spring 2016

ISSUE 1

Poetry

WHAT THE CREEK SAYS

You look to the clouds
To the blue blankness overhead
Cross yourselves, fall to your knees
Talk to sharp shards of stars
Brittle black emptiness.
No, look down at your toes in the silt:
God says “Good morning.”
His creatures waste no time looking up.
The rippling speech of the creek,
The rhythmic grinding of the foraging cows,
Heads all bowed to their green communion,
Are the liturgy and homily of this, the richest cathedral.
When everything else has changed, even the heavens,
I have not. I will stay water, no matter what comes.
There is a reason I am ritual,
Every kind of metaphor, 
The only balm for every kind of sore.

—Rita Quillen

“WHAT DO YOU CARE ABOUT?”

           —political leaflet  

always words—not these
tattooed on a page but those
I couldn’t speak as I sat alone &
buried my face in gravel
on the playground
hoping no one noticed
hoping someone did
then in high school
winding the corridors
silent as if after a betrayal
my mouth was a glue trap
from which those hissing
monstrous spiders couldn’t flee
later too in bars & coffee shops
at home under yellow lights
not even to my wife
or those I swore I loved
I left my voice
in a bottle corked
I threw it far into the empty sea

“WHAT ARE THE ISSUES THAT MATTER TO YOU?”    

            —political leaflet          

Grace sends pictures of her orchids
in their second bloom, not pink or violet
but the color of lips stained by cotton candy.
How long she fretted, flooding them,
fearing they’d die unnoticed on a windowsill.
I’m responding with a message
of praise & awe when my mother calls,
tells me her SUV overheated
forty miles from Fayetteville.
She doesn’t need a ride, she says.
The tow truck driver will take her
where she’s going. I sense a chasm
has opened underneath her feet.
I envision her falling as she speaks,
wait for her to rise again like orchids.
Two different images—I know
these are the things that matter:
what lives on, what crumbles,
what sings, & what’s then rent
upon the rocks. Why do we want
a world without such complications?
Every orchid is a phoenix flower,
meant to fade then blaze from ash.
Cars will fail & be rebuilt, as we will. 
Each next step’s a mystery, & 
sometimes, far from home, a busted hose.

—Ace Boggess

FOURTH OF JULY, NECAISE CROSSING BASEBALL FIELD, NECAISE CROSSING, MISSISSIPPI

It’s a solid hour before dark. Columns of blue balloons & speakers flank a flatbed stage. The pastor’s pulpit sits before a background of red cellophane stripes, white Christmas lights. Our children are running from third, to second, to first to home. The pines haven’t silhouetted into the horizon, the flag bearers haven’t mounted, the concession stand is open. The black stacks of woofers and tweeters pulse

with Brother Kevin’s thanks to Steep Hollow’s fire volunteers for keeping watch over the outfield, thanks to Miss Gay’s Gayla Productions for bunting, and he leads our pledge as heavy hooves cut into infield clay, stand ready to leave

the field. The Shiloh Baptist youth choir sings four hymns. I hear every word, without their voices. Cotton flags are sewn to their pockets. Is that the best looking choir you ever seen, Brother Kevin asks, as day fades. You know, the liberty bell can ring the story of our nation’s independence, but only the ringing of Gabriel’s trumpet will bring eternal freedom. When our Savior comes, we want you to be free. As the lights click and fade, children take seats along the chalklines,

the concession stands drop their plywood shutters. Lawn chairs turn toward right field, follow the progress of deacons running with flares.

—Brent House

PROLOGUE

In the beginning, black.  It's the old story—ink.
And then there was a growing out of it,
rip and bloom and a bird unwrapping her wings
one from another.  There was a world to grow into.

In the beginning came animals not two-by-two,
but one.  Discreet.  From the one
came caring and anger and water and soil.
From the one came another.
Here he is, a black bear with wings to cover
the sun or the moon or the bed where you sleep.

SISTER STORY

When we were very small, we bounded
toward any sound that sounded.  
Now we know: 
    quick atop the vole frantic in the sod root
    away away the rattlesnake shake
    avoid the tar-smell of the big road
    follow Mama on the hunt until she sends
        us out, out to  wings to circle on
    slow and low toward Oolie just landed in the big field.
The other thing we have to know
is how to find each other. 

OOLIE’S STORY

The flying is best at night.  The stars
or the absence of stars.  The woolen blanket of August heat
or the sheet of sheer February freeze in my lungs.
I say night.  But then I think of dawn, the red swell the earth
kicks up on the horizon. I think of early afternoon, 
when I can swallow ten thousand gall gnats at a pass.
Early evening, when the chimney swifts column through the mist
settling over Liveszy Lake, rising over the land then falling,
arrowed ground-ward again.  There is flight at noon, blinded,
flight just before noon, glazed.  It is all my luck to be above it all.  

I believe in your power, too, you little ones.
I believe in your hearts, the stretch of your hearts
out toward me, but I do not know how to reach in return
without slicing you bone deep.  I do not know how
the two of us can ever meet without breaking.

—Abby Chew

THIS IS THE WAY

The morning the canyon opened,
its roaring water thundering and
its mist rising through rose light
carrying sweet white azalea into black, 

the world could have been saying
It’s your time to go, and I would have,
except that too few of us have ever
stepped in a river powerful enough to pin 

a body to the bottom, or emerged
at day’s end atop a rock cliff— 
the river but a single lost thread below, 
buzzards sweeping up and out 

and over where you have just been: 
this is the way it will be when you are
not looking, when you are pulled
backwards and up as if by a string. 

Yes, the world is ending.  It is ending
every day, and our feet are not even wet. 

—Bill King

THE LANCING

The body loses glamour on tabletop, arms
splayed like a leafless tree, sleeves
pushed aside to naked flesh. There is no chance
of the doctor and patient fucking. He has seen
too soon the way she shudders at pain, he can
imagine how she looks during joy
and it makes the needle almost like      he pushes
the thought from his head, concentrates on puckering
redness, squeezing it purple. Small talk
is no use. When people die, he thinks, what can
we say? Nothing matters then; nothing except
the speed of blood and finding a way to cup the spill. 

—Denise K. James

ELEGY WITH A MOUNTAIN DOCTOR RIDING HOME FROM A STILLBIRTH

The breach was as challenging to turn as a stubborn horse.
Almost as impossible as deciding not to weep on horseback
because tears freeze. As the Bible explains: a time for crying.
His horse is as black as the centers of a brand-new doll’s eyes,
a blue-black like the absence of moonlight on a grove of laurel.

He admired the actions of beasts before the dead child came,
for an animal body, any animal or human, is supple to a point.
This boy arrived as a knapsack of forceps fractures. Dead was
when he conceded, though defeat preceded the pronouncement.
If he was ever excited by the possibilities, he’s deflated now,

recalling arterial flow soaking a mattress in a flood of failure,
the man he had been reminded again what we’re at war with
and who is, and isn’t, winning. It is either late, or very early.
No language for how the glow from a fireplace stirs shadows.
He hears D.V. as he passes on his way out. Mounts the horse.

If what we do reveals us, he’s one taking rein to keep going.
As from some afterlife, snow thickets breathe gray. Silver.
He rides in a sleep-deprived hallucination in which it drops
into the saddle behind, an apparition talking with a voice
borrowed from the antechamber of a tomb. He rides on.

—Roy Bentley

IMBROGLIO

I.
Between winter’s shut window
and sheets of plastic insulation
    the husks of summer flies
        glint neon
    their battering the screen
        a memory.        
        
    A preternaturally large
     crane fly straddles the screen
        sealed in death.

As we sleep kerosene’s blue element
    burns captive in our midst.

II.
When I came to you
    in love
    in love with love
there was no window
        only
    blind walls of adamant
    oak aged to coffee brown.

I wanted smells
    May’s perennial of perennials
        the fat-headed peonies
    July’s hot earth
    autumn’s ferment of fallen apples.

My friend opened your wall.
The wood scorched his circular blade.

I have my window scents
        and
I have sun in see-through woods.
    
I have sheets of August rain
    when fury rakes
        white across the sky.

III. 
You tape us closed in autumn.
I am sealed one among our mingled things

    my teacher pantsuits and skirts
    your jeans and your coat         
        sheepskin embroidered with sweet mildew
    your boot with its tongue askew
    your nub of chewing gum on the windowsill.

You say the plastic will keep out the cold. 

IV.
You say, The plastic will always.
You say, You will never.
Inside the low coal cramp of you
    eating the wounded fruit of you
        I know I     
            alone
                    see the best in you.

You say, One day I will tell you why.
You say I do nothing right.

V.
I am afraid of you. I want you.
I live in your walls. I am your captive heat. 

Your wall has been cut.
You are not true.

—Faith Holsaert

ENGLISH 101 SECTION J AT THE START OF MONSOON SEASON

There are men who have been rickshaw drivers
so long they walk like men in high weeds
their prayers flat rocks thrown into the sky,
men who have compressed their brains so long
with brick loads their pleas are particles
 of skull, rising hushedly as dust specks.

In my English 101 class one raining afternoon
the students pondered chip off the old block.
Your father is the block, I said, 
and if you resemble him,
 you are the chip. 

And who wields the ax said the one
who came the furtherest.  Tonight,
by bus, he will return to a village
water has expunged  five  times,
not even a blip on MSN, 
and where his father points his chin
at a river primarily half full one day, 
and primarily full the day after.
He will tell them there are words between words
and an assembly of meaning in riven wood.

It is not important to the idiom, I say. 
Decide now if you are a chip off the old block,
please, and answer in complete sentences,
I am/am not a chip off the old block because…

Outside our windows a transformer blew, 
flashed like a stealth bomb
and all the copybooks
fell into half darkness.
In the silence,
devoid of the usual
neighborly translations,
I could hear the outlandish dreams
of their fathers inside them
humming politely,
humming famously.

—Dorie LaRue

MAY-DECEMBER

When she was twenty and he was forty
he equaled everything she wanted in a man.

Her father, a geologist descended from Rabbis,
had seen fissured gaps that would crack into ravines – 
rocks don’t fracture all at once, the process
is immeasurable to the human eye,
he explained in echoed German.

But she was Spring, flirty in organza, full
of promises. With sunlight and naiveté 
gathered into her wedding dress, 
she breezed brightly into his prime.

When the baby came they gave her a name
that means noble, for surely they were king and queen.
Thought about setting up a bottled lightning stand,
but couldn’t settle on a price for pricelessness. 

They jumped back and forth across the crevice
of themselves for thirty years; eventually,
he was more like a father than a husband.
She got sick of old records and old ideas, 
stumbled around disagreements scattered
through the house like used furniture.

First, stress fractures in varying directions –
small cracks accumulate with time.
Then shearing, textured shapes, 
Scherkluft, like compression in the gut ¾
irreversible strain wherein the element breaks.

This is what she’s thinking about in the hospital room
at the bottom of their canyon. Winter is lonely, 
quieter than she remembers, more bare, fewer
places for shelter. Spring too had settled down,
stood on the edge of summer and traded
like a native – white daisies and sun for
harvest leaves flaring red, then fading brown.

—Michelle Lyle

SHADOWBOXING THE SHAMAN 

The raven appears, conjured
out of coal and spirited to the snowfield. 
She’s almost invisible, the sun behind her,
and she extends a wing, asks 

if you’re still paying attention,
mentions the squirrels knocking snow
out of the spruce, and can you see
those willow buds swelling?

This must be a dream, the white so deep
it’s almost black, and the riverside air so warm.
Her other wing waves, a half-flap,
behavior that makes sense but accomplishes

nothing. How did you get here? she asks, 
eyes like a chip of tiger beetle carapace, 

Where did you come from, to be standing
hip-deep in an edgeless, opal field?
She prods you on what feels like your shoulder,
so you turn, turn, and keep going around

for a while: trees, then not, then mountains
cut by a river, and she asks, Where are you going?
just as you come back around, again,
coal clucking at you and the wheel of your feet

—JAMES ENGELHAR

MOONSHINE

We broke the bread.
It was all we knew how to do.
Waking up from another war, my grandfather
went straight to salvaging. 
Through yolk and bone, through my grandmother’s spirits
in all their swollen bottles. 
He strung her teeth up like windchimes, 
all her tea bags across the cellar door.
Outside the bullets lunged and still he would not stop
from gathering everything she had loved.
We kneaded and sang, each pulse of the dough
like memories to us.
If anyone had asked, his sorrow was baked
into each and every grain.

—MEGGIE ROYER

SOMETIMES WISHING 

A mind will wander
hither and yon
when hands set to
some reg’lar task –
here I am snipping
a peck of runner beans,
popping tails and tops
whilst the big pot comes
to a raring boil
and the greased spider
is smoking for corncake.

Woodsmoke and hot iron
I follow right on back
to Big Elk Branch
and Miz Gaston teaching me
to put food by:
catsups and pickles and millionaire relish,
sweating at the Home Comfort
as we scalded peaches
in August and slipped them
from outta their bright skins,
stirring apple butter in the kettle
over a fire in the yard.
I learnt it was a labor
but aftertimes a joy to see the jars
filled red and yellow
in that dirt-floor cellar,  
a treasure-room
where women held the key.

Sometimes as we roll
past hayfields or tobacco, 
field-hands under they hats
in the sun, or cotton busting white
from the knife-edge bolls
and I recollect
the burn on my stooped back,
the itch of hay dust, the fiery sting
of the saddleback worm
whilst working the green corn,
but too the cold water a-trickling
over moss at the springhouse, 
and birds as would flame up
in the trees, and the mister’s orchard
sweet both spring and fall.

I had my pallet then
and not much more – 
nothing I mought call mine, 
even my ownself, 
not like now when I have
my own place
with my bits and pieces, 
books, a pot of chamomile
to take for my sleepless. 
Still, I do pine at times
for the old place,
knowing that outside
the back door a mist be
‘mongst the arms of the hills
and the first wrenbird calling clear.

—VALERIE NIEMAN

A GOOD DAY 

Walls and doors and corridors.
And windows.
You’d forgotten the windows, their brilliant eyes open on the good days.
And this is a good day.
The morphine in sync with your pain. 
The doctor smiling and unhurried.
The sexy nurse not afraid to flirt.
There are other days, and the usual downers within the good:
             the fist-glare of fluorescence, the cold-tabled x-ray, the lonely MRI coffin,
             the glum face of your cousin come from Idaho to see . . . what?
If you’re dead yet?  
A good joke, that, good enough
            to let you smile, to laugh, to surprise the living
            with your cheerful dying.  
It ain’t over till it’s over . . . 
            A late reliever in the late innings, you keep taking
the signs
            as long as they keep coming.

Walls and doors and windows.
Signs.          
A pitch.          
A chance.
You wink.
She winks back.
Call it a good day.

—MARC HARSHMAN

Creative Nonfiction

Letter to My Fifteen-Year-Old Self

(For every pregnant teen who thinks, feels, she’s alone.)

San Francisco, the Mission Barrio, 1960

I see you standing at the very edge of the rooftop, gazing down into the darkness. The garden below. Where the roses are blooming. Your step (real) father, Whitey, tends these roses. Your mother doesn’t believe in roses. You lean into that darkness. No fear. Not really. You were the tomgirl who jumped/leaped roof to roof to avoid the streets for blocks. And just for fun. The thrill shot through your body. You leaned. You leaped. Sometimes barely making it. Barely landing. Fear. Then laughter. Your tomgirl pal following you. Roof to roof. San Francisco, the Mission. Your childhood city.

Why are you leaning at the edge of the rooftop, gazing down into the darkness? The roses blooming. No scent from the edge, but you can see the blood red petals shadowed in moonlight. Some are fully blossomed, ready to shed their beauty. To touch the earth. Die, transform. Some are tight, baby blossoms; tiny slivers of blood red barely revealed. Still in the womb. They sing their whisper song of blood red. Beauty.

You’re pregnant at 15, gazing into darkness. Listening to the songs of the blossomed roses, and the whisper songs of the baby bud roses. Still in the womb. You’re pregnant at 15, alone, at the edge. Leaning. Into the darkness.

Stars pulsing overhead. Some brighter than others. Alive with light. Your favorite place. The roof. View of the city lights. Silence. You sit down at the edge, letting your feet dangle. Night breeze on your sweaty face. You wishing, suddenly, that you still passed as a boy on the city streets. Your night time visits to Dolores Park, sitting high in the pepper trees. The Bay Bridge a shiny necklace across the dark water. A few times you had to run for it when a pervert spotted you, perched so high and happy. Sometimes you sang the old Baptist church song, “I have a joy joy joy joy down in my heart…” And sometimes you sang parts of “Canta, No Llores...Sing, Don’t cry,” the parts you remembered that Mamacita knew by heart. You whisper sing those parts now, your sandaled feet dangling over the edge. And you smile because you see Mamacita, so clearly, in the alive stars, lifting her long skirt. Dancing. You join her, dancing.

You remember the morning ritual of sharing dreams, the hot chocolate, cinnamon on top, steaming your face. You almost always woke up to Mamacita praying, singing to the Child Sun in Yaqui. Her rattle. Tears and joy in that strange, beautiful language you never learned. But you loved to hear. She told you it was a song to El Niño Sol, to be born safely every dawn. You thought if Mamacita didn’t sing that song every morning, there would be only darkness. Night. No Child Sun. Birth. Dawn.

You didn’t know what birth was, being born. Except your mother, Lydia, once told you she almost pulled a sink out of the wall, in the hospital, when you were born. That it hurt like hell, that’s what she said. You asked Mamacita once, “Does it hurt the Child Sun’s Mamå when he’s born?” She laughed, “Every birth has pain, niña, but when la Mamå Tierra gets to hold her child, el regalo de luz...the gift of light, that warm little body, she laughs. Now, tell me your dream, mi Alma.” (All conversation in Spanish, Mamacita never spoke English.)

You would tell her your four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten year old dreams, and she would tell you hers. When you were six you told Mamacita you kept falling in your dream. She gently, then firmly, touched your shoulder blades, left and right, massaging them.

“These are your wings, niña. When you begin to fall in your dream, remember them, where they are. Right here.” Left and right, massaging each one firmly. Gently. “When you begin to fall, remember your wings, open them wide.” She’d spread her arms wide, smiling, her eyes on fire. “You’re ready to fly, niña, remember, open your wings wide. Your wings. Right here.” Left and right, each one.

You remember stealing your first bike as the pre-dawn wind begins to chill you on the rooftop. You lay on your back, the old blanket you hide up there under you. Some of it covering you as you gaze at the brightest star, so alive with light. You don’t know the star’s name- Venus, Quetzalcoatl. Years later you would call this pre-dawn, dancing with light, star by name. This night you remember seeing a brand new bike lying on the street by itself. You were eleven. You walked by the bike twice. No one claimed it, so you did. Riding to Golden Gate Park with your tomgirl amiga, sometimes alone (instead of boring school); riding down the final hills to the so green forest entrance, the scent of green, felt like flying. The magical fern forest, as tall as trees, the sun barely peeked through. Damp earth. The tall fern trees, large flowering plants beneath them. Large purple flowers, the size of a baby’s head, always made you laugh. And when the fairies welcomed you- their small, tinkling voices- you knew you were safe. If they didn’t, you rode away as fast as you could. Flying to safety.

You woke up one morning- your first flying dream- the large mirror over the bed you shared with Mamacita. She was singing to the Child Sun. You stood up and looked down at the bed and saw your self sleeping. You felt so sorry for her, that she had a to be in a body, that you knew how to fly and didn’t need her body. In fact, at that moment, her body disgusted you. You didn’t want to return. You looked into the mirror and didn’t recognize your six year old face. What scared you back to life. Back into your sleeping, dreaming (flying) girl body.

When you told Mamacita your first flying dream, she made you cafécito con leche with still warm pan dulce from the store down the street. But you never told her about the girl in the mirror that didn’t need a body- who returned to live. Your life. Who saw your life and stayed. You sipped your cafécito con leche and ate two fresh pan dulces, celebrating your first flight. At six. With Mamacita.

* * * * * *

You wake up to warmth on your face. The Child Sun licking you with warmth. The bright star fading. You sit up, facing the Child Sun and begin to sing your own song to his birth. And the baby bud roses join you. Still in the womb. You’ll wait for your mother to leave for work, taking your baby brother to his sitter. Then you’ll go downstairs to Whitey’s house (your step/real father), use your key to enter. Fix hot chocolate with cinnamon on top in his clean kitchen Some toast with jam. Go down into the garden to pick some blossoming roses, leaving the baby bud roses to dream. Still in the womb.

(The Birth)

“I can’t marry you. My parents say you’ll have ten kids in ten years.” The boy is crying as you both walk to your favorite restaurant where no one goes. For tea, coffee, a piece of pie. Sometimes the dinner special. He pays. He has two parents and their house is always clean. You go there once. His parents are white and their eyes say, Dirty Mexican. Sometimes you and the boy walk clear to the ocean, talking, laughing, sometimes crying, telling sad stories, and funny ones too. He tells you, “My mother used to tie me up in a chair with clothesline and gag me. She made me stay there for hours and sometimes I’d fall asleep. I learned not to cry or scream, just wait. Till she untied me. When I cried and screamed the rope made me bleed. She’d say, ‘Are you ready to behave?’ I’d nod my head yes.”

Then you and the boy take the trolley back to the Mission, from the ocean. Home. Promising to meet at the corner of 16th and Guerrero. Then one time he doesn’t come. You see him at school and he turns away, his friends laughing. Years later you find out that the word Guerrero means warrior.

Your mother, Lydia, tells a neighbor, “She didn’t want to marry him.” The neighbor smiles kindly into your eyes, “Only the good girls get caught, honey.”

You’re two weeks overdue. The doctor at St Mary’s Clinic, just three blocks from your place, tells you, “It looks like your baby’s small, so that’s okay. Plus, you’re just a kid yourself,” kind smile. But the nuns hate you. They can barely contain their contempt. An unmarried fifteen year old, pregnant, about to give birth in their Catholic hospital. The nuns want you to give your baby up for adoption. They bring in a different nun each time after the kind doctor leaves.

“How do you plan to take care of this baby, child?” Thin lips, contempt. Eyes hard, trying to kill you. You hate them back, refuse to cry. Guerrero, warrior.

“You’re going to suffer for this sin and your baby too. Do you want this for your baby?” You just smile and they finally leave you alone. You also give them los ojos de bruja...the witch eyes. The eyes you’d give to the old church ladies when they’d call you gringita and you knew they went home and broke an egg over their head for protection. You pictured the nuns breaking an egg over their bald heads, and you had to keep yourself from laughing. Guerrero, warrior.

The pains begin around your belly, and your best friend, Judy, is there at your mother’s place. Whitey cooks you special food so the baby will be healthy, and you go upstairs to his place to eat. You also bring your baby brother, John. It’s always clean, some music playing softly, his voice, “Ya look pretty damn good, kid, must be the food so chow down, and your favorite dessert, cherry cake. Hope that baby likes cherry cake, kid,” he laughs.

You’ve been taking care of John, cleaning the apartment, cooking breakfast and lunch. Dinner at Whitey’s. You even go to open house at John’s school, and a field trip to the zoo. When you and John enter the Lion House, just as they’re feeding them, and they begin to ROAR so your bones rattle, he begins to cry. Scream. You pick him up and run for it, like fuck those lions, caged. Their only moment to pretend they hunted, killed that raw mound of meat they’re devouring. That roar. John clings to you, safety. Fuck those sad assed lions.

The pains get worse, so Lydia brings you a ‘screwdriver,’ she calls it, and one for Judy. Orange juice with something funny in it, but it tastes pretty good. You have two. Judy barely finishes hers. You, Judy and Lydia walk the three blocks to Saint Mary’s, joking and laughing all the way. Even the pain is funny (still). John’s with Whitey- “I’ll be up ta see ya, kid, and don’t you worry, women been having babies for-ever!” You think of the baby, the tiny rosebud, trying to be born. Come out of you. You felt her move just once, but clearly, from one side of your stomach to the other. Her foot, that bump. You dreamt her, so you know, her. Her name, Antoinette Therese. You want her to be a queen. You tell no one about the dream, especially the nuns. If Mamacita were alive, you’d tell her of course. But you know Mamacita knows everything anyway. You heard her voice deep in your right ear. Guerrero, warrior, “No te dejas, niña.” She’d toss you out the door when you’d come in crying, to take care of yourself. Fight back. La vida. Guerrero, warrior.

The nuns are shocked, your laughing face. They take you to a room, all by yourself, and leave you there. There’s a window to the street. Guerrero Street. Some trees. You push the window open. Wind. The birds are singing to the Child Sun grown old, tired. Stretches of blood-red-violet. Mamacita had a song for the Child Sun grown old, tired. You hear her voice, the rattle, but not the words. The pain in your belly comes and goes, making you double over and moan. You begin to walk the room between pains and it helps. You’re still a little dizzy from the orange juice drink but fading- no one to talk to, joke with.

You remember how Mamacita floated you when you were sick, so you focus on the fluttering leaves, the sound of the wind, and begin to sing softly- “Old Child Sun, don’t be afraid, go to sleep, dream, in the morning you’ll be born again, Child Sun, don’t be afraid.” Then you double over with the pain but keep floating like the wind, straighten up to breathe the fluttering leaves and walk the room. “Don’t be afraid, old Child Sun, don’t be afraid…”

The door opens. “You should be lying down, not walking around, what are you doing!” the nun shouts. She shuts the window, hard, and leaves.

You get up and open the window, begin to walk again. The pain is like dying lying down, and you’re all alone, but not really. There’s the wind, the trees, the birds still singing, and Mamacita’s rattle filling the room. Her voice. Flotating.

The nun returns, her face full of hate. “I thought you’d be up again, you people!” And you know she means Mexicans, you people. She’s very white, she’ll never have a baby, she thinks God loves her better than you, a fifteen year old girl giving birth, alone. You hate her back, don’t cry. And you think of the baby Jesus born in a manger, his parents poor and wandering. The story goes in the Baptist Church. And you always loved the baby Jesus, and you think of his mother, Mary, giving birth in the cold ass manger surrounded by stinky farm animals. You smile.

The nun slams the window shut, hands you a tiny paper cup. “Here, take these, it’ll make you sleep, it’s bad for you to be walking around like a wild animal.” Face of disgust, hate.

You give her your best malo ojos de bruja and think, sleep. The room is dark, a thin light from the bathroom. Sleep.

You wake up to such pain you scream once, catch yourself and begin to moan. You can’t help it. You wonder how this baby, your daughter you’ve dreamt, is going to come out of you. At this moment it feels like she’s killing you, and, again, how will she come out, you wonder as you moan, the killing pain the killing pain the killing pain…

(Fast forward)

Years later this 5lb 4oz daughter, Antoinette, as Head Nurse Critical Care, will come upon a fifteen year old girl on her rounds, giving birth all alone, screaming. They can’t sedate her. She fights them off. My daughter, to the doctor’s shock, climbs into bed with her, behind her, wrapping her arms around her, telling her, “Breathe, breathe, I’m here with you, you’re not alone, breathe…” The doctor orders her out of the bed. She tells him, “I’m Head Nurse, Dr_____, and you can fuck off!” The birthing girl laughs, relaxes, and gives birth, screaming as the crowning begins, while my daughter holds her tight. “Breathe, breathe, now push…” Later as the girl holds her daughter, she tells her, “My mother was your age when she had me, and you’re going to be fine. You’re a fighter like my Mom, so you and your daughter will be just fine.”

Saddle block. Numb from waist down. They wheel you into a bright, white room. “Turn the mirror, she shouldn’t watch this.” The birth. Your daughter. You’re too young to insist, “I want to watch.” You finally see the doctor holding up a blue baby by her ankles. You felt nothing. Where she came out of. But there she is and she begins to cry, a thin wail. Her tiny body pulsing pink, alive. Later on, your Tia Ruth tells you Antoinette was born on Mamacita’s birth day. A sliver of Mamacita’s spirit, la curandera, the healer, this daughter.

You begin to cry. You want to hold her, but you’re too young to insist. They take her away. He stitches you up. No one speaks to you except for the doctor, once. “Are you glad it’s a girl?” He tries to be kind, but his voice conveys duty. Not the same one you saw in the clinic, whose hand felt warm on your shoulder, kind.

You nod your head yes. The nurse nun says, “She refuses to speak, doctor, don’t waste your breath.” She wheels you into a room with other mothers and she asks, “Do you plan to breastfeed?” Your mind whirls, breast feed, as in how in the fuck do you do that?

“No,” the word comes out of you.

Look of disgust, the usual hate. She returns and wraps thick bandages around your still-girl breasts. “So your milk dries up,” voice cold.

They promise to bring your daughter the next morning- the Child Sun’s warmth filling the room- you’ve been waiting for hours. One nurse nun said she was bringing your daughter right away, but it’s been hours. You finally insist, “I want to see my daughter.” The woman next to you says, “They promised to bring her baby a couple of hours ago. I’ve already held my baby many times.”

“You’re breastfeeding,” the nurse nun says, warmly. Warmly. The woman is older and white, and she later tells you this is her sixth baby, that she’s Catholic. And she asks, “Are you going to keep your baby, hon?”

She’s so tiny, your daughter. You open the blanket. The wonder of her perfect body. She’s perfect, her so tiny, pink rose toes. Her perfect, translucent hands, each delicate finger. There’s a wound on her belly button, still bloody. You open her diaper- a girl a girl a girl.

A young nurse nun brings a bottle of milk- you’ve never seen her before. “What’s her name?” she asks, handing you the bottle.

“Antoinette.”

“What a beautiful name for a beautiful baby,” she smiles. “A friend is here to see you, so when you finish feeding Antoinette I’ll let her in.”

“Thank you,” you smile into the young nun’s kindness. Sweet face. She’s probably eight years older than you, her twenties, you realize, and you wonder if she’ll become a nasty ass nun when she’s older.

As you feed your daughter, your breasts begin to ache under the tight bandages. It would be this way for the next four days, as they change the wet, sticky bandages. The young nun nurse changes them twice, each time tears come to her eyes. She bathes your girl-breasts in warm, soapy water- the other nurse nuns with cold, soapy water- and she strokes your hair.

Your mother, Lydia, finally comes on the third day after work. “You’re a mother now,” she says coldly. Just those words.

*

A week later, when your daughter’s wound on the belly button falls off, you think she’s falling apart. You bundle her up and run to St Marys crying. The kind doctor explains, “That’s where the cord was between you and your daughter when she was inside of you. That’s how you fed her, that cord. She doesn’t need it anymore, so it fell off. Now you feed her without the cord, isn’t that right?” He touches your shoulder, that warmth.

You stop crying, nod yes, and walk back to your mother’s place, holding your daughter tightly. So you don’t drop her, ever.

*

Your daughter would have colic and cry/scream for a long time after you fed her, every hour or so, in the beginning. You found that laying her on your chest, your heart, she’d fall asleep, and so would you.

One night, she was in her bassinet- the one you decorated with lace and ribbons (yes, you stole them from the five and dime store). You woke up to Lydia’s voice yelling, “SHUT UP SHUT UP!” She was shaking the bassinet, hard, yelling. You were up in one movement, throwing Lydia against the wall- you’d not ever touched her this way.

“If you ever touch my baby again I’ll kill you!” you screamed. You picked up the bassinet with crying Antoinette, taking her to the front room with the sad assed couch. Brought your blankets and slept on the sad assed couch with her on your chest, your heart.

The next morning the cops came. She told them you threatened to kill her. You told them why, crying- your baby, your daughter, barely a month old. Both cops looked at you with pity, telling your mother, Lydia, to work things out and left. She banged things around; it was Saturday, no work. She didn’t touch the bassinet, but she banged things so loudly your daughter woke up crying.

You took your daughter, your baby brother, up to Whitey’s place. He fixed you all a pancake breakfast with bacon. “You could live here for awhile, kid, I’ll take the couch. There’s no talkin’ to that woman, I know.”

You tell him what happened, why you threw her up against the wall. His face goes red. With anger. “Yeah, you and that baby stay here till we can work something out, maybe your own place.”

You’d go to welfare, holding your daughter tight. You’d stay at Whitey’s for a while, taking care of John, but not going into Lydia’s place. You’d never return to her place again, to live. To trust her. She was your birth mother, that’s all. She was not Mamacita.

When you finally got your own place with a roommate, one year older- she worked as a waitress and she was Mexican like you. You stopped taking care of your baby brother- and that broke your heart, but you couldn’t be your baby’s mother and his at the same time. She would yell, “Shut up!” when he cried and forget he was just hungry. You told Whitey to make sure John ate, especially dinner.

“Don’t you worry none, kid, I’ll be on it.”

“Even when you drink cause I’m coming back to check on stuff.”

“Dinner’ll be ready every night, so you and John eat here, you understand, Pocahontas.” This made you smile, your old name. “I’ll make sure things are okay before I get friendly with Jack Daniels, don’t you worry, Pocahontas.”

Whitey would pay your part of the rent and bring groceries every Saturday when he wasn’t being friendly with Jack Daniels. And when he and Jack got together, he made sure to bring you money before he did. And he’d bring your baby brother, John, leaving him for the day. Your daughter in a stroller, your brother in a swing, laughing. Hamburgers, fries and a milkshake later with the $20 Whitey gave you. Later, he’d give you $60 more for the week.

You don’t tell your roommate, Jeannie, about the Child Sun. She wouldn’t understand. She lived in an awful foster home and ran away. She tells you she was beaten with a belt all the time and shows you the scars, and you cry with her. And sometimes you have to throw out some guys she’s drinking with, and you know you have to move again. One of them grabs you by the arm and calls you a fucking bitch, and you won’t allow them in the apartment anymore. So now Jeannie’s mad at you too- “So what if he grabbed your arm, what are you a princess?” Her scars. The one on her face from the belt buckle.

You begin to plan, the edge of things. But not the roof- you don’t want to jump into the darkness. You want to live in the light, the Child Sun, with your daughter. The blossoming bud rose. Antoinette.

Guerrero. Guerrera. Leap into the light.

—Alma Luz Villanu

Polaroid

Recently, I happened to catch CBS Sunday Morning. The program is an oasis in the otherwise parched landscape of morning television news shows. It was Labor Day weekend and they were doing a segment related to notable celebrity’s work ethic.

John Waters was talking about how he owed his success to being persistent in his craft. The idea of seeing John on a major network morning show made me feel old, much like when I first heard Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” as the background music for a Carnival Cruise commercial. Funny how songs that used to piss off my parents now show up in ads for Viagra and pain relievers.

When I met John, I was a student of cinema studies at the University of Iowa. While my dorm mates were pulling all-nighters cramming for their exams in computer science, biology, electrical engineering, or whatever, I was out drinking, smoking dope and pointing my super 8 camera at whatever I thought was amusing. I’d edit together these little vignettes and, thanks to the fact that I’d had a camera in my hand since I was 8 years old, would get an easy A.

In 1981, John Waters was unknown to respectable society. For the counter-culture artsy types like myself, he was a god. Anyone brave enough to film a drag queen eating dog shit – REAL DOG SHIT – was aces in my book.

Jamie, my girlfriend at the time, idolized him just as much as I did. When we heard he would be the featured speaker in the monthly film studies lecture series, we were ecstatic. He was touring college campuses for the release of his third film, “Polyester” which would debut “Odorama.”  As attenders of the Iowa premiere, we received 5 X 9 cards with a series of large numbered scratch-n-sniff dots.  John’s brilliant innovation in cinema was the vision of an entire movie theatre full of people with these cards, all scratching and sniffing at the same time. The room would immediately fill with the odor indicated by the flashing number on the screen. The smells he chose were disgusting: Dirty shoes, flatulence, model airplane glue, to name a few. Too bad I didn’t buy an extra movie ticket so I could save an untouched Odorama card. I could name my price on EBay.

Instead, Jamie and I chose to buy John’s first book, “Shock Value,” as a memento from the event. There were no more than 50 or 60 students in attendance. After he concluded his hilarious, profanity laden lecture about the simplicity of his films, Jamie and I approached with his book in hand, asking for an autograph. I didn’t think twice about buying the book together, or asking Waters to reference both of us with his signature. In a flash of an eye, Jamie hesitated. Whatever thought pursed her lips was arrested by the joy of the moment. With the flourish of his pen, John waters wrote, “Jamie, Brent – so glad to meet both of you. See you in hell! – John Waters.”

We lingered, chatting with him as long as we dared. John seemed to enjoy our company. That’s when he pulled out his camera, a Polaroid SX-70, and pointed it at the two of us.

“Smile!”

A press of the button, flash of light, and there we were, the image of a couple in love slowly fading into view.  He pocketed the picture, then excused himself to greet other well-wishers.

Imagine! John Waters was so impressed with us, he took our picture.

Jamie broke up with me 18 months later. We divided our shared possessions from the 3 year romance. I let her keep the book, though I scarcely imagined her wanting it -- a book now stained by her ex-boyfriend’s name.

Fast forward to a week ago. Depressed, I was lying in bed binge watching movies on Netflix. A new doc about the Polaroid camera caught my attention. About halfway through the film, a 20 something girl with braided red hair and a lacy cotton blouse began crying.

“I know there are people dying in Haiti and children being trafficked in Thailand, but this is a big deal to me. Life won’t be the same without Polaroid film.”

She was overwrought that Polaroid would no longer be producing their SX600 color film stock.

To my surprise, the documentary cut to John Waters. He explains how he’s kept a library of thousands of Polaroid pictures that he accumulated over the decades. He too lamented the demise of the Poloroid as he thumbed through trays and trays of head shots. My heart stood still, knowing that in one of those trays, was a picture of me and Jamie from 34 years ago.

I would like to say we were among the handful of Poloroids he chose to share with the filmmaker. Sadly, we were not. It didn't matter, really. My mind was already spiraling down a wormhole. I couldn't get Jamie off my mind. I spent years suppressing the memories of our relationship. The rapture of being twenty-somethings in love, all to come crashing down when suddenly, and without explanation, she broke up with me.

Three years later, I would be engaged to marry my wife, Jackie. A woman I adore and who excels in every regard beyond any other woman I've ever been with. Unfortunately, it was only a month or so into our engagement when Jamie would re-appear quite unexpectely.  It was at a party of a mutual friend's. This mutual friend had also gotten engaged. Instead of a large, expensive wedding where hundreds of guests would be invited, they opted for a low-key ceremony with their immediate family. The party we were attending was the opportunity for their larger social circle to offer well-wishes prior to the happy day.

There she was.  I thought, what with the few years that had past, I might briefly chat with her. I hoped I could get the closure that was lacking. After making introductions, I asked Jackie if it might be OK for me to speak with her for a few minutes. She knew about Jamie. When it came to my past relationships, Jackie had been the grand inquisitor. She was determined not to make the same mistake as she did with her first husband, who betrayed her with a broad swath of secrets that would surface less than a year into their marriage.

Jackie reluctantly agreed to our having a brief chat. Unfortunately, the time it took to exchange superficial pleasantries was all the time Jackie was willing to allow. At the point Jamie told me there was something she wanted to say to me, Jackie made it clear that if I spent any more time talking to Jamie, she would call a taxi and there would be no wedding. The threat made my choice a no-brainer. In fact, I was relieved I could tell Jamie, "Thanks, but no thanks," and return to the side of my bride-to-be.

In the years the followed, my preoccupation with the conversation that never was began to grow into an obession. Not an obsession with the thought of what might have been, or regret we were not meant to be. No, simply the obsessive curiosity with what exactly it was she was going to say?  Surely it would have given me the closure that might cleanse at least one compartment of the vast recesses of unresolved issues that contributed to my lifetime of self-loathing.

While I binge watch television when I’m depressed, when manic, I obsess about past regrets. I mean really obsess. Now it was Jamie. The conversation that never was. I thought about it every waking moment. This led to an appointment with my therapist.

He had an idea.

“You’re a writer. Why don’t you script the conversation you would have had?”

Brilliant! I didn’t have to think twice about it. I knew he was on to something. That evening, I sat down to my desk and penned the conversation we never had.

“Brent, could you walk for me for a few minutes, there’s something I need to tell you.”

“Sure. What is it?”

“I’m sorry I never gave you much of an explanation about why I broke up with you.”

“Go on.”

“When I moved back home I felt like I was such a failure. Dropping out of school was the last thing I wanted to do. I realized I used you as a crutch for trying to hang on to something that wasn’t working – and I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about me. I was depressed. I blamed you for my depression. I’m sorry. Really, it wasn’t you as much as it was me.”

“You broke my heart.”

“I’m sorry. Seems like you’ve landed on your feet, though.”

“Yes. Yes I have.”

“Are you in love?”

“Uhh…well…I think so. Nothing like how I felt about you, though. What can I say?  You were my first love. You still haunt me. I keep waiting for the feelings to pass, but they haven’t.”

“Give it time.”

“It’s been three years.”

“Seriously, your fiancé is gorgeous. Strange, but I feel a little jealous.”

With an awkward chuckle, she catches my eye for a moment, then looks towards the ground. Nervous silence. She finally looks up. We smile at each other.

I turn towards Jackie. This time, she waits patiently.

In some kind of mystical reverse process, that old Polaroid snapshot fades from view

…and the camera dies a quiet death.

—Brent Watkins

Gone, Always Gone

 There were moments--I count two, my mother could have stepped forward as a hero, when she could have brought her children to safety. Instead, she died frightened and worn, in a charity hospital, a widow alienated from her children and rooming with a beer joint companion.

Both my parents began a descent into alcoholic neglect when I was 8, after my father’s only business venture failed. By the time I was 10, he’d abandoned us. (I have 2 older sisters and a younger, now dead, brother) At the time my oldest sister, a teenager, was estranged and living with another family. My mother was trying to keep the rest of us together on the 5 bucks and nightly tips she made as a barmaid.

I remember a particularly harrowing eviction, a short stay at a barmaid friend’s motel and at least three other squalid apartments we lived in during this time. At one point, there were regular door-pounding visits from truancy agents when we missed school, along with an especially humiliating Thanksgiving when I came home to find we’d been the recipients of that year’s school food drive for the needy.

After struggling for several months, my mother turned us over to the care of the county child welfare department. (I was picked up on the street walking home from school, with my mother hanging out of a car door urging me to get in. I went like a sheep. Two hours later I was processed in and being shown a bed.) We were installed in a large, comfortable campus for abandoned children, where we lived for about 3 months. (There were actually 3 large houses on the grounds; two for young girls and one for boys, up to the age of 16. I think the youngest kid I saw was about 4.) The kids were bussed every day to a local elementary school and were clothed, fed and cared for in a professionally-run group home environment. There were chapel services on Sundays, sports and occasional parties on-campus or trips to films or other special events, all provided for us by local charities. Our parents were allowed one Sunday visit a month and I saw my mother at least once when I was there. My father was still in the wind—to this day none of us know where he was, and I wouldn’t see him again until I was nearly 12.

In January of the following year, my youngest sister, brother and I were sent to live with a farm family in the Texas hill country. It was a smaller group home—with 3 other kids there, two brothers and a young woman, and the “parents” were an older couple who’d been taking in kids for about a decade.

Again, we went to the local school, in a small town near the farm, bussing back and forth every day. Despite being in the area for many years, the parents were very adamantly against any of the foster kids involving themselves in school projects. I was chosen twice to appear in after school assemblies and was harshly prevented both times. We did minor chores on the farm, roamed the hill country acres pretty freely, were well-fed and clothed (one of the annual chores was planting rows of vegetables in a truck garden on the property.) and generally treated compassionately.

. The parents were much older and, unfortunately, carried an older generation’s ration of impatience and racial bigotry. I was chastised once for reading a library book about a “n…,” the star baseball player Jackie Robinson. I remember their sneering glee when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.

My sister, a pudgy, conventional girl, bonded closely with our foster parents and went back to visit at least twice. She also kept up a steady correspondence until they passed away some time in the Seventies. My brother and I never felt that tug and, though we paid one visit—for a week the summer after we returned home, he and I shied away after that.

My parents were still allowed one visit a month. But due to the long distance (we were about 150 miles from our hometown) and their lack of a car, we seldom saw them. My mother did write, sending birthday cards and Xmas gifts.

At some point towards the end of our 18 month farm stay, my parents reconciled and began a successful campaign to win back custody. One weekend in early summer, we were allowed a visit to their new home—a large, 3 bedroom apartment in a working class area. And after interviews with our caseworker, just before the school year started, we went home.

Although both of them were employed (my father in a manufacturing plant, my mother in a crew of night maids for an office building) they lived as functioning alcoholics. My father tended to drink heavily only on weekends (he had a single 16 oz. beer every night with dinner) though once or twice a year he would go on week-long whiskey binges, foregoing work and leaving us to cover for him with his ever-understanding bosses. Sometime in the 2 years we were in foster care, my mother had taken a nasty fall while drunk, breaking her left leg and leaving a horrific scar above her knee cap. She sometimes drank heavily during the day and from time to time, we’d arrive home from school to find her too incoherent to work. One of us, whoever found her or whoever lost the argument, would make the covering call of “Mom’s sick today” to her boss. She would bounce back the next day. My father tended to ignore her episodes, barely bothering to check as she slept away.

Their work schedules were set so they rarely met up during the week--my father working 4- 10 hour days, my mother from 3-10 in the evening with a half day on Saturday. He made dinner for us and was in bed by 7:30. She came home as we were angling towards bedtime. I did hear them occasionally whispering to each other before he left for work. They tended towards conversations about something we’d done that required disciplinary attention. In the years between our return and his death, they never shared a bed. My mother slept alone in a single bed in the smallest bedroom. My father shared a double bed, with either my brother or me splitting duty. The story we were told was their disparate habits (he was a noisy, restless sleeper) made it impossible for them to share a bedroom. My father was a tall, attractive man and later there were hints that a history of adultery kept them apart.

They did make a weekly habit of meeting on Saturday afternoon, joining up at a local beer joint when she returned to the neighborhood around 3 and he’d finished his own bar rounds for the day. They drank steadily until 10, when they’d buy several six packs of beer and return home to fight.

I was in my forties, having a conversation about family with a girlfriend, before I realized how truly odd my stories of a weekly drunken, parental, bitch fight were. I have an indelible image of the two of them, hammered, swaying into the apartment, a grocery bag full of beer under my father’s arm. They would deposit the contents in the refrigerator, then rage and drink in the kitchen until the early morning hours. We would slip the telephone into an adjoining bedroom for long conversations with friends or sit in the living room, reading and watching television, resolutely not hearing the details. We never interfered and were usually not included in the quarrels. Though the beer and rage often outlasted us, at some point all parties would collapse and head for sleep. The next morning, my mother would lay in her room, usually not dressing out of her sleeping clothes, while my father cooked breakfast and later, dinner. Both meals were normally served to her in her bedroom while the rest of us ate off tv trays in the living room.

My mother was a pack rat. And her job as a maid in a business tower allowed her nightly opportunities to indulge the fetish: an endless stream of letterhead from defunct businesses, discarded ring binders, dry pens, mechanical pencils without lead, desk calendars of every size. In her mind, it was all usable for home and classroom (flip the ring binder over to hide the logo; calendar pages make good memo pads for phone messages). However, the letterhead came in 500 sheet reams, the calendars in rubber banded stacks, the pens and pencils in handfuls that eventually over-flowed the apartment.

Her job was also a source for unceasing, gossipy complaints. She’d found an archenemy in Margie, one of the cleaning crew members, and every shift would end with tales of injury and conspiracy. As she arrived home, unloading her haul of office supplies, my mother’s plaintive recitation was filled with schemes hatched by, favors granted to and insults extended from…Margie.

Perhaps because there was ready, daily supply of newspapers, my mother became a consumer and dispenser of bad news. Forever diving into the pages of both local newspapers looking for stories of crime and sudden, shocking death, she was always prepared to send us out to school and play with warnings of out-of-control buses, cars careening onto sidewalks to crush pedestrians and the lurk of drug addict killers in search of junior high school victims.

My father began to die midway through my junior year in high school. A long-time smoker despite his asthma, he began experiencing chest pains during the winter. (One of my chores was going to the VA hospital monthly to pick up his inhalers; the other was to insure his drinking clothes—blue jean painter’s pants and a heavily starched white dress shirt, were laundered and available for him on weekends.) He’d injured his back slightly in a jobsite accident the previous year and the doctor had given him hot packs to relieve the strain. He dug out the packs and began applying them to his chest, hoping to alleviate the nameless, gnawing pain. By late spring he checked into the VA hospital and in late July died there of lung cancer.

When my father went into the hospital, home routines began to fall apart. Active and in charge of housecleaning, he’d been able to ward off my mother’s pack rat predisposition. With the start of his hospital stay, she soon overwhelmed the house, ignoring our pleas to stop and refusing to allow anything to be tossed away. The best my brother and I could do was carve out bedroom spaces for ourselves. (My sisters had long since departed. The oldest to live with her musician/day worker boyfriend, the youngest in marriage to her high school sweetheart, a sergeant in the Air Force, and their growing family.)

Despite the animosity that saturated their marriage, my mother seemed genuinely frightened of life without him. At his death, she quit her job, filed for his Social Security benefits (my brother and I were eligible too-- as minors, and those were filed for as well), and then, like a Southern belle who’d lost her dear husband in the War, took to her bed. She never left it.

Very quickly, the relationship between the home survivors became one of roommates rather than siblings and parent. Torpor, fear and alcohol gripped my mother and, except for the occasional complaint, instruction or cooked meal, she let her responsibilities as parent slide away. The three of us received monthly government checks and split the bills and rent. My brother and I had high school years left to finish but my strongest memory of this time is signing my own report cards and writing any school notes that would excuse an absence. I assume my brother did the same. My mother never questioned the arrangement or our schedules.

After my brother graduated high school, we were forced to leave the apartment we’d lived in for 7 years. (The landlord had decided to remodel and we were politely asked to vacate.) We relocated several miles away, in a huge, dark, rather crummy complex near an older shopping mall. My brother and I were both working but the living situation continued to decline. I had begun a years-long battle with my own growing alcoholism. He was spending time with friends he’d met carousing in the local gay bars. And we were living with our mother in a corrosive, bickering, mutually boozy collective. I specifically remember one incident that perfectly illustrates the relationship: my brother had given me a bottle of poppers—butyl nitrite, a drug popular in the clubs he frequented. I smoked a joint in my bedroom and went out to watch TV in the living room. My mother was drunk on the couch, burbling incoherently. At every commercial, I would jump up, rush to my bedroom and do as many popper hits as I could during the break, then stumble back to Starsky and Hutch and Charlie’s Angels. That was a Wednesday.

At the same time I had struck up an easy way of buying pot from my older sister. She would breeze in past our mother, go to my room and trade the cash I’d left in a dresser drawer for a stash of weed, then breeze back out. I’d arrive, ask if big sister had come by. If my mother said yes, I’d head directly for my room. We did this for a year. My mother finally caught on when she popped into my room once when I was smoking with my sister and a friend. She stopped, gaped and exited without a word, then or later. Even one Christmas Eve, when my sister and I tried to get her high—as a replacement for the cheap local beer she drank, she only giggled through her haze.

One spring, about 4 years after my father died, I bailed out. I’d been prepping a move for several months, buying the necessary items to stock an apartment. Then a woman I’d been seeing asked me to move into her high end apartment and I accepted, leaving the next day. My brother was understandably pissed at being left with more of the bills to pay. But he followed me out the door six months later, taking with him most of the goods I’d left behind.

Unable to pay for a two bedroom apartment on a government check, refusing to work, my mother ended up living for a few weeks with my oldest sister. That situation quickly blew up (my sister has a vile temper and her common law marriage was freighted with breakups, drugs and violent tantrums from both parties) and soon my mother was sharing an apartment with a friend in our old neighborhood, a block or two from the beer joint she and my father had once spent Saturday nights. I would occasionally hear from her, usually requests for money or complaining news about my siblings. And there was little to no contact with them. My youngest sister was following her airman husband to various overseas assignments and part of the time my brother was living in the Midwest. During this period, my girlfriend had left for college in another state and I started a new, manager’s job, in a new apartment.

Alcoholism, beery indolence, smoking and no exercise left my mother in dangerously poor health. The years of inactivity following her decision to take to bed after my father’s death had left her with six inch long embolisms on veins in both legs. Just after Thanksgiving, I received a phone call, either from her or my older sister, telling me she’d checked into the local charity hospital. She was waiting for her doctor, a well-known surgeon who volunteered time, to find a break in his schedule to operate. When I broke from Christmas work to visit, I could tell she was terribly frightened; the operation was a risky one. And there was the hint as well, that she was wrung out and ready to surrender a hard, disappointing life.

She didn’t make it. The operation was pronounced a success and when she woke from the anesthesia, she was bright and cheerful with the nurses. But the first of four strokes hit her later in the night. And before the last, fatal one, she’d fallen into a permanent, vegetative state.

I got the news at work, midafternoon. I ran for a bus and made it to the hospital as quickly as I could. Reaching the correct nurse’s station, I was led in to see her body, then left alone. I don’t believe I got closer than within 4 or 5 feet. My mother was short, barely five feet tall. I looked at her small, bloated body and uttered the prayer children make over ravaged parents. Then, thinking like a dutiful son for the first time in years, I went out and got drunk.  

—R.T. Castleberry

fiction

For Their Own Good

Alek, Stella, and I lay in our pajamas at the fringe of the worn Persian runner in the upstairs hallway. We craned our necks, saw most of the dining room table downstairs. A coil of kielbasa from dinner sat on a white, gilt-edged plate, and Uncle Larry sliced a piece off and bit into it. The smokiness of that sausage lingered on my tongue from the late evening meal our aunt had served us.

Still chewing, my uncle raised a shot glass to his mouth, then paused and held it out from his nose, reddened by the January cold he’d just tramped through. Aunt Felicia leaned forward, crushed out her cigarette in the ashtray. She had an about-to-scream look on her face.

He finished chewing, ran his free hand over the wispy hairs on top of his head, then knocked back the whiskey. “She won’t last the night.”

My aunt leaned into the table. “Who said? The nurse?”

“No, damn it. The lady doctor.”

“Calm down.” They were talking loud, and we heard everything. “You talked to her?”

“Doctor Segal,” he said. Then he poured another shot. “Let’s take the kids.”

I stretched my neck out further. My mother’s sister turned her head sideways, looking somewhere not in the room. Or maybe at my mother’s framed picture from last fall, which I had placed on the buffet so we could see it during meals.

Her husband leaned forward, waited for his wife to meet his gaze. “Your cousin Tommy was there. He says let them remember her all prettied up. I’m not so sure. It’s their mother, for crying out loud!”

Earlier in the day, Mother took a turn for the worse, and they marched us into her room at Temple University Hospital. She wore a baby blue nightgown of soft cotton, and was doped up, hardly knew we were there. Aunt Felicia had applied face powder, rouge, and lipstick, until she looked like a doll. We stood solemnly around the bed while my aunt ran a brush through her hair with long, slow strokes. She tied her hair back with a blue satin ribbon, ran it just inside her hairline. It looked like a tiara.

At the table downstairs, my aunt turned toward her husband. “Flossie, down the corner store. She says the kids had enough. I agree.”

Our uncle poked the air with his finger, about to make a point. Then he sat back. “It’s your sister.”

Our aunt got up from the table. “I’ll go say my goodbyes. You stay.” As she left the room, she turned and added, “It’s for their own good.”

We’d heard it before. When they thought we were out of earshot, they’d go on about us. We were too young to deal with it. Let them remember her from last year. Mother said make sure we listen, they were the only family we had. When she went back into the hospital after the holidays, our aunt came over every day, cooked, sat in the dining room smoking and drinking. She would come upstairs once or twice an evening to make sure we were cleaned up and headed to bed. Many nights, we fell asleep to the sound of Johnny Carson on the TV downstairs. They slept it off while we lay awake listening to the jokes carry upstairs in the quiet house.

When the front door closed, my little brother looked scared, my little sister buried her face into my side, said in a muffled voice, “I want to go.”

Alek shushed her. “Don’t be a goofus. Do as we’re told.”

“No,” I said. “We go.”

“How?” Alek asked.

***

We let half an hour go by before we made a whispered phone call from my mother’s empty bedroom at the front of the house. We waited at her window a long time until we saw the car pull up. Our uncle lay snoring on the sofa as we crept down the stairs and across the living room to the front door. He stirred, called out, “That you, Sue?” He was dreaming of our mother, had a crush on her, called her sweetheart, or Susie. We held still a moment when he struggled to raise his head. When he flopped back, we slipped out the front door to the waiting car.

The light from the street lamp at the far end of the block didn’t reach our house. Poplar Street was mostly dark, but our living room lamp shined a faint rectangle of light onto our sidewalk, illuminated the soot-blackened snow out at the curb. The three of us stepped through it in our boots, pajamas, and winter coats. From the driver’s seat, Camille leaned over the front bench seats, threw the back door open, whispered, “Get in!” We piled into the old Bel Air, and he pulled his black cabbie hat over his head, told me to shut the door. He kept down, brushed the steering wheel with his hat bill, like that would make us invisible. I said, “Better move. Our aunt’s coming back.”

He steered the car into the swishing street and we made our way through North Philly toward the hospital. He breathed heavy, repeated, “I’m getting in trouble.” Camille was also sweet on Mother. From Venezuela, he’d come to study, but his English never got good, and he took a room over Flossie’s, got on with the cab company. He helped out at Flossie’s when he wasn’t hacking. I accompanied my mother in there almost every day for milk or bread. She carried her gold lamé purse, full with quarters from her coat check job at the Polish Club. When Flossie wasn’t around, he’d shoo us off when she tried to pay. “Get going,” he’d whisper, “no charges today.” She never argued, just closed her purse and left. Every Friday over tea, she prattled on to my aunt and uncle about Camille, how kind he was. Uncle Larry always went out back and dragged on a Lucky when she did that.

We pulled into a parking spot near one of the hospital’s back doors. Camille said we had to wait, his friend would signal when Mother’s room was clear. We sat for a long time. He ran the engine and heater every ten minutes or so, constantly checked the back entrance through the rearview. Alek complained for a while, but was the first to fall asleep.

I asked Camille if he loved my mother. “Tu madre es una mujer hermosa,” he said. “Susan is beautiful. Inside and outside.”

A year ago, she was also silly, which we loved. It meant things were normal. She lived with big energy when she could, and if you didn’t know her, you’d never guess what she was up against. She posed for that picture we kept on the buffet, sitting sideways on the porch rail in the back of our row house, in her navy blue dress with the white Peter Pan collar. She flashed her impish smile, one hand on her hip, the other primping her dark hair.

Last fall, she brought Alek and me to the Polish Club. We manned the coat check window after the first big rush of customers, while she went out on the dance floor. We peeked through the portal window on the lobby door to watch. Uncle Larry always danced the waltzes with her. At Christmas, after she’d started chemo all over gain, she relived every tradition we’d ever done. She never said it, but we knew she was thinking one last time. She hosted Christmas Eve Wigilia, with her sister’s help. They served all the courses—Polish black mushroom soup, a large flounder, fried smelts, sauerkraut flavored with brown sugar, onions, and mushrooms, all the side dishes, and an endless stream of sautéed pierogies onto the table, with every stuffing but meat. Our mother stood at the skillet until they insisted she sit down to the table. After dinner, we put the bubble lights on the tree, laid the train set around it, first time since our father left. We got everything we asked for Christmas morning.

All that played back while we sat waiting. It was getting colder faster, and Camille started running the heater more often, shaking his head each time. Just as Stella fell asleep, he looked in the rearview and shouted, “Vamanos!”

A chubby Latino man in green scrubs held the door open, said, “Get moving!” as his eyes darted up and down the street. Alek and I ran to the stairwell, with Camille right behind, carrying Stella, her head bobbing on his shoulder. The man led us in silence to the third floor. When he was sure the hallway was empty, he motioned us out of the stairwell.

***

“Mother?”

I stepped close, leaned over as she lay sleeping, exhaling with the breath of an infant. My duffel coat fell open and one of the button pegs rested on her nightgown. A plastic tube had been inserted into her nose and I could hear the oxygen flowing in. It reminded me of the harness horses wear.

“Mommy?” said Stella.

Our mother smacked her lips silently, like two damp layers of tissue separating and closing.

Alek touched her shoulder and whispered, “Mother?”

She woke with a start and we all stepped back. She coughed softly, sounded like a child clearing her throat in another room. She grimaced, then opened her eyes. “My babies,” she whispered. We wouldn’t have known what she said if we hadn’t heard it many times before.

For the next hour we leaned over her as she drifted in and out of sleep. We were mostly silent, said our Sweet mother’s and I love you’s from time to time. Stella stroked Mother’s hair and whispered, “Baby mommy.” Twice we left an opening for Camille, and he stepped forward, kissed her cheek softly, said, “Te amo.”

At 2 A.M. there were two soft taps at the door. Camille herded us into the bathroom shower, pulled the curtain shut behind him. We huddled close, felt each other’s breath on our faces, heard someone enter the room, walk around a few minutes, and ask “How you doing, dear?” Then came a rustling of objects, then silence. We went out again and mother’s breast rose and fell more slowly. Once, I thought she stopped drawing air, but her breast heaved slowly again after a moment. When the clock said 4 A.M., Camille said we had to get home before sunup. Alek and I kissed Mother on the forehead, and Camille followed. I helped Stella climb up on the bed and she nestled into her arms. Mother’s eyes opened slowly, Stella said, “Don’t go, Mommy,” and just then our mother’s eyes widened, she took in a quick breath, let it out slowly, and stopped breathing. Everything changed for us, right there. Hope and life and family and future—all that abandoned us with her last breath. Camille snapped out of it, told us to hurry, they’d be in soon. We gave our last kisses, full of tears, ignored Camille’s pleas to leave until he shooed us out with his hands. I had to cup my hand over Stella’s mouth. We left the way we came, before the night nurse made it back in.

***

At the funeral, Camille sat behind us near the center aisle, gave us each a pat on the shoulder every so often. Aunt Felicia, Cousin Tommy, Flossie, and other family and friends slumped in their seats down the pew and behind us, with identical faraway looks. How could this happen? She was so young. Just before the service started, Uncle Larry slid into our end of the pew, away from the grownups. He leaned toward us, we could smell the whiskey on his breath.

“You get to see her?” he asked me, as softly as his gravelly voice allowed. I must have looked guilty, he read my silence as yes, and nodded. Then he reached across me, gave Alek a pat on the hand, and held Stella’s hand for a moment. “Wish I could have been there.”

“Did you tell?” I asked.

“Hell no. You don’t either.” He looked at the casket standing a few feet away, then at Aunt Felicia and the other grownups far down the pew. He smiled through watery eyes. “It’s for their own good.”

—Ronald Jackson

Missed Connections in the Prophet of Jupiter Cafe

The espresso machine is hissing, a line of customers pressing into the tight space, before Doke, tying his apron, bursts through the kitchen to take his place behind the veined granite counter. Even though the morning line is long, Lorean wants the barista with “Doke” on his apron, blond ponytail straight as horsehair, to wait on her, because he slips her sly glances that ignite her nerve endings and pumps her extra shots for free, tracing foam on top of her drink in arabesques of paisley clouds. Rob, too, waits in line for his latte, not sure what he appreciates more, the ass of the woman ahead of him or that the barista is consistently late and takes his sweet time shooting steam into the heavy ceramic mugs.

Doke scribbles indecipherable orders on napkin scraps and eyes the erect older gent as the line pushes the woman with the beautiful hair and smell of orchid blossoms towards the counter, towards him as if she is his true destiny. She likes his cloudy smile, like he’s thinking of something to whisper to wake her, because her boyfriend doesn’t talk in the mornings, not really, just groans he needs his cup of joe to get his brain cells greased. Rob measures the woman, imagining her on tiptoe, his dick swaying gently, slowly, like the sun’s steady rise, between her meadowy thighs; she’d twenty years his junior but has reddish hair like a dissipating sunrise.

If only Doke’s damn girlfriend wouldn’t hog the bathroom every morning after sex, he would be able to leave on time, but as it is, every morning she escapes from the tangled sheets like handcuffs around her ankles, and bolts the bathroom door, expecting him, he supposes, to brew coffee in his naked, sticky state. Funny, but Lorean never sees the man she lives with drink anything in the morning, unless it’s a swig of beer pooling in the bottom of a bottle, flat, stale from the night before. The line edges forward, the large male behind him bumping Rob into the redhead so he’s afraid she can feel his hardness against her butt; there isn’t much he can do as people crowd inside to escape the morning drizzle, pressing, pressing, pushing, and even at forty-two, he can’t control his member.

Doke’s hands shake as he ejects the shots for the pretty woman whose hair reminds him of ripe peach fuzz, a texture and color he’d love to have whisk down his bare chest. Something hard nudges her rump and she slides forward a step, wishes she were brave enough to leave her drunken boyfriend because even the sex isn’t much good these days, hardly lasting long enough for her to settle her booty in the pretend silky sheets. With a jolt, an unexpected chill sweeps across Rob, as the woman steps forward, creating a gap, and takes her cup from the counter guy, her hands trembling when he whispers to her, his voice a breeze meant only for her ear, her hair puffing as if he’s blown the words her way.

Doke’s sure this woman, her cheeks the ripe blush of an apricot, would luxuriate in bed with him, her hands on his body and his in her hair, not barricade herself away from his caresses; he wishes he could brew magical words the way he did espresso so that they would break through her self-contained expression, some phrase that would make her leap the counter and kiss him, her lips warmed with her first morning foam. The thing is, Lorean knows she’ll have to give up the coffees, even if they are the best part of her day, the closeness, the barista’s long fingers touching hers when he passes her the ritual cup; she knows she’s pregnant, knows she can’t expect better than the baby’s drunken father. Rob wants to nibble the reddish fuzz on her swan’s neck; when she turns, her lips twisted in a smile that could mean she’s not angry, that she never felt his body’s betrayal, it dawns on him she has no inkling of the sway she holds over men; he tenses, sensing she might cry.

—C. A. COLE

COLONIAL STATE OF MIND

Part 2 The Departure

I took a deep breath when I arrived in Windsor and it made my lung hurt because my lungs were not used to such clean untouched unspoken unwounded air. And look here please directly at the covers of my skin: I am not white. I start off all my stories with this statement because this is the most defining aspect of me it is why I cry to allah when my mind mumbles and rumbles for dirty things it is why I still can’t eat pork without my stomach revolting and punishing me with immaculate peristalsis it is why I still get sad when I think about the sun shining off ma’s hennaed hair it is why I can’t hold back my tongue when they laugh and hiss and scream and tell me that I am wrong because listen here fuckers: I am not white and don’t you dare think I am ashamed of that.

They say that the concept of race never existed until the whiteman ventured out of whiteman’s land (he had gotten tired of looting and uprooting his own people) and when he saw the beautifully rooted people that inhabited this new clean world he needed a reason to massacre them and burn their pureness down. So he invented reds and yellows and blacks and browns and greens and blues and he mixed together all the primary colours of the rainbow so that he could label these others as others and because they were others and because these others were not his colour he didn’t feel quite as bad when he spread blankets of disease and death and shit over their once pure lands and is it any wonder that there is not purity left in the world?

The whiteman didn’t feel bad about ripping apart an entire people because the whiteman lacked the fundamental concept that every other people in the world seemed to have taken as an innate characteristic of human nature: broad-minded and well-rounded morality. The key to this catastrophe was that the whiteman was under the impression that his very narrow self-limiting concept of morality was somehow more truthly than the other moralities that existed in opposition. With this self-limiting and graciously self-defined concept of morality you can bomb entire cities and still get a good night’s rest because you are safe in the knowledge that your white jesus is better than my brown mohammad.

Even worse: the whiteman’s brand of designer-drug morality dispersed and metastasized over the oceans of the world like an aggressive carcinoma of destruction until even dark babies still in the womb sighed because of the battles they would face when they encountered the hideous vibrations that were sinisterly spread by this massive lack of awareness.

Look: I am not bitter but sometimes I can’t help feeling that maybe in the corner of the back of mind that maybe if the whiteman had just stayed and fucked up the land that he was allotted-with his gunpowder and greed, and grotesque lack of guilt-than maybe just maybe the world wouldn’t have been fucked up to such a massive degree.

I was once ischemic with thoughts that made me feel that the world was watching every blink and twitch that ran through me. In the hospital that brought me to my knees there was a man that lay in bed and spoke in little strings of words and he would stare off into space all day because his brain had burst open and made him unable to have full ownership rights of the left side of his body and look here: this man was white but I still felt like crying for him because even his whiteness hadn’t protected him from the disasters brewing within his own body. And even when I was sad I looked into his eyes as I tried to realign the spasm-rippling muscles and waves in his body and I tried to tell him that I knew that I got it that I understood but of course I didn’t because thank allah none of the vessels in my brain have burst open yet and I can’t stop thinking about it happening and that’s why I can’t fall asleep these days.

But that was three months ago and this is part two and I am still a terrorist for terrorizing my innards with terrible thoughts of the terrors that I can commit to myself in the name of assimilation.

That was back when I had still had deluded the neurons in my mind into thinking that we could for once undertake a task and finish it without disenchanted awareness and in the end I could not do it. I could not realign my personality and morality to their rules and policies and ancient archaic systematically inherently flawed OBJECTIVES and now I am back in the southeastest part of Canada which is just another metaphor for my state of spirits but also it is the present location of my current reality.

They wanted me to memorize their holey unwhole point of view of a narrow vision of a generally skewed demographic but I could not get mos def’s scripture out of my head. Yasiin’s gospel had been wired too deeply in my frontal cortex and in the end I spit in their face and took the train back home and the farther I got away from the whitest university in all of Canada the freer my thoughts felt (they were still restricted because many of the same functional variables remained: parents, religion, culture, personality, genetic predispositions, and overall self-inflicted brutality) but at least the most sinister and most foreign...the most whitest shall we say and the most evilest aspect had been cauterized. And listen my friends: it was the greatest failure of my life up to present reality dateness (this is the English translation of an urdu feeling) but I can breathe more easily now and I no longer feel like an oil-slicked imposter in my own scarred skin. I can look myself in the eyes for up three minutes in the bathroom mirror now and I don’t even need to be stoned to make it through the day.

I have finally figured out that all their promises of economic security and languid capitalistic propriety are not enough to make me forget myself and maybe maybe maybe there is another brown soul/body with a furrowed brow and painted skin and a soggy drug drenched mind and to them I say: listen to me brothers/sisters because their killing fields are still stenched and drenched with blood and their hands are still are dripping with fake reparations and sometimes you can’t help but feel that something is horribly incorrigibly wrong and just because they’re blind to their own blindness does not make your vision any less clear and don’t you ever let any wrinkled economically secure and academically enriched reality rejecting whiteman) tell you otherwise.

Am I making you uncomfortable? Please take three minutes to pinpoint the root of this discord: there may be neuronal pathways in your brain that you have been ignoring for too long.

I won’t apologize for this anger. My departure was steeped deep with anger and rage was present in the whole train ride back and I wrote three different stories while passing through perth-cobourg-toronto-smithfalls-london-chatham and ripped them all at the station in Windsor while I waited for my father to pick me up.

But those stories don’t matter because they were all a distraction and they did not have the undercurrent of that truthness that make words covalently organically and undeniably bond together into meaning and reason and sometimes truthfilled words can become charged without intent and commit treason and reveal the writer’s hidden sentimentations and this is why I write. I write for that electric burst of clarity shorter that the speed of light that illuminates all my white and grey matter (but mostly the brown) when I finish transcribing the oscillating reverberating renditions stuck in my head.

But their very first mistake was that they tried to put a price on my soul and they tried to tell me that keeping my head externally fixated downwards at all times was better for the overall structure of my wellbeing and even though my physical outside could have maybe somehow survived their flowering towering labyrinth of lies…my soul will never be for sale, fuckers.

But I am not a fool: I know that to survive in the present state of matters I have to play it from their side and show them my teeth in gritting spitting smiles and clap for their achievements with a gun to my back but I would rather accomplish this through calculated resistance than conscious submissiveness. I would rather wield my stethoscope with independence and burn through their social hurdles with eyes wide open mind clear and present heart-beat irregular but decadent than accept a stethoscope riddled with unspoken hypocrisy and attached to the chain of the bodies and souls below me that I had to crush in order to survive in “their way” (that-white-oldmoneyhoney-up–at-the-top-fuck-the-suckers-at-the-bottom way). That slow and long body/soul crushing climb to the top of a rotten mountain of sweltering bloodfilled (khooni) success is their tactic rooted in the vile laws they entrenched on a planet that we all helped decimate/eliminate/violate and I will consciously not take part in this ideology (though I may still have to commit a few more horrific acts of capitalistic violence I console myself with the promise that I will be aware of their horrificness and I will be cognisant of my crimes and this shall absolve my soul of at least three minutes worth of guilt from my bathroom mirror).

There are some laws of the universe that can’t be eroded but the laws of how people collide are fluid and always-changing and there was a girl I once knew at the place I departed from that had masala under her fingernails and thai curry curling in her curls and she told me about the incans and the mayans and the spaniards and the winding sliding gliding massacres of the southernmost americas throughout the centuries and I told her about all the disappeared/broken/unwoken women during the india-pakistan partition and we bonded/fucked/dissolved/finally broke apart in a shatter of dismal unbalanced biomolecules over our shared need for acknowledging the miseries of the past while being immersed in the weight of the future (as we suffocated in the present). At the time I thought it was all very poetic in the most narcissistic of terms and now I feel like laugh/crying when I think about the ease with which biomolecules can annihilate the bonds they create. And somewhere back in that white pinnacle of pornographically ignorant academic elitism there is a girl with masala laced eyelashes and rows of books by bell hooks and I hope the chemicals in her brain are treating her all right.

***

Back to the present: now some days I wake up feeling wounded with all the words I could have unfurled in the moments where their weight would have lifted me off the ground and some days I can’t breathe from the feeling of frightening rightness reverberating through the rivers and routes of the right side of my mind here in the most southernly stubborn summerland of southeasterly canada.

And inshallah to me my brothers in the east and mashalla to my sisters in the west because ma says all allah does is necessary for soul. And shhh please: sometimes I can almost trick myself into believing that (if only for 3 minutes).  

—MADIHA KHAN

GIVE ME MORE

Especially when you're in something, when you throw out your girlfriend for fucking the neighbor stud who lives in his loud studio apartment below you in this heavy two-story cement box with black iron stairs and nothing but parking lot and wire fence with security lights.  

At night she comes to you, she says she slipped out his window below because the door lock would wake him and she's outside your second floor windows, whispering to be let in again, and you stand up in your bed, and look out your window and there she is, she waves at you and you can barely see her in the dark, there's one weak streetlamp out there and part of a ficus tree and a nearby dying bush that obstruct your view and you've been drinking because you didn't want to throw her out but you didn't know what to do and since you've been drinking all you want to do is go back to bed and when you wake up in the morning, you wonder if it was real or not.  

The next night she comes back again.  She calls your name and you climb out of bed.  This time you're more sober, not by much but more than last night.  She asks you if she can come in.  You say, what the fuck you doing here?  I wanted to see you, she replies.  Why don't you go back to your boyfriend, you reply, you got everything out of here.  No, she replies, I want to see you.  

She throws something up at the window, it's small and circular and you put out your hand to catch it but it's dark and you think you feel it glance off your fingers but then it falls below you in the high grass that your 45 year old landlord rarely mows.  She says something else but she says she has to leave and you don't know what to say. 

In the morning you find a box of her papers in your hall closet and you call her cell number but it says that number has been changed to a new number but they don't offer to tell you what it is, so you think you'll put the box of papers to the side for the next time you see her.  

That night she comes to your bedroom window.  You are awake and ready.  As you open the window, she says, Let me come in.  You think about it. You've been lonely.  You've been drinking too much and not remembering very much.  You catch a glimpse of her face, a flash in the streetlight, and it's the face you still love but you can't forgive, you just cannot make yourself forgive.  I love you, she says, we can make it work.  Let me in, she says.  Remember when we went to those mountains and we went for a hike, just around the small hill we said and we got totally lost and I think you got that huge tick stuck in your leg and we stumbled into the pond but got back safely.  

Yeah, you remember them, you say.  

Or that time we got really stoned and made out during the entire classical music thing at the park, you remember that.  I guess, you reply, but you two had been really stoned and wasn't there a fight?  You remember, god, she says as if she didn't hear you, do you remember when you got that huge check and we spent the entire weekend in bed, ordering food from everybody.  

You remember that time.  Those were the times.  

She throws something up at you and this time in lands in the window.  It's one of the bracelets that you had given to her.  Not an expensive one, bought at a street market and merely pieces of cloth wound together, frayed and chewed a bit from age or something.  Oops, I dropped something, she says.  You pick it up and you're tempted.  There's been past indiscretions, you know about them, but they were tiny:  a kiss here, a hug there.  But this one got you.  

She asks again if she can come upstairs, if she could gather you in her arms, she's missed you, she says, she just didn't realize, and you think, yeah, maybe, maybe it all wasn't that bad, and you reach back into your room, toward the bedside table and throw something out to her.  It sails in an arc and lands on the cement.  She picks up your keys and as she comes in, opening your heavily-wrought iron gate door, you remember what a shitty memory you've always had, but then the metal door swings close behind her with its usual loud, loud bang.

—RON BURCH

APPALACHIAN ARTS

ARTIST INTERVIEW

SACRED SPACES

Kopana Terry works in many mediums: photography, music, drawing, writing, and on occasion, radio. As a musician she’s best known as the drummer for Arista Records’ Stealin Horses. Her writings are included in Arts Across Kentucky, D-Lib, and Kentucky Libraries among others. Along with exhibitions, her photographs have appeared in Spaces Magazine, Ilfopro, Ace Weekly, Louisville Music News, Lexington’s Herald-Leader and most recently in the documentary Kentucky Bourbon Tales: Distilling the Family Business. From 2006-2010, she was co-creator and senior producer for tonic: the arts and music magazine at NPR affiliate, WUKY. She’s been awarded grants from the Kentucky Arts Council, LexArts, and theKentucky Foundation for Women, and was commissioned a Kentucky Colonel in 1988. In 2003, her photo series Down the Backstretch: Women in the Thoroughbred Industry was awarded a citation of merit from Kentucky’s State House of Representatives. Her blog, the outhouse: where art goes, combines art with positive thought, and has a growing following. She earned her BA in Art Studio/Photography and Masters in Library and Information Science both from the University of Kentucky. Kopana was born and raised in Eastern Kentucky, in the Morgan County town of West Liberty. She currently resides in Lexington.

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HeartWood Appalachian Arts Editor, Vince Trimboli: The term Appalachian has so many personal connections for those that identify as such; For you, what does it mean to be an Appalachian Artist?

Kopana Terry: Being Appalachian informs virtually everything I do, sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically, but it's always there. I'm blessed to be from a very long line of Appalachians, and to have been raised in the Appalachian traditions. I can't imagine a life without that mountain spirit forming the core of my being. It provides an exceptional lens through which I view the world around me, and that is certainly passed on to my images. I'm quite proud of the meaning those Appalachian roots have given my life, and I trust it will always be a force in my work. I think at this point (age) there's little chance of it going away if it hasn't already....and it certainly hasn't!

Sacred Space seems to be an entwined theme in your work. Can you speak about some sacred spaces (perhaps the non-traditional) that inspire you?

When we hear the term Sacred Space, we're conditioned to think of a church, mosque, or synagogue; a building with four walls. I believe it's much wider than that, and it doesn't have to have walls at all.

Stories abound of African Animists giving thanks to the tree before they cut it down and turn it into a canoe. Pantheists revere nature. Native Americans believe water is our life giving force, and perform many rituals and prayers at the water's edge. Though I am myself a Christian, as an Appalachian I hold sacred the mountains I grew up in. In that way, the reverence for nature is not that foreign. And I, like many others of orthodoxy, often seek God in the outdoors. Who doesn't feel at peace during a long walk in the woods?At the same time, a sacred space can quite often be an individual, intimate place. It's not uncommon for Christians, Buddhists, Hindi, and perhaps Muslims (I'm not as familiar with their practices), to have personal altars in their homes where they might keep prayer candles, smudge sticks, icons/figurines, and other ephemera that act as conduit for prayer. There may also be places which aren't explicitly sacred to the greater world. It could be the old home place, a cemetery, or some other locale that holds a significant memory for an individual. For instance, the spot where a loved one died in a car crash: we see roadside crosses posted in tribute to the dead quite often these days. With time, any of these places can become sacred to large groups or a few individuals.

So, when I think of a sacred space, I try to think broadly, and not just about what I personally value as a sacred space. All the possibilities I've mentioned inspire me, and it's my exploration of these possibilities that advance my own spiritual growth. Each image becomes a prayer of sorts, because I must consider the greater nature of its meaning in the world, and ultimately, to myself. And it's the stepping outside of what I know, outside my comfort zone, that is as challenging as capturing a great image. It's learning what is sacred to others, and then finding a way to photograph it (them) in a way that is respectful. Many mainline Christian churches, for example, don't allow photos during service because the congregation is there in communion with God. It is an intimacy that should not be interrupted. I've been allowed to photograph a Native American water prayer but I had to do so without showing the communicant's face. This is why you don't see many people in the images at this stage in the series.

I liken the series much like circling a water drain: it has only just started along the edge of the whirlpool. The next phase is to go deeper, look closer at the spaces themselves as well as photographing those few people who are okay with sharing their time with the divine and my lens. It's not for everybody, and I totally understand that.

Do artists in other genres inform your images? If so, who and why?

If by other genres you mean other artistic media, the answer is yes. Without exception I'm most inspired by writers. In particular, I'm influenced by Appalachian writers like Gurney Norman, Silas House, and Mary Carroll-Hackett. In my readings, their words come from a place of spirit that speaks to me. I also enjoy those who write specifically on the topic of spirituality such as Anne LaMott, Nadia Bolz-Weber, and Thich Naht Hahn. Words have power. They provide perspective. They require contemplation. They reveal notions we may not have otherwise considered. Or perhaps they confirm what we knew, but were unable to verbalize, or make sense of.

If, on the other hand, you mean genres in photography, the answer is... maybe. I think at the end of the day I'm a documentarian, and others who work in this genre create images that I'm most often drawn to. Such photographers do indeed inform my own work.

My good friend Jahi Chikwendiu is at the top of the list. He does incredible documentary photography primarily with the Washington Post http://www.jahichikwendiu.com/.

I've long been inspired by Mary Ellen Mark http://www.maryellenmark.com/. I find her work to be a perfect marriage of the documentary and the artistic. It's a fine line really, and I'm always searching for it.

The WPA photographers still inspire me, particularly Walker Evans: http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/artists/1599/walker-evans-american-1903-1975/. And who wouldn't be moved by street photographer Vivian Meier?

But as far as photographers working in, say, landscape, architecture, abstract, fine art photography, I enjoy the work, but I wouldn't necessarily say the genres themselves inform what I'm doing with the exception of select technique. That's especially true when I'm shooting digital images (which I do out of necessity these days). I was trained in traditional film photography, and digital still feels so new to me that I often find myself lacking in technical prowess. Thank God I have photographer friends like Crystal Heis who are far more adept with technology than I am. They also happen to be generous in their advice. Color me lucky.

How does your work as an Archivist of Oral History inform the visual work you are creating?

Not much, really. If anything, it's the other way around. The more I photograph sacred spaces, the more interested I become in the people who created them. The images compel me to learn more about those spaces and those people. I find first person narrative intriguing. Memory and recall are complex. Ten people may experience the same event, but they recite their memories of that event in similar, yet differing, ways. It's a lot like a woven chair. The individual memory is a strand that, on its own, won't hold a single person. But when our strands are all told, they weave a seat that's sturdy enough to hold real weight. Our collective stories become more accurate together than apart. It's rather like a congregation of believers really.

At some point, I wouldn't be at all surprised if I include an oral history component to the series. Not only would this then include other voices - literally - in the conversation, but it provides another layer of exploration that, together with the images, could create something beautifully spectacular. It's all part of circling that drain.

Is there one space that you have always wanted to photograph?

I don't think I can pick just one. It would have been Stonehenge, but I have photographed it, though I would love to do so during the summer Solstice. That would be fantastic. Also, the Coptic Churches of Ethiopia I imagine to be exquisite as well. There are, of course, the many gorgeous cathedrals throughout Europe, particularly Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland. But I also rather enjoy churches that are no longer functional. Churches in disrepair are particularly interesting to me. So much love and energy went into building a place of worship, and then left to fall apart, is quite a story. For me there remains something sacred amidst the dilapidation. Spirit doesn't die.

I'm now in the second chapter of the Sacred Spaces series. New spaces, more people, more detail. I'm excited about circling the drain.