnies who gave him a crunchy carrot to eat. He thanked them for their kindness and went on his way.

After a while, he came to a large patch of ripe blackberries. There he met a family of deer and they shared the berries with him. He rested there for a few minutes and visited with the deer. Then he thanked them for their kindness and went on his way.

Then Little Unicorn came to a beautiful, green pasture with horses and cows. There he met a family of Bluebirds who were catching bugs. They offered him some of the bugs they caught, but, since unicorns don’t really eat bugs, he politely declined. Still, he thanked them for their kindness before going on his way.

Little Unicorn finally reached his home in the woods and found the clear, sparkling stream. It was shady and cool in the forest, and he was glad to be home. He bent down to get a drink from the stream. Suddenly all of his woodland friends came out to greet him. There were foxes, racoons, squirrels, the badgers and the owls and woodpeckers that live in the trees. And, of course, there were more deer.

Then Little Unicorn looked up and saw his mama. He ran to her, and Mama Unicorn was so happy to see him.

She knew he must he tired from his adventure. Once the woodland friends went back to their homes in the forest, Mama made a soft bed of leaves over a hollow log where Little Unicorn could take a nap.

He had a nice, long nap and dreamed of his adventures. When he woke up, he called out, “Mama!”

“What is it, honey?” asked Mama.

“There’s a little girl under my bed!”

“I see,” said Mama. “Little girls are good luck, but what is she doing under your bed?”

“I think she is hungry and looking for something to eat,” he said.

“Well, what do little girls eat?” asked Mama.

“I don’t know,” said Little Unicorn. “I think they eat bugs.”

You stare at your brother across the hospital bed. “You weren’t there, so how would you know?”

Mom’s eyes are taped shut and the rhythmic heave and sigh of the ventilator fills the silence. Aiden inhales and looks at the floor. He looks like he is trying to summon patience and courage for this conversation.

This annoys you. Aiden has always acted like this when challenged or knows he is being called out on something. A lingering childhood petulance that has travelled too far into adulthood. For once, you are not trying to prove him wrong or show him up, but he refuses to or cannot recognize the difference.

Aiden finally replies, “Mom did not name a power of attorney. She didn’t write it down. Didn’t have time before—,” he sweeps his arm toward mom, “before all this. She wouldn’t have without talking to me first.”

His tone is a scold. You finally tear your eyes away from the monitor and look at him as he adjusts his ball cap, putting it on backwards. Errant strands of hair stick up from under the band of the cap. He needs a shave and a cut. One of his shoelaces is untied and his jacket is rumpled.

You are not fooled. The lack of personal care is not because of mom. You wonder if he has lost his job.

You ask, “How’s work going?”

He rubs his face with both hands like he has just woken up. “Fine.” He shrugs and looks away, trying to be nonchalant. Dark circles, like dirty smudges, hang under his eyes.

“Good,” you say. It is a game you both have played all your lives. You both know he is lying.

But you find no comfort in being right about Aiden and you turn your attention back to mom. Shrunken and frail, her body looks adrift on the hospital bed. The covers come up to her neck as if she is being swallowed whole, the monitors and machines looming like a wake of vultures.

A heaviness fills you and you feel as though you have travelled a great distance and have only just arrived.

“Aid, I’m not the bad guy here. This is tough for both of us. Mom called me several weeks ago. She knew she didn’t have much time. She was very emphatic. She did not want to be kept alive on machines like this.”

“How do I know you’re even telling the truth?” Aiden raises his voice, but you hear the desperation underneath and know he is frightened. “Just because everything in your life is hunky-fine.” He is shaking his head. “You know what I think? Mom is just one more problem for you to solve. You can’t be bothered, so you just want to pull the plug and be done with her. Admit it. You always must have everything sorted and tied up in a neat little bow.” His tone is mocking now.

A nurse breezes in through the open door. “Good morning! How is everyone today?”

She walks to the far side of the bed and pushes a button on one of the monitors. “Doctors are making their rounds. They’ll be here soon,” she says conspiratorially.

The nurse has a pleasant face, but the creases at the corners of her eyes are telling. You suspect she has been listening outside in the hallway.

You get up and walk to the bedside and as you do, you get a whiff of Aiden’s breath. He has been drinking. You are suddenly aware of the small bulge in the side pocket of his jacket. Your eye catches the edge of a ribbed silver cap. A flask.

The nurse changes the dressing on mom’s IV, initialing the date and time in pen. She says, “There, that should do it. I’ll be back after rounds.” You get the impression she would like to say more, but she averts her gaze.

If the ventilator and monitoring are discontinued, will the IV fluids be removed, too? You want to ask about pain killers and hydration. Is your mom even in pain?

There are so many questions. So many decisions.

But when you look up to ask, the nurse is already gone. When you look at Aiden slumped in the chair, his eyes are closed.

You are suddenly so angry, your body trembles. You clench your fists as resentment pours through your veins like black ink. Like an IV wide open, the ink travels fast, coursing through every organ in your body until your limbs tingle with rage.

Oddly, it is your mom you are angry with. Not Aiden. Your mom, not Aiden, put you in the position of always being the bad guy.

Aiden’s right. Mom put nothing in writing. She did not designate a power of attorney. She did not even call Aiden. She expected you to carry out her wishes, handle the details, manage the estate. And like a good girl, you have like you have always done.

Most of all, she left you to soothe Aiden. To smooth things over with him. Take care of him, lend him money, and enable him as she has always done. You, the caretaker, the decision-maker. The responsible one.

You swallow back the acid rising in your throat and gaze down at your mom. Her face is slack, serene almost, and you think this is the most content you have ever seen her. You try to summon the pity you felt only moments ago, grasping for any remaining compassion, but it is out of reach, like fragments of a dream dissolving.

You hear footsteps and voices approach from down the hall. A herd of white coats enter the room and surround the bed. They ignore you at first. Someone logs onto the computer, while the others consult their phones, jostling one another and chattering amongst themselves. When they finally lift their heads, faux smiles plastered on their faces, one of them asks, “So, which one of you is in charge?”

You glance at Aiden. Bleary-eyed, lids fluttering, he sits up and runs his hand over the flask in his pocket. You can tell he is itching for a drink.

You take one last glance at your mom, then nod toward Aiden. “He is,” you say, a thrill shuddering right through you.

You ignore the stunned look of fear and confusion on Aiden’s face, and walk out. Your body feels loose, almost as if you are floating down the hallway. Your mom’s nurse is standing at a counter, talking with someone. You give her a little wave and walk on.

Here I was, standing in the place that’s meant for repair. For mending and fixing and returning people better that they were found.
But you… were unfixable. You… were unsewable. Hospice worthy, not returnable.
I looked down at you, my mother, hands on your chair still - resting.
And I know I’m alone.

The emergency room was filled to the brim – everyone in their own world,
their occasional glances seemed to saturate my soul.
It was more than I could bear, this time paused amid chaos,
It felt alien yet familiar – like this was how it was supposed to be.

I was acutely aware and yet - I heard nothing clearly…No distinction, no articulation at all
In front of me I saw lips moving and faces of expectation, or maybe anticipation, I couldn’t tell.
Just the dull swoosh of realization whizzing around me embracing me…
Waiting on my answer.

I process your slight head tilt, the lack of spoken word I still couldn’t get used to.
This woman that killed me in Words with friends, This woman that wounded me with her wit,
This woman that gloated over knowing more than most…
She was just a ghost.

Suddenly I’m aware of my surroundings again,
That the world is more than just me and you - moms shell,
The nurses and techs wait patiently for my orders but I can tell - they are becoming frayed.
Slowly, disbelievingly - I shake my head “no” .

Before I could turn away I heard an awful, guttural sound nearby
It would be a full 10 seconds before I could process that the sound was coming from me.
I broke down right there in the room full of people, all wanting to help but knowing they can’t.
I have to make this journey alone.

They help me back to your jeep. I chose to bring you home in it, your pride and joy because I thought we we’re escaping together.
I didn’t expect that 3rd stroke on the way out the door. I didn’t know you’d be taken alive.
The first took most of your speech, the second the rest. This 3rd one took your physical ability along with your dignity.
The jeep was not fit for this task.

As I stared from your, my mothers, chair to the passenger seat it may as well have been Mount Everest but “we’ll climb”, I thought.
The staff generously helped me get you inside and buckled you up real tight.
I almost laughed out loud when I realized what great lengths we take out of habit to protect, even the dead that are walking.
I shake it off and drive.

Processing it all isn’t an option, it is time to get things done and done well.
Just like you taught me.
I make phone calls & line up helpers at your parking spot so we can get you unmounted safely.
I beat them all somehow and surprisingly easily slid you back to your wheelchair waiting on the ground. I know if you knew - you’d be anxious, not proud.
Together, we roll past your favorite familiar scenery to your home.

Looking back I wish I took more time to show you the pond you loved so much.
The turtles sunbathing lazily, The egret you loved to bird watch when you didn’t think anyone was watching you.
You begged for your own bed before you lost your voice but it wasn’t practical we told you.
If only we knew you wouldn’t have needed it long.

Death is a difficult thing but dying is off the charts hard.
Wanting you to live but knowing you can’t. Wanting you to have peace but watching you suffer. Helplessly.
Not knowing which is easier to wish for, more time or less suffering.
It’s all a blur to me.

Those last moments days later – are permanently ingrained. The sights, the sounds – those damn sounds, still haunting me.
Thinking you’d hate the fact I was calling you mama and rubbing your head but doing it anyway.
Your sons picture strategically placed front and center in your view in case you could still see.
Knowing you’d rather it was him next to you but loving you anyway.

I remember telling you that you were wrong about me. That my gentle forgiving nature was what, in fact, made me strong.
That the perceived weakness was a facade of yours and I would be OK. That you could let go after any raspy breath you chose.
I promised to make sure the kids and my brother would be OK too… best I could.
I remember every word.

Then you, once vibrant and full of color, were now peaceful and pastel.
Your raging red angry rash was what went first, disappearing into your skin tone.
I remember thinking I was so glad you weren’t suffering from that damn itch anymore.
I remember feeling relief for you. Shock for me, and time standing still again.

I wanted to memorize every single inch of you. Knowing it was the very last time we’d be in the same room like this.
I held your hand until it was cold. And then some more before quietly tiptoeing inside to get our golden child.
Him and I standing in front of you, the super still quiet of the room. No longer hearing breaths or gurgles - or you chastising us.
My brother, now an orphan, and me - without a mom.

Look around you.
Nature propels our world
and we are only tolerated
by its free spirit.
Nature is the kiss from a beautiful rose,
the melancholy of a faded lily.
Nature is the sun’s reflection
of your lover’s flowing hair
in a river of distinction.
It is a sunset, unable to describe.
Nature is a stout old tree
you can wrap your arms around.
It is the sea, gained by the tide in one phase
and lost by the ebb in another.
Let us not disavow Nature.
Let not the Sixth Extinction endure.

His voice floats
across the airwaves,
knowing no bounds.
The Canadian bard’s lyrics
journey across the world.
A comforting melody
surrounds your soul
on long, lonely roads
where the sun will never go down.
Ships and trains forever carry stories
from a mind only partially indexed,
rolling down a highway of sound waves
towards an eternity of light.

It was the summer of ‘21.
Everyone had bacterial vaginosis.
The roaring twenties are back, baby!
We took our heels out from the backs of our closets
And dusted them off. You’re in New York,
You’re allowed to cough again; you’re allowed
to contract a virus or infection. When we go to the Upper East Side,
taking the silver underground snake from our
Pest-filled, vest-filled Village dream, you’ll
Turn to me and say, I feel like I’m in Europe.
We are in Europe! We’re in Europe and the Americas
And in the sky and the ground all at once.
Jump into the East River and see if you get a burning rash.
Womankind was meant to live like this -
Within ten minutes of each other by foot.
The sanctity of female friendship! The rats in the
First Avenue L station! The taste of true adulthood:
Trader Joe’s extra firm tofu roasted in a smoking oven.
Girls everywhere are putting hardcover books into tote bags.
When it rains for three days straight, we lace up our boots
and face the wet world. Freeze the summer in a photo:
the purple strobe lights of Catch, Meatpacking at midnight,
We’ve been drunk all summer long, we’ve been shaking
Hands with the bacteria. Nothing can hurt us,
We have no Achilles’ heel. We are just young, and fun,
And in love, and we all have BV.

(Author’s Note: This memoir about my guide dog won first place in the 2021 Memoir category in the Ozarks Writers League Writing Contest. Jemma touched many lives while she was with me. Unfortunately, she died of cancer on her eighth birthday.)

Time stretched as I sat in my dorm room at Leader Dogs for the Blind in Rochester Hills, Michigan, waiting to meet my freedom and independence.

I want my dog. Bring me my dog.

I sat on the mat where he or she would sleep, so my scent would be near. I fingered the nasty chain to attach my dog to the wall overnight, making sure I knew exactly how to release the clasp, even when barely awake. I couldn’t understand why my guide had to sleep six feet away, tied to a wall, instead of beside my bed, tied to me with her leash.

Their house, their rules.

And Leader Dogs had a lot of rules. No toys, no furniture, on-leash at all times, even in our rooms, chained to a wall overnight and when we left the room.

After almost three hours of waiting, finally, a knock. I leaped up and sprinted to the door.

“Are you ready?” Amber asked.

“Are you kidding?”

“Do you want to know your dog’s name?” The gigantic smile that lit her voice and face told me how much she enjoyed what Leader Dogs calls Dog Issue Day.

“Yes.” I’d been waiting well over two hours and was obviously the last in my group of four to receive my dog.

For the love of all things holy, BRING ME MY DOG NOW.

“It’s Jemma.”

“A girl, I presume?”

I got a dog with a COOL name YAY!.

“Yes.” Amber stretched out the agony.

“What breed?”

“You’ll find out in a couple of minutes.”

“Meanie.”

“That’s me. Hand me your leash.”

I handed it over. Two days ago, stiff, but now pliable. I had worked that leather in every conceivable direction until my hands hurt. Jemma would start to know my scent before we met. The next time I held it, MY dog would be at the other end, at last.

My mom, who lives next door to me, wanted me to have a blonde girl. She likes female animals better, and blonde dogs photograph better than black ones, which tend to come off like blobs in pictures. Mom used to teach photography and had won numerous contests. Photos aside, why it mattered to her, I wasn’t sure. We’re neighbors, but I don’t live in her house. Would Mom get her wish?

Thunder and Molly, my first two guide dogs who I trained myself, were dark girls. I didn’t have a gender preference. Molly’s black coat glistened brightly. Thunder’s cattle-dog-like appearance fooled people, as she was a pure-bred smooth collie with mostly black, brown, and blue merle colors. I hoped for short fur. I wasn’t a huge fan of goldens, so even though I didn’t tell them I wouldn’t take one, I hoped for a lab of any color or my top choice, a golden-lab cross.

It would be so cool to be able to say, “My dog is a goldador.”

Amber asked me to go sit down to receive my girl and suggested I turn off the music, just for the beginning while she was talking to me. She left the door unlatched for ease of entry. Since she had told me to keep things low-key, as my dog would find that more comforting, I had prepared a playlist of quiet music. I had been playing said songs since coming back to my room after lunch. The calm tones hadn’t stopped me staring down the door, yearning for my new guide dog.

But hopefully, this would help Jemma feel everything would be okay. The soothing sounds put a nice ambiance into the room. The energies of the songs, smells, and emotions had to be right in order to support my new fur baby, who had been through so much in her short life.

I sat on the floor. I wanted to be right on her level and not at all intimidating. She had been through a lot of changes within the last few months and was going to be nervous. Three minutes stretched into three hours, at least in my eager mind. Soon, I heard another set of click-click-click steps with a human handler, then a light rap on the door, and my new girl with Amber, still out of my line of sight, stepping inside.

“You can call her name as soon as I let go of the leash.” Amber spoke softly, setting the tone.

Would Jemma be a black lab? Yellow lab? Golden retriever? Goldador?

“Okay, I’ve dropped the leash,” Amber said.

I tamped down my exuberance and quietly called Jemma to me.

A golden girl trotted into the room, tail low. She glanced at me, put her head down, and sniffed everywhere. Her breath came in loud, rapid pants.

Poor stressed-out puppy.

“Come here, Jemma.” I reached out my hands for her. She dashed over to me and kissed my face with rapid licks. Most people believe when a dog licks your face right away, it means they love you. Dog language is different. That behavior means “Please, don’t hurt me.” It’s a sign of fear.

This was not the choirs of angels singing and the dog immediately bonding to me that I wished to experience. And since I’m an animal communicator, I knew her thoughts and not just her body language.

My hands brushed her briefly, then she skittered away and sniffed around. I wanted to cradle her in my arms and tell her she has her forever mommy and her forever home now, and that everything was all right. I held back tears. I would need to handle my fragile little girl with patience and loving encouragement.

What have they done to her?

My brain clicked a puzzle piece into place.

Tight-lipped as Amber had been about my “Juno,” the generic name Leader Dogs uses before you know your guide’s actual name, she had told me something important. Jemma was a prison puppy. I had imagined that her being convict-raised along with the grooming tools they gave me, which were better suited to short fur, meant I would get a lab or goldador. Labs are steady by nature. Goldens, more empathic.

They put sensitive, emotional goldies in prisons?

Jemma came back to me. I extended my hands for her to sniff, then stroked her silky ears. “I’m your new mommy, Jemma. I promise to take good care of you. You’re okay.”

Jemma went back to scrutinizing the tidy dorm room with her nose. Knowing whomever I received was a teenage dog, potentially apt to chew or carry things around, I left nothing but my cell phone and the TV remote on my nightstand.

Okay, Amber, you gave me my dog, now go away and let us settle in and start to bond.

The trainer sat in a chair. “She’s a golden retriever.”

“Yes, I can tell.” I called Jemma over again.

Still stress-panting, my new guide once again rapid-fire licked my face. I grabbed the leash to keep her with me for a moment. She sat in front of me, facing away, while I gently scratched her neck.

Poor baby. You’re so afraid, but I promise you have a forever home now.

I let her tether go so she could explore. Her tail kept wagging in the low position.

“See, Jemma girl, everything’s just fine.” She was so beautiful.

“She was born February twentieth of 2014, so she’s 17 months old,” Amber told me.

Our instructor kept talking to me, but most of it came across like one of Charlie Brown’s teachers… “Wha-wha-w-w-wu-WHUH…raised by a prisoner at Fort Dodge Correctional Facility. Waw-WU-w-w-wu-wu-WUH.”

Only a few phrases made it through the dog-induced haze. Something about trimming her feet. Something about people in the hall. We’d be training together every day but Sunday for three more weeks. I could catch up on anything I blurred over later.

I patted the floor. “Come settle beside me, Jemma,” I encouraged. She sat with her back to me.

“Her tail is always going, and she is a curious dog. Loves to explore.”

“Were you her trainer?” Just because I was in Amber’s group didn’t necessarily mean she was the primary instructor of my dog.

“I’ve known her since the beginning, and yeah, I was her main trainer. Her sponsor was my mentor.”

My anxious dog panted hard and trotted all over the room. I grabbed her leash so she would come and let me help calm her.

“Goldens are strong mommy or daddy dogs,” Amber explained. “She’ll settle in well with you within a few days, but at first, she’ll look to us.”

“You’ve been working with her for a few months, so that’s to be expected.”

My poor baby kept stress-panting and pacing the room with her tail wagging low. I needed to get her calmed down, and that would take a little time.

“What’s her weight?”

“Currently, she’s fifty-four pounds.”

“That sounds low to me for a teenage golden.”

“She was a little pudgy when she first came back. They over-dieted her.”

On her next pass, I gently explored my new dog. “She’s awfully thin.” The xylophone of ribs beneath my hand alarmed me.

You starved my dog. You stressed her out, and you starved her.

“She’ll put on weight while she’s here.”

Don’t act so nonchalant, Amber. You were her trainer. You shouldn’t have let a growing dog get that skinny.

All school-trained guide dog puppies I’ve ever known have been shuffled around a bit before meeting their human handler. They start their journey with the person or family who keeps their mother, then at seven or eight weeks old, they move to a puppy raiser, around their first birthday, they go back to the school for evaluation and training, then a few months later, if they make the grade, they get paired with their blind handler, then off to their new homes.

“When you see the vet in a couple of weeks, she’ll give you a goal weight.”

How can they know what’s best for her adult weight when she’s only a teenager?

“We like everyone to keep your dog trim.”

“That’s my plan,” I assured Amber.

I don’t want a moving hassock, but she shouldn’t be a fur-covered skeleton either.

I pushed down my anger about her being so emaciated. I didn’t want to make this any harder for my dog. The anger was certainly not at her. And in a year, she would be one hundred percent mine, not the school’s anymore.

Jemma got up and went exploring again. My poor, stressed girl continued to pant rapidly. I beamed love at my beautiful new guide. My trainer droned on about… whatever.

Amber, please go away now so I can get to know my dog.

Some of the instructions made it through the fog. “No human food. We check their poop every few days, so we’ll know if she gets something she shouldn’t.”

The poop police are watching. Do they have in-room surveillance, too?

Amber continued, “Keep her attached to you at all times until we tell you it’s okay to let her loose in the room with her leash on. And clip her by the collar to the wall anytime you leave to go to the bathroom, do laundry, or whatever else without her.” She pointed to the chain in the wall by her sleeping mat for emphasis.

I understood perfectly well the importance of keeping your new dog tied to you every minute for a while. I call it the Great Leash-Up. It teaches them to be connected to you and ensures they don’t get into trouble. A crate seemed a much better option than chaining a dog to the wall, though. I imagined that’s how she had slept up until now.

Jemma, I need to do it here, but I will not chain you to a wall when we get home. Promise. I will attach you to a table or bed sometimes, but it won’t be a chain.

Leader Dogs gives every student a metal tie-down. I put mine in the far corner of the top shelf in the closet, where it stayed. I would not even bring it home with me.

More Peanuts teacher wa-wa, then, “We’ll call everyone out in about an hour to have you start working your dogs in the hallways.”

“Will I need the harness?”

“Not today. We’ll just work on basics like heel and sit."

After what felt like the whole hour but was probably only a couple of minutes in real time, Amber left us alone.

I talked soft assurances to my girl. “You’re safe, and everything’s fine, my beautiful girl, we’re going to have a wonderful life together…I’m your mommy forever.”

Once Amber had left, Jemma’s tail wagged higher as she darted around the room. Her panting slowed some, but I knew from her behavior and thoughts that she still felt terrified. Also, as an empath, I also felt her fear. And she kept telling me not to hurt her. My heart ached.
As before, I had to grab the leash to get my girl to stick with me for more than a second.

Jemma went to investigate her new harness, which hung by the door. She reared up and sniffed it.

“That will be yours soon.”

I turned the dog day-playlist back on. The wondrous music box, otherwise known as my cellphone, fascinated Jemma. Wagging her tail high, she sniffed it, looked at me, then sniffed it again.

“Is that a magical singing box, my Jemma girl?”

She licked my chin. With Amber gone, she settled with me better. After a few minutes, she stopped stress-panting, and her explorations became less frenetic and more simple curiosity. I can’t blame a dog for checking out a new space, but it hurt that she felt so wary and afraid. When she came over, I stroked her soft fur. The whole time, I spoke reassuring words to her.

Then, I started singing along with some of the songs. Jemma sat up and stared at me. I supposed she didn’t hear much of that in the prison.

“I can’t help falling in love with you.” I sang. My girl stared into my face, slurping me occasionally, through several songs. She especially loved that one.

Jemma nestled beside me of her own free will. Soon, she rested her head on my lap.

I altered the line in “Love me Tender,” to be, “Oh my Jemma, I love you, and I always will.”

Her soulful eyes drifted closed at last, and she sighed.

(For Jane)

You gave me this city thirty years ago
bewitched me
with iron-laced galleries above arcane streets,
music and food drifting
from French Quarter doorways.
Every year since then,
we have walked beneath antique oaks
that witnessed duels fought over beauty
such as yours.
Here,
I have seen the sky on fire above the Mississippi
and often walked with your hand in mine
the white light of a full moon
pursuing us along black water waves as we stroll.
But tonight
we walk from the alley of pirates
to stand on these stones
before this cathedral
beneath two contrails above a three-quarter moon
slipping through ragged clouds
The past swallows all
as we watch painters, poets and jugglers
mingle with angels
and whores
and the ghosts of both.
It is in this moment
with the steady clop of horse hooves
before an unseen carriage
at last, I understand this portal,
and know
why one hand holds yours like gold
and the other becomes familiar with a pistol grip.

My friend Lester Armagost loved Halloween. He lived around the corner from me in a turn-of-the-century house. In mid-October, Lester would start turning his house into a haunted castle. For many years, it was the location for the town’s most popular and much anticipated Halloween party.

The prep involved removing furniture from the lower floor, stapling Visqueen to the walls, putting up decorations, and hauling in bales of hay for seating. For the yearly party, Lester did things to his house that most folks would never consider doing. On Halloween night, Lester would open his home to the children who were trick-or-treating. Later in the evening at 9 p.m., the house was open to adults. During the Halloween party, the upstairs bathtub served as an iced beer bin. There was a well-stocked bar in his kitchen, and Lester hired bartenders to mix drinks. He did everything necessary to create a good time for his guests.

I knew Lester was ill before we met and became friends. That didn’t bother me. I knew several people who had AIDS. I had lost friends to the disease. When I lived in Fayetteville, I hung out with four guys whom I considered my best friends. Of the four, three succumbed to the disease. Although there was a fear among the general population, I knew that AIDS could not be transmitted through casual contact. The stupid disease was not going to keep me from making and loving friends, sick or not.

During March of 1994, a late-season snowstorm dropped several inches of snow on Eureka Springs. Lester called to tell me that we had a friend, Steve, who was in bad shape and was in the ICU at the Eureka Springs hospital. Because the roads were impassable, Steve’s nearest relative, a brother living in Oklahoma, could not travel to Eureka Springs to be with Steve. Lester and I donned our snow boots and walked to the hospital. We didn’t want our friend to be alone.

Even though we weren’t really family, because of the seriousness of Steve’s situation, the staff bent the rules. They let us sit in the ICU with him. I don’t know if Steve knew we were there, but I like to think that he did know. Lester and I rubbed his arms and legs and held his hand. As sad and trying as the situation was for Lester and me, the time the two of us spent together at the hospital sitting with Steve was quality time. We cried, we laughed, and we talked about friendship, hopes, and fears. I kept thinking that it could be Lester in that bed. Lester was thinking the same. Steve lived less than twenty-four hours after being admitted. He was thirty-nine years old when he passed. Before leaving the hospital, Lester and I had a good cry, hugged for a long time, and silently walked home in the snow.

The weather in July of 1995 was summertime hot when Lester became bedridden. Unlike Steve, who passed in a hospital, Lester was in a bed in his home and surrounded by many friends who sat with him during his final hours. He lay unconscious with flowers strewn all around him on the bed and pillow. I was very sad. At the same time, I thought that the sight of him on the bed, smothered in flowers like an Indian prince, was beautiful. I knew that Lester was surrounded by love when he left us. He died at the age of forty-one.

The following Halloween, there was one more party in Lester’s house. The party was held to honor him, and it was as festive and fun as ever. Lester would have liked that. His ashes were at the party in a beautiful urn, and I know he was there in spirit.

It is good to leave this world while being loved.

Gunfight of hipbone feared nausea
mother’s pinched brown fingers
on the day you get diagnosed
a prophet with a P.H.D.
adds letters to your name
sends sweet holy alprazolam uncured
grabs the pink Cadillac of your throat,
lets Ani Difranco know you have anorexia before you do.
Penny taste of ensure/ echo cafeteria
Who of starved belly, atrophied to ache?
or the ice cream you eat every day, dial-up dinner &
Man Whose Fault It Is, all of them,
face the music
& the music is weeping with the rain,
the college you wish you attended, the professor who said you’d go early, advanced.
Mr. Day and his question about a sunflower, “Is it only one flower? Or is it the potential of every sunflower?”
Were you a sunflower? Prescription-seed,
complex PTSD wouldn’t let you know.
Show us Man Whose Fault It Is-
Forgiveness is dead, and there is no permission to give.

Udoka often regards thoughts of death with the weight of uncertainty pressing into the corners of his mind; an unsure kind of sadness in his heart, a secondhand grief gathering in his throat.

It might have been the nature of grief–the startling quality of sad wails and the dramatic flair with which people mourned–that caused him to think of death as an inherently malevolent thing, a thing worthy of being feared.

Once, when he was seventeen and his mother had just received the call informing her of her father’s death, he watched her–this woman for whom the word ‘strong’ had always been a defining adjective–crumble to the floor like a sack of willowy things, a community of broken things. He observed her as she cried, mouth agape in a terrible scream, eyes bleeding tears and red enough he feared she would cry blood too.

He saw her take on a newness in that moment. It should not have startled him, should not have unsettled him in the way that it did and yet he found himself filled with a crippling stillness, wondering if she had not in fact known, months before the call came, that her father would die.

Months later, he left for University and washed away the memory of her grief from his mind, absolved himself of that irrational fear of death.

But he remembers it now, the signature of that fear, the distinct quality that it carries.

He is dressed in black and she is seated across from him on a plush navy blue couch in her living room. She is wearing her favorite house cloth; a breezy, feathery night gown. He remembers that gown, she had worn it religiously throughout his childhood. He is almost surprised that it is still intact.

“I am gay.” He says it softly as though the decibel in his voice might affect the extent to which he knows his words will hurt her.

She is silent. He expected this reaction but it does nothing to ease the tightening in his stomach or the gathering of sweat in his armpits. He averts his eyes from her unreadable face and focuses instead on the crisscrossing design on the carpet beneath his feet. He almost doesn’t notice it when she stands up from the couch and heads into the adjoining kitchen.

She returns with a pink bowl clutched in her hands and for a small moment he imagines that the bowl is filled with water. He imagines that she walks up to him and splashes the water on him, eyes blazing with betrayed fury, mouth agape and screaming in that same terrible manner that had crippled him all those years ago.

But she goes back on the couch and balances the bowl on her thighs. It is filled with melon seeds.

She plucks one seed from the bowl and peels off it’s crisp yellow shell to reveal the cream colored seed inside. She picks another and repeats the pattern. Her movements are methodical. The silence is stifling.

“Since when?” He is almost startled by the gentle resonance of her voice, by the unflinching ease with which she asks the question.

He finds, in that moment, that he does not know what to say. The crunch of egusi shells are the only sounds he can make out in the stillness. He listens closely for another sound, something outside the sphere of his mother’s presence, something from the outside world that might prove that he is not so utterly alone in that moment. Anything that might anchor him. He hears nothing.

“I was born this way, mama.” He is reminded of that Lady Gaga song ‘baby I was born this way’ and he finds that the memory causes him to want to laugh, it unloosens something in his stomach.

She looks up at him from the bowl of egusi seeds and he resolves to hold her stare, to not blink or avert his eyes.

“Nobody is born gay, Udokamma.” Her response is crisp. He has not even had the time to reel before she returns to peeling her egusi, carefully nonchalant of the amalgamation of emotions that clouds his face.

When he says nothing, she takes the incentive to continue.

“There is a pastor on Okigwe street. Very powerful man of God. He will deliver you of this madness.” Her tone is smooth, fluid and precise.
There is something about her easiness that stills Udoka. He watches her, the stylish way in which she avoids looking at him, the utter lack of surprise, the absence of betrayal in her aura. He watches her as she plucks the melon seeds away from their shells and then he comes into the realization that–for a small moment–causes him to lose feelings in his legs.

“You knew.” His words are an accusation.

She does not deny it.

He begins to cry. The reaction startles him but he yields himself to it.

“You knew, all these years. You watched me suffer and all this while you knew?” He tries to hide the betrayal in his voice but it bleeds through nonetheless.

“And so what if I knew? What does it change, Udokamma? Tell me. What does it change?”

The air charges with something electric, something large and cruel and hurtful. He wishes that she will cry too, that her eyes will moisten and that her body will crumble as it had done all those years ago when her father died.

But she does not cry and all he can think about is that call from the neighbours a few hours past that had unmoored him.

“Hello, Udoka. Your mother had a heart attack while peeling Egusi. It happened so suddenly. She’s gone.”

It is him who crumbles instead, him who falls towards the floor like a sack of willowy things. It is him who holds the bowl of egusi seeds and the feathery night gown that carries the unique signature of her musk.

She was looking at me from across the table with beguiling eyes. As soon as I sat down in front of my sterling silver I could feel them on me like hot, incandescent stage lights. They were watching me, sagacious, watching as I picked up my glass of water and brought it to my lips, watching as I wiped the dampness from around my mouth. Curious eyes, they were. Ogling me like I was the first woman they’d ever seen in their life.

And I didn’t dare meet their gaze, despite how easy it would have been. All I had to do was look up — a gesture so innocuous that no one would’ve batted an eye. Pretend to glimpse the clouds, the way the sun was slanted on our dinner table, the ketchup stains on the worn tablecloth… anything that would have given me an excuse to glance at her for even a moment.

Keeping my eyes fixated on the wilty spinach salad in front of me may have been the hardest thing I had to do in my life. And that wasn’t a hyperbole.

Four tomatoes, sliced down the middle. Were they cherry or grape? They looked too rounded to be cherry but had too many seeds to be grape. Maybe they were some sort of heirloom?

“How’s your food, dear?”

I looked up, stunned, feeling more exposed than a bathtub murder victim, body naked sprawled out for everyone to see up-close. For a second I’d forgotten there was anyone else around me. I blinked rapidly and glanced down at my food once again.

I couldn’t bear to glare at those damn tomatoes anymore — all red and fleshy and gushing with seeds, skins wrinkling ever so slightly from the sting of the sun.

This is it, I thought. I’m going to be lovesick all over the table.

The nutrients I was born with,
You have ripped from my flesh.
My shell,
You have fractured.
Digging into my core.
I am a mother.
Guarding her children.
Vengeful for those who do us harm.
Wiser than the minds who adorn greed.
Stronger than the iron you seek.
Take notice of my bareness.
Take pity on your children’s future.
For I am a mother who will not forgive.
Broken shards are left for you to feast on.
Do not underestimate my fury.
You narcissistic human race.
I will suck the marrow from your bones.
Wrapping you in dust.

mere memory does everything

Fair is fowl and fowl is fair
that’s all ye know…
and all ye need to know…?

Speaking is a form of
writing with tongue,
and writing a form
of speaking with pen
as such won’t a test
on this with a demo class
really estimate the true
potential in a teacher aspirant
necessary for a student ?

But instead think of one, only
with multiple choice questions,
something that tests only memory.

Can mere recollection of memory
without something to test
research, analytical ability
and creativity out of a
brainstorming extempore
assess the quality?

We just buy books
that have scores of
multiple choice questions
prepared by “experts” and
just remember the types of
questions and answers
or memorize those from
old question papers,

commit the dates and
years of famous deaths
and births, wars and pandemics,
names of authors and
famous / notorious personalities,

instead of the creative potential
or “imagination …(that is)…
more important than knowledge.”
as Einstein says.

That’s enough and promising
to be “qualified” to teach
at any university,
assures the Government.

But can mere memory ascertain
that you can lecture
an hour on counter-terrorism
or counter-intelligence or the
imminent threat of AI or Robotics
to human existence or write
a phenomenal dissertation
on Einstein’s quote :
“Pure mathematics is,in its way,
the poetry of logical ideas”?

Can only reading and writing skills
include listening and speaking as well?

Today “National or State Eligibility Test”
has even become the most
glamorous post nominal
and a blaring promise of
a secure job, with fat perks
and a lifetime dignity.

A NET or SET-qualified beginner
moves from pillar to post
for a ghost writer for
a couple of Scopus Journal
publications and thesis
for his PhD that is
mandatory for promotion.

Indian Government considers National Eligibility Test (NET) or State Eligibility Test (SET) as a standard to teach in a university or college. This exam is just based only on multiple choice questions which are to be answered on a OMR sheet.

Your wings spread
on Alki Beach next to Puget Sound.

You are wearing red mittens
and the snow glitters near your pink ears.

Your hair like poured butterscotch radiates
bright stripes of the morning’s sun.

You giggle, “Look at me!
I’m a snow angel!”

and I recall what the nurse
said just four years ago,

“Your baby, your beautiful baby,
hair like an Irish child.”

and how I wrapped my arms around you
whispering in your ear,

You are mine, stay with me.

No prophet, self-driven, chose clay to mould,
enchant it. Judged by fancy and it seemed
to fall together. Suspecting happy accidents
he searched for flaws, soon found them:
seams of discontent stretched length to length,
a jagged rift rent head from heart, heart from him.
Hard handed, he squeezed the seeded clay
too late. The earth had set and would not ply.
Seal imperfections. He stuffed each crack
then smoothed to a shine. To no avail.
He whittled stolid stone and wedged it in.
It fell rejected. The breach grew great.
Plane down the scale, eliminate distortions.
Still saw beneath the crust the secret spider strike a smile.
What now to do? All craft he knew
and energy expended, he felt the fault in him
and he a god. But to rivet meant to split,
to split destroy, and thus, he knew, to lose
entirely. Bent on achievement, foresaw
recasting dream, no locked rock, bird’s beak,
flushed by selfish heaven’s purloined flame.

Three Worlds/Question/Wandering/Curiosity

My heart conceives
Silence in the chaos
The womb is the culmination of
Three worlds,
“Oh lord of the caves”,
Where do you reside?

Hearthstone/Answer/Request/Surrender

Mountain gooseberry,
Primula grow in clusters on my skin
I ran into the temples
To find you in the stone.
If you reside in stone,
Why don’t you abscond to see me?

My body is your hearthstone
Oh lord of the highest peaks!
Please come home.
There is no meaning in my existence
Without you.

Union/Euphoria/Laundry/Spiritual Awakening

Rivers deliquesce in the blood
Gush back and forth between the
Arteries and veins
Laundering my
Pride
Guilt
Lust
Wrath
Envy
Sloth
Gluttony.

A One-Act Play

By Charles L. Templeton

Cast
Judge: Wanda Windbag
Prosecutor: Jubilation T. Calhoun
Defense Attorney: Delores Fishdodger
Defendant: The Donald
Jury: The Audience

Judge Windbag: I would remind the jury that since Mr. Trump offered to testify on his behalf, he will not be allowed to plead the Fifth Amendment during questioning by the prosecutor, Mr. Calhoun. It is the hope of this judge that the prosecutor will ask some semi-intelligent questions and refrain from offering up those sugarcoated softballs that, the defendant’s attorney, Ms. Fishdodger, spent the last four hours asking the defendant.

Atty. Delores Fishdodger: I object!

The Donald: You go get ‘em, Fishy!

Judge Windbag: Oh, sit down, Ms. Fishdodger, you can’t object to me! In case you haven’t noticed … I AM THE JUDGE! And I will not tell you again, Mr. Trump, do not speak in my courtroom, unless you are called upon.

The Donald: Well, why does Fishy get to object, but I can’t?

Judge Windbag: Because she’s your attorney.

The Donald: Oh, so if I’m my attorney, I can object?

Judge Windbag: Yes, but then you would have a fool for an Attorney, a role which I think Ms. Fishdodger has adequately fulfilled for you. So, if you have no more questions Mr Trump, may we move this along? I’m having a root canal at five thirty, which I am starting to look forward to. It couldn’t be this painful.

The Donald: Oh, but you would be wrong there, Judge Windbag. I had one of those not long ago. But then that would be determined by how you would define ‘long.’ But I know long, Judge. And I know painful. Nobody knows pain like me. I am the mother and father of all pain. Believe me, Judge, my pain is tremendous…

Judge Windbag: Enough! I am sure that not only is your pain tremendous, but so is that of anyone who has to listen to you longer than five minutes. Let’s move this trial along. Do you have any questions for this witness Attorney Calhoun?

Prosecutor Jubilation T. Calhoun: Indeed I do, Your Honor.

Judge Windbag: Well, come on, man. Don’t stand there like the cat’s got your tongue, I’ve got a dental appointment I’m looking forward to. Approach the defendant and ask your first question.

Prosecutor Jubilation T. Calhoun: The cat doesn’t have my tongue, Your Honor, just my brain. Very well, Mr. Trump …

The Donald: Hold on there, counselor, if you would allow me Judge? Since, Jubilation, you don’t mind if I call you Jubilation, do you? You can call me Mr. President. Jubilation has mentioned a cat having his tongue, which will help me explain “grabbing ‘em by the pussy …”

Prosecutor Jubilation T. Calhoun: Objection!

Judge Windbag: You can’t object to yourself. Maybe your mother could, but you can’t. You opened this Pandora’s Box.

The Donald: I never said grab ‘em by the Pandora’s Box…

Judge Windbag: One more outburst and I will have the defendant gagged! Now, let’s proceed.

The Donald: If I’m gagged, how will I answer questions?

Judge Windbag: (Fist clenched) You will have to write your answers down. Now, let’s get on with this farce of a trial.

The Donald: Oh, I don’t mind writing at all, you Honor, I have beautiful handwriting. The most beautifulist of all the Presidents. I’m most proud of my Ds and Ts, they are gorgeous …

Judge Windbag: (Hand on Forehead) I believe I might be having the DTs … Mr. Calhoun, let’s proceed.

Prosecutor Jubilation T. Calhoun: Uh, thank you, Your Honor…I think?. Mr. Trump, have you ever lied to hide the truth about something you have done?

(pause)

Judge Windbag: The defendant will answer the question.

The Donald: Oh, sorry, Your Honor, I was waiting for a pen and paper. I thought you wanted me to write out my answers.

Judge Windbag: (sighs) That will not be necessary, at this time. Just answer the question.

The Donald: Very well, Judge, and might I add that you are looking particularly beautiful today. You don’t own a cat, do you?

Judge Windbag: Mr Trump!

The Donald: Sorry, Your Honor, Er, ah… what was the question?

Prosecutor Jubilation T. Calhoun: Have you ever lied to hide the truth about something you have done?

The Donald: No way! The Donald is the truthiest person in America, maybe the world. Putin is a close second. But no one is more truthy than me. My truth is tremendous. People love it. I can give them one truth today and an entirely different truth tomorrow. And they will love both truths equally.

Prosecutor Jubilation T. Calhoun: So, you have never lied?

The Donald: No, never. If the President believes it’s the truth, then it’s the truth.

Prosecutor Jubilation T. Calhoun: But you are not the President…

The Donald: I don’t believe that, so it can’t be true, can it, Jubal? You don’t mind if I call you Jubal do you? You can call me Mr. President.

Judge Windbag: This should be where you change your tactics Mr. Calhoun. Your current line of questioning is taking us further down the former President’s rabbit hole.

Prosecutor Jubilation T. Calhoun: Very well, Your Honor. Mr. Trump, did you have any discussions with foreign leaders before the events of January 6th?

The Donald: Absolutely! I have tremendous conversations with everyone … kings, queens, prime ministers, dictators, and even some aliens. All very classy conversations. You know, the very most classiest.

Prosecutor Jubilation T. Calhoun: Aliens?

The Donald: Sure, why not? They love me. We’re building a space hotel together. The Trump Hole. You know like a Black Hole. It is where all their money will disappear. It’s going to be huge. My friend Elon is going to find a way to take people there. Classy stuff, Jubal, you want in on the action?

Prosecutor Jubilation T. Calhoun: (shakes head) So, Mr. Trump, did you take the advice of any of your advisors prior to January 6th?

The Donald: Advisors? Of course, I have advisors. My hair is one of my best advisors. (Whispers) It tells me things nobody else can hear.

Prosecutor Jubilation T. Calhoun: Your Hair?

Atty. Delores Fishdodger: I object, asked and answered.

Judge Windbag: Sit down Ms. Fishdodger, or you’ll be taking my place at the dentist’s. Answer the question Mr. Trump.

The Donald: Yes, Your Honor. (Turns to Jury) You see, my hair has tremendous insights. It’s like genius-level hair. Very, very, smart hair. It helps me bigly when I’m making decisions.

Prosecutor Jubilation T. Calhoun: Did your hair advise you on making business deals while you were President?

The Donald: I am the greatest dealmaker in the world. Deals just happen around me, counselor. I make deals while brushing my teeth. I make deals while eating a taco. I made deals while suffering bigly from Covid. You should read my book, counselor, The Art of the Deal.

Prosecutor Jubilation T. Calhoun: (Bigly sighs) Mr. Trump, on January 6th you addressed a crowd of your supporters and urged them to “fight like hell.” Could you please explain what you meant by that?

The Donald: Well, you see, I was talking about fighting for America, fighting for democracy, fighting for those fantastic hotel and golf course deals … you know, the important stuff.

Prosecutor Jubilation T. Calhoun: So, you were referring to metaphorical fighting?

The Donald: Absolutely. Metaphorical, allegorical, maybe even a smidge of alliteration. I’m a very, very, literary guy. My supporters love my literariness. Like when I created the word ‘covfefe.’

Prosecutor Jubilation T. Calhoun: Covfefe? What is that anyway?

The Donald: Oh, you don’t need to worry about that, Jubal. My doc, Admiral Hufghfufu assured me that it’s just a temporary agvofofi. I can tell by that look on your face that you are amazed by my literaritude. (Smiles and gives dumfounded jury a thumbs up)

Prosecutor Jubilation T. Calhoun: (shakes head) And when you told your supporters that they need to be “strong” and that “we won’t take it anymore,” what did you mean by that?

The Donald: Oh, that was just one of my bigly motivational speeches, you know? Like when I told my contractors they needed to be strong negotiators if they wanted to get paid.

Prosecutor Jubilation T. Calhoun: Right. What about your statement, “they should march down to the Capitol?

The Donald: Oh, my hair was telling me that the crowd needed to practice their navigational skills. I thought they needed some bigly help finding the right route for their Capitol tour. The Capitol can be very, very, confusing.

Prosecutor Jubilation T. Calhoun: Now, Mr. Trump, during that same speech, you told your supporters to be peaceful, but then you also said, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” How do you reconcile those statements?

The Donald: Ah, that’s an easy one, Jubal. You see, I’m a big fan of balance. It’s like when I have to balance my executive time with my TV time. Sometimes you gotta throw a curveball to keep things interesting.

Prosecutor Jubilation T. Calhoun: So, just to clarify, you were encouraging your supporters to be strong, fight like hell, march to the Capitol, and balance it all out with peace?

The Donald: You got it, Jubal. It’s like going to a buffett. You gotta sample a little bit of everything. Variety is the spice of life. I mean just look at that jury … couldn’t be anymore variety than that (give jury another thumbs up), why there’s a couple of blacks, you know blacks love me, and a chink, and a messican, and a …

Judge Windbag: That’s quite enough, Mr. Trump! Counselor?

Prosecutor Jubilation T. Calhoun: No further questions, Your Honor.

Judge Windbag: Thank God! You may return to your seat Mr. Trump. Bailiff, do you have any aspirin or maybe some arsenic?

The Donald: Thanks, Judge. Can I get a copy of this transcript for my new book, The Art of the Appeal?

Dear Poem,
Do you have any deep insights for me?
Sometimes, I come at you with
Unrealistic expectations
As if you are my psychic,
Or psychologist,
And I expect you to
Do the work
To unravel me
To save me
To love me
To lead me.
I do not want to
Trivialize your power,
Reducing you to a sterile collection of words.
Nor, do I want to burden you
With more than I should ask,
Demanding supernatural
Metaphysical
Otherwordly
Truths
That I cannot access elsewhere.
Perhaps,
Dear Poem,
I should just
Let you be
And I should
Listen
To what you have to say.

Sitting here on the cold table
in a borrowed gown
that opens in the front
waiting to be scraped
crushed
violated in the name of
Due Diligence
praying to the god
Early Detection
that I don’t go out
like you did

She stepped outside to have a cigarette, and again, she saw those goddamn vultures. It was the third day they’d been there. They’d claimed the trees between her property and her neighbor’s, but what she didn’t understand was… Why were they facing her property?

Her online research had enlightened her to certain facts about the ugly winged creatures - a flock of flying vultures was known as a kettle. Vultures perched in trees were known as a committee. And if you saw a group of them feeding on a dead thing, then you were looking at a wake of vultures.

Most likely, the ones staring at her were turkey vultures and those suckers had a six-foot wingspan.

But why were they facing her house?

Vicki stared back at them, the committee on one of the pine trees, must be around twenty of them. She flipped them the bird.

“Ha. See what I’m doing? I’m flipping the bird to birds. Or is it… I’m flipping birds the bird?”

Vicki gave those gawking vultures an evil sneer before she turned and went back inside her house. That snear was a reflection of her internal emotional state as of the past couple of months. Bitter. Snarky. And she felt things were going to get worse because she formed an idea that grew claws and dug into her brain - those goddamn birds were like a fucking neon sign:

DEATH

It had loomed over her for a few months. Months she had moved through without much thought - get up, go to work, come home, eat, watch TV, sleep, repeat.

Never mind the pain in her chest, or the bright, red blood she coughed up from time to time. No big deal. Didn’t mean anything.

Never mind the pain in her lower abdomen, or the black fecal matter she sprayed into the toilet every day. No big deal. Didn’t mean anything.

But those goddamn vultures…

On the third day of their visit, she kept thinking about them, perched on the branches, just sitting there, staring. The images of them popped into her mind, what the meaning of their presence might mean, making it difficult for her to forge a robotic normalcy of a day.

Vicki felt like she was in a Poe story, or a Hitchcock film.

Wasn’t there anything to be done about those peeping intruders?

Screw it. She was going to have to ignore them. She didn’t have any other choice. She had mad skills in that arena. She could do it.

Vicki parked her car in the carport, got out with her purse, headed for the front door of her home. Didn’t even look at the trees. Didn’t even have the urge to.

She hadn’t thought about those goddamn vultures all goddamn day.

The pain in her lower gut nabbed her full attention as it grew exponentially and travelled across the front of her body, stopping her in her tracks. She dropped her purse, then dropped to her knees with her hands on her abdomen.

“Holy shit,” she croaked.

The projectile vomit was next. It sprayed a thick, red half moon shape on the tan fence that surrounded the trash can. It dripped from her mouth, tracked down her scrub top. No big deal. Didn’t mean anything.

Vicki fell to the pavement, on her left side, balled up into a fetal position. Nothing but razor pain from her throat to her asshole. And then she shit her pants. No big deal. Didn’t mean anything.

“Fucking hell! Seriously?!”

She heard the flapping of wings. A lot of it.

Through her watery eyes, she saw them. May have been all of them. Those goddamn vultures. Featherless, red heads. White beaks. Brownish-black bodies. Feet like chickens’.

They flew down and landed, walked and hopped along the driveway, toward her, taking positions inches from her body, surrounding her. No big deal. Didn’t mean anything.

“What the fuck?!”

Vicki barfed again, a small amount on the pavement. One of the vultures lapped it up like a dog drinking from a water bowl. Its tongue and beak turned red.

“Go fuck yourself,” she said. And then she began to feel lightheaded.

And still, the vultures assembled. All around her. Two, three rows thick. They stood there, motionless, staring at her, like statues, waiting…waiting.

“No.” Vicki rested her head on the ground, closed her eyes while the eyes of the vultures uniformly turned bright white. They all spread out their wings, showing off their impressive wingspan, totally covering her body and the ground around her.

Vicki knew she couldn’t ignore her reality. This was a big deal. It did mean something.

And then she died.

The next thing Vicki knew, she was perched on a branch, staring at her neighbor.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/world-theater/Ghost__Post__65979acd0cea76912ae11211Mon, 08 Jan 2024 19:04:42 GMT

Sneaking into the World
through a back door
that was left unlocked
by mistake

Shame on the usher

Look at me now
hanging with a crowd
full of radiant
souls

Floundering forward

I aspire for the heights
to topple walls
that hem me in
leaning toward the end

Show is almost over

Inky dinky boy
shooting off
some magnitude
could be sparks of memory

Rolling down the aisle

Watching from the balcony
last row— I can barely see
faces on the stage
acting out their rage

Piercing the Heavens

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/convicts-kingpins/Ghost__Post__65979a340cea76912ae11203Mon, 08 Jan 2024 19:04:20 GMT

We know some are gold souls
in tarnished guise, in an armor of rust
& no lust to remember for those knights
of nights mortal as the most tender
& tired thing opening my eyes
to what cloaks held
the bars, drugs, hunger,
diamond-shining with a promise,
need-deep, to be there
through the dawn only
& not lying should, afterward,
soldiers to the battle,
they not return ever

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/elles-request/Ghost__Post__659798820cea76912ae111f5Mon, 08 Jan 2024 19:03:55 GMT

“Mom, can I have this? It’s been sitting here by itself.” Elle was interested in the pocketknife that was in a little leather pouch, the one my father had always carried on his belt and used to clean his fingernails with. Of course, it had far more significance for me than that. When he died it was one of the few things of his most personal belongings he had left to give, the sum total of my inheritance. Handing it to me reluctantly and solemnly as he did, you would have thought it to be a million dollars. My mother never thought of leaving me anything. There were all the self-help books she collected by all the perfect people who’d written them. Over a lifetime they’d never helped her, she died pretty much ignorant as the day she was born, a testament to how one or one-hundred self-help books won’t help you, if you’re not motivated enough to read. I think it made her feel better just to have them on a ramshackle shelf to look at. And as a backdrop to the bookshelf and the knife itself, was the rest of the junk they owned and had hoped to sell.

They were flea-marketers. Toys, trinkets, knickknacks, novelty dishware cups saucers and glasses, old lanterns, shoes, belts and clothing, bird houses my father built. That was their stock in trade second-hand goods, odds and ends, cast offs and when they couldn’t make ends meet at the flea markets, my mother would make cinnamon rolls, hoagies, chocolate fudge and butterscotch pies for my father to take around to sell in local stores and delicatessens. I was never really sure how I felt about it. I was never really sure how I felt about them. They were always poor as hell. Sometimes I loved them and sometimes I didn’t.

But now this mountain of worthless shit was all that was left and I had to get rid of it. My parents had died within months of one another, we spread their ashes over a local flea market just like I wished I could set all this junk afire box up the ashes and toss its tacky legacy in the dumpster, be happy to have nothing more to do with it c’est la vie. But they loved to peddle this stuff and with it stuffed into an old Dodge van always in need of some repair they huffed and puffed their way to every flea market up and down the east coast like two gypsies. I was hardly ever in tow often left with a relative.

So here I was up to my ass in an Everest of collectibles with my daughter asking about the penknife my father used to clean his fingernails with. “You don’t want that,” I said, and to entice her attention away I held up a little keychain, a dangling compass in a clear plastic ball.

“Yes, I do,” said Elle. When Elle was little she was a hellion but now as a teenager she’d made this remarkable transformation into a discerning sensitive young girl. She’d picked up the knife and turned it affectionately in her fingers, seeming to imagine its past as if it were a museum piece. Never having known her grandfather I’d mentioned the knife’s crude history to her before, painted a picture of him using it and with a touch of bile, his handing it to me at the end as if it were some sort of family heirloom.

“Why would you want that old penknife?” I asked with a laugh, she would have to justify herself to me on this one.

“Its surface is so smooth and worn,” said Elle, “this slightly wobbling blade, emblem with the engraving worn off, its weathered panels suggest an old, true friend, lasting, durable, a trustworthy sidekick in service to its owner.”

Not a bad observation for a young teen I thought. I tossed the compass and tried to look at it the same way but I’d never thought of a penknife quite like that especially this one. To me it was still just a pocketknife, one I’d seen used a million times for the most banal purpose.

“But it’s about to come apart.” I said, slightly irked at her fixation on the knife.

She shrugged. I bit my cheek; she’s allowed to have her own opinion about it if she wants to.

Now after listening to Elle, I remembered my mother picking the knife up at a flea market, giving it to him proudly, “Look honey, it’s for you.” When she handed it to him, he’d barely looked at it, but in the quiet hours of his oft-beleaguered existence he would sit with that penknife and rake the accumulated detritus of his life out from underneath those fingernails and once done rise and be ready to face living again. My resentment at the knife and anyone who would show affinity towards it was because at the end of his life it was all of himself he had left to give that wasn’t some other piece of junk for sale. To change my opinion about it would require some difficult soul-searching which amid all this other trash-bagging I was not prepared to embark on.

I had thought about handing it to her the same way he’d handed it to me solemnly reluctantly as if it were something to behold, but I couldn’t do it. What Elle didn’t know; gambling was the third prong of their existence. When my parents couldn’t make ends meet selling junk or peddling food, they played the lottery, one day they hit it big but kept on gambling. Deep in debt filled with regret unable to pay their bills they’d simply quit on life and each other. In this falling down shack alongside the railroad tracks my mother could no longer get off her couch, listless my father could only sit and stare raking his fingernails with that knife never able to rise up to face life again, and when he finally bestowed it to me it was betrayal I felt, it could have been a small fortune, instead of an old worn-out penknife.

“You know what? You’ve convinced me. I’ll hold on to the knife, I hope you’re not disappointed.”

“Not at all,” said Elle.

Elle became distracted, I went outside threw the knife hard as I could heard it crack and ricochet to the bottom of the dumpster I’d rented. Maybe with that stupid knife gone, I could let things go, stop blaming missed opportunities on it, I felt relieved, as if a hundred-pound weight had lifted. Then I went and retrieved it. Back inside with Elle I told her how I’d changed my mind, pressed the knife reluctantly solemnly into her hand and with her young and innocent wisdom beside me, perhaps dutifully, maybe even with some newly mustered reverence I could sift forgivingly through what remained of my parents’ lives now.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/broken/Ghost__Post__659797e30cea76912ae111e8Mon, 08 Jan 2024 19:03:31 GMT

Broken koan—the sound of one hand clapping
is not the rush of wing beats in the air
as the great horse flies over us, broken free
from the Medusa, art out of the horror.
The way wind moves is more in solitary moments
flapping the plastic bag caught in the branch
or causing trees to whisper all those names
that hide among the leaves like hidden tokens.
Thus the great image of the steed that passes
along the steppes as lightly as a cloud;
thus the connection to the passing thought
as light as moonbeams touching undergrowth.
We wait for names to come to us. They may not.
It makes no difference. All the names are here.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/destiny/Ghost__Post__6597967f0cea76912ae111daMon, 08 Jan 2024 19:03:16 GMT

So hard to forget
life is a reminder
caught in a net
the shadows cast by the sun
the memories flow of all that was
unable to keep them out of view
always a prisoner without a cell
the mind imprisoned all in a newfound hell
captive, hostage, kidnapped
no guard is needed in this world of mine
just thoughts of persecution without a key
the door to salvation is locked, no escape
an endless journey through darkness
speak a truth that no one wishes to hear
there is no justice without endless cost
money for freedom but always shackled and chained
write it down as there is so much to say
words meander lost on their own for none to see
a life invisible to all but me
a world of wonder that will leave me cursed
anxiety, depression, and panic will never cease
want to move on but are blocked by the ghosts
of those who hate and their despicable ways.
your owner summons you to lie and deceive
choke me and stab me while trying to sleep
death in dreams, eyes open but never awake
angels of darkness sent to retrieve the soul
of light from that deep buried place.
angel of mercy please appear, protect the
harmed and innocent from whom they
were born to be.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/a-perfect-murder/Ghost__Post__65977c400cea76912ae111c5Mon, 08 Jan 2024 19:03:03 GMT

The idea came to Janet slowly, over weeks and months. At first, it had seemed unthinkable—something she would not, could not do. But as the idea took root and flowered into a plan of action, she realized she was, indeed, capable of committing murder.

In fact, the planning of the act was therapeutic—even comforting. Her confusion, pain, and hot rage morphed into a cold kernel of anger that was somehow more tolerable. She would no longer be the victim—he would. That detestable man who had stolen her innocence would be her victim.

Yes, she could murder him. And with relish.

At first, she didn’t believe recent news reports of adult women recalling sexual abuse they had experienced as a child. Repressed memory? It seemed ridiculous that someone would unconsciously avoid thinking about traumatic experiences. Wouldn’t it be etched into her brain if something horrible happened to her? How could she forget she had been sexually abused?

But, over time, she wondered if that would explain the confusing snippets of memories, as well as the perplexing absence of recollections, that haunted her. The unexplained feelings of shame and her meekness as a child. Her low self-esteem as a teen. The hatred she felt for her stepfather. Her strained relationship with her mother, who had not divorced him until long after she left that dysfunctional home.

Analytical as she was, Janet read everything she could find about repressed memories. Afternoons, while her husband was at work, she reclined on the sofa, absorbing the latest research on the subject, tears soaking her lashes and blurring her vision. Secretly, as an adult with grown children, counseling and hypnosis confirmed what had happened to her as a child.

Janet could recall only a few details of the abuse, which was a blessing, but she remembered enough to know it was true. She now understood why her initial love for her mother’s husband had transformed into intense hatred. The teenage rebellion that drove her from home at sixteen finally made sense. And she knew, without a doubt, the man her mother married had groomed her from early childhood. He had touched her in totally inappropriate ways even though he was the only father she knew.

Janet decided to confront him about his abuse. And then murder him. She imagined going to his house and his reaction to seeing her. She liked to think she would not scream obscenities but that she would remain calm and cool. Sometimes, she would look in the mirror, practice what she would say, and feel the rage build until she was on the edge of losing control.

No, I must remain calm. She told herself. If I am to commit murder I must stay in control. There is no excuse for losing my power and making mistakes.

She considered how to murder him. Poison? Yes, that would be the way to do it. She knew nothing about firearms. Buying and learning how to use a gun was too complicated. Besides, shooting him would be messy. And it would be obvious how he died. By poisoning him, he would be found dead, and nobody would suspect he had been murdered.

Perhaps she would sit beside him and offer him a poisoned drink, smiling and pretending concern for him. And when there was no turning back, she would tell him what she had done and wait for the panic in his eyes—the knowledge that he would die. Then, she would taunt him with what she knew he feared: the fire and brimstone of hell for sinners like himself.

For weeks, she plotted how to do the deed. The drunken lout lived in a remote shack on the edge of her hometown. Perfect. Few neighbors and fewer friends. It was only an hour’s drive from her home. She could go there and back and not be missed. Her Lexus would attract attention, so she would rent a car using a credit card she would get for just that purpose. She wondered if she should disguise herself. That would be a reasonable precaution in case someone saw her at his shack.

Janet had always taken pride in her appearance. A petite blonde, she wore expensive clothes that accentuated her curvy figure. Her discretely highlighted hair was always impeccably styled in a classic cut. She never left her lavish home in an upscale neighborhood without makeup. She carefully applied cosmetics, transforming herself into a stunning woman who turned heads wherever she went. Yes, a disguise was essential.

She drove to a nearby town to shop at a Salvation Army store. But even though she had tried to “dress down,” she attracted too much attention.

“Can I help you find something,” an overly curious clerk offered.

“No, thank you.” She murmured, embarrassed, “I’m just browsing for a friend.”

Janet was overwhelmed by the abundance of racks of clothing on display. She deliberately browsed two sizes larger than her size 6. She pulled out a dull-colored plaid flannel shirt she wouldn’t ordinarily wear. Yes, it was satisfactorily sloppy and plain. It would do. She tossed it in her cart. Glancing around the store, she realized other customers were watching her. She hurriedly moved down the rack and selected a pair of khakis one size larger than usual.

As she headed toward the checkout stand, she spotted a display of hats. Janet loved hats. Before she realized it, she was trying on one and then another, admiring herself in the mirror attached to the stand. One darling hat, in particular, was perfect to wear in her convertible.

“That one was made for you.” The nosy clerk said, causing Janet to jump in alarm. “You should definitely buy it.”

“Yeah. I think I will.” She said as she tossed it in her basket with the flannel shirt and khaki pants.

But she grabbed a grubby OU ball cap and threw it in as well as she hurried to check out, paying with cash—no credit card for these purchases.

Her husband had a late business meeting that night, and she was glad to have the evening to herself. She showered and shampooed, scrubbing her face free of cosmetics. Instead of blow-drying her hair, she let it air dry and pulled it into a rough ponytail at the nape of her neck.

The khakis were too long. They dragged the floor, but when she cuffed the pant legs she realized she forgot to buy tacky shoes at the Salvation Army. She rummaged the back of her closet until she found an old pair of wine-stained sneakers.

Pulling the ball cap on her still-damp hair, she examined herself in the full-length mirror in her walk-in closet. Who are you? She asked her reflection.

Pleased with her disguise, she concentrated on the specifics of the murder. The devil is in the details, she reminded herself, giggling.

Gloves. She must remember gloves. She would leave no fingerprints. There must be no evidence of her having been there

As an added precaution, after the murder, she would find a secluded country road to change clothes. She would take an ordinary trash bag to dispose of the items she had used for the deed in a gas station dumpster.

To her surprise, she found she was enjoying planning the murder—going over the details repeatedly to make sure nothing was overlooked.

Antifreeze was an obvious choice for the poison. A recent television show depicting a murder gave her the idea. Odorless, colorless, and sweet tasting, it would be easy to add to a milkshake she would take him. He loved sweets, she recalled.

She would watch him drink the milkshake, and when it was almost gone, she would confront him with what he had done—that he used her innocence for his gratification. She repeatedly played the scene in her mind—how she would phrase her accusations, making him confess. She imagined telling him the milkshake was poisoned. She wanted, no needed, him to know she was exacting revenge after all these years. She fantasized about seeing the look on his face when he realized she was murdering him. She could almost smell his fear. She yearned to witness the life light leave his eyes.

But, being practical, she researched antifreeze poisoning and learned that, after ingesting antifreeze, it could be several hours before symptoms occurred. And it could take a few days before he died. What if he had enough sense to go to the hospital when he became ill, and some overzealous ER doctor recognized the symptoms? No, poisoning him with antifreeze was not a good choice.

She considered murdering him with digoxin, a medication commonly used for cardiac disease. An overdose of the drug would literally stop his heart which had a certain poetic appeal. However, acquiring digoxin would be problematic. And the dosage and effect were iffy. It could take too long to kill him.

Perhaps she could inject him with rapid-acting insulin. She could manage to acquire a vial or two. She would surprise him with whiskey and then get him sloppy drunk. It would be easy to spill some on his shirt. Then, as a dutiful stepdaughter, she would help him change. She would be ready with a loaded syringe in her pocket, and when his upper arm was accessible, she would quickly inject the insulin.

Of course, he would know she had given him a shot, but it would be too late. It couldn’t be taken back. And then she would tell him what she had done and why. She reveled in imagining how she would taunt him, watching and waiting as he alternately sweated and chilled while the insulin drew life-giving glucose from his blood. Finally, she knew he would become increasingly confused and lose consciousness. He might even have a seizure.

She would give him another insulin injection once he lost consciousness to ensure he had a deadly dose. As a nurse, this was the one time she would not be concerned about an overdose.

It could be days before his body was discovered. Nobody would suspect murder. And, if they did, her visit would not be suspicious. Even if a murder investigation were initiated, insulin would not be found at autopsy.

After considerable thought and research, she chose an overdose of rapid-acting insulin as the perfect choice for an undetected murder.

The question became not if or how she would do the murder, but when.

She waited patiently for the perfect time. Finally, a calmness came over her. The rage no longer haunted her. She felt at peace with what she was about to do. She was an ordinary woman who lived a typical middle-class life. She never imagined she could intentionally harm anyone, much less commit a cold-blooded, calculated murder. And yet, that is precisely what she was preparing to do. She felt no guilt, nor did she have second thoughts. It was merely a matter of timing when she would finally enact her plan to murder the man.

Time passed.

Her brother telephoned with what he called “bad news.” Their stepfather had been found dead several days after his death. His body was severely decomposed.

“Probably his heart,” he said. “They don’t know for sure. But we all know he was drinking himself to death, so it’s not a big surprise.”

There was no question of foul play.

There was to be a funeral of sorts. There was no family left, no friends. He and their mother were making the final plans. She wouldn’t go. She had no intention of pretending grief or, as the saying goes, “paying her respects” to a man she had detested almost her entire life. She knew she would not be able to fake grief.

She only regretted that he died before she had a chance to murder him.

Or did he?

Repressed memories are peculiar that way.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/issue-21-winter-2024/Ghost__Post__659c4625255808b0908896f6Mon, 08 Jan 2024 18:00:00 GMT

Dear Friends of eMerge,

Welcome to the Winter edition of eMerge, your gateway to a world of captivating literary expression. It is our pleasure to introduce you to an issue brimming with exceptional works that showcase the talent and creativity of our contributors. This edition is particularly special, as it features contributions from six outstanding nominees for the prestigious Pushcart Prize and winners of the Woody Barlow Poetry Contest.

The writers and poets whose works grace these virtual pages have poured their hearts and souls into their creations, and we are delighted to share their voices with you. From thought-provoking essays to evocative poetry, each piece has been carefully selected to offer a diverse and enriching reading experience. So, whether you are curled up by the fire or watching the tide roll away, relax and enjoy our latest offerings on eMerge.

In addition to celebrating the artistic achievements within these digital pages, we are thrilled to announce that eMerge is now a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. This exciting development means that your generous contributions to eMerge are now tax-deductible. As we continue to grow and support the literary community, your donations become an integral part of our ability to provide a platform for emerging voices and established talents alike.

If you are passionate about fostering creativity, supporting writers, and contributing to the literary landscape, we invite you to consider making a tax-deductible donation to eMerge. Your support enables us to maintain our commitment to excellence and to elevate the voices of writers who inspire, challenge, and enrich our understanding of the world.

To make a donation and explore the various giving options, please visit our donations page at https://donate.stripe.com/. Your support, no matter the amount, goes a long way in sustaining eMerge and ensuring the continued success of our mission.

Pushcart Nominees for 2024:

Linda Reising for her poem,  This is Not a Symbolic Poem About Cicadas, challenges the notion that cicadas are overused symbols in poetry and offers a fresh perspective on these insects. The poem successfully challenges the conventional view of cicadas as cliché symbols. The concluding lines bring a touch of irony by suggesting that the female bugs are patiently waiting for "Mr. Right" after seventeen years. This twist adds a layer of commentary on the cyclical nature of life and relationships, contrasting with the initial rejection of cicadas as mere symbols of memory and rebirth.

Bill McCloud for his poem, Black Carnations, successfully weaves together symbols that add layers of meaning and depth to his narrative. The poem captures a sense of mystery and nostalgia but leaves room for interpretation and reflection. After reading Black Carnations several times, I am always left wanting to know more about this mysterious woman.

Barbara Carlson for her poem, His Sign Asks for Water, employs strong imagery and symbolism to convey the emotions and experiences of a homeless man. The image of the rain and the man soaking in it becomes a metaphor for spiritual nourishment. When I think about the approximately 100,000 homeless veterans on the streets, Barbara’s theme of seeking solace and spiritual connection in difficult circumstances is poignant to this old Marine.

Toni Huffman, whose pen name is Antonia Love for her poem, Two Men and a Truck, evokes images of moving out with imagery like, “knick-knacks,” “newspapers,” and “grocery store boxes.” Toni effectively communicates the emotional journey of the speaker, from the pain of the breakup to the sense of liberation and optimism of the future.

Zhenya Yevtushenko for his poem, Names I will Learn Soon/Buffalo, Uvalde, Tulsa, …delves into the emotional aftermath of a mass shooting, capturing the juxtaposition of personal and communal experiences. The mention of walking the dog after such a tragic event adds a layer of intimacy and humanity to the narrative. The questions posed, particularly "who pulled the trigger and who pulls the trigger inside?" prompt introspection on a broader societal level, addressing both the external and internal aspects of violence.

Elaine Alarcon for her poem, In the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden, captures a vivid and contemplative experience in nature. The imagery is rich, and the poet successfully conveys a sense of connection with the environment. The use of specific details, such as the orange poppies, cactus flowers, and giant boulders, enhances the sensory experience for the reader. The poem's exploration of time and history through the journey of a lone ant adds depth and complexity to the narrative. The references to historical events and milestones, from the Magna Carta to the Declaration of Independence, create a broader context for the ant's journey, connecting it to the larger human experience and the passage of time.

Thank you for being a cherished part of the eMerge community. We hope you enjoy the literary feast that awaits you in this edition and look forward to your continued support.

Joy Clark, Editor
joyeliclark@gmail.com

Charles Templeton, Editor Emeritus
cltempleton@gmail.com

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/a-chance-to-be-saved/Ghost__Post__6531f213767b370fd1a43684Mon, 30 Oct 2023 16:56:53 GMT

In the early 70s I taught Junior High Art in Saint Louis. My fellow teachers became my running buddies. One of my friends, Evelyn, was a music teacher. Due to her position, she scored two free season tickets to the Saint Louis Symphony. I often went with her. I was appreciative of her generosity because as a poorly paid teacher, I could not have afforded to attend the symphony. However, there was a torturous trade-off. Evelyn had become involved in a charismatic Catholic-based faith healing movement. I had to feign interest and attend the healing sessions with her. I was not going to give up a free seat at the symphony even if I had to pretend to be interested in a religious activity that was somewhat strange to me.

The healing sessions would begin with the testimonies of believers who had been healed. There were always many nuns in attendance. I was a skeptic who was raised a Methodist. The teachings of the church of my childhood didn’t include the belief in contemporary faith healing. We were prepared to take “what is” and limp all the way to the grave. Despite being somewhat bored during the testimonies, I was fully awake when the star of the show took over. He was a priest, Father McNut, and the leader of the local movement. He was tall, dark, and handsome. He resembled a young Charleston Heston, and he was very charismatic. I think the combination of looks and charm gave him the edge to be persuasive. It didn’t work on me. However, I kept going in order to keep in Evelyn’s good graces, and to keep my seat at the symphony.

After only one year in Saint Louis, I quit my job, and I moved to Tennessee. I enrolled in the Memphis College of Art to further my studies as a painter. I immediately took up a hippie persona, and vowed to never again wear a necktie. I let my hair grow long. I wore love beads and ragged bell bottoms. I was free.

I had been living in Memphis for several months, when I received a call from Evelyn. She asked me to accompany her to a Kathryn Kuhlman event that was to take place in Memphis. Miss Kuhlman was a flamboyant and prominent faith healer with a huge following. Evelyn, Father McNut, and his followers had become groupies of the popular evangelist. I said, “Oh, what the heck, sure I’ll go.” Then I forgot all about it.

A couple of months later, Evelyn called early one Sunday morning to tell me that the day had arrived. She had saved me a seat to see Miss Kuhlman at the Assembly of God Church. It was a very large church, the one that Elvis attended when he was in town. When the phone rang that morning, I had just walked in the door from being out all night dancing, and I have to admit, I was still tripping on LSD. No excuse except that it was the ‘70s.

I was wearing a black see-through shirt, black and white striped bell bottoms, and platform shoes with stars painted on them ala Joe Cocker, an English rock star. I looked down at my clothes and I thought, “Hey, these are good enough.”

I jumped into my car and drove to the church. My friend Evelyn had ridden to Memphis from Saint Louis with a bus load of faithful followers of the Saint Louis charismatic Catholic movement. The group included a large number of nuns. I found my seat in the church and sat with my friend Evelyn and the sisters. Fortunately, the row in front of me was also occupied by nuns. If I had sat behind one of the many women that were there with high hair, my view of the stage would have been blocked.

We were there early that morning in order to get a seat. We had to sit through the entire morning service while we waited for Miss Kuhlman’s afternoon performance. For lunch we shared peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that Evelyn and the nuns had brought with them on the bus. By this time, I was really starting to suffer and was wondering if Miss Kuhlman might be able to heal a drug crash.

At one o’clock, Kathryn Kuhlman took to the stage wearing a very gauzy white dress and gold lame high heels. She was slender with bright red hair, and she was very theatrical. Shortly after she took the stage, folks lined up one by one to be healed.

Miss Kuhlman would describe the person’s ailments to the audience, touch the afflicted on both sides of the neck, and they would immediately fall backwards into the hands of her attendants. If the attendants missed, the person would fall to the floor. They arose healed or so it appeared. Folks were falling all over the place on stage including some of the nuns from the bus. They fell to the floor like shot penguins.

As badly as I felt, I did find the healing service interesting and entertaining. However, if I had been a praying man, I would have prayed for the service to end. Two hours into the service, Miss Kuhlman called for all folks who needed to be saved to come down to the altar. I thought, “I have found my avenue of escape!” I got up from my seat and brushed past the many kind church goers and the nuns. They were patting me on the back, and congratulating me. They thought I was about to be saved. When I got to the end of the aisle, I made a beeline for the door, jumped in my car, and I went home. I was far from healed.

I never heard from Evelyn again.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/where-no-light-shines-2/Ghost__Post__6531e3d7767b370fd1a4363bMon, 30 Oct 2023 16:56:44 GMT

First I just stand and watch him. So relaxed, so uncomplicated.

They don’t talk about the times when you envy your child – really and truly grok the advantage that the adorable little son of a bitch has on you – simply by virtue of being too young to shoulder a single burden.

“He’s two,” Todd says without moving his eyes from his iPad. “You want something different? You thought you were giving birth to the exception?”

He’s strangely sexy in these tuned-out moments, blue of eye and furrowed of brow.

“You want a machine, go to Fry’s.” That’s one of his favorite lines and he pronounces it as though it was the first time. Every single time. “You want a person, you’ve got one right there.”

Sexy, but jumping him never enters the picture, even if Forrest weren’t sitting three feet away in his high chair, drooling something purple or pink or otherwise gaudy-colored onto his chest. These days I don’t even bother with a bib because when I try to put it on he screams like he’s being waterboarded. Instead I just take his shirt off and wipe him clean when he’s done. That’s the easy part of my day. Believe it.

When he was born we agreed I would be the one to stay home. It just made sense: I was the one with less money, more commute, stronger piss-off about having to be somewhere at a certain place and time. Offices were never my thing. This could be the exit door I needed.

Baby as utility, as reason. You think it just happens on Jerry Springer?

“So negative.” Todd closes Facebook, opens Facebook. He caresses Yelp and cheats on it with Reddit. “You just carry this shit around with you and it poisons your heart.”

Thing about Todd is, he’s an asshole, but a smart asshole, and so often a correct one. That’s the hardest part: you hate him, not because he’s too direct or too right, but because it’s that much more pointed and painful that you could love him.

I did. Honest.

“Well,” he said when the pregnancy test turned up positive, “that was unexpected.” Then a flick, a short, steep intake of breath. He’d been trying to quit smoking. It was fun while it lasted.

“We can do it,” he said over Zagat-approved food that night. “It’s whether or not we want to.”

I did love him then, I did. My love for him was tentacled, a hydra-head. It stretched and peered in all directions. It had powers that far outstripped those of your average serpent. It could kill you and for that I loved it, I loved the love.

Pregnancy: a series of paper cuts against those heads of hope. Each malady – night sweats, restless legs – felt a fresh insult. You. You did this to me. Then I turned up with placenta previa and we weren’t allowed to have sex until the baby was born. Fine. Fine by me.

Labor: a crystallization of what was to come. Push through the pain. Bear down and breathe out. Legs up, down, over and across. Spread them and pray. Finally, finally. Forrest. A gray bundle with an oxygen mask across his tiny crumpled face. I held him against my chest and our hearts fought each other through our flesh.

Breastfeeding: a joke. He tried to latch onto my nipple, wanted to feed. Nothing came down to sate him. The film they’d shown us in class didn’t look like this.

“That’s theory,” Todd said, correctly, of course. “This is reality. Worst case scenario, we’ll do the bottle.”

We did the bottle.

Nights: the worst, as they are for every honest parent. Outside with its swaths of black, inside with Dr. Brown’s bottle at hand, formula dribbling down his chin. The screams echoed for hours. Reflux. Colic. Food allergies. All the possibilities, all the permutations. Todd took him from my arms and the sound seemed to dwindle just enough for the difference to grate on me. I carried you, you little fuck. Pushed and howled and tore, and still you prefer him.

“He’s a month,” Todd said. “Two months. Three months. Not even a year.” Time drew on and still he was never wrong.

Factual accuracy.

You couldn’t get him on that.

You couldn’t love him for it either.

That’s his face there, sleeping in the car seat, our child’s features arranged in the folds of his father. Except he’s not sleeping. Except I didn’t even realize he was in here. Except it’s 85 degrees outside and he’s not moving.

You pluck methods, piecing them together like floral bundles. You find your way. And then one day there no longer is a need for direction. The path cut short, littered with the crumpled corpses of petals.

You too, crumpled.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/villages/Ghost__Post__6531f44c767b370fd1a43695Mon, 30 Oct 2023 16:56:34 GMT

There are not really villages in the valleys
between the mountains.

They only exist in my mind.

There are not really people
living in huts in those villages in the valleys.

They only exist in my mind.

There are not really stoves
lit by matches in the huts in the villages.

They only exist in my mind.

There are not really home cooked meals
placed from stoves to tables in the huts.

They only exist in my mind.

There are not really dirty dishes
that must be taken from tables to sinks.

They only exist in my mind.

So there will not really be fires
consuming the tables and huts.

They only exist in my mind.

Just like the incessant smell of smoke, persistent, demanding

Only exists in my mind.

Because there are not really villages in the valleys between the mountains

Only the ashes left behind.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/a-table-governed-by-phantasm/Ghost__Post__6531f4d7767b370fd1a436a1Mon, 30 Oct 2023 16:56:20 GMT

All forsaken figures dispense drinks with it
In trivial routineness with a slovenly bodach
But littlest to the next on the devour table.
In succession to shepherd’s pie, Cornish pasty
Teeth mechanisms crush ties near to tongues
And beast deepens its digestion with bile juice.
The aprons stitched with white rose’s fashion
Like chalk and cheese names on a radio cast
None a synonym voiced for the paranormal.
Fail to recall the prayers, O Lord, Amen Father
Stone deaf remain words of heed, mind, wishes
Only sinful bloating reverberates the housing.
The timepiece clicks, so do the cell dials’ rings
Ear-splitting goes jarring by forks on eardrums
Baby sitting by spook spills a dark night distance.
The feet glued to hidden air under drugget on tiles
Heads rotating to the western devious enshrines
Drilling partitions on a table governed by phantasm.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/the-waiting-room/Ghost__Post__6531f96a767b370fd1a436dfMon, 30 Oct 2023 16:56:11 GMT

Chris, my deceased ex-husband, comes to me in dreams. Always in dreams – daily, weekly, monthly. Sometimes he holds a baby boy with dark brown locks that fall thick from his head in curls. He brings with him my daughters, young. We marvel at this boy, singing and laughing and celebrating. He is my son. He is my children’s brother. I strain to take a longer look, but before I can he is gone. The dream is over and I wake and wonder.

I told my now-grown children about these dreams.

“I didn’t know you were pregnant a third time,” my oldest said, almost a question.

“I had forgotten,” I answered.

In truth I did. That is until the dreams came vivid, full of joy and mystery.

---

It was the eyes that got to me. Sunken. Ashened yellow. Fixed on the ceiling, but not really the ceiling. They were the eyes of a woman approaching death. She feared it.

The woman’s face was soft like snow after a winter storm, ripples of snow across her face. Gentle slopes smoothed by wind. It was framed by long, sparse wisps of uncombed gray. Her mouth, thin lines of faded red, lacked moisture.

Her eyes again. Glazed. Pupils big and black, death black, floating in a yellow bloodshot sea. She was searching for something. Not here.

There. Death was now coming into focus. She was trapped between two worlds and I wondered what she saw.

She jerked. Grinding sounds came from her throat, the air now like poison to her lungs. Her stomach heaved from the stretcher; her eyes rolled. She lifted her bony, naked arm to grasp the sterile white sleeve beside her, but her failing body was too weak to hold on. Her arm slid from the sleeve, floating recklessly, landing off the stretcher. It dangled, rocking back and forth like a limp pendulum swinging irregularly from an unexpected jolt.

They raced into a nearby room, doctors scrambled on both sides of her. Their frantic, muffled voices and the equipment’s shrieks tore through the walls. I said a prayer for her, but the storm was over. She was gone.
The waiting room, which had quieted since she was wheeled through the big double doors, remained without sound. Even the children sat still.

“Debbie,” a nurse said. I followed her into a clean, white (always white) room and watched as snow, misguided by the wind, hit the warm window, turning from a light flake into a heavy drop of water. It was another Alaska November, still early enough into winter I welcomed the snow, wanted it.

“Have a seat,” she said. “The doctor will be with you shortly.”

He wasn’t, but I was glad as I needed time to think. It was the first time I ever witnessed death. I was told it would be peaceful. White lights. Tunnels. But for her it wasn’t. Her eyes screamed at what she saw, but she couldn’t run, escape it. I didn’t understand – one moment she was there, frightened, alive, feeling, breathing, thinking. The next minute an empty shell. I cried.

I wondered where her family was and thought of my grandma who died in a nursing home, also with no family beside her. My grandma’s mind went first, and I assumed death was a friend to her. For months before she died she saw gypsies hiding watches in the curtain by her bed. She saw my mother when she looked at me. She didn’t always recognize her son. We went to her funeral, my Mom, Dad and I, but were the only ones there because we were the only ones who could make the trip from Arizona to Salt Lake City where she would be buried next to my grandpa. The grandpa I never knew, who died before my birth, my father still a child.

The three of us stood in an empty graveyard watching her coffin being lowered into the ground, falling leaves circling in slow motion around it. I was sorry no one lived nearby to check her grave, bring flowers.

I now realized that I felt sorrier for her after death than at death. I wondered how horrible it had been, to die alone. I wished someone had been there for her, to hold her hand, love her. I wished I’d sat by her bed, stroked her fevered head, whispered some kind of assurance. But instead she faced death, whatever that means, alone.

“Sorry you had to wait so long,” the doctor said coming into the room. “We had an emergency. A woman just died.”

“I know. I saw her as she was being wheeled off the ambulance. It must be very hard on you,” I said, wiping my tears. “It must be hard to keep working.”

“No, she was old,” the young doctor said. “There was nothing we could do to save her. Now if it was someone young like you with a whole life ahead of her – then I might cry. But she’d lived a long life. It was her time.”

He looked at my records, businesslike, putting on his glasses, turning page after page of my medical history. He reminded me of my then-husband, Chris, when he read the morning paper. He had the same intense look of someone deep in concentration – the furrowed brow, the unblinking gaze. I knew if I stood on my head and waved my arms he wouldn’t see me. Instead, I stared out the window, now streaked from melted snow. I thought about death and wondered if it was like the melting snowflake, just a change in form, a continuous cycle of different lives. I hoped so.

The doctor set down the papers and cleared his throat.

“I see you’re having menstrual problems,” he said taking off his black-rimmed glasses, staring at my face. “How long has this been going on?”

I told him about three weeks. At first it wasn’t heavy. Then it stopped, started again. Stopped. “Two days ago, it became so thick I had to go to the bathroom every 30 minutes and was passing clots, some the size of peas, some looked more like golf balls.” I was getting weak, dizzy.

“When people talk to me, sometimes I hear the words and understand what they mean, but I can’t link them together,” I explained. “Yesterday in class I couldn’t understand anything the instructor was saying. I left and nearly passed out while walking to my car. I don’t know how I got home, but I did.”

“Why didn’t you come in yesterday?” he asked.

“I just thought I was having a really weird period and was weakened by the heavy flow,” I said. “I just thought it would get better.”

I lied.

I didn’t tell him Chris and I had plans and I was afraid if I came “yesterday” it would ruin them. I didn’t tell him I’d bought a $100 dress, spent a fortune on tickets to a dinner and had a sitter coming. I didn’t tell him I thought time away from the kids for an evening might save our dying marriage. I didn’t tell him the flow thickened throughout dinner, that I got sloppy drunk on two glasses of wine and embarrassed Chris by alternating between drunken slurs and high-pitched giggles. I didn’t tell him Chris had to take me home before the evening barely started. That I woke with a hangover and bloodstained sheets. It was easier to just say that I thought it would get better.

“Could you be pregnant?” he asked.

“No.” I was horrified at the thought. “I’m very careful.”

He didn’t believe me.

“I want to do a blood test just in case. It sounds like you either have fibroid tumors or are miscarrying.” He explained about fibroids while he filled out a lab slip and sent me to another part of the hospital where a woman took my blood. More blood. I sat in another room, this one empty, waiting for the results.

“Dear God, please don’t let me be pregnant,” I said softly. But I knew I was. I felt stupid for not realizing it sooner.

And I knew, right there, right then, my baby, what was left of it, was dying and I couldn’t do anything about it. “If you let my baby live, I’ll go to church. I’ll do anything. Please don’t let my baby die,” I cried.
I got up and paced the room. I didn’t even want a baby. Both girls were in school and, now, finally, so was I. I stayed home for eight years so I could raise a family, be there for them when they were toddlers. That part of my life was over. A baby was the last thing I wanted. But still, I didn’t wish my child’s death.

“I know I didn’t want a baby, but I want this one,” I said. “God, if you let me keep it I’ll do anything. I’ll quit school. Don’t give me a baby only to take it away. Don’t be so cruel.” I knew, however, it was already too late.

I raced to the bathroom wanting to look at the clots, wanting to see what would have been my child, say goodbye. I gasped in shock. The flow had stopped. It was over.

My baby was gone and I thought it my fault. They might have been able to stop it if I’d gone in sooner. And I hadn’t been eating right, and was drinking and giggling while it was dying. ALONE. I felt as though I murdered my child.

I remembered my friend, Kendra, who lost her baby a year earlier. I thought about how she must have felt as she carried hers for months before it died and she wanted it, really wanted it. I wondered if she blamed herself. But she had no reason to. It was the cat …

It clawed at her, tearing the flesh on her arms, hissing, arching, drawing blood and screams before running back to wherever it came from. She had to have about half a dozen shots in case it was rabid. “I don’t think it will hurt the fetus,” the doctor told her. A few weeks later she miscarried. She called me from the hospital. Then she never spoke of it again. It was too painful.

“I’m sorry,” I told my unborn child and wondered if it could hear me.

“Are you here?” I asked. I felt nothing. “Could you give me a sign that you hear, that you understand?” Nothing. Maybe I wasn’t pregnant, I thought. I decided it was best not to know, at least not now. I decided to make a run for it. But as I tore out of the bathroom, the nurse approached me.

“You may take this back to the doctor,” she said, handing me the lab results. I paused before looking at it. It read, “negative.”

“I think you already lost the baby,” the doctor told me. “You waited a long time before coming in. That’s why the test came back negative. You probably weren’t very far along, just a month or so. I want you to go to a gynecologist first thing in the morning.”

I went to the waiting room by the lab to grab my jacket and thought about the doctor. I wondered if he cried when a woman lost a developing child. Probably not. Not for a fetus. Where does he draw the line? When is a person too old, or too young, not to merit tears? I knew death was an everyday event to him. But, still, I didn’t like him. What did he know about losing a child, even one that was never wanted?

Walking back through the emergency room, I was shocked to see the covered corpse of the woman being wheeled to the elevator. People who were once chatting, waiting to be seen by a doctor, now stopped their conversations and stared at the form of the now-cold body. They were all new faces, not the ones that had witnessed her arrival.

A woman, middle-aged, stood nearby, her eyes swollen red, her face puffy. She boarded the elevator, too, and I wondered if it was the old woman’s daughter. I was glad she was there, glad she was crying. I watched as the doors closed, then turned to walk away.

“Look at the faces on those people,” the receptionist whispered to a nurse as I passed the station. “They’ve never seen a stiff before.” She laughed. I wanted to slap her, but instead ran out the door and into the parking lot, just glad to be out of the cold, medicinal atmosphere of the hospital.

Driving home, I watched as falling snow struck my truck’s window and wondered what I would tell Chris, and tears flowed at the thought of it. As I left for the hospital, I asked him to come, but he was watching a game on TV, still mad at me for ruining his evening.

I turned on my wipers, which beat the thickening snow from my windshield. The blades thumped as they raced back and forth thrashing at the snow.

They moved with ease, a strong and steady pendulum, sounding harsh compared to my irregular, soft sobs.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/a-classroom-project/Ghost__Post__65320400767b370fd1a43743Mon, 30 Oct 2023 16:56:01 GMT

Wait until dark. Not milky dark. Black opal dark. Wait until the sky turns itself inside out and you can sidle under the wood fence undetected. Your dog will be conspicuous bounding along in the freedom of the night. No one cares about that. A dog can be in the apple orchard. You can’t. You have a paper bag to fill. Many of the apples on the ground are sound, full, even unbruised—just waiting on the ground like beached whales looking for an ocean. It is a starless night, all the better for you: person of trespass. One slight bend of moon breaks the black sky blue and you can feel it like a knife on your back. Please don’t let me get caught. My second graders want Taffy apples. On Friday we’ll melt the caramels in a crock pot and take turns dipping our fat apples into their sticky coats of caramel, leaving them to sculpt in sweetness on a sheet of wax paper.

This apple heist is charity, sweet happiness for seven year olds who could care less about brushing their teeth, could care less about cavities. The mix of sweet and tart; this is the taste of childhood. Lingering.

Headlights. Lay low. The dog still bouncing, catching the moonlight in fierce nips. The headlights drag along the road—even the car seems to savor this September night. The pueblo-style house sits in the distance, maybe a mile away, the lights fuse the windows yellow. You can feel the current of life inside that house up the road. That house you are hiding from: marauder of the orchid.

Will there ever be a night this magical again? Your bag of apples is heavy as a bowling ball. The sweet glory of the steal. You are the Robin Hood teacher, stealing an apple tasting experience for your Friday afternoon kids.

You’re not doing this just for the kids though. You want your taffy-stuck remembrance of Fall—the sugar ache of childhood that makes your teeth hurt. You want this so bad you steal for it.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/old-and-neglected-poem/Ghost__Post__6531fe02767b370fd1a43716Mon, 30 Oct 2023 16:55:52 GMT

She makes paint from moldy brick with the flavor
of advertisement and blood and

hair and bits of concrete raised

raised from the floor; she leaves them there
to wait to speak, there’s an offstage rumble

and this time it’s the furnace,

because it’s cold in the basement, even in summer,
and the girl is almost sleeping,

she cannot tell if the cobbles

lying covert beneath the street
have been buried or planted,

she is happy not to know,

as for the cobbles,
who can tell?

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/after-the-emergency/Ghost__Post__65320553767b370fd1a43761Mon, 30 Oct 2023 16:55:42 GMT

You sit in a brown Adirondack chair
on a steep slope looking east
between the pines so tall
they were surely here, large even,
before you were born.

The storm chased out the humidity
and now, a month before autumn,
and still in the heavy grasp of katydids
and one insistent bird that changes
trees too fast to see, you are safe.
Free from the worst you imagine.

In the distance, tourists with phones
and not enough light still try to catch
the old church’s round roof
while one slim beetle that can fly
lands on your forearm, stays.

This is what you told yourself you wanted:
a quiet evening, a chair with a view,
a breeze, the rumble of motorcycles
fading to a line on the horizon.

But if you’ve learned anything
from the long drives to the hospital
or letters from the lawyer, phone calls
that aren’t wrong numbers at 2 a.m.,
and that tone in his voice, her face
when there’s something to say
that will shake away the Etch a Sketch
of your life for a moment, it’s that
nothing will be the same.

There is no emergency.
There is only emergency.
How can it be any other way,
the pages of the sky, each one
in slow motion or fast,
keep asking you.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/what-a-mostly-blind-eye-says/Ghost__Post__653204c5767b370fd1a43752Mon, 30 Oct 2023 16:55:32 GMT

Close the lids of your words and listen.
The dirt, soft and loamy, is where
the rising world makes its home.
I may be mostly blind, but who isn’t?

Still, I can see the sounds of birds
only the power lines adore. I can inhale
a swath of light swimming in sun
the so-called seeing eye can’t imagine.
Light hums like the smooth sides
of a large cave, marrying the particulars
we usually divide: irritated cat
instead of unmade bed, doorknob
instead of golden globe mirroring the sky.

Why do I keep saying, “mostly blind,”
as if someone, surely not me, chuffed
all the shutters down at once to fixate
on where the wall meets the floor
with a pipsqueak of a crack?

Nothing taken or lost ever leaves us completely.
Bodies were made to compensate, to sing
in their rusty voices of what’s coming
into view, especially in the dark.
All God’s children love the sky.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/tork-is-cheap/Ghost__Post__6531fd5f767b370fd1a43707Mon, 30 Oct 2023 16:55:11 GMT

Okay, let me explain: it takes less torque
to loosen a threaded fastener than it does
to tighten it. Try it with a couple of lines,

blow them apart. Rhymes
act like inclined planets.
No, sorry, I meant planes.

Think uphill and downhill.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/the-wind-and-me/Ghost__Post__6531f815767b370fd1a436d0Mon, 30 Oct 2023 16:55:00 GMT

On this leaden gray day, the first autumn winds coerce
the sieves of my house, droning like a turbid sifter,
grinding foreign matter and depositing tiny particles
against my windows.
Outside, a banging wood fence burrows into my mind,
weltering skewered words and needling difficult lines
into vacuous prose.
Leaves, whirling, swirling, brown and crisp,
blow round the corners of my house,
piling up secreted lines.
For my pen has been bereft since this windy ogre arrived.
And as I write I know it has no voice.
It only blows cold.
Perhaps, when it fades, my mind will become resolute
and I will write with renewed autumn serenity.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/at-nolas-kitchen/Ghost__Post__6531feab767b370fd1a43724Mon, 30 Oct 2023 16:54:51 GMT

After her hellish flight from NYC to Portugal, Maggie D did not expect to look up from her curry at Nola’s Kitchen to see a man tumble out of a six-story window. He fell through a missing pane of glass in a large window at the top of a dreary building. He fell onto the roof of a grey and black Smart car just then turning the corner below. Then he rolled off into the street across from the restaurant.

Maggie D dropped her spoon in the curried cauliflower and did not run out of the restaurant with everyone else to cluster around the body. What could she have done anyway? She sat quietly in quilt, wiping her spoon.

Soon enough the ambulance arrived and the man was hauled away. The knot of people from the restaurant now returned. They were two middle aged couples from the table next to Maggie D’s. Americans.

“I wonder who he was?” said the bald man. “Was he pushed or did he jump? How old was he? Good God, I wonder what it is like to die.”

“Oh Frank, just stop!” said Linda, his wife, tucking into her meal.

“Do you think it was an accident? Or was it murder?”

Linda suddenly reached over and cuffed Frank’s head with her free hand. “Enough already!”

“What? What’d I do?”

“‘What is it like to die? Was it an accident? Did someone push him?’ You’re writing a friggin’ novel.”

“So?”

The other man facing Maggie D made a long face.

“He’s very bad,” said Maggie D.

Linda turned and looked over her shoulder. “That’s not the half of it.”

Everyone laughed.

“Just for that,” said Frank, looking at Maggie D., “you can’t read my novel.”

“How mean,” said Claudia, the other woman, channeling Terry Gross. “So did the victim jump or was he pushed?”

“I haven’t decided,” said Frank. He glanced up at the building. “It is a strange place to be. What’s up there anyway at the very top, but dusty empty rooms.”

They looked up at the window.
“Put a thunder shirt on him,” said Linda. “He needs calming.”

That elicited more laughter.

“Whatever happened, I’m glad I’m not that poor bugger,” said Joe, the second man.

“I should like a thunder shirt too,” said Maggie D.

They watched her carefully ease her arms through the straps of her backpack. Then she gathered up her metal cane leaning against the next chair and inched her leg brace around the table legs.

Frank rose to hold the door.

“Be careful of open windows now,” he said.

Maggie D. laughed.

“Oh, Frank. Do I have to put you to bed?” said Linda.

The next night Maggie D. returned to Nola’s Kitchen and ordered an omelette. It was easier to go there then to traipse all over looking for a new restaurant, especially when she still had jet lag. She sat at the same table as before and looked out at the dreary building from which the man had fallen. She missed the Americans. Had Frank worked on his novel?

Why was the man up there by that window? She wondered. What was happening in his life to drive him up there with such an unfortunate result? Did someone lure him up there? Or had he wanted to cross over? Sadness washed over Maggie D. Maybe she should write a novel too.

The waiter interrupted her meditation by spilling the little cup of ketchup she had ordered. The ketchup splattered into a Rorschach test at her feet.

“I am so sorry, Madame. Did it land on you?”

She shook her head, wondering if spilled ketchup revealed life’s secrets.

Several waiters came running with a mop and a wad of paper towels.

“It’s all your fault, you know,” said the waiter smiling at her pretty face, her cornsilk hair.

She laughed.

“Next time, no ketchup for you.”

“Have you seen the ‘The Matrix’?” she asked. “Has anyone ever told you that you look just like Lawrence Fishburne?”

“No,” he said, giving her a hug, noticing that despite being a dwarf with a leg brace, she was perfectly proportioned in all the right places.

That night Maggie D. opened her hotel window for the night air. It was hard to sleep. She worried about her eventual departure. It had been so hard getting to Porto, so debilitating.
She had had to climb the steps to the hotel reception - six marble steps without railings.

She had to climb two more marble steps to the lift. It was even worse at the airport. She had nearly fallen while going from Terminal E to Terminal F at Charles de Gaulle. A couple was following too closely and plowed into her, not noticing that she had a cane and a leg brace. They had not even bothered to help her regain her balance either as they raced ahead. Somehow she had managed not to topple over her carry-on, fighting back a sob.

Then her leg brace got snotty.

“You might as well give up,” said her leg brace. “Look at you! A crab scuttling across silent seas. If you don’t have health, you don’t have anything. Why knock yourself out traveling all over creation?”

“Be quiet.”

“Think about it, Boss. It’s quiet on the other side. No worries. No —.”

“Shut up!”

Now sea gulls outside her window were screeching. How lovely to be a seagull, she thought, to have wings, to drift on an air current. The air currents of her own brain now drifted here and there as she drifted off to sleep and finally landed on the handsome man from the plane whom she had commandeered when they first landed in Porto. The handsome man who had caught his gaze.

“Can you help me thread my arms through my backpack? It is hard for me to twist.”

“Yes, of course,” he had said.

He had graying temples and a kindly face. He was slender, all in black — black shirt, black suit. He could have been a poet, a priest, a vegan academic or all three.

“Take your time. Take your time,” he had said, holding out the straps of the backpack.

She had smiled at him. “Thank you so very much. It’s my arthritis.”

At the baggage claim she had tried not look for him but she couldn’t help it. Then she spotted him. As he was pushing away his trolly, she had called after him. “Thank you again!”

When he heard her voice, almost as if he were listening for it, he had turned and smiled. “You are quite welcome. Enjoy your holiday.”

Her eyes followed him through the exit.

Now as she drifted deeper into sleep with the sweet wind stirring the curtains and admitting the night sounds outside the hotel, the world shifted a little and the man reappeared in her dream. He passed through a shaft of golden light and paused. Then he turned to her and beckoned, smiling broadly. Yes, she would go with him to his well-appointed home of books, art and musical instruments. Yes, she would cook curried cauliflower for him and match his hunger. Yes. She could, she would do that.

Meanwhile, under her bed, her shoes began to murmur.

“Boss is dreaming again about that guy on the plane.”

“Leave her alone,” said the other shoe. “He’s a perfect fit.”

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/a-conversation/Ghost__Post__6531f642767b370fd1a436aeMon, 30 Oct 2023 16:54:37 GMT

“I found myself standing at the bathroom sink…”
gazing at the mirror, at the old man
looking back at me.

It had to be asked, “How did you get here?”
There’s only two of us:
You live alone.
You eat alone.
You watch movies alone.
You sleep alone.

With a stern face I responded –
“That’s the wrong question.”
The correct one is:
“Where are you going?”

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/i-wonder-if-poe-in-his-most-extravagant-hallucinations-paul-bowles/Ghost__Post__65320134767b370fd1a43734Mon, 30 Oct 2023 16:54:21 GMT

for Eva

This is not a poem about moonlight
but November shadows elongated
around a house
where inside seven cats have huddled
for days awaiting their still mistress
to feed them
while the neighbors
note the overflowing mail box
and do nothing despite having
an emergency contact,
not wanting to miss
the opening day of deer hunting.
Minnesota nice.

Through the long terrible hours
the cats have waited, creeping in confusion
around the body
their hunger now a panic
as the phone rings and rings
and no one answers.
Sirens suddenly assault the evening,
growing louder and louder
surrounding the house
until police rattle the door,
shattering the glass,
and splintering wood.

The cats flee to dark corners
behind the upright piano and the droopy
mattress lining under the bed
as heavy footsteps pound the stairs
and strange voices register dismay
at the spectacle slumped
on the couch, book in her lap.
The strangers move from room to room
looking for signs of violence,
checking the medications,
attributing all finally to natural causes.

The cats know none of this,
their lives changed forever
by a last breath, a last heartbeat,
a wave never to return.

They huddle still
long after the body has been removed,
the doors secured,
the footsteps have faded away
and food and water put down at last
leaving the house to settle.

Only when they hear their familiars outside
crossing the yard, rabbits in snow,
the moonlight catching their shadows,
and the hooves of deer snapping twigs,
do they creep bewildered to their bowls,
not knowing they are lost.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/who-would-have-guessed/Ghost__Post__6531e9e0767b370fd1a4364fMon, 30 Oct 2023 16:54:09 GMT

On a Friday, January 13th 1950, we were braving a huge snowstorm on the way to the hospital when I came out of my mom wearing tap shoes and singing “On The Good Ship Lollipop.” Well not really, but almost. Anyway, I made it into this world.

Lying in front of the pecan Hi-Fidelity cabinet with the straight pointed legs at my home on 40th and Sheridan Avenue South in Minneapolis, I waited for my mommy to set up the ironing board, plug in the iron, and carefully place the 33 ⅓ LP on the spindle so we could sing and dance to Shirley Temple’s songs from the movies we adored and watched over and over again.

In the 1930’s when she was a little girl, Mommy watched her Shirley Temple movies at the movie theater five blocks away from her home. It only cost a nickel. My sisters and I watched those same movies on the television in our living room. Heck, even my little brothers watched Captain January, The Little Colonel, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm as those boys were good singers and dancers, too.

In 1957, Mommy asked me what I wanted from Santa for Christmas. The sole thing on my list was a 12” Shirley Temple Doll - the least expensive one. I figured if I asked for only one thing, and if it was affordable, my chances of getting what I really wanted would improve. And it worked! Christmas morning smiling up at me, there she was lying under the Christmas tree in her pink onesie with my name attached to her wrist - my very own 12” vinyl Shirley Temple doll. Oh, how I cherished that doll.

The years passed, life’s desires took hold of me, and along the way my beloved Shirley Temple doll fell by the wayside. I looked high and low for her, but I couldn’t find her anywhere. Well into my 30’s, I was at a loss to find Shirley no matter how hard I tried. Although she won’t admit it, I think my mom put her in a box to give to the Good Will, poor baby.

I had to find her. That’s all there was to it. I scoured every antique shop I happened upon, but not one Shirley Temple doll peaked out through the glass cases.

One evening, I had an hour before my French class was to begin at the Alliance Francaises in the warehouse district of downtown Minneapolis so I decided to order a frothy cappuccino at the nearby bookstore. There was an antique shop next door so after drinking my coffee, I gave finding my 50’s Shirley another try.

There she was sitting all pert and pretty in a foggy glass case near the back. I’m telling you, that Shirley doll was smiling at me. I convinced myself she was indeed the long lost doll from my childhood. $98.00 later, she was once again resting safely in my adoring arms.

As a child, many of my Sunday mornings were spent sitting on my daddy’s lap combing over the want-ads of the hefty five inch thick Minneapolis Star/Tribune. If there was something to be had at a darn good price, you could find it among the hundreds of little boxes advertising used cars, ebony clarinets, and washer/dryer combinations. So, when the internet hit, it hit me hard. Obsessively hard. Ebay was pure magic. I set my alarm for the middle of night to get in on a last minute bid for a ruby and gold pagoda ring listed in Thailand. It was beyond amazing. You could buy a 1,000 year-old enameled cricket cage from China and Civil War daguerreotypes in hard cases. I bought a 1963 Morris Minor 1000 right hand drive stick shift with a big white steering wheel out of the UK. After six months, I managed to get Petula through Homeland Security and into my garage. One day I set about finding a 1930’s 13” composition Shirley Temple doll like the one my mom would have had when she was a little girl. It was easy, but it was also expensive. Still, the one I found and purchased was in very good shape for being so old.

Surprisingly, my mom passed on keeping the 13” composition Shirley Temple doll she would have had as a child. I decided to post her doll for sale on Ebay for twice what I paid for her. Mere moments later, a girl bought my 30’s Shirley paying full price on a “Buy It Now.” There was no doubt the buyer wanted that particular doll. I was to send Shirley in a sturdy box carefully cushioned in many layers of bubble wrap to Gina Napolitano at a shipping address in the Rossville neighborhood of Staten Island, NY. Gina was over the top excited about her purchase and once you hear her story you will be, too. Gina couldn’t spill the beans to her mama so she exploded with her plans in an Ebay message to me:

“I’m going to take a composition doll restoration class and make that old Shirley Temple doll brand spanking new again,” explained Gina. “You see,” Gina went on, “my mother grew up in the poorest Italian neighborhood on Staten Island. When the Depression hit her family, it flattened them with an asphalt stench and the annihilation of a double drum road roller.” (Note: I delighted in what I knew was Gina’s Italian/NYC accent crawling out from behind every syllable of her writing.) “Mama was a little girl when the Depression robbed people of what it means to be human.” wrote Gina. "My mama’s parents, my grandmama and grandpapa, wouldn’t let my mama play with her Shirley doll because if she broke it, they would not be able to buy her another one. So, they boxed up Mama’s Shirley and put her high on a shelf in the back of a closet for safe keeping only allowing her to take the doll out at Christmas.

Mama was eight years-old and it was the long awaited Christmas Day - the day she would be allowed to play with Shirley. Mama invited her friend from next door over to play with Shirley too because her friend did not have a Shirley Temple doll of her own. Cradling her precious Shirley in her arms, Mama went to the back door to let her friend in. Mama’s friend took one look at Mama’s Shirley Temple doll and became enraged with jealousy. She grabbed the doll by one leg and smashed her over and over again against the wall, cracking her face, legs, and fingers beyond repair. Mama couldn’t stop sobbing. That doll meant everything to her.

When Mama had me, she told me the awful story about seeing her Shirley in crumbling pieces on the kitchen floor. She told me over and over again, year after year after year, ‘Gina, I still miss that doll. My yearning for my Shirley never really goes away.’”

“Oh, my, Gina,” I wrote back. “This is so heartfelt and good, it might be the most amazing Christmas present ever. Gina, I have Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm bib overalls and a straw hat for that doll that I want to give to your mom, okay? In fact, I have an original Baby Take a Bow dress I will send to you as well. Would that be okay?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” Gina wrote. “This is going to be even better than I imagined. I’d better get on with the lessons and restoration,” Gina wrote. “Christmas is in two months and I want Shirley to be perfect.”

Six weeks passed and I’d heard nothing from Gina until one day I received a message with a photo attached. Gina had worked magic into the composition of that 1930’s doll. If you looked long and hard enough the smile on Shirley’s face became real. Shirley’s golden curls were divine.

On Christmas Day, I received a note from Gina with a video attached. In the video, Gina’s mama sat in a chair waiting for Gina to give her her Christmas present. Gina placed a beautifully wrapped box on her mama’s lap. Gina’s papa took the video of Mama unwrapping her gift. When Gina’s mama removed the lid, she gasped, “My doll. My doll. My Shirley. You’ve come back to me.”

Mama looked up into Gina’s face with a look for which words can never do justice. Silence took over the room except for nose blowing and tears. Mama held her long lost Shirley Temple doll to her shoulder kissing her face over and over again.

And a thousand miles away, a stranger who sold an old doll on Ebay cried.

Gina wrote one last thing to me the day after Christmas:

“Thank you, Julie. If you ever decide to come to Rossville on Staten Island, come and visit us. We’ll walk down to Portofino Pizza for a slice, my treat. I promise you will not be disappointed. Porofino’s is a small family owned pizzeria that also has fresh garlic knots that are out of this world.

Merry Christmas. With love, Gina Napolitano.”

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/the-sun-rises-twice/Ghost__Post__6531f15f767b370fd1a43675Mon, 30 Oct 2023 16:53:53 GMT

Six days of the week,
The sun rises once.
On Tuesdays, though,
The sun rises twice.

You work that day
At the Senior Care Center.
Each Tuesday morning,
My darkness lifts.

The moment I see you,
A second sun clears
My horizon of night –
For today, I feel alive.

Your welcoming smile,
Your near-giddy voice,
Your lustrous eyes,
Issue a galaxy’s fill
Of ten billion suns.

Then six long days
Of total eclipse.
When on Tuesdays, I return,
You are there –
If just for today,
The sun rises twice.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/backlighting-in-autumn/Ghost__Post__6531f036767b370fd1a43665Mon, 30 Oct 2023 16:53:35 GMT

Long-forgotten chill
And diminishing sun
Perform their natural alchemy
On deciduous trees,
Transmute dark green
Scrub oak leaves
Into yellows, oranges,
Golds, and ruddy browns.
These scrawny survivors
Wring from hardscrabble lives
A severe kind of beauty.

Backlit by a fading sun,
A patch of glowing leaves
Lingers before nightfall,
Suspended in the air
As much as in time,
Then vanishes until morning –
Minus a few more leaves –
Backlit now by an eastern sun.

Wonders of the world
Come in small sizes,
Magnificence, not
A matter of scale,
But of wakeful
Eyes’ recognition
Of what soon passes
From sight.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/mrs-santa-clauses/Ghost__Post__65320604767b370fd1a4376fMon, 30 Oct 2023 16:53:23 GMT

Claus One

Lockdown coffee cake
it never rains in southern California
or so I had heard it said…
until refraction
concern crisp and clean,
& cannot be swept or hid

Claus Two

Corn,
a metaphor for a woman un-satiated
starched jeans & buttoned down
collared shirts for IVY LEAGUE boys
to play foolish games
& pretend ‘it all came undone’ after 21

Claus Three

Upside down collard greens,
if you new who knows who,
words are like motor oil
for advice eclipsed nights

when your god is too small
and excelling is a habit
choose to ignore editorial demands

write it down if you must,
if waiting broke the bridge
You were not built to break

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/alone/Ghost__Post__6531f710767b370fd1a436bfMon, 30 Oct 2023 16:53:13 GMT

I no longer sleep alone.
It is a strange feeling
knowing that there is
someone else in my bed.

Two nights ago, she was
playful.
She planted a hickey on my
thigh.
Last night it was on my
stomach.

You see there is a spider in
my bed.
Woke up when she strolled across
my face.
I am her midnight snack.
Murder on my mind.
Solved by relocation to the
backyard.

Bat food – I hope.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/watch/Ghost__Post__6531fc95767b370fd1a436faMon, 30 Oct 2023 16:52:58 GMT

Julie no longer plays into the big hand,
The heavy hand, the upper hand,
The hand that silences, shames, smacks.

She used to plead, “Pick me! Pick Me!”
In a rush, she’d cast her heart into pools of abandonment—
Pearls to swine, like clockwork.

They could count on her to bear the secrets,
The stains, the scarlet paragraphs and
Chapters that chronicled cries and crises.

But in the hour of need, past half the darkness
The second hand clicked into place. . .
Safe hands and second chances surfaced.

This is her day in the sun. Love won.
Flourishing, fostering freedom and hope,
Counting on truth—not time—to heal her wounds.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/warning/Ghost__Post__6531fc23767b370fd1a436ebMon, 30 Oct 2023 16:52:43 GMT

What happens to a voice unheard?

Does it get lodged
Like popcorn kernels behind a tonsil?
Or deflate like a tire—
And then collapse?
Does it smell like singed hair?
Or bubble and fizz
Like a chemical reaction?

Maybe it just whispers
Like a secret in one’s ears.

Or does it scream?

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/christmas-1962/Ghost__Post__6532067e767b370fd1a4377bMon, 30 Oct 2023 16:52:21 GMT

It was Christmas 1962, I was seven-and-a-half years old and having serious doubts whether Santa Claus was real. It was all the usual clues – the multiple Santas in the various malls, the hidden packages under my parents’ bed and the serious doubts a man with a white beard could fly in the sky with eight reindeer, squeeze down a chimney we didn’t even have, and deliver millions of toys to all the world’s boys and girls in just one night.

I was raised in the suburbs of Toronto, the middle child of five boys who was, frankly, a little different than his four brothers.

Hockey ruled in Canada, and I remember my dad at five in the morning driving my two older brothers to the indoor arena for hockey practice. There was a public outdoor skating rink around the corner where we lived and my father would flood our backyard every winter to make our own private ice rink. There was no shortage of ice, except on rare days when temperatures rose above freezing. This was obviously pre-climate change.

Hockey Night in Canada was close to a religion in our little suburb, and kids in our neighborhood donned hockey skates as soon as they learned to walk.

I, however, was not the least interested in hockey. I wanted to dance on ice.
I was totally enthralled with figure skating and loved watching it on television. When the Ice Capades came to town, I begged my parents to take me, to no avail. I was obsessed.

So that year, when asked what I wanted for Christmas, it was a pair of figure skates, making sure Santa understood that it was figure skates, not hockey skates – the ones that were all shiny black and had the little pointy things on the top of the toe blades.

I had never been this excited for Christmas. I threw all my Santa skepticism aside and set out milk and cookies for Jolly Saint Nick, with a big fat carrot for Rudolph, before going to bed.

I could hardly sleep, and aroused my sleepy younger brother at four in the morning to quietly sneak into the living room to check out what was under the tree. There it was – a box, all wrapped up: “To John, Merry Christmas from Santa.” My heart was pounding.

I impatiently waited until 6 am before dragging my parents and two older brothers out of bed.

We had a family tradition of giving each other gifts and opening them first. The big gifts from Santa were always left to the end; sort of the big morning crescendo before the big morning breakfast.

After waiting for what felt like an eternity, the box from Santa was finally on my lap. I savagely tore open the paper, lifted the lid – only to find hockey skates!

I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with the 1972 cult film Female Trouble, but in it, is a scene where the star, Divine, playing the teenage character Dawn Davenport is desperately wanting cha cha heels from her parents for Christmas. It being a John Waters film, when Dawn unwraps her present and opens the box to discover she did not get the cha cha heels her heart desired, she flies into a major tantrum, screaming, “these are not cha cha heels, I wanted cha cha heels you bitch”, then proceeds to throw her father into the Christmas tree which falls down on her mother, ending the scene with both parents trapped underneath, uncontrollably sobbing, “Oh Dawn, oh Dawn!”

My reaction was not so dramatic. As my disbelief turned into tears, I threw the box of hockey skates down and ran into my room, slamming the door for added affect.

There was no way to console me. It all confirmed what I knew in my heart was true – Santa was fake and my parents not only lied to me, but also knew how much these figure skates meant to me. With my Olympic dreams dashed, I felt betrayed.

I never did get a pair of figure skates, and it took awhile, but I finally forgave my parents.

My seven-and-a-half year old self learned some pretty big life lessons that day: people who say they love you, can deceive you; you can’t always get what you want; and, be dubious of anyone pushing invisible entities on you.

The following Sunday I loudly announced to my Sunday school teacher and class: “There is no such thing as Santa – or Jesus.”

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/issue-20-fall-2023/Ghost__Post__653fd996767b370fd1a437d4Sat, 28 Oct 2023 16:57:00 GMTDear Friends of eMerge,

As the leaves begin to change and the air turns crisp, I'm delighted to welcome you to the Fall 2023 issue of eMerge. I hope this issue finds you well and ready to embrace the magic of the autumn season.

In this Fall 2023 issue of eMerge, we're excited to present a delightful assortment of holiday-themed works that will infuse your heart with the spirit of the season. As the year winds down and festivities approach, you'll find pieces that capture the essence of the holidays in ways that warm the soul. Moreover, we understand that our world can sometimes be overwhelming, and in these pages, you'll also discover works that resonate deeply with those facing the challenges of navigating the complexities of our times. From the joy of celebration to the solace of reflection, this issue offers a diverse range of voices and narratives, catering to a multitude of experiences and emotions.

eMerge is a labor of love brought to life by an incredibly dedicated and talented team: Cat Templeton, our web editor, and Charles Templeton, my co-editor. Despite our small size, we take immense joy in knowing that our work resonates with our readers. Your feedback and questions are always welcome, so please don't hesitate to reach out to me at joyeliclark@gmail.com. Lastly, I want to express my deep gratitude to our valued partner, The Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow. We also wish to recognize our new featured partner, WriterCon Magazine. Our heartfelt thanks to both of these organizations for their support in uplifting writers of all genres and stages in their careers.

As we step into autumn and then winter, remember to take care of yourselves in this busy season. Thank you for being a part of the eMerge community, and enjoy the diverse and captivating offerings in this issue.

Warm regards,

Joy Clark

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/issue-18-spring-2023-2/Ghost__Post__64b5c32ade9ec80df1dde9f8Fri, 04 Aug 2023 13:45:08 GMTDear Friends of eMerge,

I want to start this note with an apology that we're a little late getting this issue out. Both eMerge and I, personally, have been in a season of change and growth. It's true that you can't rush growth; growth takes time, needs care and attention, patience and a good senses of humor. If you are also in a season of growth in your life, I hope you are kind and patient with yourself, even when navigating system glitches and email backlogs and to-do lists as long as an 19th-century novel.

This issue is full of work that was truly an honor to publish. Some pieces defy genre, such as "The 'Post' in Postcolonialism" by Khadidja Bouchellia; and some pieces are playful with form, such as "How to Get Lost" by Louise Krug. We're also publishing our very first translated piece: "Rusty, My Friend" by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, which brought tears to my eyes both the first and second time I read it. But each piece in this issue brings something unusual, something inventive, something strange and wonderful to the table. I hope you take the time to read it all. Amid the hot, claustrophobic days of summer, there is fresh air to fill your lungs here.

Finally, I want to end on some good news! Because of the aforementioned system glitches, we've extended the Woody Barlow Poetry Contest through October 1, 2023! So pull out your notebooks and polish up an old gem or create something brand new. We can't wait to read your work.

eMerge is published because of the generous work of my very small team: Cat Templeton, our web editor, and Charles Templeton, my co-editor. Because we're a small but mighty team, we take a lot of joy in knowing that people are enjoying the work we do, so feel free to drop me a line with any questions or comments about eMerge at: joyeliclark@gmail.com. Finally, thank you to our featured partner, The Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow for their long-time support and commitment to uplifting writers of all genres at all stages in their career.

Stay hydrated and take care,

Joy Clark

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/today/Ghost__Post__64bff5b7de9ec80df1ddeb2cFri, 04 Aug 2023 13:43:26 GMT

Today,
And every day since Vietnam
I see the brown eyes
Of a ten year old boy
Staring through me…

He was not crying
Or blinking
After we killed most of his
Three generation family

I couldn’t explain to him
About mistakes…
Or the fog of war
As we carried dead family members
Past where he sat
He continued to stare
Showing no emotion
Fifty years later
I wonder
Where he is
And if he has healed

I have not.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/gawk/Ghost__Post__64b5cf49de9ec80df1ddeb10Fri, 04 Aug 2023 13:43:15 GMT

Trina neared the end of her anecdote. Unexpected breathlessness. Mixed up “champion” with “championship.” No one at the table seemed aware of the error. They looked pleased with more than the considerate brunch that repelled all possible allergies. They looked ready for dessert, a sweet way to push back from the table. Reassured, she launched a punchy last line. Their chuckles and gentle nods revealed the reward for sharing her chance encounter in childhood with Cassius Clay, before he became the world-famous Muhammad Ali.

Finished with her story, she looked down at her plate, at a piece of avocado toast couched against a slice of potato tart. She lifted the green tidbit to her mouth. Heard her stomach growl, signaling her to head to the buffet table for another helping. A smidgen more wouldn’t harm her calorie and cholesterol limits, especially if she left the potato tart on her plate.

“And what do you say, Dad? Is that how you remember it?”

Jackson. Half-brother of the groom, good friends with him, a testament to how a blended family can work out despite divorce. He was leaning over to spot his father’s answer. Trina was half-standing, the last of her avocado toast already in her mouth. Distracted by her growling stomach, but not enough to overlook Jackson’s question. She followed his lead, glancing down the table to the end where Terrance sat.

“No.”

Part of Trina wanted to pretend. Make like she hadn’t heard her brother’s answer to his son’s request for verification. Or maybe Terrance was distracted, too, answering a question put by someone at that end of the table. Jackson’s question sounded innocent, plucked from a sea of submerged history. Limp, waterlogged stuff everyone dumps overboard to lighten the load of chugging through endless days and nights of good, bad, whatever. How about this detail, his question asked. Recognize this—the moment when this happened?

Terrance said no. A definite rejection. An order to throw the crap back. It’s worthless, doesn’t belong here, among us. Not acceptable on this day of happy matrimony.

She looked at him, her mouth finishing its job of chewing the toast with avocado smeared on top. Bit of a culinary miracle. The toast didn’t get soft, the avocado remained green. Later, she would remember thinking about the crunch, the creaminess. Her throat and tongue in concert. For now, she slumped back in her chair, unable to shift her focus away from her brother’s face. For a second she grew afraid she’d choke, cause even more of a scene than what was surely sucking out all the air while she stared at him and none of the gawkers said a word.

The look he gave her held onto pain. Held her in a bright gaze that stepped them onto a threshold and stopped. She was stunned. The threshold pooled, a watery mess. Her eyes were damp. She could have mistaken the choking sensation. It was more like a sucker punch, T-boning her liveliness. A rising tide of shock. She felt her eyes blinking, shutters slamming, protection from the storm: Terrance, the male’s male who always knew the correct answer. Always held his goateed chin high, his mahogany body the plank that survived the wreck of patronizing scholarships, made it to shore, became the frontispiece of success.

She sensed him forcing back something. Making himself turn down his temperature. Past heated anger, a conditioning of the air that reverted to cool and then to cold. Gripping the look he gave her as he sat, rigid. No recognition of a blood bond. No warmth. No rescue.

It was a time in childhood they shared. That was all. She’d told a tale that sounded almost silly. One small ripple of time. She was 8 or 9, he was maybe 15. She couldn’t see what the big deal was. She’d spotted the man as he left a neighborhood bar. She remembered late afternoon sunlight falling across him and the two men with him. The bar’s doorway taking its time closing after them. Darkness from inside the bar challenging the sun, giving the three a weird glow as they paused, squinting. The man in the center looked like her big brother, especially in the eyes and chin and molasses coloring. When she told the man, unabashed, on her way home from a piano lesson, the man reversed her notation: he was the Big Man, not her brother. A stance she’d stumbled back home from. When she told on herself, she got a comeuppance, for talking to a stranger and for mistaking the next world champion for someone anywhere near her brother.

Now, she was still confounded. How could her story—their story—smash his fabrication, his breastplate of confidence. What was he fighting not to reveal? Why the pain? She swallowed an urge to hug him, ask him to daub her tears, like he used to do when she scraped her knee or shoved a bully who knocked her flat. Remember, she wanted to ask but didn’t, how we laughed at ourselves as we practiced the Twist while you played your Chubby Checker 45? Now, Terrance was hard, unrelenting. Touch me, he seemed to warn her with his knifing stare, and I will make you hard too.

She stood, all the conversations at the table buzzing in her ears. Everyone sounded quickly and with relief interested in some other topic. Any other subject sounded OK to them as long as the words swerved them away from the smack-down they’d witnessed. They could step aside, revisit the merriment housing their smiles and nods and genteel chatter. It was difficult for her to move but she was able to make her legs take her toward the exit. Later she would chew on the astounding flavors and textures of one person’s pain flooding her. For now, she was glad she’d kept her coat on, relieved not to need to navigate the checkroom. She could go.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/two-spotify-walks-after-patient-transport-july-16th-2020/Ghost__Post__64b5cd3cde9ec80df1ddead3Fri, 04 Aug 2023 13:43:03 GMT

Part I. Dusk—Pink Floyd, “Wish You Were Here,” 1975

I grabbed Gatorade on a sunbaked return home
to gawk groundward in a cloth chili pepper mask—
and not toward Tulsa’s shrapnel within paling skyline,
not to co-opt it for the sake of longing any longer.

I stumbled over my doorstep’s first Amazon Solzhenitsyn novel—
A Day in The Life of Anybody Not Doing All This,
where if “You” just had to be somewhere, then not “Here”
or even there, but away from all this, was all I’d “Wish” for still—

but if its Ivan hinted how best to cheat on my path through spacetime,
I was too worn down from 13-hour shifts on foot and sweaty
five-mile commutes to splice a day’s film to headspace.

As my apperception’s reel-to-reel flickered
like every daylight’s fade out,
no thought ever seemed enough.

Part II. Late—Keith Jarrett, “Answer Me, My Love,” Live in Munich 2016

Plodding back from fetching forgotten CVS psych meds,
I wondered, what use all those spastic obversions to response were—
such as entreaties, invocations, querying—beyond
consignment sales of cerebellum grooving out chronic aches?

What use, as two more EMSAs wailed rejoinder of anti-Siren-Song
(its primordial “Stay the Hell Back, I Lure You to Living”),
were one’s engines for craft or seeking purpose in abecedarian

spillages after inner cogency? What use was dejection
at being kicked and kicked way down in the dumps
of our regional vortex in the Great American Dumpster Fire?

What use was smearing pencil points for pretty pearls to ask
or rifle through middens of a vacant “Answer,” to have taken
stabs at “Me” or “My”, to grope around for the stuff of “Love”?

What use are such words?

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/the-post-in-postcolonialism/Ghost__Post__64b5c770de9ec80df1ddea5cFri, 04 Aug 2023 13:42:49 GMT

Google search: I no longer speak to myself in my mother tongue.
Google search: I no longer think in my mother tongue.
Google search: I no longer dream in my mother tongue.
Google search: How do I mourn the death [word deleted] the loss of my identity?
Google search: Meditation for trauma
Google search: Quran cleanse for anxiety and grief
Google search: Did Algeria open its borders?
Google search: When will Algeria open its borders?
Google search: Covid cases in Algeria
Google search: I have Covid symptoms
Google search: Ginger and turmeric blend for covid
Google search: my dissociation is worse after covid
Google search: ideas for covid care packages for friends
Google search: Booster shot near me
Google search: Did Algeria really open its borders?
Google Flights: XNA to Constantine, Algeria
Google search: PCR test near me

I woke up disoriented and confused by the sound of the Adhan. I haven’t heard the call to prayers in three years. The voice sounded different. It sounded transient, crispy, less cracked, and more powerful. I figured our local mosque has a younger Imam now. Moments later, I heard hurried steps and running water. I heard whispers of morning prayers. I heard the soothing sound of my father’s voice as he prayed for heaven—for all of us, for all humanity. It lulled me back to sleep.

My mother laid out a spread that morning. The smell of coffee teased my nose. It smelled sweeter than the coffee I had in the States. It took me some time to realize that I’m here. I’m back in the homeland. Nothing has changed in the kitchen, just a new shiny pot and more plastic containers. I stared blankly at the bubbles that formed on my coffee cup. They twirled in a harmonious dance. The froth reminded me of Aphrodite’s sea stunt and of births and rebirths. I looked up to see my mom looking at me. I could see in her eyes that she is trying to grasp that her daughter is here. My mom and I talked a lot more during the pandemic. Our relationship changed to the better. I can tell her a lot more about my life, and she seems receptive of it—very understanding even. It’s rare for a Muslim mother not to mention marriage to her thirty-year-old daughter. I respect that about my mom, but I also understand that it’s temporary. I know the subject will come up someday.

The night of my arrival was emotional. My siblings were there waiting for me at the airport. Kisses on the cheeks while tears ran down. I felt their heat piercing my flesh. The fear of loss is haunting us. We lost so many aunts and cousins in the past, and now the pressure to survive seems collective. We lost more family members to colonialism and to natural causes than the pandemic. The response has always been the same when we hear of death. It’s Allah’s will. Everything is pre-written—it’s maktoub.

My mom insisted that I begin my breakfast with her homemade bread and a dab of olive oil. “It’s good for your health”, she said. A statement I heard often growing up. I wish I can explain to you how powerful this love language is for mommas of North Africa and the Mediterranean. They offer you herbal medicine to outlive them. The belief in the magical powers of olive oil has always fascinated me. I never questioned it.

My mom’s stories seem more detailed now that she’s in her sixties. Maybe they were always detailed. I don’t remember. The stories began with brief updates on the pandemic then they somehow shifted to stories of colonization—the shift that often happens when my mother is telling stories. She placed a bowl of peas on the breakfast table and began to crack them swiftly from their pods.

In the past three years, I tried working on myself using the framework of Western psychology. I learned about boundaries. I wanted to tell my mother that we can postpone the conversation to when I’m ready to receive the information. I wanted to tell my mother that I was getting triggered, but I didn’t know how to translate it properly into Arabic. My tongue couldn’t release those words. It felt like an insult—a betrayal. Stories of violence that seem so normal to her made me want to weep. The feeling of anger towards the colonizers became a searing pain that tore through my insides. I felt like I’m betraying her and my ancestors who sacrificed their lives for our freedom.

I exhaled the anger outside of my body. My shoulders released their tight grip, and I continued to listen—but this time attentively. I allowed myself to receive my mother’s stories. I observed how she speaks about colonialism like it’s a present occurrence not a memory. I wanted to tell my mother who couldn’t finish elementary school (because of colonialism) about the “post” in postcolonialism. I wanted to tell her about the scholars who theorized her life, and my grandmother’s life. I wondered what her critique would be. I wanted to tell her about the subaltern while she spoke. I wanted to tell her she’s the reason I’m researching colonialism. I wanted to tell her that she’s the storyteller of our often-erased history. I wanted to tell her that I, like a clay vessel, carry her stories with me even when I have no capacity to listen. Her words stick and cling onto my memory and my flesh. I carry the violence, the trauma, the legacy of the free people, the Amazigh, of the martyrs and the freedom fighters— I carry them, and they carry me like a pea in a pod.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/urban-revelations/Ghost__Post__64b5c3f1de9ec80df1ddea09Fri, 04 Aug 2023 13:42:38 GMT

I broke the pattern.
Crackled curves down the
smooth surface I was trying
to preserve for you.

I tried so hard to keep the sidewalk
clean, shoving the banana peels and half-drunk coke cans
and crumpled cardboard into the streets that lined my veins.

But the pressure eventually built up
and the contents of my capillaries
exploded, sending the ugliness I was trying
to spare you from right into your lap.

Showing you the shameful truth.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/places-like-people/Ghost__Post__64b5c4e6de9ec80df1ddea1aFri, 04 Aug 2023 13:42:26 GMT

moving slowly, lowly
eyes glued to the topiary
snow fills sides and winds
following one everywhere they glide

a shadow of light
a son shining bright
dull boys
red walls
similar rum

a beating drum doused in oil
a boiler
a hissing hose coiled
and the spoiled sting of blades gone astray

all accompanied by the lingering tray of an old fool’s ash
sauntering with you along in the walls
tobacco and stairs now complimenting the hairs of some dog
one that bites and barks
your third

now 217
swirling in green, a dead woman’s tub
the mutt is back
licking and lapping at the sin
whiskey sliding down your cheeks and chin
his laugh paired with your now crazed grin
confirming the horror you knew to be true

this castle?
why, dear sir,
you must be mistaken
I fear, you and yours, have always
lived here

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/how-to-get-lost/Ghost__Post__64b5c8edde9ec80df1ddea75Fri, 04 Aug 2023 13:42:13 GMT

Nick, the kids, and I were invited to a birthday party for the father of my daughter’s friend. They lived far out in the country on a ranch, in an old stone house. We wanted to go because they are nice people, but Nick was out of town so I had to drive. This was a problem, but could be overcome, if we planned carefully (I don’t drive on the highway because I have double vision, a result of a brain surgery I had in my early twenties).

After breakfast, Nick and I peered at our phones, looking at the different routes. There were several, both of which followed roads I’d never heard of.

One evening, I was at a fundraiser in my neighborhood for the state book festival, and read a short essay I’d written on having double vision. Unusually, I was nervous, shaking in my legs, and my face was hot. Maybe it was because I knew most of the people in the audience, but I could barely look up from my paper. Afterwards, as I tried to leave the crowded room, people pressing into each other to try a bit of cheeseball or a lava cake, a man cornered me. He lived down the street from me, and I could never remember how to say his last name.

“I was at a dinner party and met your cousin,” he said. He was much taller than me, and a close talker. “She told the whole table your story, and said that you had had a handsome French boyfriend. Boy, she sure likes to talk.”

Together, a few days before the birthday party, Nick and I drove two of the routes that Siri gave us, one of which was extra-confusing because it involved a windy, unmarked road, and Ys that were tricky to remember which way to take.

By “my story,” the neighbor man meant my brain surgeries and heartbreak. I had just moved out to Southern California from Kansas to be with the French boyfriend — we had bought a mattress and a couch, and weeks later the symptoms started. The next thing I knew I was wearing an eye patch so I could see straight. After the surgeries I moved in with my parents in Michigan and had to learn to walk again, the whole shebang, without him. He had said in a letter that he wanted me to come back to California when I was better and we would pick up where we had left off, but it was becoming clear that there was not going to be a return to normal. Physically, I was changed, with facial paralysis, a balance deficiency, and permanent double vision. It was too much for him to kiss me during our last visit.

A couple of days after the fundraiser, I dragged a dining room chair over to our high bookshelves. The old photo album was up there with photos of my French boyfriend and me, some of them only days before my symptoms began: headaches and tingling limbs, the trip to the E.R. In one photo, we are at a wax museum in Las Vegas, shaking our fingers at George W. Bush. I wore a tiny white t-shirt and denim mini-skirt. I was 22. Blonde. Pretty. In another, he gazes out at the beach we lived by in Santa Barbara.

My kids are outside and Nick is working, so I let myself cry. I can’t stop, and in intervals, the crying goes on for days, mostly when I am driving or on walks. I start to worry.

On the day of the birthday party, the kids and I left our house an hour early for a thirty-minute journey. I drove like a cautious snail. We had a case of grape soda in our trunk, which was what I told the mom we would bring. It was a sunny day, and rural Kansas looked like a study in contrast, the fields burned black like ranchers do at that time of year to allow new growth. The pure sky. The kids and I looked for, and found, the landmarks that told us where to turn or when to keep straight on the particular route I had chosen. Signs that only we would know: that gravel road, the “Disney House” as my daughter christened it, the log cabin. Finally, we found our friends’ house. But there was no one home. “Hi! We are here. Are we early?” I texted the mom. No reply.

I looked at my French boyfriend’s Facebook account. He had sent me a friend request me a few years back, and I’d accepted, but we had never communicated. I hadn’t even looked at his profile until now. I hadn’t wanted to see. Now, clicking, I saw that he was back living in Paris, had a son, and surmised he had split from his model-esque Turkish wife by the drop-off of photos of her after 2016, but I had no proof. Still, I was happy about the prospect of him being divorced. She was too beautiful, as I looked at her page, seeing photo after photo of her looking how I would never look in dresses and heels. It made me nauseated. For the first time ever, I thought about emailing him. What I would say, what I would ask (“I am not the same person I was back then.” “How do you spend your time?”), but I couldn’t tell if I really wanted to know information or was just curious to see what would happen.

Outside the empty stone house, I thought to check my calendar on my phone. The party was tomorrow. I wrangled the kids back in the car. The trip home was a mess. I got turned around, and couldn’t find that gravel road. We ended up on a fast and busy two-lane where a truck laid on his horn at my slow speed. Everyone cried.

Later, I relayed the story to Nick, who was in New Orleans covering the Final Four college basketball tournament. I tried to ham up certain parts, but he saw through it.

“Just don’t go back tomorrow, it’s not worth it. Take the kids to a movie,” he said. “The drive is too much, it’s O.K.”

His being gone reminded me of what life was like before I met him. It was like being in a pitch-black room, looking for a light switch with your hands straight out in front of your face. I needed him a little too much, and I don’t like that about myself. But when you meet someone who is O.K. with you needing them, it’s like drinking sweet, cold water. Impossible to stop.

Things I had tried to reassure myself with to stop crying:
a. You just want your youth back
b. You are in a better place now
c. Think of how wonderful your family is
d. Etc.

Nothing worked.

The next day, despite Nick’s advice, we did the drive all over again, and found their house without a hitch. The party had BBQ, horseshoes, and a fishing pond, but we hadn’t known so hadn’t brought rods (not that we owned any). So we watched other people cast and reel. The rest of the guests seemed like family members, and there were no other kids. My daughter’s friend seemed more interested in lugging her baby cousin around than playing with her, so the kids and I played corn hole.

On the phone, I told my mom about the neighbor man’s comment at the fundraiser. “Oh honey, I’m sorry. People can say such insensitive things.” We started going down the road of how my cousin and neighbor were gossiping fools, but that’s not what really bothered me. What I couldn’t articulate to her at the time was a question: “When will I stop getting sad when I think about that time in my life?”

I emailed the French boyfriend. It was short, friendly, and honest but not inappropriate (“I just wanted to reach out and say hello…thinking about our time together is painful for me…”) and I sent it after proofreading it once.

On the drive home, we stopped and got grocery store Starbucks. The kids got fruity drinks and I got a coffee at 4 p.m., guaranteed to hurt my sleeping chances. I didn’t care, I was just glad to be back to where the speed limit was 40. None of us reflected on the birthday party at all. It’s like it never happened.

The French boyfriend wrote back, formal and benign. (“What a surprise to hear from you…Thanks for reaching out. Your email put a smile on my face….”) After reading it, I felt deflated. What did I think would happen? What was I wanting?

I wanted:
a. An apology
b. Congratulations for moving on
c. A request for forgiveness.

I got none of those, of course. Instead, I looked up memes about closure. I took a walk in bright sunlight without sunglasses, hoping the sun would help me like an article I read said it would (oxytocin? endorphins?). I downloaded a cognitive behavioral therapy app. I listened to music constantly. I started therapy again and increased my Zoloft.

A few months after the email, the French boyfriend liked a post of mine. That had never happened before, and it made me happy, because my post had been about an upcoming facial surgery. In my mind, that “like” said he was happy for me. Since the “meh” email, I had reconciled myself to the fact that his life was probably better than mine, he was happily married after all, and I was just a little unhinged. “Thanks for the like,” I messaged him before thinking too much. “It brings me peace to know that you and I made it through that impossible time. I’m glad we both made it to the other side.” A message popped up a few moments later. “That’s sweet of you to say, although a ‘like’ feels insufficient considering the nightmare you lived through. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for you more at the time. That you are at peace brings me peace as well.”

I didn’t show this message to Nick right away, but I didn’t feel guilty, either. For once, I didn’t think of what to do next. I simply existed. Every now and then, I opened that last message from the French boyfriend, like a pinch to reassure myself that it was real. I had finally received that apology I had always wanted. Now what?

One night a few days later, Nick and I laid on our bed and I told him about the emails. I told him about the crying and the memories, Facebook, and my old photo albums, the like and the apology. The word “peace.” I was nervous, because pain from the past is one thing, but emailing is another. Bringing exes into the present is something we have never done, not at all. I was pretty sure that Nick knew why I had done what I did, but there’s always that tiny bit of doubt that maybe he didn’t. Maybe he didn’t understand me.

Nick stayed silent, and then he said, “It’s O.K., I trust you,” and I knew that was true. Then he said, “Do what you have to do,” and I did. I let things be.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/mckean-country/Ghost__Post__64b5ce50de9ec80df1ddeaf4Fri, 04 Aug 2023 13:42:03 GMT

Music in the sky, the hills—
clouds make music too.
Keep listening. There’s music
everywhere—rivers, lakes,
a forest, a clearing. There’s
nothing that’s not music.

Can you hear the wild?
Open yourself to everything
underneath. There’s
nothing that’s not music—
the dirt, the rocks,
your history on earth.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/how-it-will-be/Ghost__Post__64b5cca3de9ec80df1ddeac4Fri, 04 Aug 2023 13:41:51 GMT

For Max Elbo

It will be June and we will be sitting
in the Parc Monceau, the one with the pond
and the columns and we will be at a table,
one of the small ones, and we’ll have just struggled
to buy a baguette from Madame on Rue de Mosselle
who hates Americans and also other tourists.
It will be like that other summer, when
we stayed in the 19th Arrondissement and
you will be stepping toward us along the path,
dodging les gens, smiling, and we will forget
for just a moment that you’ve gone
somewhere we can’t follow, left us shadows,
the breeze under the plane trees by the canal.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/delta-summer/Ghost__Post__64b5c57fde9ec80df1ddea23Fri, 04 Aug 2023 13:41:34 GMT

Delta summer plays possum
with Buddhist Sisyphus lessons

a stray cat
evening thunderstorm
slows thoughts

flash flood warnings
notice sensations

deep weather pushes
Wednesday’s
speechless noise

do not drive unless
it’s an emergency

cherry pits falling
on pistachio shells
sound ready
to compost

the time echo
tastes cold air
turned hot like
when you pee
after iceskating

when I sing for the boa
the kittens trill

why do I peel the tape
off the book spine
leaving it so sticky
I have to retape

fancy snakes sleep
sea scallops split
kimchee mouths

seven steely-eyed sloths simmer seaside
seven slick silver sliders sleek and smirking
seven stuttering splices of smack splash
seven spider slips speak of Spaniards
seven Saturdays splurged on sushi
seven strings silly stop showing
seven sample skeletons sometimes sidle

what if we could
taste with our skin
the way an octopus does

these are the stories
of my hands
on the keyboard

left longer
right wider
left taller
right deeper
left lifts light air
right finds
dinosaur stones

waiting for the
next fearsome thing
running under a lark

diurnal den of dreys
diatomaceous drifter dog
densely dim diner dins
daleths delve deliberating

chasing clockwise thoughts
I cannot track
unraveling directions
heading to the right
the heavier denser side

this posture feels like a hat
I’m not wearing any more
with its numb January hands

circulating left
stiff right
windy left
swizzle stick left
pink flamingo fizzy
Shirley Temple
grenadine syrup left
thick brick right
steady as she goes right
left freedom rides the wind
twice right lines

the math is off
marching 2/2
Sousa horns
your left your left
your left right left

there’s the tie snapped
for the chorus performance

a little yellow book finds
thin pointed pain on the left
shoulder blade
with its uneven glasses

I know if I try I will know
I know nothing

what I know does not matter
what I know makes no difference

the left higher than the right
the left the top step on the ladder
the right the bottom rung

this morning
we make a minyan
of hard boiled eggs

Siri says all the alarms are off
then she says the next alarm
is set for 10 p.m.
make up your mind Siri

a mother bat and her baby
recognize each others’
voices and scents
among thousands
in the nursery colony

a baby bat is a pup
a bat is as smart as a dolphin

vampire bats feeding
hurt no one
the cows do not feel
quick incisions
or lapped up blood

some people suck
but none can pollinate like bats
who maintain and advance
rather than destroy
ecological systems

sensation decomposes
bark turns to mush

I uncoil my head
shit from a mussel

what happened to
the rest of them
I can’t be the only one
waking up to climb

the butterfly effect
shouldn’t be a burden

winter arrives early tonight
or maybe it is just near
the back of my neck

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/rusty-my-friend/Ghost__Post__64b5ceccde9ec80df1ddeb01Fri, 04 Aug 2023 13:41:16 GMT

by Frume Halpern
translated from Yiddish by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub

Excerpted from Blessed Hands: Stories by Frume Halpern; translated from the Yiddish by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub (Philadelphia, Pa.: Frayed Edge Press, forthcoming)

Translator’s Notes: “Rusty, My Friend” is a story in Blessed Hands: Stories by Frume Halpern, my forthcoming translation of her Yiddish-language Gebenshte hent: dertseylungen. Halpern wrote with tremendous empathy about the lives of those marginalized by a range of causes and conditions, include illness, physical handicap, poverty, and racism. In “Rusty, My Friend,” Halpern creates a delicate meditation on aging and lost love as conveyed to humankind’s best friend.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Robert Linn and Victor M. Linn and Judith Linn, for kind permission and support and to Norman Buder for very helpful responses to queries on Yiddish language matters.

---

Rusty, my friend, even though you’re four-legged and I’m two-legged, we have a lot in common. My affinity for you is profound. It seems to me that I feel you the way I feel myself, that I hold you the way I would hold my own self. Like me, you’ve been forgotten and sidelined because of your age. You’ve lost your practical utility to humans, a quality you’d mastered throughout the years. Now, nobody cares about you. Like me, my four-legged friend, you’re alone and not attractive to people’s eyes, and as for your practical utility to dogs—well, that’s also been lost.

I feel you, my friend, and I don’t let you out of my mind’s eye. Now I see you, my little lump. You’ve selected a sunny spot of earth on which to curl up and bury your head in a few wet blades of grass, and with sleepy, cloudy eyes, you look dully at your “hims” and “hers” racing after summer butterflies and the cheerful children around them who fill the air with raucous laughter.

No one can compete with you when it comes to sniffing something from a distance or when you get the urge to play with the “she” around whom everyone is now dancing.

Based on your phlegmatic cleaving to the ground, one might presume that their activities don’t matter to you; after all, you’re not even looking in their direction. But, my friend, I know that’s just a show. I sense your internal pain. I see your twitching nose. I see how you flap an ear and give a snort with your shivering nose, and although I can’t claim to be an expert in canine psychology, I could swear that you, with the whole of your ungainly body, are now with them, with the young “puppies” that don’t even send a friendly sniff your way…

It’s already happened several times. There you were lying down in your loneliness, like you were already buried in the ground, when suddenly, as if the earth whispered a secret in your ear, you leaped up, like you did in your youth, and headed off like a whirlwind. Those around you tried to follow your example by running for a bit, but they soon returned, as if they’d decided: We won’t catch him, in any case. Let him run, that old fool. When you returned like a victor, with a guest, no one even looked at you. Your master didn’t even offer you a caress in thanks.

After one such expedition, I notice a flicker of old age in your eyes. This much is apparent: It’s all too much for your current capabilities. You flop to the ground, your usual resting-place, utterly spent. Just a moment ago, you detected from quite a distance with a sense of smell that has yet to let you down, someone from your household, but he doesn’t give you what you deserve. It is he, Grazia, who receives the special treats, the kind words, the caresses. It was he who danced around the guest, not you. He is beautiful. No one can resist his black, gleaming pelt with the white spots. The spot at the very center of his forehead adds a world of charm. Now Grazia rejoices in his conquest!

I’ve gone through the same thing, and so I feel for you. Oh, how I feel for you, Rusty, my friend. I know you’re exhausted and that you have pain in your sides from the running you just did; here you are lying in the tumult, with shortness of breath and sleep in your eyes. I feel for you, Rusty, my friend. Forgotten one, like me. I read all your resentments. Right now, I see that you are tired, that you tremble from time to time. Your muzzle rests on your weak front paws, your wide, pendant ears are even with the ground, and your half-open eyes are veiled with a slimy membrane. It’s hard to know whether you’re asleep. It’s already dark. The setting sun sets a slice of sky aflame. A few rays stumble upon your head and make their way through the dark recesses of your dozing brain to illuminate the remembrances and desires there. You glide in the past, my friend. Here too, I feel for you, Rusty, my friend, because the setting sun has also stirred up for me times past, yet not forgotten…  You are still feeling at this moment how and in what way to throw yourself upon your enemy, upon any dog who stands in your way and doesn’t let you get anywhere near the female your heart so desires… A burning fury is ignited within you. You let out a wild howl! You give yourself a shake and there you are again lying on the ground. You woke up…

Oh, Rusty, my friend, how well I understand you. Oh, those years, when your legs were even, flexible, nimble, and swift as an arrow released from a bow! Why, your legs ran so quickly that they were invisible. I, too, Rusty, my friend, when I close my eyes, see myself long ago… the only difference is that I sit on a bench and you—on the ground.

Rusty, do you remember those adoring, soft, and loyal hands that we both loved so? Between you and me, Rusty, there was no place for jealousy. I loved to caress your satiny curly fur—fur of a hue that, in the dark, looked like flames, the only-just vanished flames of the setting sun. Your eyes were so human that I often thought you understood a bit too much for a dog… And what a scamp you were! Your ears stood like a young hare’s. She and I, both of us loved to play with your ears. No less than me, you were greedy for the caresses of those hands with their magic-fingers.

Remember how those hands caressed you. You wanted to thank them with a kiss, and in the face, no less, right? Remember how she embraced your handsome head in her translucent hands with such tenderness so as not to cause you any pain. Then your eyes would ask me to come to your aid. Neck outstretched, you would look at me, a little embarrassed. I saw a tear in a corner of one of your eyes.

Ach, ach, Rusty, my friend, how foolish one can be when young and in love! Now, when I speak to you without words, I can say that to you. You know, Rusty, there was a time when I was jealous of you? No, you can’t know. More than once, when I spotted her sitting on a bench in the garden, you at her feet, your handsome head on her lap and she playing with your silky fur—oh, was I jealous of you! Oh, how I wanted to be in your place!

Ach, ach, how monstrous the years can be, Rusty, my friend.

You lie in the corner and although you’re always drawn to the ground, you turn your head to the slice of moon that leaps out now and then from the heavy, dark clouds as if seeking to free itself from their pressure. But the clouds are rushing off to who knows where. As recently as earlier today, my eyes followed you as those of your kind held sway over the meadows and you were seized by a sudden urge. You hastily got up from your bed, shook the dust from yourself, looked all around, and spotting a white “she”, for whom you apparently have a “weakness”, made off in her direction as one would to an old friend. But she, although no innocent young thing herself, started barking so forcefully as if you wanted to slaughter her. At the sound of her cries, the entire “dog brigade” came running and started barking, and you, poor Rusty, unfortunately had no alternative but to retreat…

The truth is, you left in dignity, albeit with a lowered head; you didn’t flee, but walked slowly, step by step, and then returned to your bed.

As it does for myself, so my heart ached for you, Rusty, my four-legged friend. I experienced something similar in my own life. Strange, but when I saw you coming back with sadness and awkwardness in your steps, it seemed to me that I heard your wide, hanging ears weeping over your bitter fate…

… It’s midnight. A stripe of light extends from a lamp hanging from a beam, cutting through the dark fog. You, Rusty, are seemingly enveloped in a shadow, but when an edge of the moon reveals itself, your presence on the ground is spotlighted. When one gets close to you, one might think that you are still, like the ground itself upon which you lie, and like the trees standing by your head. But that is not the case. It’s not just the ground that is still, but also the trees that are still. You, Rusty, are very far from still. In your subconscious, something is happening. It’s hard to say what. What I do see: Your body gives a shiver, a jerk, as if someone had stepped on it, and from your throat—as if you were enraged at someone—a kind of grrr can be heard… Any minute now you will be coming out with a true canine bark. Perhaps you’re angry at the moon… and perhaps the moonlight has brought memories of the past back to you? Perhaps the moon has awakened in you a longing for those tender hands—the hands with the magic fingers, for which I, too, yearn, yearn unceasingly?

Of one thing I am sure: Despite your awkwardness and your proximity to the earth, you’re a dreamer, and that makes me happy. Because you ought to know, Rusty, my friend, that to dream is itself an achievement. And there’s something else you ought to know—one can’t always dream. A dream, too, has its time…

So dream, Rusty. Dream, my friend!

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/sleepless/Ghost__Post__64b5cfeede9ec80df1ddeb1fFri, 04 Aug 2023 13:41:04 GMT

Oh, to sleep like the cat.
Indolent napping during
Daylight hours,
Exhausted by a night’s prowl,
Then a rarefied rest.
Balletic investigations
Of belly, paw, and privates,
Easing her down upon
The counterpane:
The Isle of Tabby.
Eyes half-mast and slow fade
To brief oblivion of empty house.
Until a human invasion.
Obscene stretching
Invites a touch, a scratch,
A shift of position,
Then napping on.

Oh, to rest a long time!
A poison-spindled slumber
With no wake-up call.
Instead, this wakened/woke
Angst of Now.
A flash of heat, petty fretting,
Life-or-death disquiet,
Breaking glass, a mate’s mere snore,
Toss and turn me long before
Oblivion will come.

Oh, to be nocturnal like the cat,
Aptly named Aurora.
We pass in the night.
She creeps toward her bowl,
I stumble toward the clock,
Old woman squinting
At a luminous dial.
How few hours has she rested?
Vigilant and wary of
A siren in the distance,
A dumpster dropped
From a midnight height,
An exchange of vital cautions
By the neighborhood dogs.
A freight train slows
At endless crossings
From north to south of town.
That not so lonesome moan
That offers no repose.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/my-dad-is-sick/Ghost__Post__64b5cc45de9ec80df1ddeab7Fri, 04 Aug 2023 13:40:45 GMT

I’m not saying –
To all the followers,
To all the friends,
To all the subscribers–
Anything about the terror
That is holding me so still.
So still I appear
Perfect–
So still I seem
Weighted–
So still I could be
The soaking cold
Night before
Spring dawns.
No.
I am, not.
Rather,
Electric, I am, in hateful waiting.
The stillness of
An alligator jaw.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/me-the-hellhound/Ghost__Post__64b5cbe7de9ec80df1ddeaa9Fri, 04 Aug 2023 13:40:31 GMT

When I dare to be powerful
I eat the world alive.
There is no helping any of you
You won’t be my friend–
Silence will sink us –
I might not say anything
But the vibration
Of me will judder
In your palms.
Oh how you itch to
Leave how you wish
To be free to
Find yourself back in a park
Swinging in the flat sunshine
Flying free over cement
Baby-face and rolls
A cozy sitter nearby
Heedless of the others.
This is your rollercoaster
To emancipate the treasures
Of your heart – out
Around through you.
No need to play with
The lurkers no need to
Open up to them no need to
Launch yourself into
Their foray, to collide
With the cruel
Shape of their words
As they cut zigs
Into the grass.
You’ve forgotten,
Haven’t you, why you are
Here? It’s the long slow
Play to run away from
Me from me from
Me the hellhound who
Tucks inside
Mirrors, creeps in
Gloom, slurs into
Mistakes the rakes the villains
And somehow bares logic
Once cemented and
Decided to speak up –
Oh no. No, no.
We are revealed in our
Discomfort. So you
Sit with the heart of
Maleficent, love pounding,
Wonder worrying:
What is my next
Iteration? Will it be
Mud, apostasy,
A screech owl
Rending the night
With her vow to
Retreat? Friend,
Tell me what you
Want.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/tin-roof-chatter/Ghost__Post__64b5c6dade9ec80df1ddea4dFri, 04 Aug 2023 13:40:08 GMT

Hidden in the thickets of cedar, pine, and weeping willows
the old cabin patched with make-do siding and leftover windows.
The tin roof shines when the sun comes peering through the clouds
but in the mountain rains the roof chatters telling tales out loud.
Old wives’ tales crackin’ a smile like peppercorns in the stew
and shared recipes of the perfect buttermilk biscuits, cornbread too.
Sewing swatches together for a warm patchwork quilt,
stitching a ruffle to a too-short dress not wasted to clean up silt.
Though legends speak of the cry heard of a mother with her stillborn,
years to follow the midwife’s hallelujah cries for four healthy newborns.
There are fishing and bull frogging tales longer than PaPa’s legs
and the neighbor’s filly jumpin’ the six-foot tall fence pegs.
The eight-point buck’s head mounted over the stone fireplace mantel,
venison pot pie at the dinner table while hungry children quiet their tattle.
Porch gossip of a jilted love affair with a soldier gone away
and who’s passed the smallpox onto the poor clan down the way.
If listened close enough as the summer rain pitters and patters,
The tin roof chatter echoes our own stories, real heart matters.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/is-this-reality/Ghost__Post__64b5c602de9ec80df1ddea30Fri, 04 Aug 2023 13:39:58 GMT

There’s something wrong with me. No, really. I mean it, there’s something wrong with me. I know you’re thinking “everybody thinks there’s something wrong with them,” but I know there’s something wrong with me. I know it because I think of my life in every single timeline. Why do there have to be so many possibilities as to who we can be? Why can I think about all the things that I could be or have been or don’t want to be or do want to be? Why do I think about running through a field with no shoes on and a white dress and flowers in my hair? Then I think of the version of myself who sits at coffee shops and takes in the people and drinks a drink that’s warm and velvety and enjoys the simple pleasure of letting the warm liquid trickle down her throat?

Then I’m me but I have heels on and a pencil skirt and work day in and out in New York. I’m drinking with my girlfriends on the weekends and letting rich men buy me drinks at a rooftop bar. I think of the ways that I could act or look. The different ways I could present myself, then I think about the fact that I’m not any of these girls I’ve described. Could I be all of them? Maybe if I tried hard enough. I could be all of them in this lifetime, but is that what I want? What do I want? That’s what’s wrong with me, I don’t know what I want. I don’t know which version of myself to grow into, to become. Then I ask myself: is it predetermined? Is it already set in stone? Destined, maybe?

I have a control issue. If you’ve ever gotten close to me you know that. I don’t like letting things happen. Go with the flow? Not this girl, given I have gotten better at this. I’ve learned the flow is a nice place to be. To not have to have that control all the time is actually immensely relieving. To live in peace and not worry about what’s happening next.

However, current Raven and past Raven still have some issues with it. The flow I mean. Is that okay? Sure. Do I need to learn that it’s also okay to not be a big ball of anxiety when I have nothing to do? Yes. In this timeline, the one I’m currently in, I’m learning so many lessons. I’m learning that I adore sleeping in my bed by myself with the stars placed on my ceiling from a sweet boy who wanted to be more than what we were. I appreciate the morning air during the summer time, and I enjoy wearing oversized sweatshirts and shorts and having bare feet. In this timeline, this Raven loves to braid her hair. To wear rings on all her fingers except the middle one because she read once that if you wear rings on your middle finger you’re inviting chaos. Real? Probably not. Will I continue to not wear rings on my middle fingers? Probably. In this version of myself I am constantly trying to prove myself, but to who? Myself? The world? Then when trying to prove myself I think of all the other versions of myself that I could possibly be because do those versions flip pennies on the street so someone finds it face up and has good luck? Is that version of myself in love? Does she worry about her weight? Her hair? Her makeup? Does she have an eating disorder?

I think about the girl who stayed in Hawaii, who got to live her island dream and be with the boy she fell deeply and wholeheartedly in love with in the sand. She wakes up in the morning and hikes the green mountains then spends the afternoons with waves washing over her. Her hair is sandy, wavy, and has highlights from the sweet Hawaiian sunshine. She goes to work at the coffee shop in the morning and she works the restaurant or bar or hotel job in the afternoons or at night to cover her rent. The boy she fell in love with adores her and constantly battles her homesickness from being 5,000 miles away from everyone else she loves. He kisses her eyelids before she goes to sleep. She dances with her friends in a bright kitchen with no air conditioning but that’s okay because you don’t need cool air when you have love surrounding you.

When you’re content in the moment and the only moment you’re in is the present you don’t need cool air blowing the back of your neck. You’re too giddy with love and drunk on the people surrounding you. But is that version of myself happy? Would this be the way life would be for her?

I think about the version of myself that never went to college. Never dated the same boy for three years. The version of myself who stayed at the small liberal arts college that I transferred from due to a breakup and anxiety that left me shattered and scared. I tell people I wanted to live off campus in hopes that it covers up the fact that I was 19 years old and freshly out of a three year relationship where I only thought about being in the relationship and others and not who Raven really was. I didn’t transfer to live off campus because I was lost and confused and sad.

All of this to say that I’m allowed to be all versions of myself at once and to move through this life in the ways that I am.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/goddess/Ghost__Post__64b5c7f7de9ec80df1ddea68Fri, 04 Aug 2023 13:39:41 GMT

These days, I look like the fertility goddess,
tumescent tummy hanging low,
pregnant with improbable possibility.
Then the thighs, fluffy and rounded
on squat, sturdy legs, feet splayed wide.
Oh, and the breasts, pendulous
and swinging free.

I was given the goddess as a gift,
a gesture of goodwill to help catch the baby
I was reaching for, but kept missing.
The goddess lived in the upstairs closet,
sleeping with the miller’s wife, the untamed shrew,
a handmaid, and Bathsheba.
I hated her.
One day, I carried her outside,
kicked her thick body to the curb,
clapped my hands and said so long,
I hope to see you never,

But she was in the mirror
this morning, there in the steam-streaked glass,
wet and gleaming,
curves and mounds,
voracious and
breathing warm hunger

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/marilyn/Ghost__Post__64b5ce00de9ec80df1ddeae5Fri, 04 Aug 2023 13:39:23 GMT

I saved up and bought a 3-D printer. It is the 2600 polymer extruder, the largest I could afford. I had to upgrade my Mac, which dented my savings severely.

And man, it is sure worth it. The first thing I printed was a quail. I’ve had this ceramic quail sitting on my desk for years. After reading the printer’s instructions I took a dozen pictures of the quail from all angles, printed it out and set it on the shelf next to the real one. Now I have a replacement in case the ceramic one breaks. It looks very good side by side with the original.

Then I had an idea. I went to my files and pulled out my collection of Marilyn Monroe pictures dating back to the 50s and 60s. I selected a couple dozen of the best ones and scanned them in. Then I filled in specifics about size, surface texture and colors. The program took some time, then gave me a read out of my project: it would be printed in five pieces, legs, arms and torso with head, printout time: 2.5 hrs. I held my breath and hit the print button. Two and a half hours later the pieces lay on the kitchen table, and my canister of soft tissue thermoplastic was almost empty.

Fortunately I had a quart each of two-part polycement and I glued it together very carefully, trying to make the connections as clean as possible. I say “it” but, of course, I mean “her.” She is beautiful as I had expected, but kind of a funny texture. Well, not funny really, just not quite flesh-like, but close. I suppose I didn’t really expect her to feel like a real girl, but I was hoping. My friend Dominic says hope is the most disappointing virtue of the three, and he’s right.

I dressed her in a lovely silk gown, spaghetti straps, mid-thigh length, a lustrous silver material, very sheer, very Marilyn, very sexy.
I’ve thought a lot about it, and I can’t really explain why I wanted one of her. She didn’t invent the comedic blonde, she only perfected it. In my earlier years no one else was quite as wonderful to look at. And, a good sense of humor has always been important to me.

Now, she’s sitting on the couch in my living room, waiting for me to finish typing this report. She’s absolutely, convincingly beautiful. Time means nothing to her, of course, she’s only a plastic doll. If I get sidetracked with another project, she won’t say a word or make an impatient face.

However, she’s probably wondering what we’re going to do today. Yesterday, I took her for a drive. We went to the park. I drove slowly, enjoying the fresh air and allowing her to enjoy seeing all the trees, birds and people. I thought she might feel connected to them, to us. She might acquire a feeling of belonging, something beyond her extruded teflon reality, her roots you could say being made of primarily petroleum products and all.

She is so beautiful quite a few people notice her in the car and stare. I don’t think she gets embarrassed at all when people stare at her. Marilyn always had a very calm stage presence.

I try to act normal when I carry her out to the car and arrange her in the passenger seat. It makes me a little nervous toting her around like you’d carry an elderly person to their bed or a bride across a threshold. I feel a little nervous and a bit self-conscious, supposing a neighbor might think I’m transporting a dead body. She is kind of limp and her joints seem a bit clumsy, but so far, either nobody’s noticed, or maybe they’ve become used to my quirky projects.

I find that seeing the admiration on everyone’s faces is almost as satisfying as creating her in the first place. Next, I am going to look for every picture I can find of Labrador Retrievers. I want to print one for the back seat so we can look more like a family.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/spider-2/Ghost__Post__64b5cb87de9ec80df1ddea9aFri, 04 Aug 2023 13:39:00 GMT

I want to shift my shape and stalk
across a jeweled dew-dropped web
spinning a spiral tunnel as I walk
all corners anchored firm to fight the ebb
and push of errant breeze or stormy blow,
snug against all tricks Fate might deliver.
When it’s finished, I will back on tip-toe
down my chute, stop to sever silken thread,’
patient, curb my hunger, crouching in a
waiting trance, feeling neither hope nor dread.
I rely on heaven-sent sweet manna.
Some hasty, flighty creature on the wing,
too quick to whoop-de-do, dive, zip or zing,
will bumble in my net, then stick there fast
to offer me refreshment and repast.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/berry-buckle/Ghost__Post__64b5c686de9ec80df1ddea3eFri, 04 Aug 2023 13:38:45 GMT

More cake than fruit than the other fruit desserts, it is much like a coffee cake. It has a cake foundation and a crumbled topping with fruit in between. The history of this dessert says it is much like a crumble, named after its buckled or crumbled appearance with the streusel topping. A kuchen is the German cousin to the American buckle.

Cake Ingredients:

½ cup+ unsalted butter, room temperature, plus more for baking dish
1 cup granulated sugar
3 large eggs
zest of 1 lemon
1 cup all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking powder
1-pint berries of choice (heaping 2 cups)

Topping Ingredients:

1/2 cup all-purpose flour
2/3 cup sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, diced
1 teaspoon milk

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 350° F. Butter a 2-quart oval or square baking dish; set aside.
2. In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar with an electric mixer until fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating after each addition to combine. Fold in lemon zest.
3. In a large bowl, whisk together flour, salt, and baking powder; with mixer on low speed, gradually add flour mixture to egg mixture until well-blended.
4. Spread batter in baking dish. Scatter berries on top.
5. For topping, in a medium bowl, combine flour, sugar, and salt and whisk to combine. Add cold butter and milk; cut into flour mixture until butter is blended. Form mixture into small crumbs and scatter over top of buckle.
6. Bake until a toothpick inserted in center of cake comes out clean and top is golden brown, 45 to 50 minutes.
7. With a large spoon, scoop out onto serving plates; serve with a dollop of whipped cream or ice cream, if desired.

Makes 6 servings.

]]>https://emerge-writerscolony.org/contests/#woody-barlow-poetry-contestGhost__Post__64777cf4de9ec80df1dde9dbWed, 31 May 2023 17:05:32 GMT

The top five poems will receive $100 each: Winning poems will be published in eMerge and in the ECHO Anthology and considered for Pushcart Nominations each year. Submissions accepted from June 1 - September 1, 2023.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/issue-18-spring-2023/Ghost__Post__64275185de9ec80df1dde841Mon, 17 Apr 2023 03:39:17 GMTDear Friends of eMerge,

Spring brings warmer days, longer days, brightly colored flora, April showers, and a new issue of eMerge! I'm delighted to present Issue 18, filled with meditations on color, whimsical monologues, a delicious pesto recipe, and nature galore. Additionally, this issue also touches on what it's like to have a diagnosis, feel an absence, or long for understanding. Each moment is human; each moment matters. I hope you enjoy reading these unique pieces as much as I did.

eMerge is published with the generous support of the Board of Directors and the staff at the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow. Our website is designed and managed by Cat Templeton. We are currently raising funds to continue publishing in 2024, so if you enjoy this issue please consider making a small donation here. Even a small contribution will help us continue publishing writing from emerging writers that intrigues and inspires.

Until next time.

All the best,

Joy Clark

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/honk-if-youve-read-boot/Ghost__Post__64274e34de9ec80df1dde7fbMon, 17 Apr 2023 03:21:29 GMT

The other day I was thinking of a new way I might promote my book, Boot: A Sorta Novel of Vietnam. My youngest daughter, a self-proclaimed computer Guru, said, “Pop, you’re pretty damn good at marketing; about the only thing you haven’t tried is bumper stickers.” Bumper stickers, I am thinking to myself, they work pretty good for politicians and whales. So, my daughter and I set off to FayetteNam to one of those chain print stores to check out designing and printing bumper stickers. Normally, I’m much more frugal with my money, I still have the first dollar I ever made (a 1957 Silver Certificate signed by Priest and Anderson I earned mowing my neighbor’s yard with an old rotary mower), but my book is having a good year. I sold over a hundred books in 2021. Why, heck, that’s almost two books a month! My friends tell me it’s doing better than most self-published books, but it ain’t ever going to be a run-a-way best seller. Shoot, a young man could have a pretty good time with that kind of money.

So, we get to the print shop and start looking around. I see a bumper sticker that says, ‘Honk! if you love Jesus.’ Well, the old creative juices start flowing, and I’m thinking, that worked pretty good for Jesus; I hear people honking all the time, wonder how that would work for Boot. So, after some haggling with my daughter, the wordsmith, we finally decided on ‘Honk! If you’ve read Boot.’ I wanted it to say, ‘Honk if you love Boot.’ My daughter convinced me that it was more important to know who read it than who loved it. “Besides,” she said, “We don’t care if they love it, as long as they buy a copy. That’s the American Way, pop. The code of Sam Walton and Jeff Bezos.” So, this big ol’ smile of parental pride spreads itself across my face; I’m thinking, Dagnabbit, I have raised a genius daughter. I couldn’t wait to get home and tell my wife about our brilliant daughter. So, after an acceptable amount of time haggling with the clerk over the colors and size, etc., we were ready to make our purchase.

“How many would you like?” The clerk asked. “We are running a special today if you order a hundred.”

“A hundred? I only own one car. Why would I want a hundred bumper stickers?”

I told him that the five dollars and twenty-six cents he was charging me for one bumper sticker was eating into my profits something fierce. He finally capitulated and allowed us to leave the store with one bumper sticker. “The gall of some people,” I said to my daughter, who was putting the bumper sticker on the back of our truck.

“He was just doing his job, pops. You need to relax.”

Dear Lord, I just love my genius daughter, every time I get up on my high horse, she knows just what to say to bring me back down to earth, I was thinking.

So, we pulled out of the parking lot into traffic, and we got our first honk! I looked in the rearview mirror to see who had read my book. It was a man in a John Deere ball cap holding up his middle finger. I asked my daughter what that meant.

As we pulled up to a stoplight, she said, “That is the digitus impudicus, I believe. It’s how folks in Boston talk to each other when they cannot be heard. It’s called, let your fingers do the talking. In Hawaii, it’s called the Good Luck Bird, so I suppose he is wishing you good luck on your book.” Did I tell you my daughter was a genius? Then we heard another honk, and another. My daughter said, “Maybe we should have waited to put it on, pops.”

“No, no, no!” I said. “This is great! I don’t think Jesus ever got this many honks.” I was living in the moment. I was exuberant and filled with ecstatic joy. I even honked a few times myself and waved the Good Luck Bird to everyone. Soon there were cars and trucks all around us, just honking and waving the sign of good luck to us.

A couple of people were so excited that they got out of their cars and started walking toward our truck. Probably to thank me for writing such an inspirational book. It was at this time that I noticed that the light had changed, so I left them with a final wave of the Good Luck Bird as we drove away, filled with love for my fellow humans! I just love folks who can articulate what they mean, whether they use words or symbols or sign language.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/six-syllables-two-words/Ghost__Post__64274d3ade9ec80df1dde7ddMon, 17 Apr 2023 03:21:15 GMT

When the doctor told me my diagnosis,
I measured the syllables in each word
Bi-po-lar Dis-or-der
Six syllables, two words

Stars shattered
across the blue of my eyes
and my hands clasped in prayer

Now I say this language over and over
Over and over
The long o
An utterance of air
Breathe out, breathe out
Bi-po-lar Dis-or-der

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/how-to-write-a-book/Ghost__Post__64274efade9ec80df1dde809Mon, 17 Apr 2023 03:21:06 GMT

Sit down. Don’t get up. Start. Keep going.
It might be awhile.
It’s the pond; is that
a skim of ice still floating? Don’t test. Don’t
look closely. A foot dangled
will no, don’t! you out of it:
Instead: jackknife. Unfold into dark water.
Emerge. Let your shocked skin burn with joy.
Stand on the old deck.
Shake off water like a blue-eyed border collie.
Put in collard greens. Put in Marrakech.
Cut paragraphs apart with scissors.
Place in pillowcase. Shake well.
Dump contents on the floor:
You’ve found your structure.
Put in itemized bills: each suture, blood unit,
Mr. Robb from the collection agency, who told you,
“I don’t know you, Miss, but I’ll pray with you.”
Put in the girl in cut-offs, secretly walking
the narrow porch rail above the forsythia,
or running, red lollipop in red mouth,
saying to herself the words she didn’t say to Mother:
“See? I didn’t fall, I didn’t choke, I didn’t put my eye out.”
The exhaled whiff of florist’s refrigerators:
cold freesias, lilies, baby’s breath
crackle of green paper, long distance
you’re breaking up I’m losing you there’s only 1 bar:
sweetheart roses would not bring you back, sweetheart
you never had me
Add garlic, ginger frying in ghee.
Put in ripe Red Haven peaches.
Put in the lost skate key, the lost earring,
the khaki canvas duffle SwissAir never found.
Add the smell of a burning bridge
Add the smell and squeal of a tire, burning rubber
I’m outta here
Omit transitions, jump
from rock to moss-wet rock:
The reader will leap with you.
Put in love, death, fear, mercy and deceit
But never say the words.
Don’t say, “The house was drafty.”
Instead, write about the windows in winter, and how,
though they were closed (it being January)
the yellow curtains ruffled with the wind.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/simplicity-the-cutting-edge/Ghost__Post__642749d7de9ec80df1dde77cMon, 17 Apr 2023 03:20:47 GMT

Simplicity is a capsule
Holding infinity.

The Cutting Edge

Big talk from big lips
Big promises big slips
Big push for a big grip
Big tumble into bigger dip.

Little handle, little control
Little push into little mold
Little person little too bold
Little took, a little crook stole.

Closed eyes, closed ears
Closed life to closed tears
Closed budget, closed fears
Closed court, closed years.

Simple mind, simple tick of time
Simple reason for simple crime
Simple rent on a simple dime
Simple me, writes simple rhyme.

Outside denies inside view
One mistake a multiple few
One chance to escape you
One word not two.

Don’t look back, I’m on front row
I’ll shrink the image, then I’ll grow
I’ll forget, then I’ll know
I’ll fall apart, to turn and go.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/slingshot/Ghost__Post__642748abde9ec80df1dde764Mon, 17 Apr 2023 03:20:32 GMT

At first, I think I know a story and its timing, but then I don’t, and can only conjecture. There’s a lot that I cannot seem to recall with certainty about my father’s carved wooden slingshot—when and why he made it, how I inherited it. As happens when I look at photographs of him, particularly the one of him smiling, around age eight, sitting on a high-back chair with his arms way up in the air, I can usually hold the slingshot for just a few seconds before the emotions rush and sweep.

Except for its artfulness, it never made sense to me that my father made a slingshot. Until a friend offered the suggestion, it had not occurred to me that the pristinely carved object had been made not for animal seeking, but for use on targets unable to be harmed. Another friend suggested not long ago that boys of my father’s generation who took wood shop might have made slingshots as a matter of course. These explanations make far more sense to me than others, thinking about a man who abhorred violence in any form, and taught me to do the same.

---

My father told me a story about having pinned a butterfly when he was a boy. At the time of the telling, I was about the same age as he had been when the event happened. All of the other boys taunted him, the only one who refused to kill. He used this story to instruct me about the dangers of peer pressure, wanting me to be my own person, and not live with regret, as he had. His description of carefully pushing the pin into the body and watching the wings stop slowly chills me still. My father died by suicide decades before Neurodivergent was what he might have understood himself to have been, and well before his only offspring grew up to claim a Neuroqueer identity.

At around the same time period that he taught me about animal cruelty and the importance of thinking for oneself, my father offered me kid-friendly examples of civil liberties and human rights. Starting when he was very young, he had friends from many backgrounds. He knew the children from the Little Red Schoolhouse and the neighborhood. One afternoon after school, he brought home a friend to play with him at the apartment. For reasons that my father didn’t understand in elementary school, the doorman wouldn’t let his friend use the elevator, insisting that rules required the child to use the back entrance, instead. My father asked his friend to wait for a moment in the lobby so he could fetch David, my grandfather. Grandma Frances, the breadwinner, may have been teaching or working in a library when this incident occurred, but she likely would have handled the situation in the same way as her husband did.

My grandfather spoke politely while firmly to the doorman, then accompanied both boys to the apartment, using the elevator; the operator pulled the inner gate shut, in silence. In telling me about what his friend and he had experienced that day in the late 1930s, my father didn’t mention the word racism, but I knew what he meant for me to understand. I also knew what she intended when my mother showed me a photograph from her elementary school in Brooklyn. Taken more than a decade after my father had been that age, the photo of my mother with her classmates was a sea of white faces, except for one thin boy whom she befriended when most of the other kids had refused to pay him any mind.

These stories informed my actions when, as a teenager, I sought quiet revenge against the cops who kept targeting my friends who lived a few blocks away from me in Coney Island. One of these families was the one that had lost their brother to a swing and a wall. As a much younger kid, I rode on the backs of the boys’ bicycles. A bit older, we played b-ball and board games, shot pool and drank chocolate egg creams in my basement. During neighborhood fires, we gathered on the street, nervous and curious. On many summer nights, we sat under lampposts listening to cicadas and on lawns waiting for lightning bugs.

---

When I was in college, a few of the boys from my friendship circle drove late at night from Brooklyn in a cramped car to pick me up in New Jersey. Squished in further, we headed south on the highway to surprise a mutual friend who was attending school in Maryland. Amy’s grandmother lived across the street from my parents; a regular visitor with her little sister and even littler brother, Amy was a central part of our group. After we jumped the fence to go to the beach, the boys were the ones with whom she and I got into trouble, along with some of the other girls. (Back then, I did not know what it meant to call myself genderqueer, and could not have had access to or used that language, because it did not yet exist.) Angry and worried, Amy’s grandmother and my mother showed up with dangling flashlights. These friends were my people, well before I really got what was meant by privilege, inequity, oppression, or institutionalized violence.

---

My confusion about my father’s slingshot mirrors his departing behavior and presumed choice, the self-imposed toss and smash after a lifetime as a pacifist, someone who taught me about social justice before folx called it that. I think often about the adult conversations we might have had, and the interactions that could have transpired during my adolescence.

---

Today, I’m wondering again about what he would have thought of my mother having asked me, after she remarried, to pay the cemetery staff an annual fee to take care of the yews in front of the grave he hadn’t wanted. I once typed out a poem, “Exhumed,” on the back of the bill. One Yom Kippur, I took the subway to the cemetery and used Grandpa David’s Balda camera to create double exposures of the two Wiener gravestones, several rows apart. While in traditional terms I might have undermined or even defied the holy holiday, I believed my behavior had been in keeping with the reflective spirit of the day as much as it displayed a grief-stricken rebelliousness. There are many stories, including these, that I wish I could tell my father, that he may somehow already know.

---

Some people have assumed that my near obsession with Walter Benjamin’s life and writings has to do with his having taken himself out rather than be taken by the Nazis in 1940. Benjamin’s arguably self-protective suicide, in some ways parallel to what happened on a massive scale at Masada in 73 CE, is far less interesting to me than his bricolage. My father’s violent death, while long being a fulcrum of my emotional attention, is far less intriguing to me now than imagining the lives we didn’t get to share.

---

When I went through my first serious break-up, I told the person with whom I had been lovers that they were the one who would most likely best understand my unhappiness, but they were certainly the very last person with whom I should have discussed my pain with any real depth or specificity—so I didn’t. In an odd parallel, it would likely have helped if I could have talked with my father (other than in my head) about what it was like for me to have lost him, how I felt about him leaving me, and the circumstances, altogether. I believed he knew better than anyone how his death affected me.

---

My father’s last morning might have been the only one when he didn’t say good-bye to me before going to work. Or, that was the dramatic story that lived in me for most of my young life, the echoing torment about whether or not he knew when he woke up what he would do that afternoon, if the plan had been set in motion, or if he was impulsive after the bad news he received. He certainly knew that he had a meeting with administrators, that day. My mother was none too pleased when two of them showed up at our house to pay their respects during shiva. They were probably the last people to see him alive, and had delivered to him the devastating news that my mother called the straw that broke the camel’s back. For a long time, I couldn’t endure that idiom without feeling bilious any more than I could watch even an animated Spider-Man dive off a skyscraper.

---

As an adult, possibly prior, I imagined that my father might have had some inkling as he got dressed for the last time that Thursday morning of the very bad update he was about to receive from the pencil pushers—he was being transferred to a school in a new role, one beneath his rank, expertise, and talent, a move necessary due to his obvious sinking and general unavailability. It wasn’t a full-on layoff, but a severe ego blow to someone already far below sea level.

In therapy at the time of his death, he had not been given any pharmaceuticals, but my mother wondered later if that might have helped or even preserved him. My father had what would now be called a nervous breakdown well before my parents met. My mother’s father warned her about marrying and having children with a man 14 years her senior, someone who was never married before and had also been diagnosed with neurasthenia.

---

My father taught me how to shoot. I don’t think I’m inventing a wish that we played together with the slingshot. I feel my tapered hands, smaller versions of his, looping then tightening the rubber band around the indentations carved about a centimeter beneath each of the two tops on the split V. Gripping the base of the Y, mimicking his every move, I knew he was proud of my good aim.

He had taken me to the shooting gallery in Astroland. For a quarter, you got ten shots with the air rifle. I liked when we shared a gun just as much as when he stood behind or beside me, watching me shoot solo. He and my mother or he alone sometimes shot while seated next to me. At first, my feet didn’t reach the ground from my spinning place beside theirs. It’s odd to me to think now about how accurate a shot I was as a kid, given my not great vision, even with eyeglasses.

---

The first real gun I held was pink and silver. When I was a baby dyke in my 20s, I thought my herbal medicine teacher’s LadySmith (a Smith & Wesson revolver) resembled its owner: fierce, and more than a little queer. Her Greenwich Village storefront and school had a sign way up on the wall behind the register that read, “Forget the dog, beware the owner.” Much later on, in Tucson, a friend of mine took me out to an unofficial range to try out his registered gun. He warned me of the kickback, explained how to use the safety earmuffs, and ran through the placement of the sights. Aiming at a graffiti N on a trashed horizontal water tank about 50 feet away, I hit exactly where I planned, on the first try. That was the only time I shot a real gun. I’ve handled others, including what I think was a .38 with a silencer that my grad school colleague called his KGB special—no joke.

---

My parents were both great shots (who, if anyone, taught or encouraged them is nobody’s guess). At the shooting gallery in Coney Island, hitting the owl’s perch resulted in a quick vertical climb and descent sequence accompanied by a hoot. There were many options, including a smaller bird that spun in its cage, a furry creature (I think it was a skunk) that tilted, and my favorite: the piano player. Both of my parents played the piano; so did I. So many stories can be told about the music.

Hunched over his upright, hands splayed on the damaged keys, the dummy musician and his piano were immense when compared to their mostly animal and a few object companions. I knew that I was hurting no one and nothing; even symbolically, we weren’t shooting at creatures and things, only at their targets, and we certainly weren’t killing any piano players, just making a temporarily stuck one move. His bullseye was in the middle of the back of his bench; when it was struck, he lurched upwards, banged his hands down on the keys abruptly, music churning briefly. Often, even if I had hit his target, earlier, I saved my last shot for him.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/innocence/Ghost__Post__64274af8de9ec80df1dde79bMon, 17 Apr 2023 03:20:17 GMT

We took her,
Money was exchanged;
Distraught, Innocence wailed all the way.

Crushed by loneliness,
The others shunned her;
Suffering their own version of
Stockholm Syndrome and
Joining the pack
With the naïveté of Patty Hearst.

Innocence wailed through the night in her confinement.
It was cruel punishment
Until it wasn’t.

With blue eyes open,
Innocence began to see the kindness;
Others broke,
Welcoming the interloper.

A kennel became a haven,
A house a home.

Tails wag in playful repartee,
Puppy paws pound and
Happiness manifests in playful yips and nips.

The white-dipped tail
refuses to surrender to its aggressor
Until dizziness sets in.

Innocence restored.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/heralds-of-spring/Ghost__Post__64274fbdde9ec80df1dde81fMon, 17 Apr 2023 03:20:04 GMT

In March, the heralds of spring
seep through cracks
like the oil spill from my ’65 Chevy.
Their antennaes sniff out food
on the butcher block counter top
to carry home to their castles.

They move in concert
like a flock of birds
separate, yet united.
Helping one another,
with divine purpose, ants
succeed where humanity does not.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/two-suns/Ghost__Post__64274f5cde9ec80df1dde815Mon, 17 Apr 2023 03:19:43 GMT

Falling off a cliff
into the dirt gray
morning, shuffling
around until hot drink
and the book sits beside
as the gold hair of
morning falls across
the sky; glorious.

Crossing the bad leg
over the better one
as the impressionist
paints with last light,
cold cup and mate beside
until the paint fades back
to gray, a rise and set
in one day; divine.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/meandering-in-blue/Ghost__Post__64274a6ede9ec80df1dde78cMon, 17 Apr 2023 03:19:24 GMT

Am I blue? If you have to ask then you’re probably blue. Billie Holiday asked it. I asked it while climbing a steep hill in the Missouri moonlight. Am I blue? Yes–blue in that indulgent way that is melancholic but also a nice reprieve from the energy of netting joy and complacency, the steady stab of boredom. I am blue like a flat stone under the cold moonlight. I am blue like a Blue Jay feather caught in the slide of gravity. I am blue like a clock that doesn’t tic, stuck in time, blue inertia. I am blue like a low iceberg. Blue breath. Frozen will.

When I reach the top of the hill, there is a ranch-style house with small windows, tiny eyes on a large face. My parents sleep in this vast hollow of land where the woods meet the water and green lichen embroiders the undergrowth.

Am I blue? Yeah, I’m blue. It’s a good song in my heart. A blue refrain. My parents are alive, dreaming. I walk up the hill into a future that has no color. Muted. I feel blue rising though. The lightest of blues fills my throat.

My feet walk in mismatched stride, heavy and light footsteps: Polka and Tango married in blue. It was a good dance, those years when my parents were alive: my dad with his blue-washed work and my mother with her blue-lavender voice.

Am I blue? yeah, blue with a sentimental heart. This is a final blue. It is the kind of blue that comes after a hurricane. I can’t find the moorings except in the watery dregs of blue memory.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/medication-1-the-sun/Ghost__Post__64274cf3de9ec80df1dde7d3Mon, 17 Apr 2023 03:18:51 GMT

They say a little sunshine would help,
“It’s just out there, don’t lose hope!”
But the sun only blinds my eyes,
and dries my throat.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/to-the-girl-ive-never-talked-to/Ghost__Post__64274c87de9ec80df1dde7c9Mon, 17 Apr 2023 03:18:38 GMT

We only felt the same breeze,
stared at the same star,
held the same bar–frigid.
We never talked,
nor even spoke a word.
But in my head,
everything in my world,
there’s nothing you’ve never heard.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/i-am-dreaming-i-am-dying/Ghost__Post__64275023de9ec80df1dde829Mon, 17 Apr 2023 03:17:13 GMT

I am dreaming I am traveling
I am dreaming a road
A new installment in a series
of recurring dreams, I recognize
some turns, intersections, landmarks.

My map lost, I rely on dead reckoning
I have no destination, only to understand
where I am. The horizon edges into sky.

My fear rises, metallic until the road
reminds me it is just a road

I am dreaming I am climbing
I am dreaming a mountain
rising faster than I can scale.

My magical limbs stretch and grab on.
Cartoon boulders expand and roll,
mountainside approaching vertically.
Until I am falling backwards,
now gently into air so soft it smiles.
It is just a falling. It is just a mountain.

I am dreaming of an opening into
a kaleidoscope of everything. I can see all
of a generation coming in together, a layering tide
just as native councils have taught.

We are travelers aligned in ways we have
not known. On roads, mountains, passages.
I float in gratitude that I can see
this moment that is forever.

I am dreaming I am dying
I am dreaming a gateway.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/runway/Ghost__Post__64274946de9ec80df1dde770Mon, 17 Apr 2023 03:16:33 GMT

The triple jump is track and field’s oddest offspring. A circus act. An intentional stumble done for distance. A Seussian hop, skip, and jump. But it requires strength and agility, and when done well, it’s a sight to behold. You might remember Al Joyner in 1984: those high-knees, long strides, the bicycling legs mid-air, the double fist-pump from the pit.

At 14 I couldn’t run all that fast and wasn’t much of a long jumper, but there weren’t many takers for the triple in Newton, Massachusetts in 1987, so I gave it a try.

My personal best was 38’ 3” (roughly twice a giraffe’s height, 18’ shy of a full Joyner), which qualified you for the state meet. Time to shop for running spikes. I found a pair of white 1988 Nike Zoom Lights–blue swoosh, red and yellow accents–that came with a little plastic wrench with which you screwed five tiny metal spikes into the sole of each shoe in the shape of a half-oval spanning from the ball of the foot to the tips of the toes.

Fully outfitted, I was feeling pleased with myself when in the league meet, leading up to State, I got beat by a first-time jumper from Brockton who’d twice fouled before (on his third leap, despite taking off from inches ahead of the board) he broke the meet record. A teenager in a man’s body, Curtis Bostic was a triple-jump blasphemer, a careless trespasser who’d go on to play Division I basketball, and who’d dared to laugh sidelong at our measuring tape spools and chalk-marks.

That evening I was shuffling around my worn red bedroom carpet thinking back on the meet when my mother knocked and said she had something to show me. From a shoebox under a pile of duffles on the floor of my closet, she pulled an ancient-looking pair of black leather running shoes with rusted, brutal-looking spikes. The shoes would have been early Adolf Dasslers, I later learned, running spikes from the late 1920s made by the man who would go on to found Adidas.

“They’re your grandfather’s,” my mother said. “He ran at Stanford in those. Though of course you can’t apply there,” she added, eyebrows raised, “because he owes them money.”

Tucking the curious comment away for the time being, I held the 60-year-old shoes, felt their leather, fingered the tarnished spikes. I imagined the tracks they’d run, the purchase they’d gained, the speeds they’d helped my grandfather reach.

Though I didn’t really know the man, had met him only a handful of times as a boy, and could barely picture his face, I felt different. Turning the shoes over again and again, I felt as if I was part of a legacy. There was collegiate speed in my family dating back half a century. I went to bed buoyant, imagining how my grandfather’s shoes on my feet might put me on a par with big-time jumpers like the one who’d cleaned my clock earlier that day.

The Japanese writer Ryunosuke Satoro put it this way: “Let your dreams outgrow the shoes of your expectations.”

But then, wearing not Ben’s spikes but my own brand-new Zoom Lights, I flopped at the state meet. Failed to reach even my personal best. And in fact, despite continuing with track and field through high school, I never again reached that freshman-year mark. I can live with that. When it comes to athletics, I’ve long since gotten used to the idea that I peaked too early.

The part of the story that disturbs me still is that the torch-passing scene–it never happened. Though I remember with some clarity squatting before the closet contemplating those antique shoes and the man who’d worn them, I must have made it all up. My mother has no memory of it, or of inheriting any sports equipment, and we can’t find the Dasslers.

It’s unlikely that the spiked shoes are sitting in a box in my mother’s attic, humming “Das Lied der Deutschen” through spiky teeth. My mother is the type to notice when a doily’s been moved an inch, and she’s prone to comprehensive spring cleanings (attic included), so it’s more likely that I invented both the shoes and the scene of their bequeathing. That at some point, having heard that my grandfather had been a runner, I’d bred that information with the image of my own Nike spikes bought at The Barn and imagined the worn-down Dasslers. Imagined them into my life because I’d so wanted them there, so wanted my mother’s father, the mysterious Ben Kagan, the legendary speedster and college dropout, to have gifted them to me.

“It’s like ‘The Little Match Girl,’” my therapist said a few years ago when I told him the story of the phantom spikes.

Jungians like him, mind you, come armed to the teeth with stories. Literary references. Lines of verse committed to memory. A narrative for every situation. My bespectacled, white-haired, lapsed-Catholic Jungian, in fact, was more facile with stories from around the world than the most cocksure Comp Lit grad student. I’d heard him quote verbatim from Rumi and refer excitedly to black and white films that I could locate only in fragments on YouTube, but Hans Christian Andersen–the creator, in 1845, of the little girl with the matchsticks–was his favorite.

In the comparison, I’m the girl. Which is unfortunate because the girl, out of doors in winter time, suffering from hypothermia, hallucinates what’s inside the house against which she leans–warm stove…holiday feast…happy family…Christmas tree…–and then freezes to death.

But still she has her vision. Her hope, and her dreams. Her match sticks.

She’d planned to sell the matches and appease her abusive stepfather with the earnings, but having failed to do so, she ends up lighting them, one by one, to provide herself a little warmth. And even though it’s horrible to imagine trying to warm up by the staggered heat of a fistful of five-second flamelets, there’s something noble about her efforts, something stirring about her final visions. She sees a shooting star (Someone’s on their way to heaven!) and then, in the flame of the next match, her grandmother. To keep the vision alive as long as possible, she lights, all at once, the remainder of the matches, and the next day she’s found frozen on the street by passersby who see only a small, ice-cold corpse. They don’t know about her beguiling visions.

I’d had my own, my therapist was suggesting. Lit my match. Though I hope not to keel over dead after seeing whatever I might next see, I suppose my writing this story is how I hope to strike my remaining matchsticks into a flourish of flame.

A student of mine here in Chicago, a 17-year-old named Jalia, saw such visions as distinctly American. In her final exam on a June morning in 2018, she put it like this: “Americans prefer, accept, and reward illusion…the privilege of America is that we can overcome the truth…protect the fantasy…it’s better than a busted reality…in this way the lie is moral.”

As for the Dasslers? Such was the mythic pull of my grandfather back then, the way he worked subliminally on teenage me, the way with just a hop, skip, and jump down the runway of my mind, I could transmute his absence into experience as real-seeming as any other. What I had was a vivid non-memory, nostalgia for an experience I’d never had, a dream. What I wanted was to have had a bona fide bestowing, a conferral like those you see in tapestries: wise and wizened prophet gifting winged shoes to young warrior.

In those days, though, instead of the sandals of Mercury, I’d inherited something mercurial. Ben was hermetic instead of Hermes. I’d have to keep lighting matches. Avoid freezing to death. Stay warm long enough for the fire to catch.

He’d been with me in a sense, or I was with him, the way a woman is with child.

But Ben was a ghost. How was I to welcome such freely fanciful visions while also seeking something like the truth? How to find not some two-dimensional rendering of a villain, or a conveniently reductive narrative of the source of evil in the family, or for that matter a whitewashed Genius, but a man, in all his complexity? I’d never really had him close, and now he was long gone.

Luckily my vague longing for the man I hadn’t seen for years and couldn’t really remember didn’t stop with phantom footwear or other fantasies from the closet. As I grew older and my grandfather’s absence more present, my mother’s house became a reliquary. Up on the walls in our ranch-style, middle-class home in a significantly upper-class town hung Art, an array of tangible objects, and they came from Ben, who’d been not just “a runner” but “a good photographer,” “a writer” (that much I vaguely knew since forever), and something of a collector. Hanging on the walls of the house and my mind were:

• a tall and narrow charcoal sketch of Pete Seeger, guitar in hand, done super-thin and extra gangly, as if by Giacometti, a print that Ben had bought for my mother when she was a teenager enraptured by the early ‘60s folk scene;

• a couple of Ben’s own stylish black and white photographs, portraits, one of my mother as a teen, looking back over her shoulder, and another of my elegant grandmother, Hannah, his first wife, captured in a similar backward glance;

• a photograph of an Italian street scene, complete with a brick wall on which is affixed, above a leaning dustbin and a primitive broom, a torn poster, ornamented with assorted camels and bottles, announcing, “caffe BOUR BON primo”;

• and two dark and magisterial portraits of Arturo Toscanini, taken by a professional, gifted to my grandfather, passed on to my mother, and eventually–and still today–featured above her living room desk.

Toscanini, solemn and athletically musical, loomed especially large in my teenage imagination. Together with Pete Seeger, the two portraits of Toscanini combined to form a pagan trinity. In one the maestro suddenly appears with arm aloft, baton in hand, in full, vigorous command of strings or horns or timpani, testing the give of a dark suit jacket dramatically accented by side-tufts of unkempt white hair. With the conductor’s dark suit on a pitch-black background and those conflagrations of white hair book-ending his resplendent face, each portrait looks as if a wispily mustachioed specter has given birth to himself all of a sudden out of the darkness. Like a struck match.

In the beginning was the maestro, spectral and self-begotten.

I know now that Toscanini was the conductor of the NBC Symphony Orchestra while my grandfather was a producer at NBC. At the time I knew only that he and my grandfather had sort of worked together. That was more than enough: Toscanini stood in my adolescent mind for high culture, dark passionate excellence, and old world elegance, and given that no pictures of my grandfather bedecked our mantle or walls, the maestro stood for my grandfather.

So I drew him in: throughout high school I kept a black, hard-cover, picture-heavy biography of Toscanini in the drawer of my little nutbrown bedside table and, when I wasn’t re-reading Larry Bird’s 1989 ghost-written autobiography (Drive: The Story of My Life) or steaming through my Piers Anthony fantasies or my brother’s racy Ian Fleming novels, I now and then flipped through the Toscanini book, studying the pictures. It had belonged to my grandfather, I was told, so it became my bedside bible.

It felt taboo: Ben wasn’t around, and he wasn’t to be spoken of, but this wild genius was right here. Plus he was called “maestro.” Maybe in some roundabout way I could grow up to be not just another suburban schmuck! And if like the maestro, then also like my grandfather, whom I couldn’t remember ever having met, but who beckoned me strangely just the same.

At the school in Chicago where I’ve taught for the last thirteen years, there’s a volume-cheerily-at-eleven security guard named Rosie who calls me maestro. “Good morning, maestro!” “Hu-uump day, maestro!” “Buenas noches, maestro!” She’s not being poetical: the word means “teacher” in her native Spanish. Still, it gives me an electric charge every time she says it, sends me whipping away to Toscanini, and to Ben, before bouncing back to where I stand in the school hallway, slightly taller.

When I visited Italy with my high school choir, I tried to reproduce my grandfather’s photograph of an Italian street scene, which hung on my bedroom wall. In my attempt: book-ended by umber and tan boxes and a wheelbarrow standing on its head, scarlet graffiti anoints a brick wall. Je t’aime, it reads.

I had the picture printed at the local Osco (so quaint!), framed it, and put it up in my room, my Italian street still-life next to his, my wheelbarrow mirroring his dustbin, my bricks his bricks, my “Je t’aime” his (undeniably less affectionate) “caffe BOUR BON primo.” It was the communion I could compose.

Je t’aime, my picture said to me now and then as I strode through my high school years. Je t’aime, it murmured more intimately as I lay still, burning with curiosity and affection for the man who’d run races and made photographs but above all, I was told, been an important writer in New York.

The poet Joy Harjo spoke to my students once. “Your grandparents, your ancestors are still in you…” she said. “Where do your words come from, after all? Why do you write the way you do?”

What had my grandfather’s sentences been like?, I wondered, as I worked to form my own in school. I could genuflect before his images, but I’d never read his words. Why not? What had he written? Long before I studied his many hundreds of scripts, or practically memorized five letters he’d written to my mother, or explicated his college columns, I had in mind, from what I’d heard and that he was “from New York,” “a writer” and not a poet, say, or a novelist, but a writer of real-life, true stories that packed a punch. A man of dashes and plain, powerful sentences. You could hear it in his plosive, pugnacious name: BEn KAgan.

And still I wondered, Where was he now, the man himself, and why not here, once in a while? And why had he quit us? Wherever he was, did he know I was here in this bedroom doing my writing, lacing my Nikes, watched over by Toscanini?

I never asked out loud. I knew the rules, remembered the rift. That he’d behaved badly. That one shouldn’t expect anything of him, shouldn’t outgrow the shoes of expectation. And yet–

Je t’aime, je t’aime, je t’aime.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/italian-basil-walnut-pesto/Ghost__Post__64274b86de9ec80df1dde7aaMon, 17 Apr 2023 03:16:07 GMT

Ingredients:

4 cups Italian or Genovese basil leaves*
3 garlic cloves, peeled
1/2 cup chopped walnuts, toasted
1/2 cup grated Parmesan-reggiano cheese
zest & juice of 1 lemon
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon coarse or freshly cracked black pepper
1 teaspoon kosher salt

Instructions:

1. In a medium-large food blender/processor bowl, chop and blend the basil, garlic, and walnuts.
2. Add cheese, lemon zest & juice, olive oil, pepper, and salt; process until well-blended.
3. Refrigerate in air-tight glass container.
   Makes 1 cup.
   

• If you blanch the whole basil leaves in boiling water for 5 seconds and immediately put into an ice bath it seals the bright green color. Drain and squeeze the water from the basil before adding to the food processor with the other ingredients.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/under-my-canopy/Ghost__Post__64274daede9ec80df1dde7ecMon, 17 Apr 2023 03:15:46 GMT

Prickly with a gentle touch.
The sweet smell of childhood.
Sap sticking to my fingers as I sweep the needles with my hands, making a bed to lay my head and be still.
Still enough to watch the creepy crawly bugs marching on your branches.
Still enough, a small bird pops in to work on their nest.
Still enough to hear my mother calling me, knowing she cannot see that I am just a few steps away.
Still enough, I can feel the sun trying to penetrate the needles and shine on your spring branches.
Still enough, I see your skin is brown, black, green, and blue with a hint of mustard yellow.
Still enough, I wonder how many needles you carry and how many you have lost.
Still enough, I have convinced myself when winter arrives, I’m going to climb to your peak and crown you with lights.
Still enough, I wake up and realize I no longer want to be still.
Your canopy is grand.
Your shade is inviting.
Thank you for sharing your space where I can be me while I am hiding.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/the-dinner-table/Ghost__Post__642747a9de9ec80df1dde754Mon, 17 Apr 2023 03:14:59 GMT

The moment doesn’t have to be exact.

the dinner table isn’t quite set
hell, might as well mix the forks and knives
for the salad and steak,
let a wine glass break, or two, seven,
make sure the chairs are facing out
so the guests have to seat themselves,

and what about the rest?

what about it?
the candles, appetizers, the ambiance
leave it, away with it, do what will with it

The moment doesn’t have to be exact
I feel more alive that way, more there.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/nature-lurks/Ghost__Post__64275079de9ec80df1dde833Mon, 17 Apr 2023 03:12:51 GMT

The smell of nature
Craving the tensions of the rose water
Licked the motions desires
Clear blue sky
And the pine
On the hillside
The symbolism is hidden
But the emotions are endless
Colors arise and secrets die down
The hope grows like a tree
And the colors are purple
Savaging the day awakened

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/oh-those-amphibious-legs/Ghost__Post__64274c00de9ec80df1dde7b9Mon, 17 Apr 2023 03:12:25 GMT

Oh, those amphibious legs! Delicious fried frog legs! They taste somewhat like the other white meats such as fish or chicken. Frog legs have an epicurean experience of their own. If you have ever been around Missouri fishermen or outdoor game men and women that know the rivers like the back of their hands, well you will appreciate how those frog legs got onto your plate, a real river-to-plate story.

The Franklin County family farm was a weekend getaway place for some city folks. It had a few outbuildings with tractors and equipment as well as a big 2-room cabin built above the Bourbeuse River. Uncle Floyd and Grandpa George furnished the cabin with white kitchen cabinets, a long dining table and chairs, metal military-like bunk beds, pull-out couches with roll-out beds on the screened porch. Summer family sleepovers could include 8 adults and at least that many kids. With all the family together, sleep was not guaranteed those nights. If it wasn’t the family, it was the Baby Ben wind-up clock’s irregular rhythm tick, tick, tick, tock, tick, tick, tock, tock, tock, tock … that would keep an eye open throughout the night.

Aunt Emma always said, “if you want to marry into this family, you have to catch a bullfrog with your bare hand.” The tradition carried through many generations since the 1940’s. Cousin Karen and your fiancée Manny set aside a summer Saturday night with her father, my Uncle Floyd to go frogging on the Bourbeuse River. That weekend the July humidity and clouds built up keeping everything soupy. The hot summer day finally cooled down 5 degrees with sundown. Those clouds may let loose rain anytime that night.

On the front porch Uncle Floyd and Uncle Bernie gathered hip waders, flashlights, and carbide lights. Outside near the water pump, the empty gunny sacks awaited the bull frogs that were to be caught that night. Karen and Manny finished their last gulp of well water from the communal enamelware cup when her dad and uncle came off the porch and handed them each a flashlight and a carbide light to put on their heads. Each gathered a gunny sack and headed down the trail to the river. That night the moon hid behind the clouds, so those flashlights were handy getting down the rocky trail. Two canoes sat on the sandy bank waiting for the four froggers.

Karen climbed into one canoe with her dad, and Manny went with Uncle Bernie. Down the river they quietly paddled. With their carbide lights on their heads, the four froggers’ eyes were peeled for those frogs. They could hear those critters croak. They banked in a cove where “bloop, bloop” sounds kept up. The bullfrogs were jumping into the river to avoid the visitors. Tall Uncle Floyd led the way into the river, kept the river water below his hip waders while looking for those peepers. Short Uncle Bernie forgets, and one big “bloop” drops down until the river waters are just below his eyes and carbide light. Yes, he is about a foot shorter than Uncle Floyd. Karen and Manny make note and keep closer to the riverbank while wading the Bourbeuse.

Uncle Floyd catches the first bullfrog that night. “Splat”, his big hand flattens over the bullfrog on the overhanging tree branch and swoops the amphibian into his gunny sack. Uncle Bernie catches his first soon after. He’s got to keep up. Manny finally catches his first ever bullfrog for family initiation. Excited, he repeats his strategy to catch another 5 bullfrogs for a dinner. A half dozen bullfrogs makes a dozen fried frog legs. That would make one meal. Karen had been out frogging with her family before, so she let Manny keep his good luck going. Later that night she caught a few bullfrogs, too.

After about a dozen bullfrogs hopping inside each gunny sack, the clouds opened wide. Heavy raindrops turned into a gush of a storm after a loud clap of thunder. All four froggers jumped into their canoes, the three men were paddling as fast as they could. All Karen could think was to cover her head with her gunny sack of frogs as the raindrops hurt coming down as her father was paddling at a fast pace. Lightning and thunder only heightened the urgency to get up that slippery hill and into the cabin. Karen realized as she got onto the front porch that her hair and clothes smelled like river water and frogs. A fragrance only country folks don’t mind, this city girl wished she was home.

After the storm blew over, the four froggers went out to the fillet board hung between two tree trunks. Seasoned after many fishing and frogging seasons at the river, knife cuts decorated the board. Uncle Floyd and Uncle Bernie had hung the gunny sacks with ropes, and had Karen and Manny swing the gunny sack of frogs into the tree trunks to stun the bullfrogs. Uncle Bernie pulled the first bullfrog out, laid him on the fillet board, and with one whack of a sharp knife, the bullfrog was beheaded. The bullfrog’s eyes blinked, mouth opened to croak, but no sound. Uncle Floyd finished filleting the bullfrog, and the legs were put into an enamelware bowl of salted water sitting on the board.

Another night of frogging provided enough frog legs for the big fry. The ladies of the family got the fixings together while the men dipped the frog legs in a cornmeal batter and fried them up crispy in cast-iron skillets filled with hot oil. Frog legs, corn-on-the-cob, potato salad, gelatin salad, skillet cornbread, green beans cooked in bacon and onions, and of course, a choice of pies and brownies delighted the palates of at least sixteen hungry town and country folks that hot July weekend. What an experience, all for a fresh frog leg dinner in the middle of summer at the family cabin up the hill from the Bourbeuse River. Unforgettable.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/a-calling-to-return/Ghost__Post__63b303e7de9ec80df1dde550Wed, 18 Jan 2023 17:44:23 GMT

I’m not sure why my mind keeps returning to my time on the hill, the remote hill in Vermont I so wanted to leave when I was eighteen and felt penned in by the smallness of it all.

The wider world was calling, the promise of college and meeting new faces and hearing stories about places I hadn’t been and hoped to one day see. I couldn’t understand why some of my graduating classmates weren’t doing everything they could to get away. I was ready to grow up and grow out, to get away from the hill, with its dirt roads and modest houses tucked around bends and scattered in meadows. Even the bigger farmhouses, despite impressive sizes, looked worn out beside faded red barns that slumped to one side and wore rusted hats. These homesteads were built to last, built to work sunup to sundown in what was once an active farming community. Their heyday had come and gone before my family moved into one. We had our own slumped red barn, a bleached woodshed attached to it. Tin roof, streaked orange. The 1832 white Cape Cod house my parents bought, like the barn and woodshed, had been neglected for decades. They’d spend ten years restoring it and would sell before they had time to start renovating the barn.

I think about the hill and try to piece together why this is so. The pandemic, perhaps, something we believed could never happen in our lifetimes. Or, could it be the waves of violence and protesting coast to coast in America, and across oceans? It sometimes feels like we may never get on the other side of these lifechanging events, and through it all there’s a growing part of me who wants, more and more, to return to the hill.

To where it’s quieter, where there are more trees and fewer people, more birdsong. Where I remember smelling summer; the lush, wooded, cool scent of things growing. Orange daylilies, wild ferns, pungent mosses along Vermont’s dirt roads. I think about living again among the state’s rolling meadows and abundant shade trees and fields framed by two-hundred-year-old stone walls. Where it feels—it may not be, but it feels—safer. Less traffic. Wider spaces. The home of my childhood. Thirty-five years after I left, as often happens with the passage of time, I realize what I had.

And I want it again.

---

February, 1977. We arrived in a snowstorm.

My parents moved our family to Vermont from Pennsylvania in the middle of a school year. My sister Mare was fourteen, my brother Pat thirteen, Tom ten, and Sean nine. I brought up the back of the line, at eight. Mom and Dad had asked the seller, an investment property owner, if they could settle on the house in June after the school year ended. She refused.

Dad drove through the night, 400 miles, two puppies squeezed in the back of a station wagon with five kids. We arrived at the bank on a Friday morning. The moving van was scheduled to meet us at the Cape later that day. The overnight drive had felt endless, the environment the next morning foreign. Paperwork signed, we left for our new house nine miles away. I watched my siblings’ faces for clues of what to expect. It felt like we’d landed in what seemed the last stop on Earth. A place I hadn’t been able to find on a map: Newbury, Vermont.

The Village of Newbury has a population fewer than 400 people and is home to a small general store, one bank, a church, a post office, a handful of houses, and the quaint brick elementary school I attended that fronts onto an immaculate, tree-lined, Revolutionary War-era Common where schoolkids sled in winter and townsfolk set up fairgrounds in summer. Newbury Village is what I believe Norman Rockwell strove for when he picked up his paintbrush. Greater Newbury includes the Village, along with West Newbury, South Newbury, Boltonville, Peach Four Corners, Wells River, and Newbury Center, yet still barely tops a population of 2,000. We landed in Newbury Center, the smallest of the hamlets. There’s an unofficial marker where civilization ends and the wilds of Newbury Center begin. That delineation, to this day, is the car-rattling thump as one’s tires drop into deeply rutted roads. While villagers enjoy paved streets through the half-mile downtown, Newbury Center has dirt roads that snake endlessly down narrow lanes and up mountainsides.

Our house sat at the edge of twenty-five acres. Mom’s desire to restore the neglected Cape fueled her every free moment. In the time it took to unpack boxes, she was lining up carpenters and whirling through the homestead like a dervish, punching through walls and ripping down ceilings. Mom embraced open concept fifteen years before it caught on in the 1990s. She’d enlist my brothers for grunt work, giving them sledgehammers, light supervision, and the promise of a hardy dinner before getting out of their way.

As an adult, I reflect with appreciation on the unspoiled beauty of my childhood surroundings. I now understand what my parents gave my siblings and me. They relocated us to a place, a time, sheltered from the societal effects that too often harden landscapes and perspectives. Nestled along a picturesque bend in the Connecticut River, Newbury remains untouched. In the soft light of an encroaching evening, it enchants.

---

I was in Newbury again for my high school thirtieth reunion a few years ago, staying in an Airbnb in the Village. As I turned out of the rental’s driveway that Sunday morning, headed back to my home in southern New Hampshire, I turned right instead of left. I couldn’t be this close and not at least drive by our Cape. My parents had moved off the hill in 1998, eleven years after I graduated from high school. They wanted to be closer to my sister, an hour north, as my brothers and I lived out of state by then.

I drove past the Newbury Village General Store after leaving the Airbnb. It has stood on the tiny main street since 1840. I walked inside to buy a candy bar and it was a time capsule, with the same rows of wood shelving, bread loaves stacked high, canned items three-deep, chip bags lined up. Jars of penny candy. Milk and beer at the back of the store. The worn black-and-white checkered floor and the jangle of bells at the red front door felt like old friends.

Dad and I, for years, would stop into the general store on weekdays on our way to pick up Mom from her nursing shift across the river. We’d pick up more bread, another box of cereal, and always a candy bar for me. While I could say the reward for my bottomless sweet tooth was what I most valued, I now understand it was the unrushed afternoons riding shotgun with Dad; first, in our yellow Dodge Coronet station wagon he’d named Betsy, and then in the maroon Chevy Impala station wagon that was just slightly smaller than Noah’s Ark. I’d tell Dad about school and listen to him quietly hum, windows rolled down in summer, heater toasty on my feet in winter.

That Sunday after my high school reunion I lingered in the general store, walking up and down narrow aisles. I pulled the store’s jangling door behind me and crossed the street to the Common. I looked up at the monument to the Revolutionary War General, Jacob Bayley, and closed my eyes; listened for laughter, hoping to hear my classmates shouting with the delight of being kids again. I looked down at the grass and remembered how I’d lost part of my front tooth on the Common in 1979. I was playing “Rock Soup” with Joy and Beth, and as werewolves we snacked on stones in an imaginary broth. Joy eagerly spooned a rock into my mouth and as stone connected with enamel, a searing pain bubbled up from my gum and hot tears splashed my cheeks. Joy kept apologizing while Beth dropped to her hands and knees and rubbed the grass, looking for my tooth wedge. We never found it and I walked around for weeks with a snaggle tooth.

I crossed the street, got into my car, and took my time driving up to Newbury Center, the roads as bouncy and dusty as ever. From the Village, I followed Sawmill Hill past Hebb’s Corner, climbing to Scotch Hollow Road. I took a left onto the Lane, a right at the top onto Fuller Road. I followed the dirt road for several miles, then started my descent around Dead Man’s Curve that got its grisly nickname in the 1800s when a funeral procession lost a coffin from the back of its wagon as a horse climbed the hill. I rounded the last bend and recognized the vista that had always greeted my family. I parked the car at the crest and walked. The woodshed and barn had a fresh coat of red paint. The large metal potato digger sat where it always had, on the side lawn. My brothers, in the summer of 1977 while exploring the fields for the first time, discovered several pieces of rusted farm equipment from the 1800s. They rolled up the potato digger and a large manure spreader, Mom directing them where to position each to its best advantage. Friends and visitors complimented my parents for years on the wonderful finds.

The Cape on Fuller Road sheltered my family for twenty-one years, from our arrival in that snowstorm to Mom and Dad’s last summer in the house. Through high school and college graduations, marriages and births and retirements and deaths of pets, it was the place we returned to, as so many families do with beloved homes. For holidays and celebrations and sorrows. To keep traditions alive. Dad loved it best of all the houses he’d lived in. He said it rooted him.

I snapped photos with my iPhone while deer flies chased me, the kind I remembered from childhood that bite and sting. I breathed in the familiar scent of damp, forested air. I kicked stones, watching dust dance in sunlight rays. I didn’t expect any cars, and none came. I reversed course and ended at the cemetery where my father is buried on Scotch Hollow Road. I parked again and walked to a small metal gate, unlatching it. I weaved among grave markers, making my way to Dad’s stone where I told him I’d just been at the Newbury Village General Store and had gotten a candy bar, knowing he would enjoy hearing that I still fed my sweet tooth.

---

Though we may leave a place, many times a place does not leave us. I think it’s because of this that I feel, more often, a calling to return.

I’ve made no plans, the idea just percolating in my head for now. I sometimes scan Vermont real estate listings, calculating—for fun—how much I’d need for a down payment. The idea of a second property appeals to me; something small and within driving distance that I could use as a weekend escape. I scroll through the limited listings online, ruling out most. My mother and I saw a listing in the spring of 2020 for a circa-1880 one-room schoolhouse. We knew immediately where it was. The schoolhouse had been converted into a small, two-bedroom home in the 1970s. I flipped through online photos, and imagined children in the early 1900s practicing penmanship at small wood desks.

The schoolhouse is a half mile from Newbury Center’s small cemetery. Since Dad’s death, several of my parents’ local friends have been buried there and my mother will one day join them. The headstone already has her name and birth year. She’d insisted to my sister when they were planning Dad’s funeral that she wanted her details carved at that time. Why, I don’t know. I don’t like to think about the date that has yet to be added, so I’ve not asked her about her earlier decision.

I’d planned to take a drive to Newbury Center to see the schoolhouse but decided against it as the pandemic worsened. A year passed. I pulled up the listing again in April of 2021 and discovered it had been sold the previous November. I didn’t think I’d be as disappointed as I was. I recall how eager I was to leave as the eighteen-year-old who believed she’d outgrown what this place has to offer. I consider, again, how several classmates never left. Whatever they saw that I couldn’t all those years ago seems enough to have kept them there. I think about my father in the cemetery, just down the road from the schoolhouse. I think how it would have been nice to buy that one-room schoolhouse, to be closer to him. To be closer to where Mom will eventually be buried.

Our family plot can accommodate four, and as the only unmarried sibling in my family, it’s been a long-held assumption that I will take one of the remaining spaces, upon my death. I like knowing I have a final resting place secured. It feels like coming full circle. Though my siblings and I were born in Pennsylvania, I consider Vermont our family home, the place where we all set down roots and budded from childhood into the adults we would become. Only my sister remains in Vermont.

I sometimes daydream that I bought the schoolhouse. I think how I could have turned it into a weekend writing retreat. A place to escape the demands that pull at me, like the job that affords me the opportunity to work from a home office, but with the expectation that I will be available early, late, and always. I think about the traffic that surrounds me. The news that comes at me, at all of us, nonstop. I think about Newbury Center’s trees and fields and quiet and memories. How my parents left behind a life they’d built in a city and struck out for new land and traditions and community. The feeling of safety it reawakens in me, of recalling what we’d been given, soothes me in a world that feels increasingly provoked.

A resting place in Newbury Center waits for me. Yet a calling to return, perhaps sooner rather than later, whispers.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/lamentations/Ghost__Post__63b30593de9ec80df1dde562Wed, 18 Jan 2023 17:44:03 GMT

I
The Answers

I ask the night,
but it has no answer,
except for this—
headlights and taillights remember, forget
passing through the dark;
snow falls in livid slants under streetlamp light.
I ask the day,
but it has no answer,
except for this—
no children play,
and adults are afraid.

I ask the crow,
but it has no answer,
except for this—
fly to night roost at the setting sun;
fly from night roost at its rising;
be black ink on a paper grey sky.
I ask the seagull,
but it has no answer,
except for this—
let the winter wind carry you sideways,
far, far from the sea.

I ask the dusk;
it cries, Despair.
I ask the dawn;
it answers, Hope.

I fold the shirts you have no need of now,
buttoning the buttons,
soothing down the arms and back.

II
Ways of Being Lonely

Dawn is always hours away.
And it’s still winter, always winter.

The cold insinuates itself through a crack,
cooling coffee in a forgotten cup.

Water chokes through gurgling pipes.
The furnace ohms an alto A.
The fridge drones on, then off, then on.

A cut lemon blues with mold,
oranges transmute into morbidness,
and casseroles know endlessness.

The CBC runs earnest docs,
rightfully exiled to 3 a.m.

The coffee maker bleeps off.

Dawn is always hours away.
And it’s still winter, always winter.

I tiptoe through the empty flat,
forgetting that I can’t wake you.

III
White Fog

White fog shrouds everything
ten floors below as rain streams through
the open screened window. Obscures
the greening that you’ll never see.
Settles like death over life, over time,
over memory. Fades all to silence.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/anything-at-all/Ghost__Post__63b3068dde9ec80df1dde574Wed, 18 Jan 2023 17:43:46 GMT

I could not run
fast enough
across our front lawn
on Denver Drive
toward my father’s bright
blue eyes
his outstretched arms
St. Augustine grass
thick around my toes
palm trees
swaying through
the salty sky
the joy
that surged through
my tiny body
as he picked
me up
to tell me
he loved me
my three-year-old
curls caressing
his sunburned cheek

Who could
have imagined

the disappointment
shame and sorrow
that would creep
between us

when Daddy stumbled across
our living room hardwoods
Winston in one hand,
Jack Daniels and Coke in the other,
and I was fourteen gliding
through steps for my Saturday recital
my auburn braids flying with me
as he slurred his praise,
his grin sloppy with pride

these unwelcome
visits that came
too often
and

now the squeak of my soles
on the Comet-scrubbed floors
as I reach across
the rail of his bed
cold like his sallow cheeks
now empty of smile
the damp brush
of my lashes
against his forehead
as I pause
to see a blink
a quiver
anything at all
in those bright
blue eyes
gone now
to gray

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/invitation/Ghost__Post__63b30784de9ec80df1dde583Wed, 18 Jan 2023 17:43:24 GMT

At boarding school, I
the only Jew; the only
son of Abraham.
By fiat Baptist
come Sunday mornings.

Trays passed;
body and blood
from box to box—
bread, then wine.
The preacher robed
Genevan black
spoke of host.

Am I invited?    
What kind of celebration may I attend?
Infant fore-skinned, how do I belong?

Dressed in charcoal Sunday grey
we’d walk from school
and file into latch-box pews.
The trees koyo, then bare,
then budding green:
resurrection nature’s idiom.

Unbaptized, unshriven, unsaved,
I learned hymns
and prayed, chewed, swallowed god.

Who bakes holy matzo?
Jesus’s body. Mary Magdalene?

Does god love a party crasher?
Bring my own bitter herbs,
walk roads that do not pass
Damascus or Calvary.
After church we’d share
hard apple cider and laugh
at girls who squirmed
to look.

There were a few
I would invite
had I but known
the party’s moment,
its final destination.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/the-luthiers-poem/Ghost__Post__63b3085ade9ec80df1dde594Wed, 18 Jan 2023 17:43:02 GMT

Life happens
even to musicians
harmonize motets
birth death encores

At the library the homeless woman reads obituaries
wishes somebody might write hers

A blue sedan abandoned to weather
waits for a tow; crammed migrant occupants
picking produce flow north

Mayans from Guatemala search for pueblos,
sing in languages no one recalls
like Welsh Shamus Scot’s fiddle
Gaelic wailer of ancient odes
frame drum pipes
war chants mysteries Druid magic
blood trail written in squash, beans, corn

Appalachian danced squares
moonshine love affairs    feuds
Hatfields McCoys  colliers’
hymns don’t get black lungs to heaven

too proud to bend
giddy-up fiddles
banjos do-si-do burlap and calico
worn from plowing

Guitar frets worn as the women
who toil in endless sun
rounded bridges carry overloaded SUVs
children dropped over an angry wall
Mariachi songs for bunioned feet
poverty
never retreat
rainbow serape
maracas, trumpets, bravado

or is the word machismo?

music language life
deep furrows souls

The birthday cake woman
wrapped in rags and Homberg
spits and coughs death’s rattle
lacks laces for castoff men’s shoes
hums a dirge from mother’s
funeral she cannot remember

A man, drunk by noon, sings
offers his bottle to a brother

Sympathetic strings reverberate;
next time comes around.

She uses yesterday’s newspaper
to sole her Goodwill wingtips
Rest assured, she ain’t going nowhere
just dancing to the music
no one else can hear.

On the border, the detention guard,
salvaged from Germany
says nada,
mutters, wonders
how many have crossed today
his great-grandmother played the zither
sang We Praise Thee, King of Kings,
In darkness when we waited

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/double-shifts/Ghost__Post__63b30914de9ec80df1dde5a6Wed, 18 Jan 2023 17:42:38 GMT

Carouselina slouches on a broken bench in a laundromat near her apartment. Hands vised in her lap, legs jittery about more than splinter stabs. Her least favorite chore is halfway done, thank God for tiny favors. She leans forward, snags a glimpse at two dryers several feet away. They’re still tossing her clothes around—half pissed about their job, half on a what-the-hell-let’s-finish-this cycle.

Like me, she thinks. I’m half here and half out the door. On my way to…

Nowhere. She slumps against the window behind her, springs forward. The ooze from countless heads of hair gel smearing that window? Now it’s on her head. She could throw a damn good pity party right now. Maybe she ought to go in the room where her clothes are drying. Check how many minutes until the cycles end.

But then she’d come face-to-face with the two chicas who muscled her out of that room. As soon as she went to put her wet clothes in the dryers, the two of them slammed their bags onto the bench she’d emptied. Stared at her, shoved a try-it-bitch glare onto their light mocha faces. Scarlet lip gloss on smoochy mouths, painted eyebrows pointing up, then down like weapons. Tight jeans they must have held their breath to squeeze into, cropped tops with denim jackets, one sleeve slightly off the shoulder. Blinding white sneakers they either just got or spent hours cleaning, probably with old toothbrushes. Shooting what sounded definitely like hardcore half-threats in Spanish.

Carouselina puts them at late teens. Maybe they just got dumped from foster care. Spending their days stroking their phone screens, looking for anything. Looking for someplace legit to be on a weekday morning. She spots their empty garbage bags dangling over the bench. She pictures them walking around with the bags: defiant, desperate. Maybe they escaped a gang thing in Central America and they’re overcompensating.

She flips open a notebook in her head, scribbles “overcompensating” on a page of other Words That Fascinate, “chicas” and “smoochy” and others she wants to remember before they drift away. It’s a 20-year-old game she plays when she’s in the laundromat. To chase away boredom, stop flicking spitballs at where she is and isn’t, shoo shit that keeps buzzing at her. Always ready to remind her how close she is to the edge.

It nearly got her this morning. Nervous energy jack-knifing through her, upping the risk of splinters. Daring her to write down all the stuff in her head, like she keeps claiming she’s gonna do, someday. She pushes down on her knees to keep from jumping up. Going where, she couldn’t say. What little money she has, from a proofreading job that only took nine weeks to get paid for, she sank a lot of it into a plane ticket. Supposedly a good idea. At first. Head to DC for two nights. See a nephew get married—something she doubts will ever happen to her. Stay at a hotel. A friggin hotel, with a big bed and two, no four pillows. Premium channel TV. Maybe even room service, although that’s probably pushing your luck, C.

She’s about to ease ahead with her DC fantasy—what the hell, may as well, that’s what they’re for—when somebody’s voice breaks through in a smooth, clean way.

“And so I told her, I said, you can’t do better.” Mid-range tone, nothing remarkable.

Piques her curiosity. Do what better, C. wonders.

“You got that right. Girl, I’ve worked third or fourth shift for close to 15 years. Good pay. Nobody’s benefits are better.” A deeper tone, scratchy. Decades of cigarettes?

C. is fully perked. Ready to listen, gain some advice her bank account can use.

“Uh-huh.” Mid-range’s response is muted, her head level with a washer as she dumps clothes in. C. winces, her grimace hiding under her no-name baseball cap. The woman’s face is awfully close to touching the gunk circling the washer’s inner ring.

“Only two things I’d change. Never hardly get to see my kids. Have to trust God to take care of ’em while I’m at work. Sometimes I pull double shifts so I’m gone from 9 at night ’til now, then got laundry so time I get home—”

“They’re gone. I know. That’s why I moved to first or second shift. Did not like my husband spending all that time without me.” The wheels on a laundry cart argue with the linoleum floor as Mid-range scoots the rest of her clothes to another washer.

“Whole lotta trouble two Black kids can get wrapped around without me watching them. But what else can I do? Got rent to pay. Groceries to buy. Trying to save a bit.”

A dryer door slams shut. Coins pop in the slot.

“Pray, that’s what,” says Mid-range. “When all else fails . . .”

“Pray,” they tell each other in unison. Chuckles cool the tension of having to make do with next to nothing. C. knows.

The woman with the problems introduces herself. Thelma, she tells Mid-range. Loretta’s her name. She starts telling Thelma about the church she attends. Says it helps her feel a smidgen better. Just enough to get her and her husband through Sunday dinner, dessert and dishes. And then it’s back to that Monday stuff again.

Thelma says, “I got a bad back from hauling mail bags. Whoever’s thinking about a job at the post office? Tell ’em they need a mule’s back.”

C. likes the sound of them. She hadn’t thought about working at the post office. But it couldn’t join her fantasies—her back is too weak. She grabs her semi-legit laundry bags, one cloth, one recycled from plastic, doing extra duty for groceries and library books. Pushes off from the bench and heads back to where the chicas reign. Screw them and their hard eyes and tough words. She will play herself: a strong-spined woman with a bitch in reserve.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/caregivers/Ghost__Post__63b309bcde9ec80df1dde5b6Wed, 18 Jan 2023 17:41:41 GMT

I once had a mother who loved me before
she fell into the ocean of lost words
and speech. We journey to play on the beach
where I lose sight of her on the horizon.

Grey clouds march across the sky. We are not
certain of the monsters they push in. Finding
ourselves unprepared, we run for shelter, seems
the smart thing to do before being plummeted
by memories. We leave a drowning blue bird

on a blue wave. It is hard to look into “old”
eyes, painful to see their disturbing questions
staring back. Best to pretend we don’t know
the answers. Instead we keep busy counting
our blessings, and our lists of accomplishments.

We travel alongside the Tin Man collect our heart
medal from the Wizard so we can get out
of this place. There is one, though, who stays
behind, who does the heavy lifting, who brings
mother’s hand to her lips, understanding

the value of touch. When it rains it pours
heartbreaks and the caregiver is there to mend them
in ways our loving “too much” causes us “too much”
pain. So she goes back, back to find what she
sees as life but we see as dying.

I thank God for the angels among us
who understand the “long good-bye”,
who see sandcastles in the sky
where others see storms.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/unsheltering/Ghost__Post__63b30aa9de9ec80df1dde5c4Wed, 18 Jan 2023 17:41:22 GMT

An excerpt from my diary on July 3, 2020

My husband bought me a motorcycle today.
He has the idea that we can pack our things
into tidy bundles, rev up motors,
already having found someone to love
and leave the pandemic behind,
as we outrace the upcoming Kansas City
hotspot of our present-day existence,
zooming off into a blazing saddles' prairie sunset.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/a-past-love-with-apologies/Ghost__Post__63b30b5fde9ec80df1dde5e1Wed, 18 Jan 2023 17:41:00 GMT

Her name is in my notes
in a journal at the bottom
of a cardboard box in the
back of a storage unit in
northeastern Oklahoma
and I am so sorry that my
age and Covid-brain have
made it temporarily impossible
to remember her name.
And I apologize to her.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/routine/Ghost__Post__63b30b0ade9ec80df1dde5d3Wed, 18 Jan 2023 17:40:38 GMT

For more than sixty years
I’ve had a subconscious
routine when I shower

Let water run over me
Shampoo my hair
Rinse then condition
Rinse then soap all over
Then final rinse

for sixty years

This morning I forgot
the routine and just
stood in the shower
with water running
over me and not sure
what to do next
How do I begin?
Where do I start?
What do I do first?
Why am I standing here?

I eventually stumbled
my way through and
made it out of the shower

But now for the first time
in my life I fear tomorrow’s
shower and the unknowable
when routine is no more

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/the-drift/Ghost__Post__63b30c74de9ec80df1dde5f1Wed, 18 Jan 2023 17:40:10 GMT

by Todd Sukany

No wonder you take the high road as you whittle
words into a poem.  You suggest: concentrate
on a task, say . . . shoveling snow in your driveway,

and let your mind fly like the powder,
blowing back to the area just vacated
by your red scoop.  Focus that fine powder

swirling past your fogged, frosty glasses
and just before non-Sunday-appropriate
oaths join the ice fairies

that the wind puffs past your scarf, down your parka,
to mingle with the fat flanking your vertebrae.
At your leisure, you would, of course (or naturally),

begin to identify each vertebra by its Latin name,
harp some song about a random event
from childhood or adulthood or some other hood,

and make a tired reader type into the phone,
pro biscum latinatio expresso.  Expresso is American
for espresso and yet, reader, you knew that.

Oh, the surprise of crema entering this poem
on a dark night before your summer celebration
sips away the blizzard of confusion. (Note how I

brought you back to the opening lines again
to remind you of snow blowing itself into
a healthy poem? Sweet conceit--get my drift?)

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/enjoying-the-show/Ghost__Post__63b30d3cde9ec80df1dde5ffWed, 18 Jan 2023 17:39:48 GMT

The way to Carnegie is left,
left, left, right.  The path to the Gillioz
Theatre is slightly less known.  More like

Google Satellite peers into downtown
Springfield (MO, of course) and there,
one can watch The Great Russian Ballet,

or probably more accurately,
a Russian troupe, headed by someone
whose lamb chops are dusted in

Thanksgiving flour.  But the highlight
of the evening is granddaughter
in the aisle, lockstepping with a stage

full--the Doves of Peace, the Waltz
of the Flowers.  She raises both hands
into a blossom above her head

and I feel her left hand circle
my right to complete the move,
never blinking, never dropping concentration.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/dancing-in-the-dark/Ghost__Post__63b30e3cde9ec80df1dde61dWed, 18 Jan 2023 17:39:13 GMT

It was socially acceptable in the 1970s for two women to dance together. They danced together in nightclubs, street fairs, and on telecasts of the popular American Bandstand show.

The same was not true for men dancing together. It was so taboo that when I lived in Memphis in the 70s, it was illegal for two men to dance together. I don’t know if it was a city law or a state law, but it was one that was enforced in Memphis. Arrests did take place. Four male couples were arrested for dancing together at a bar, the Closet, and the arrests were reported in the Memphis Commercial Appeal newspaper.

My partner Dick and I enjoyed dancing. On weekends we went to a bar called the Psych-Out on North Cleveland in Memphis. The bar closed at midnight on Saturday. However, no one left the bar at closing time.  The tables were cleared from the center of the floor, doors were locked, and we would have a “private dance party.” The cops were aware of what was happening inside the bar and would periodically show up.

The bar owner kept a lookout on duty and if the cops pulled into the bar’s parking lot, lights inside the bar would flicker on and off. Everyone would quit dancing. By the time the cops were let in, we were all seated. After the cops left,  everyone once again danced.

The popular ‘70s song, “Miss American Pie,” was a favorite of the bar patrons. When that song played, everyone would stand together, place arms over shoulders, and form a huge circle. The circle, with up to 40 guys in the formation, would then go round and round in the bar. We whirled around the room for the entire length of the eight minute song, locked together, having a great time. We were young and reckless, and enjoying an activity that was perhaps made more exciting because it was illegal. We were brothers, arm in arm, sharing a secret that involved more than dancing.

We would dance all night long. At dawn, we left the bar, and several of us would go to the Ohman Inn, a diner on Union Ave, where we ate breakfast and made plans to do it all again the following weekend.

“While the sergeants played a marching tune, We all got up to dance,” American Pie.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/mini-chocolate-silk-tartlets/Ghost__Post__63b30dc7de9ec80df1dde60bWed, 18 Jan 2023 17:38:46 GMT

Crust Ingredients:

1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
½ cup unsalted butter, cut into small cubes and softened
3 tablespoons heavy cream

Crust Instructions:

1. Preheat oven at 400°F.  Lightly spray a 12-count cupcake tin.
2. Whisk together the flour, salt, and sugar in a medium bowl or food processor bowl.
3. Add butter, and blend together until the mixture resembles fine crumbs.
4. Add cream; stir until crumbs are damp and hold together.
5. Divide mixture into 12 parts, and pat into 12-count cupcake tin covering bottom and sides of each cup.
6. Bake in oven at 400°F oven until crust is golden for about 10 -12 minutes.
7. Let cool completely before filling.

Filling Ingredients:

2/3 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
2 ounces unsweetened chocolate
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/3 cup butter, softened
2/3 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon powdered sugar
Whipped cream for garnish

Filling Instructions:

1. In a small saucepan, combine sugar and eggs until well-blended.
2. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until mixture reaches 160°F and coats the back of spoon.
3. Remove from heat; stir in chocolate and vanilla until smooth.
4. Cool to lukewarm about 90°F; stir occasionally.
5. In a small bowl, cream butter until light and fluffy.
6. Add cooled chocolate mixture; beat on high speed for 5 minutes until light and fluffy.
7. In large bowl, beat cream until it begins to thicken.
8. Add powdered sugar; beat until stiff peaks form.
9. Fold in chocolate mixture.
10. Pour evenly into crusts.
11. Chill for 6 hours before garnishing and serving.

Makes 12 mini tartlets.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/i-hear-of-the-mockingbirds-songs-no-more/Ghost__Post__63b30fb8de9ec80df1dde62dWed, 18 Jan 2023 17:38:21 GMT

by Thadeus Emmanuel

Where has the morning mockingbird gone with its songs—
Those exciting rhythm and blues of melodious symphonies?
For I hear no more of their mellowing whispers;
that comes through my open window panes at every dawn,
When the cooling gentle breeze of the morning blows.
Or was it all a lonely wandering music maker;
That has lost its home to the glooms of the day,
And now left with the cold; that shows no mercy
Even at its fluffing feathers to catch the warm?
Or was it all a lonely lost mockingbird
Making vocal concerts on the balcony of anxiety,
And now waiting for a loved one to lead its way home?
Perhaps, if for these reasons the mockingbird sings no more
Tell it my restless mornings have missed its sounds;
Those exciting rhythm and blues of melodious symphonies.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/what-kind-of-house-are-you-now/Ghost__Post__63b3102dde9ec80df1dde639Wed, 18 Jan 2023 17:37:55 GMT

I’m a bungalow with an airplane wing
too hot to inhabit except in winter.
Did I mention I could fly?

I’m a rambling ranch going to town
and back to the country again
to plop myself down in a den of sunflowers,
annuals with faces large as platters to face
down the darkness until we all turn to sleep.

I’m a Victorian in great disrepair
on the edge of what was once a great dome
of a city. It rains here, mostly drizzle now
that we’ve lost our thunder, but in the flash
of moon every October, my attic ignites
into a miniature circus of curious and lost
toys come home to roost and play.

I’m a yurt full of flies in summer,
a dusting of snow in winter,
three sets of bunk beds but always
enough blankets, which is good
since I live at higher elevation than most
humans can stand, and I love the solitude.

I’m a house of dreams draped in snow,
my roof starting to sag, but look what comes!
Crows large as house cats, tiny juncos afraid
of nothing, female cardinals with their orange
tails and tailwinds propelling them and all
the others to my bird feeders spilling
across the yard, welcoming everyone.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/winter-solstice/Ghost__Post__63b310a8de9ec80df1dde648Wed, 18 Jan 2023 17:37:29 GMT

When the short days feel  
inexpressible. When    
nothing's left of fall. When  
the dark entry of winter makes    
each of us shrink. When   
relatives finally call.

Some of us burrow. Some    
of us bake. Some of us    
leave the year behind.    
Some of us take. Some of us    
travel into the cold,      
ice, and snow—the moon's    
crescent reminding us to go     
easy. We've been here before.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/madonna-of-the-matilijas/Ghost__Post__63b31107de9ec80df1dde658Wed, 18 Jan 2023 17:37:10 GMT

Looking out my window, I see the Madonna blessing the white Matilija poppy on my windowsill.  It's a showy flower  baroque petals, paper thin; glowing golden heart  the kind of thing she's used to.  They grow wild in the empty lot next door.

A hundred decades of unanswered prayers echo through my brain.  Hail Mary, full of grace…  Please let…  Please make…  Please get…  Please take…  Candles flicker; stale whiff of incense, beeswax, hair oil and perfumed soap.  Shabby coats brushed, shoes polished, hair slicked back, whatever the poor can do to impress the Queen of Heaven.

Holding my breath, I slide the long nail of my index finger, filed thin for just this purpose, beneath a scale of skin and pick it off my arm.  Geese trail sad goodbyes across a blue sky. A car honks on the street below.  Somewhere a door slams.  My collection of blue glass quivers on the sill.

Sound waves move in tiny shocks of pain across my naked skin.  Rosy welts blossom at their touch, itching, twitching, screaming to be scratched.  She watches me rip myself.  Bare-assed and blotchy, I blush beneath her tranquil gaze.

Aggravated by prickling sweat, a red itch blooms in the tender inside fold behind my elbow.  It burns and swells, demanding surcease.  Denied release, the tortured skin cracks and oozes, trickling thin rivers of platelets and plasma.  Like lengths of frayed red ribbon, they spill along my forearm, pool crimson in my up-turned palm.

Mary isn't expecting it, the scarlet spot like a bright nail hole.  A tiny tsunami travels across the fixed sweet smile; a moue of grief, a flicker of rage.  Lest she be troubled, I ease across the floor, sliding each flat sole in careful increments across the waxed boards.

There’s always water everywhere.  I pay Charlotte, the little girl downstairs, fifty cents a day to fill bath, basins, wide-mouthed jugs, bowls, pans and platters.  She tops them up once a day while I hide behind the screen in the corner.  Water sometimes drowns the itch.  I spend hours in the bath, reading and writing, sipping whisky from a jelly jar.

Reaching the nearest vessel, I plunge my arms up to the elbows.  Liquid works its magic once again.  Inundated in relief, I cry a little then lift my hands to show her.

The teapot whistles.  Startled, I flinch.  My skin tingles, nothing more.

Our Lady steps across my windowsill, brushing past the poppy to pour.  The itch subsides.  I sit naked across the table from her, sipping Earl Grey.  She speaks Spanglish with a soft lisp.  We tell knock-knock jokes and eat two jelly donuts that a small attending angel drops in her lap sometime through the second pot of tea.

She cries about the crucifixion.  I tell her about the crib death of my little boy.  It gets hazy after that.  I remember poppies in the bath water. She holds my hand while the angel pours boiling water from the teapot into the tub.  She washes me head to foot.  She swaddles me in soaking linen sheets. I sleep.

I wake to shadows.  Geese trail sad goodbyes across a pale sky.  A car honks on the street below.  Somewhere, a door slams.  My collection of blue glass quivers on the sill.  I touch my skin, soft as a baby, tender and luminous in the evening light.  Soon, I will dress myself, walk to the cathedral and light a candle.

Hail Mary, full of grace...

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/one-dish-dinner-pork-with-blueberries-and-cream/Ghost__Post__63b3116cde9ec80df1dde66bWed, 18 Jan 2023 17:36:46 GMT

Serves 2
1/2 – 3/4 hour to prep and cook

2 medium Yukon gold potatoes cut bite-size

• Throw potatoes in cold water and bring to boil.
• Boil 8-10 minutes while preparing rest of dish.

Splash of oil
1 tsp cumin seeds
2 servings pork cut in bite size pieces ( I use two thick boneless loin chops)
I large onion chopped
I/2 sweet red pepper chopped
2 cloves garlic finely chopped
Ground cumin to taste
2 or 3 large handfuls of greens (more if you like, I prefer spinach)
dash or two Pickapeppa (my preference) sauce or green tabasco
1/3 cup blueberries
2 tbsp. heavy cream
2 tbsp. blueberry (or other flavor) BBQ sauce

• Heat oil till hot. Add cumin seeds and give a quick stir.
• Throw in pork and stir-fry at high temp till just cooked through.
• Remove pork and seeds to dish. Reduce heat.
• Add another dash of oil and onions – sauté till translucent.
• Add peppers and garlic, sauté till peppers soften.
• Sprinkle with ground cumin to taste (optional).
• Add greens and stir till leaves wilt.
• Drain potatoes and add to pan, mix gently.
• Return pork to pan, stir till hot.
• Add blueberries, stir gently till blueberries glisten and warm.
• Mix cream with BBQ sauce and stir into mix. Heat till hot. Dish and serve immediately.

Alternatively boil potatoes just until tender before stir-frying pork meat. Let potatoes drain while meat cooks. Add a tsp each oil and butter to hot pan after removing pork and fry  potatoes till they get a bit of color. Remove potatoes, lower heat and continue with recipe.  Return potatoes and pork to pan together before adding cream. (I once substituted chicken for pork, but it’s not as flavorful or satisfying).

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/your-hands/Ghost__Post__63b31209de9ec80df1dde687Wed, 18 Jan 2023 17:36:16 GMT

by Carra Leah Hood

disappearing part by part first

hands then feet then chin then mouth the way

I smile your smile upper and lower

molars clenched leaving a gap between

incisors that cuts my lip when you eat

popcorn and call my name from inside

a dream or a shadow slinking away

from view into view and then you are

gone and touching silence you become

me becoming you disappearing

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/a-winter-morning/Ghost__Post__63b312a2de9ec80df1dde690Wed, 18 Jan 2023 17:35:28 GMT

blue skies and winter sunshine
moves me forward
as I sit here framed in light
bathed in morning’s warmth
as full glass windows hold out the cold
while also holding all of Lake Ann’s Bear Cove

a blanket of diamond sparkles lights up the waters
moving in quick time across the lake — seemingly, forever moving towards me
in such a delightful dance
pulling me
straight up to
blue skies,
my spirit rises

and I standing bare
stark and naked
pale against a winter sunshine

if for only a moment
free . . .

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/a-checklist-for-dying/Ghost__Post__63b312fdde9ec80df1dde69fWed, 18 Jan 2023 17:34:58 GMT

by Vicki Mayk

Get a notebook. It doesn’t have to be fancy, the hospice nurse says. A spiral one -- the kind kids use in school -- will do. Pick the cheerful blue one. Use it to make a list in case your emotions get the better of you – or because you are moving robotically through the day due to exhaustion from getting up during the night to check on your mother.  Just consult the list. No memory required. It works nicely to record the daily duties that are the equivalent of laying bricks on the path to the grave.

Administer the medicine. Count the pills looking like brightly colored beads into the day-of-the-week pill case. Prime the injection for the dose of insulin that Mom insists on giving herself – her last opportunity for self-sufficiency.

Ignore the bruises. The marks, blue-black and purple on her paper-thin skin, are necessary. They confirm attempts to handle the pain, balance blood sugar, remain among the living.

Make the appointments. Oncologist. Chemo. Blood work. Coordinate the schedule so that everyone in the family knows who is driving to what appointment on which day. Never miss a day of work while ensuring Mom never misses an appointment.

Drive to chemo appointment. Engage in idle chat on the way to the doctor’s office, distracting Mom with a story about Aunt Betty and her drinking. “She drinks, she smokes and she’s going to out-live all of us,” Mom declares in a tone that indicates she finds this unfair. Switch to describing the antics of your dog, Barkley, who she refers to as her grand dog. This will help her to avoid anticipating the miserable hours watching drugs, the equivalent of poison, drip into her veins. Pull up close to the building’s entrance and help her out, then go to park the car and scurry back so you can ride the elevator up with her, holding her arm gently as she exits and totters toward the oncologist’s office door.

Make chicken soup. It’s the one thing she can eat, even on the days when chemo sours the stomach and wrecks her appetite. Peel and chop the carrots. Dice the onion. Thinly slice the celery. Pull chicken from the carcass. Add it all to the chicken broth and simmer until the kitchen is fragrant and there’s no scent of decay.

Clean the television screen. This guarantees a clear picture for Mom’s viewing pleasure. There’s nothing like “Dancing With The Stars” to distract an 85-year-old woman with lung cancer. It’s not exactly the dancing that distracts her. It’s Maxim Shmerkofsky, the handsome Russian ballroom dancer, who takes her mind off her disease. Later you’ll remember what Mom always said when she saw him: “He can put his shoes under my bed any day.”

Do the laundry. Mom’s soft pajamas, feminine and trimmed with lace, pass through your hands from the laundry bag to the washing machine. Pretreat the stains. Add the detergent. Wash and dry. Fold them like the relics they soon will become, laying them with reverence back in the drawer.

Make the arrangements. This is another suggestion from the nurse who told you to get the notebook. Do it now, while Mom is still alive, she says. This euphemism for visiting the undertaker and picking out the box for her ashes doesn’t make it any less grim. The nurse tells you that you’ll be glad you didn’t wait to do this chore. Nothing about it makes you glad.

Call her friends. It’s important to do this while she’s still lucid enough to enjoy the conversations. Get out the address book with the picture of the cute puppy on the front. Begin to methodically go through the list of friends. Follow the letters of the alphabet: They lead you to names signifying life-long relationships. Call them first. Dial the numbers and hand Mom the phone. She doesn’t tell her friends that she’s calling them for the last time. You don’t either.

Watch her die. She falls asleep one day and is never awake again. The hospice nurses call it actively dying. Months later you’ll try to remember the last conversation you had with her.

Listen. Play the last message Mom left on your cell phone. Repeat over and over again. Hear her voice reminding you that she needs you to go to the bank for her. Remember when you added that chore to the blue notebook.

Adjust to the loss. You can’t. You wonder what you’re going to do now that you’ve got all this time on your hands.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/issue-17-winter-2023/Ghost__Post__63b30310de9ec80df1dde543Wed, 18 Jan 2023 17:19:52 GMTDear Friends of eMerge,

Welcome to 2023.

I am so grateful to be bringing you another issue of eMerge, filled with poetry, prose, and recipes that can brighten these cold winter afternoons. In these digital pages you can find meditations on winter, mortality, and a willingness to celebrate life at every age and stage.

eMerge is published with the generous support of the Board of Directors and the staff at the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow. Our website is designed and managed by Cat Templeton, who makes eMerge possible. A special thanks to everyone who submitted work for consideration during our last submission period--it was an honor to read your work. Thank you so much for helping us grow this little literary corner of the internet.

May your year ahead hold wonders and joy unforeseen. May you read some poetry and prose that invigorates your soul like a good cup of joe. May you find connection in unexpected places and know that, no matter what this year looks like for you, you are not alone.

All the best,

Joy Clark

[TableOfContents]

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/christmas-eve-dinner/Ghost__Post__6340c49b455590094ea7a7eeThu, 20 Oct 2022 22:27:10 GMT

Annie stood outside the arrivals area of terminal 4, Kennedy Airport, her hands already numb from the dreaded cold in New York City. She was waiting for a cab to take her to Chinatown where her grandmother lived in some rent-controlled dump.

Annie was in New York because she had nowhere else to go for Christmas. Her parents won a cruise for two in some sweepstakes drawing and were gone for two weeks. Annie didn’t want to spend Christmas alone, so she came to visit the only other family she had. The annoying grandmother in New York who always smelled like medicinal oils and didn’t speak a word of English.

It took only a few minutes before her grandmother started nagging her about grades and boys. She rolled her eyes, aware that she made a big mistake coming to New York for the holidays. This would last all week. She threw on her coat, her grandmother still droning on behind her, and headed into the city.

It was Christmas Eve and there were many places to go, but some friends told her that a dive bar in the West Village had the best wings and tater tots. That’s where she would go to first.

It was still early in the day so the place wasn’t crowded. Annie ordered her food and sat down by the window. She checked her phone but no one sent her any texts. All her friends were home for the holidays.

“Are you Japanese?”

Annie looked up and saw an old man, seated by himself at the next table, looking at her. “I’m Chinese,” she responded.

“You look Japanese,” the old man said.

Annie turned back to her phone. “Whatever.”

“I had a Japanese friend once.”

“Yeah?” she asked, not paying attention. “What happened to him?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know his name and I’ve never spoken to him before.”

“What did you, meet him in some S&M chatroom?” Annie glanced at him once with a sneer and turned back to her phone.

“We didn’t have the internet then. This was in 1942. I was a marine in Guadalcanal.”

“1942?” Annie looked up for a moment. “What is that, like World War I?”

The old man smiled. “I’m not that old. World War II.”

Annie looked back at her phone. She was trying to text her boyfriend but the reception was bad in this dive.

The old man turned and stared out the window, emitting a deep sigh. “We were there to fight the Japanese. We landed in October, and by December, we had the Japs by the throat. They were outnumbered and they didn’t have food or supplies. We were already hoping to go home for Christmas. But the Japs were resilient. They held on.”

“Uh huh,” Annie said, pretending to pay attention. There was finally signal and she was hoping the old man would shut up so she could focus on her text.

“It was Christmas eve,” the old man continued. “One guy still had a bottle of bourbon and we shared it. We partied. I had some bourbon with the boys on Christmas Eve. We slept very well that night.

“I woke up with a bad headache in the middle of the night. There was someone else in my tent. I thought it was one of the guys getting up to use the john, but I looked carefully, and it was an enemy soldier. He was all alone, and he was going through my stuff.”

Annie looked away from her phone then and turned to the old man.

“I grabbed my sidearm and pointed it at his head. He froze. Then I saw what he was stealing. He was after my food. He must not have eaten in a week.”

“Did you shoot him?”

The old man shook his head. “I lowered my pistol. I pointed to the food, pointed to him, and waved for him to get out of there. Let him eat tonight. Our bombers have been pounding their positions for weeks. He may be dead the next day. Why not let the guy eat.”

Annie was silent. She placed her phone in her handbag.

“The next day was Christmas day, and we were making a push up this hill that the enemy were holed up in. But someone made a mistake and we walked right into an ambush. I didn’t know what was going on. Someone stepped on a landmine and then, bullets were flying from all directions. I was hit in the leg and I had shrapnel in my back. I couldn’t move at all. My group was getting wiped out and the enemy was running right through us. I forced myself behind a bush and tried to stay hidden. One Jap ran right past me, and then turned around to stab me with his bayonet. But he stopped. I looked at him. I recognized him. He recognized me. He stole my food just a few hours ago.”

“You gave him the food,” Annie said, quietly.

“I did. He lowered his rifle, he took a step back, and he shouted something in Japanese. I guess he said something like “all clear”. I don’t know what he said. He gave me one last look and ran off. I never saw him again.”

“And that’s your Japanese friend?”

The old man smiled. “A friend I shared dinner with on Christmas eve.”

“Where do you think he is now?”

“Probably dead,” the old man said, shaking his head. “We were killing them in Guadalcanal. Even if he survived, he’s probably dead by now.”

“Why?”

“I’m 91. How old would he be?”

“You’re really 91? What are you doing in a bar?”

“Having some bourbon with the boys on Christmas eve. So I can sleep well tonight.”

“That’s nice,” Annie said, her voice low. “That’s nice that you remember your friends like that. And then you go home for Christmas Eve dinner.”

“Oh, I won’t eat at home tonight. Dinner is cheap at the senior citizen’s center.”

“But, aren’t you supposed to have dinner with…”

“She passed on. She left six years ago. Six years, three months, twenty-four days ago.”

“Oh my God…”

The waiter stopped by with the old man’s check. He slowly counted out some cash to pay for his bourbon before turning to Annie again. “It was good talking to you, young lady. Enjoy those tater tots.”

“Sir, um. Are you all alone tonight?”

“Oh no. I have my radio. I listen to the news, political commentary. I have my routine.”

“All night?”

“I turn it on at 2 AM. The city is really quiet at 2 AM.”

The old man climbed to his feet, reaching for his cane, and headed for the door. Annie wanted to say something else to him, wanted to invite him over for Christmas dinner at least. But she was just a visitor herself. She watched his lanky figure slowly push through the door and disappear into the streets of New York.

That night, Annie could not sleep a wink. She thought of the old man’s Japanese friend, an enemy soldier that they were almost destined to meet in battle. And yet, without knowing the man’s name, seventy years later, the old man still considered him a friend. She wondered whether many years later, this old man whom she forgot to ask his name, would still be her friend.

She turned to the digital clock against the windowsill and noticed that it was already 2 AM. The city really was awfully quiet. She wanted to turn on the radio to hear what the old man would be listening to. There was no radio nearby. She tried to download an app on her phone so she could get radio signal, but after several attempts, gave up. There was no app that would help her hear what the old man was listening to. It was futile.

Annie sat back and threw her phone into her bag. On Christmas Eve, the old man was all alone thinking about a friend he did not know the name of. And so was she.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/tides-for-sale/Ghost__Post__6340c49b455590094ea7a7eaThu, 20 Oct 2022 22:27:03 GMT

Static time
Big old stupid city

On the embankment of rug and tassel

What could lap
At a shore this old

But pruned and petted candies

Strings of sponge
From tops of heads

A boat rocks aside: a hand meets charge: a tide shifts: a mountain learns a new name

Water doesn’t need to set aside time
To say yes

It laps it over and over again with nothing to count

An ancient time can now be pixels
But don’t forget to bring your enchanted gloves

The water hurts but it must be bottled

In line for sparks
Outline the scores

Found that shape was mine

Come down on down
Pale comparison

A faceless man attempts the biggest grab at the moon

A little of its wobbly oil to be the perfect mirror
And a fortune to be made if the right buyer ever wanted some reflection

Now what will light the way for night shifts and rendezvous

Buy the batteries from that same monstress man
To find a place and a time for toying with myself again

Hoping to fit into an angle that machines don’t yet know how to navigate

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/pigeon-hawk/Ghost__Post__6340c49b455590094ea7a7feThu, 20 Oct 2022 22:26:55 GMT

I awoke this morning, as I have for almost forty-six years now, angry, discontented, irritable and world-weary. Thinking back, I seem to have come into the world this way. The few respites from this baseline state gleam like gems in my memory, links in the shit-sausage of this long jump from vagina to grave.

My AA sponsor tells me to pray. Having been raised an atheist, I find this ridiculous. But he says it works and everything else he’s said has, so I listen. That old Irish gangster starts his day talking to God. Together, we have fashioned a prayer of sorts for me, and it goes a little something like this: “Please don’t let me act like too much of an alcoholic today.” I say another before bed: “Thank you for not letting me act like such an alcoholic today.”

This morning I forgot and leaped out of bed. I had decided to sleep in, eschewing my daily yoga practice, a two-hour ritual of Ashtanga yoga and meditation, in favor of catching up on some badly needed rest. I am, as a recent New Yorker article about pre-post-Covid anxiety put it, “burned out.” One and a half years of teaching high school online has finally caught up with me and the push to the last day of instruction feels like quite the slog. Until then, it is taking a lot of loin-girding to meet my students with the openness, patience and integrity they deserve.

After waking, I made a coffee and moved my chair to face the corner of the window in my apartment where, through a small porthole in the thickening trees, I can still catch a glimpse of the East River this time of year. I looked up and saw a pigeon soaring over the area like a hawk.

The pigeon who thought he was a hawk.

And I remembered to pray.

“Dear Nature/Homeostasis/Symbiosis/Big Bang/Entropy/Mystery…”

I quickly readied myself for class. I ran water through my hair and arranged my bedhead into something resembling an outline that would appear kempt against a zoom background, threw on a collared shirt and opened my two computer screens, one to project the power point presentation and PDF of the novel we are reading and another for managing the Tetris-like attendance software that texts parents about tardiness and helps me respond to their sometimes-frazzled messages in real time while I facilitate the first minutes of class. I set my third screen, an iPhone, on its chrome pedestal so I could manage the class’s comment stream and arranged my background to look as professional as possible by throwing some unfolded laundry beyond the purvey of the webcam.

As tired as I am of it, it’s always fun when I get to class. My co-teacher was absent today, so the kids quickly commenced the online equivalent of throwing spitballs, which I volleyed like the drag queen I am. “Loving the EMSR breathing today Darren,” wrote one. A maddening echo at the beginning of class had necessitated switching to a plug-in mic. Thus, the outmoded iPhone cord, hanging haphazardly from one ear, had been picking up my grunts and sighs as I worked out which device was the culprit. “The end of the world will be averted by steam-punk tech,” I responded forebodingly into the reverb before I disconnected the USB-C adapter. We managed to read the final chapter of Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle and have a lively discussion about the intersections of gentrification and squatting.

What is prayer? For many years, my protracted morning routine has been crucial in mitigating my congenitally miserabilist disposition: I awake, contemplate a lesson from my Guru, a reclusive spiritualist writer who, via his bi-weekly correspondence course, imparts to me what he, himself, sometimes terms the “new age mumbo jumbo” that I use as a playbook for life. (He once asked his own guru about all the earnest weirdos who read his “lessons,” and the great Baba is reported to have replied, “Healthy people don’t go to the doctor.” I think this describes me perfectly.) I also practice Kriya Yoga, the dynamic meditation technique taught by Paramahansa Yogananda, an initiated practice, passed down from empowered teacher to fire-ceremony-initiated student in an unbroken line for centuries. “I go through all this before you wake up…”

Prayer is all those practices, of course, but today I am reminded that it is, at its core, just what my dear sponsor admonishes me to do, and which this morning I failed to:

“Say your pleases and thank yous.”

The pigeon is gone now. After circling for a long time, it disappeared over the East River. It’s been almost a year since I’ve received an animal sign like this one. If you aren’t familiar with this divination practice, the crux of it is that you know you’ve received an animal sign when a non-human being comes into your field of perception in a surprising or serendipitous way, and right then is when you need to consider the message it brings, which can usually be deciphered by contemplating its physical attributes, interactions with humans and other organisms, place in the food web and some general associative cultural symbology. Before you cancel my culture-as-costume aping of Native spiritual practices, please consider that we were all indigenous at one time and entertain the possibility that perhaps its exactly that that white people need to remember. Alternately, I’m Irish so put that in your authenticity pipe and smoke it if it helps you read on:

I’ve written about Pigeon in my musings several times before, once when he came to remind me to pay attention to my inner child, once when he came to approve of reentering therapy (to tend so said inner child), and once to remind me to cherish my relationship with my sister. Hawk has also made many appearances, mostly when I need to be reminded to take the most expansive view, to pull out to a wide-angle lens, to remember whatever is greater than the little I that I think I am, that which I still struggle with calling You Know Who.

What wakes me up some mornings with rage? I was once told by an astrologer that I had a “tough row to hoe” in that the particular array of planets in my natal chart predisposed me to an unrealistic but unrelenting quest for harmony. That’s fucking true.

Not too long ago I was at a party, sipping a soda and cran and holding up a wall, when someone I’d never met before walked up to me to say, “No offense, but I don’t like white people” and then proceeded to make some untoward presumptions about what I must think of people like him. Spit ball launched. I replied, “Oh stop your flirting” and walked away. I have found sass to be the only sure remedy for preemptive strikes against white supremacy and/or bully-flirting, with which I am intimately familiar (thanks French and Russian lovers!) Nonetheless, this interaction saddened me. Because, well, I have a hard-on for harmony. How we can’t all just take the most expansive view still baffles me, perhaps inordinately.

I know I should let that go. And I think that’s exactly what prayer is for, but, as I said before, I simply can’t believe in a capital G God. It’s just too ridiculous and always will be. Ironically, I am working with two sponsees in that “fastest growing club that no one wants to be in” (Alcoholics Anonymous), who are struggling with “giving over” to a higher power. If you’re not familiar with the tenets of AA, turning your will over to a power greater than yourself is pretty much foundational to the program. One sponsee comes from a Christian background and the other a Muslim one. Both are scarred by their upbringings. Nonetheless, this “giving over” is happening for both of them.

It’s a mystery, you see, like this little morning meditation I’m doing through this rambling essay. We don’t know how it works. If I told you I did, you’d be wise to disregard anything I say.

Pigeon and Hawk. The pigeon who thought he was a hawk. The hawk Darren thought was a pigeon. We are both human and divine. That’s why we can give over to a power greater than ourselves, and how. As my Trump-and-IRA-supporting sponsor tells me, “Kid, there’s only one thing you have to know about God and that’s: ‘It ain’t you, motherfucker.’” We exist on different levels at the same time. I have come to understand that there is absolutely no contradiction between loving yourself as god herself and reveling in the smallness of yourself against her gracious relief. But we must “give over.”

I realize this is rather easy for me to say. Summer approaches. This last push is just that: For me, there is an end in sight. Not so for many dear friends, whose gluttonous companies have managed to maintain surprisingly high profit margins throughout the pandemic, it appears to me, by working fewer and fewer employees harder and harder. And when my friends get company-wide emails about “mindfulness practices” like “take time for a walk” I feel that I finally understand the true meaning of ‘gaslighting.’ “Be sure to take those summer half-days,” says HR to the overworked managers who are now tasked with merchandizing, “as long as your project’s on track.”

So, being told to “give over” can be maddening. Being told “why” to give over is perhaps a little less maddening. Being told “what” to give over is approaching helpful. But, for me, being told HOW to give over is preferable. Many people told me that I “should,” some told me “why,” fewer told me “what,” but only one told me how, my woo-woo Guru, who, I am told, is on Lexapro.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/coup-de-grace/Ghost__Post__6340c49b455590094ea7a7f9Thu, 20 Oct 2022 22:26:45 GMT

(The needle and the damage done)

I couldn’t make my hands abandon
the comfort of that crazy fur
sticking up everywhere at odds
like a little gray bear’s coat.

More than cat, you were joy and muse;
an easy companion so true that
I had to be reminded,
“Come on,
it’s just a cat, not a little man
in fuzzy pajamas.”

Still,
we never should have had to part
in that one curious flicker
of surprise and surrender
as you grew very small behind your eyes
and finally disappeared…
leaving me holding only…well…the cat’s pajamas.

The vet asks what I want to do with your body.
The impossible, of course:

Cradle it on my shoulder and
re-ignite the joyful purr,
feel you nestle against my neck as always,
while my weary hands find solace
in the friendliness of fur.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/counting-trees/Ghost__Post__6340c49b455590094ea7a800Thu, 20 Oct 2022 22:26:31 GMT

The air is different here.
My block in Royal Oak Township on Detroit’s border has become relatively bereft of trees.
My block in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a mere forty-five minute drive away, is lousy with them.
My husband Shawn cut down a healthy, old growth maple so he could better sun himself on the back deck. I still mourn the tree four years later.
I can see ten mature trees through the narrow view from the windows of my office. Littleleaf Linden, Red Sunset Maple and Emerald Green Arborvitae trees grow in our front yard. I take a census and find 115 hearty trees from my block to the main street, Packard, and back.
I want to transplant some of these trees to my old neighborhood.
I could take them at night. On a truck. Stack them five high
And they’d hardly be missed.
Why should Ann Arborites have all the shade?
Trees are the lungs of the Earth.
Trees reduce crime.
Provide jobs
Clean the air,
filter water.
Cloverdale Avenue needs all that
more than Kensington Drive does.
Cloverdale needs me
more than Kensington does.
After nearly two years away because of the pandemic, the contrast is stark.
Hardly any tree cover over the street where I grew up. Long gone are the days when my friends and I would climb the oaks that lined our street.
Insect infestations and oak wilt caused many to be cut. My childhood friend and neighbor Angie tells me that a few remaining trees were blown onto power lines in recent storms and had to be removed.
They were not replaced.
Angie says the black squirrels that she used to see only in neighboring Oak Park have replaced the brown ones that used to be so commonplace in the Township and wonders whether it’s because of the dearth of trees.
The grass is still perfectly manicured on Cloverdale.
Lawns are uniform, like the white and red brick houses, and a deep shade of green. Angie tells me that even our carpet-like lawns were patchy in 2020, the year when nothing was as it should have been.
In Royal Oak Township
Or Ann Arbor
Or anywhere else for that matter
I long to breathe easy in both places.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/you-can-change-your-life-in-arkansas/Ghost__Post__6340c49b455590094ea7a7efThu, 20 Oct 2022 22:26:16 GMT

Especially if you fly on Christmas,
the hours in the air a meditation
upon the months and year. You think salvation
might be yours if only you shake your fist
at some old slight, look ahead to this
in-between state, a place of transition
between east, west, north, south. It’s like fiction,
you think, these strange and busy weeks. Success
seems elusive. Yet isn’t it success
to think freely, as you’re doing now, high
above clouds, imagining how your art
will sustain you. Colorado, Texas,
Arkansas. Guitar, paintbrush, canvas. Why
make the mind do all the work? Invite the heart.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/mailbox/Ghost__Post__6340c49b455590094ea7a7f2Thu, 20 Oct 2022 22:26:05 GMThttps://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/spider/Ghost__Post__6340c49b455590094ea7a7f4Thu, 20 Oct 2022 22:25:57 GMT

I tried to save a spider
from my station
where I was working
with nails and hammers;
wooden splinters flying.
How was I to know
dust would overpower her?
That she’d be stuck
in a web of my own neglect?
She stayed fast to the window,
clinging to a light
she couldn’t taste.
And I turned back,
hastily,
my own project
taking precedence.
Telling myself that I was
busy.
But the truth is
I couldn’t bear
to watch her waste away.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/the-porch/Ghost__Post__6340c49b455590094ea7a7edThu, 20 Oct 2022 22:25:39 GMT

If I had a porch, I would
want to sit with my grandfather,
learn to swear like a sailor and
listen to his stories.

Of sailing the oceans on
four masted ships and taking
months to return home.

Of blowing his bugle as the
horse Calvary charged,
during the Moro Rebellion in the
Philippines.

Of firing the 155mm artillery
piece during five battles in WWI.

Of the Gold he was paid
as a mercenary with
Pancho Villa’s Army.

Of his teenage bride, the
only women he ever loved.

That is what I would want to
do–if I had a porch.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/shadowleaves/Ghost__Post__6340c49b455590094ea7a7f8Thu, 20 Oct 2022 22:25:27 GMT

I am
colors
on the outside

I brush
up against my insides
rushing forward

I trace myself
back into life —
living

folded up
against the world
charting a course

I am pressed
like a
grain of sand

it’s crystal clear
I’m cut off from my own sight
imagine

I am
neither
mix nor colors

I find
not a hue
of myself

only the
spirit of
shadowleaves

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/fun-town/Ghost__Post__6340c49b455590094ea7a7f6Thu, 20 Oct 2022 22:25:14 GMT

Tulsa is a fun town
but it’s not a funny one

Sam Kinison lies buried
in Tulsa just eight miles from
the Center of the Universe
and just ten miles from
the center of the massacre
that started with a
stumble and a scream

Then fifty years later Sam
Kinison was preaching
the Gospel on the
streets of Tulsa Later he
brought his comedy and
his scream to town with
a plan to return to
preaching A plan that
ended because of the
inability of two speeding
objects to successfully
occupy the same space
And Malika screamed

So now Sam Kinison
rests in the beautiful
Memorial Park Cemetery
in Tulsa and Tulsa
remains a fun town
but it’s not a funny one

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/final-visitor/Ghost__Post__6340c49b455590094ea7a7daThu, 20 Oct 2022 22:25:06 GMT

Death came
barefoot
to the door,
wrapped in
downy wings
the color
of dusk.

Wearing eyes
of pale blue sky,
she bent low
to kiss cold,
parched lips,
taking a last
breath.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/there-is-a-door/Ghost__Post__6340c49b455590094ea7a7dfThu, 20 Oct 2022 22:24:35 GMT

“At the end of my suffering,
there was a door.”
~ Louise Gluck

Always. Across the once-green expanse
hilling the horizon edged with cedars
leaning into each other in the sun

right before the wind returns
to clear us of all this humidity,
the righteous angst of being human,

which is not to say it was easy:
we were lost here, like hurricanes stationed
in place against their will to dissolve

into oceans. We were afraid often
of it never ending, pain so fluent
in speaking the language of forever.

We were separate from each other
below the cusp of so much sadness
that even the dragonflies avoided us

or we were trapped in the timbers of pain,
piercing our temples or aching in our calves,
keeping us awake no matter how hard we kicked.

It didn’t, doesn’t matter if we cried out
or tightened the long vertical muscles in our necks
to hold in our curses or screams
or especially if we felt nothing but the bank
of fog become an ocean so deep and tilted
away from the light that we thought we lived here.

Somehow—a miracle, a piece of luck, a strange
happening—there was a door, and then,
on the other side, we found each other.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/no-mans-land/Ghost__Post__6340c49b455590094ea7a7ddThu, 20 Oct 2022 22:24:23 GMT

Red turkey wheat heads bob above the flat horizon
Mimicking war bonnets bouncing on galloping steeds.
Beating drums of hooves pound the earth
Charging red-hot sparks of friction
Winnowing the shaft from the wheat.

Howling winds whoop out haunting war cries,
Echoes reverberate from Mesa to Mesa.
Shouts, entwined with shadows of twisting smoke signals,
Scalp creek side cottonwoods.
Skinned naked of their dry foliage,
Skeletons quiver.

In drunken concentration,
Metal dinosaur rigs move in phlegmatic rhythm,
Craning their necks, hypnotically dipping,
Sucking up black gold liquor, mellowed by ages,
Reserved in Nature’s hidden still below,
Intoxicated by the speed of light.

Harnessed wind power circles like a striking hawk.
Taut aerial cables bisect the blue grid works overhead.
Faded Conestoga ruts run parallel below.
History’s map dries in the dust and is lifted aloft,
Taking new direction.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/ode-to-myself-at-12-years/Ghost__Post__6340c49b455590094ea7a7e0Thu, 20 Oct 2022 22:24:05 GMT

After William Wordsworth

There was a time when I did not fear
the future that lay ahead of me;
I did not hesitate to go near
and never would I flee,
but ever-present were tears.

My mind was fresh and witty,
I lived forward in a dream
which to me never did seem
the likeness of a pity.

The pale brain sops with worry;
gooey reminiscence, recognizing
that somehow, it is always in a hurry.
It abates the trauma, finding
those years truly to be surly.

It was the last good year for innocence,
so often I think about the warm sun,
the way I could always have summer fun,
yet I’ve lost that company, in a sense.

It’s how the smell of sunscreen and sweat
annually toss me into emotional debt.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/rain-delay-broadcast/Ghost__Post__6340c49b455590094ea7a7e7Thu, 20 Oct 2022 22:23:54 GMT

“Friday it rained all day - there was no ball game. So we stayed home, we listened to it on the radio.” - Chico, in the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup

In this evening’s

lack of a game worth waiting for

in this evening’s

distortion of the spacetime’s damp
moral arc of ground, fence, and ball,
call it a toss-up, the raincheck

of this evening.

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/domesticity-like-the-cubs/Ghost__Post__6340c49b455590094ea7a7ebThu, 20 Oct 2022 22:23:32 GMT

The same thump as thumbs
Meets you
And greets you
Push down

With
The pink cross on the music man’s back
Who taught us to
Teach time and waiting

Reach for stupid places and incubation
Cause any bed is big enough
And no price is high enough
Sleep a little longer

It is all the tiniest tidal wave
And every time arms disappear the legs do too
Something else grows
Like the shallow of eyes in use

Could we have a year of hibernation
In a carved out pink den
I’ll soak it up and you can keep rolling it out
With a title to my name and more life to yours

Of joint and afternoon mildness
Everything made of squared
Even the soup has no shape
And the stench that always climbs

Higher and higher
To the best neck
Layered and layered
Of filo pastry

Moistened and moistened of buttered marmalade
And crumb of crispness
And shy of cluttered folds
Fought for but never worn

Anything could be success
But the easiest is to stop planning
Call off the straws
And just bob over

And hope the thread finds me
It can’t stop falling and growing and getting tangled
Close enough for one eye
Stand mirror to mirror

And the bones tucked away in a sleeve
You’ve known all these
But can never hold them down
Once you throw away their clues they will grant it all

Three points touching
I’ve promised myself that nothing grew for you
But everything is
So much so that they could be reaching the pinnacle any minute now

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/circles/Ghost__Post__6340c49b455590094ea7a7f5Thu, 20 Oct 2022 22:22:58 GMT

We don’t run
in the same circles

But she’s there for
every time I read

She always comes with
someone I don’t know

But she always comes
whenever I read and
sits on the front row and
follows every word and
one time as I finished
she stepped up to me and
ran her hand down my arm and
then she left with someone
I’d never seen before

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/postpartum/Ghost__Post__6340c49b455590094ea7a7dcThu, 20 Oct 2022 22:22:44 GMT

Three thirty in the morning
She sat up in bed
Wearing the nightgown with holes
Mechanical pump on her breast
Staring out over the backyard
Despairing

Her mind told her “Your life is over.
What’s the point?
You’re a mess.
Existentially, you’re going to raise this girl and educate her
For what?
To one day feel like this.
Like her life is only for her daughter
God, you’re a shitty person.
This was all you ever wanted.
So malcontent.
So ungrateful.
Don’t you have the decency to feel guilty that you are such
A. Bad. Mother?
They’d be better off without you.
The life insurance would be more useful than you are right now.
You can’t even have sex yet.
Body broken
A desiccated flower trodden underfoot on a sidewalk
Never to be whole
Damaged
You’ll never feel pleasure again.
Your body belongs to the baby.”

Nothing was more exhausting than this conversation with herself.

She switched the pump to the other breast
And smoothed the hair on the angelic baby next to her.

This glimmer crossed her mind:
“If I died, I wouldn’t be able to taste strawberries again.”
This one thought, a tether
A rope to the hope
Of ripeness
Of sweetness
Of summer
And as the tears rolled down her face, she talked back to her mind.
“We’ll see. I’m gonna hang around one more day.”

]]>https://staging.emerge-writerscolony.org/apple-bundt-cake/Ghost__Post__6340c49b455590094ea7a7e3Thu, 20 Oct 2022 22:22:31 GMTIngredients: