Poetry

Triptych

Mariam Ahmed

Entwined upon gray slate
a pulse - two beats - a
third heard faintly

Bodies embrace, soft breeze
petals fold, delicate
and three trees

Trails wind, the edges
frame a face
silence, finally

Farewell to The Union

Carol Barrett

I began forty-three years ago, first University Without Walls,
teaching in the Loveland, Ohio retreat center run by a Catholic
order of lay women who grew their own food, served zucchini
every meal, one form or another. We slept on cots too short
for the tall among us, waited in line to call home on the payphone.

I traveled up to 37 trips a year, flying far to greet colleagues
from around the globe, meet students presenting dissertations
in their living rooms. I told one he drank too much. He quit
drinking. I installed an extra-large mailbox, got a second phone.
The work was interdisciplinary, life-changing, just like the brochure.

Now we meet online. I read and comment ten hours a day. The work
stretches all of us. I have hooded over a hundred with doctoral satin
and velvet. They carry the mission of social justice on their backs:
domestic violence, incest, homelessness, slavery’s half-life.
They inspire, provoke, change policy, dream. Always, they dream.

Something went wrong. What I know: rent went unpaid,
the building padlocked, phones shut off, student loans did not
materialize, paychecks were late, again, again. The Dean ordered
bottled water for the hot July residency on a cousin’s credit
card. The Provost used his to hire signers for the deaf.

I want to be like poet Tess Gallagher waiting for two fawns
to return to the yard, prance proudly across the lawn, then
leap over the low rock wall to the stand of Blue Spruce out back.
But the University President has taken her Mercedes for a spin, run
a red light. Instead of Pomp and Circumstance, a screeching siren.

at the laundromat, a cleansing

Shannon

at the laundromat, a cleansing
the swishing swashing, a hymn
communion of low humming
sitting, the very catholic ache
the way metal sticks to your thighs
the same steamy heat
fills every empty vestry

a red hair tie digs in
like a prayer

on the window, a newspaper
clipping: I saw Jesus in the laundry cycle

probably, there should be
someone at the counter

but there never is

just the purifying presence of the fluorescent lights

The Sacred Place

CS Crow

They sacrificed pig's blood on their altar
But it had long been a desecrated place.

A long desecrated place, their sacred space, 
First with their words, then with their votes. 

First with their votes, then with their money.
Tithes to their God, donations to their golden calf.

Donations to their golden calf stopped 
When we had enough and tore him down. 

When we tore him down, they promised us
There would be no place where we feel safe.

There has never been a place where we feel safe.
We consecrate ourselves in unsafe places.

We consecrate our safe spaces into sacred places. 
They had their churches, we had our queer bookstores.

The queer bookstore they threatened to burn 
When Sam Sax read Pig at a poetry reading.

After the poetry reading, they called us pigs;
They demanded we sacrifice our blood on their altar.

The Day After the Funeral

Pat Daneman

Everything she owned is on its way down the front steps
or through the garage onto the U-Haul her daughter rented
this morning and backed up crooked into the driveway.
The pink couch, the lamp with the crystals dangling
around the bottom of the shade. Her summer impatiens
and petunias are frost-burned, heads hanging.
Her son’s dusty footprints step on each other across the porch.
He goes in and out the propped-open front door,
letting flies in, carrying boxes heavy with books,
rattling with pot lids. I used to see her sitting out
on warmer days, oxygen tube running from nose prongs
down to the tank. She was tiny, always breathless. Not at all
the smiling woman on the cover of the memorial program,
wearing a low-cut gown, raising a glass to us all.

Sister Mare

Narya Deckard

Horses
                  rumble inside me

Horses
                  beat in my chest

Horses
                  with their flesh like love

Sister mare
      Let me weave your mane with daisies
      In return for your gift of milk to the wayfarer

Men and gods cannot catch us with their fetters
As my hands touch the soil, earth’s dark grave

Sister mare
      Let me braid your tail with yarrow          
      Your forelock with clover

Horses are the thunder in rain
A hammer to the thorn

Sister mare
      I’ll make you a crown of forget-me-nots
      To ring around your blossoming ears

We rise in a moonlit sky, the palomino
Soft beneath my bare legs as she flings her seafoam mane

Sister mare
     Teach me
     The way of the horse

Sister mare
      I yearn for humility
      Here in your gift of grace

I see you in the lake of my mind.
I am rounded at your feet.

Because this is the American Story Too

Sahar Fathi

The CIA staged a coup,
The people wanted
The freedom to choose,
Instead - a theocracy
That ruled with an iron fist.
And her parents fled,
And ended up here,
Their promise
Reduced to washing dishes
And barely holding on.
In a one-bedroom apartment,
They named their only child
The Persian word for “dawn,”
And the American kids
Laughed and teased
That little girl
Who had gormeh sabzi
Instead of ham and cheese.
And in the summers,
She received her first
Hijab of many.
Two big eyes
Lost beneath
One long eyebrow,
A crumpled veil,
Forced on her head.
She was
Born in one country,
To people lost from another,
And this,
This is the American story too –
How she grew up
To watch
As her blood lines
Fought to be free.

Permaculture

Hannah Houser

In the trailer of my childhood,
sister asleep in the bed with me,
I hear the deep groans
of sod beneath cinder block –
thick clay that has held and holds
my mother’s family,
and her mother’s,
whose kin plowed this land
before it was a home.
It sighs now, full of
what seeds went planted and
unplanted, a question of
present and future need.
“I can take it” the soil breathes,
“I can hold it all for you.” And so
I give it my childhood nightmares
of beasts and violence,
passing through quilt
and wood paneling
into that soup of
memory and roots.

Gestalt v Zeitgeist

Heikki Huotari  

You can't spend the currency of Philadelphia in Pittsburgh but you can say mea culpa in place of both hello and goodbye.

Tell the amygdala to grok the paper roses. Rock breaks scissors and gestalt deciphers zeitgeist. Dissonance is brighter prior to alignment.

Having Doppler shifted, I know neither my velocity nor my position. My sweet chariots are at the ends of pendulums. When what I thought was odd was not I

lacked imagination but when what I thought was not odd was I lacked emotional intelligence. What doesn't happen doesn't happen in a vacuum.

One alarm clock if from the existing infrastructure, two if the result of an internal search. In every argument with reds, blues lose.

I'm reading the original Armenian. Let's astrally project just like we did last summer. Worthy is the lamb that wasn't slain.

How precious this misinformation is! How unobtrusive the acoustics! You will know your expert witnesses but by what they've done for you lately.

Every insect in its hexagon and leisure in gazebos. I'm the i in team. It's my apotheosis and I'll celebrate excessively if I so choose.

My Friend, In Real Time

David P. Miller

in memory of Karen Friedland

My friend confronts her dying.
Hundreds witness with her.
She posts the cancer’s
every next appearance.

I want to resist figures of speech.
“Cancerous” describes the cancer.
Metaphor is repellant.
“Like a cancer” is the simile
to elaborate the cancer.

Among her replies to the thing:
Greenhouses, manatees, snowfalls,
night skies, lotuses, spiderwebs.

I remember George Harrison’s difficult
nothing in this life that I’ve been trying
can equal or surpass the art of dying,
but have known no one else to practice
this art in full view, as she does.

She writes: Next up, soon, is hospice.
We’re introduced to death doulas.
We paste Valentine hearts across
everyone’s screens. Our replies
spill, stumble, weep, amen, hover,
mouths uncertain. Each typed word
a strain against speechlessness.

Images crowd regardless. Hundreds
perhaps picture a room and bed.
Before sleep, and in the morning,

I scroll in hopes of reading one more
Have a great night, friends!

INSIDE THE CAPITAL CITY

Joanne Monte

It’s not a graveyard of enduring losses,
or an open hole in the ground

where a priest will offer prayers.

It’s never been a field of crosses,
crushed laurel wreaths, or flags. No,

this is the dumping ground

where children will come
to sort through the empty jars,

hoping to find just one

with a single spoonful of citrus jelly,
a drop of sheep’s milk;

a crushed bag of Goldfish; a kernel

of two of corn.  All this in view
of those who will one day

bottle the blood of their wounds.

Missoula Floods

Sam Monroe Olson

So many nights I drove the flood’s cut, slept
by that river, and woke in a scatter

of shotshells, star-jot beer cans– so many dawns
rocked awake by eighteen-wheelers

jake-braking down from their home-shaped
wounds in the cliffs. I always promised

those mornings after not to harm that way
again, not driving but fleeing, boring down

white lines like bright rails through Earth’s crust,
my little truck pitching towards the center

of a world without light, where I learned to feel
my way by hand, panning that mantle’s glint,

tracing it for what strange warmth can be found
there, and following it deeper, down to the liquid

core where I once saw luminous geese plying themselves
from inklike seams and rising away, beating

silently up to a starlit road to be born. Years ago,
on the gravel spur to a mine, quaked out of sleep,

I promised the child I have not yet had I would never
cut from our doorway, promised her I would hold on

the way bluffs cradle floods, letting her ream but never
letting go, promised myself I would hold her the way

thrushes held themselves at the tops of my earliest
hemlocks, lost in the ocean dark, hanging fault lines, but still.

Elegy for Cormac McCarthy

Isaac James Richards

I remember the first time I read The Road
in one sitting

when I was supposed to be volunteering
at a Boy Scout Merit Badge Powwow. 

Afterward, I walked through sunlight
differently. Felt I was floating.

Then again, for the second time,
in an introductory sociology class.

Why is there order?

I still remember the course questions:
who wins, what is real, how do we know

what I want to know:
how Cormac would’ve answered

those questions—
what he thinks of them now.

I remember my grandpa gripping
a glistening rainbow

trout, something slipping
out of his hands.

LOVE, WHICH WAY IS HOME?

Abhijit Sarmah

on this quay of denim memories what confounds his devotion
for wuthering winds is a quaint symphony of the spirit,

symphony of the deepening rivers that often daub a helix,
symphony articulated in barracks and songs trailing hearses

a fraying harvest moon means little to a merchant of starlings
in pursuit of reaped and threshed remnants, hiraeth for

a shadow town with the dead weight of burning sequins, red
hooks afloat in the luster of a sky working on an infinite etude,

heifers silent as the exit music of spring blasts in the leas.
The dissonance between longings of altered kinds only seems

fancy to ones without constellations of grief for softened palms.
When allowed, derisions of black winters shadow the splendor 

of roiling terns imitating the ceremony of returning, of living with
the language of self, of singing sweet madrigals for gulf ghosts

that still lug the memories of serpentine nights of defeat and rue.
Must he always loathe his desire to fleck the world in theories,

stories that remain creased in his inner pockets, ones sewn to
his body like skin or incantations to melting flint afternoons?

No way should a merchant of starlings know the immensity of this
Elysium crafted of minutiae: suffusing clouds, buoyant black birches,

geese floating in ether, surfs squeezing into another, a frisky sun.
A muslin-soft wave laves his steps as the symphony dawdles.

Koj lub npe hu li cas? (What is Your Name?)

Mary Vang

I told a friend, “You should embrace your name,
because it has either given a blessing or misfortune.” A long time ago,
a Hmong man and woman got married. They were siblings. There was no celebration—
everyone whispered, criticized the family
who belonged in the same clan village. A curse has haunted them
as they vanish into thin air, a reminder for the rest of us
some loves are ill-fated.

In the Hmong culture, when a baby entered the world from its mother’s womb,
white string bracelets had been tied on the wrists as blessings
in this imperfect, vivid world.

Then, she called your name.

It has always been true,
some loves are permanent
or someone’s voice
made your name special.
It got entwined in a bond—
secured, knotted, and inescapable.

Creative Nonfiction

The Tree in The Middle Of The Road: Sentinel of The Prairie

Mary Lucille Hays

Following Kirby Avenue, one of the Illinois gridline roads, “the country way” of our childhood, went straight through farmland. We would stop at the crossing each mile to look both ways in summer when the corn was high or check for traffic and then breeze through the intersections when it wasn't. To get to the farm, you go straight until you come to "the tree in the middle of the road," a lone Hedge Apple standing on a corner where the lane takes a little jog at the county line where the grid doesn’t match up. A Sentinel of the Prairie, it surely marked the corner of an ancient hedgerow. And here we turn left. Soon we come to a cow pasture, Camp Creek winding through it. Scrubby little trees grow along the banks and black cows wander, keeping the meadow well grazed. A right turn takes us into White Heath, and then it's an easy way through town and onto the farm. The simple directions with only two well-marked turns made this way a favorite for family trips to our home place, and we kids would try to be the first one to spot the tree-in-the-middle-of-the-road. As a child, I didn't worry about the species when the tree itself had its own name, so it was not until I was an adult and living at the farm myself, that I realized it was another Osage Orange. Would it matter if I tell you now that the tree was majestic, lording it over the corn and beans? Was. I took it for granted, along with everybody else in the county. My cousin, Adam, used to photograph it for a class, and everyone knew where to go when you said to turn left at the tree-in-the-middle-of-the-road. Most know where to go when you tell them to turn left where the tree-in-the-middle-of-the-road used to be. But what happened to our tree?

One day, driving home after work at dusk, I saw a strange, boxy shape looming in front of me. I was almost to the corner before I realized someone had topped our beloved tree, hacked off the limbs. Only a stricken trunk remaining. At first, I didn't know what I was looking at. I felt disoriented. Did I somehow take a wrong turn? As I got closer, I knew. And I felt sick. I stopped the car on the road and stared for a long while. The trunk was two and a half or three feet in diameter and twisted a little. Stumps where its great limbs had been (themselves a foot and a half across) seemed to be reaching up in surrender. I felt rage bubble up in me and I started crying, mourning an old friend. Then I took my left turn toward home.

When had it happened? WHY had it happened? A few days later I found my answer. I began taking the country way to town every day, trying to steel myself against the loss. One morning I caught workers clearing the wood away. They had a backhoe and chains and had somehow uprooted the trunk which lay precariously across the bucket. I stopped my car and rolled down my window. The road commissioner came over and introduced himself, leaning his elbow casually on my open window to talk to me. I knew I sounded plaintive when I asked him about the tree, and he nodded sympathetically. "Rot," he said. "I didn't want to cut it either, but we thought we'd better take it down before it hurt somebody." The nearest house was over a mile away. The road was not well traveled. If a tree falls on a lonely Prairie road, and nobody is driving by, is it really a danger? The backhoe was crawling toward the flatbed truck, the giant wooden torso rocking just a little across the bucket. I could see a small darkness in the heart of the great trunk. I didn't say what I was thinking: that Osage Orange wood is like iron, and that it would be many years before that little bit of rot could spread enough to cause that tree to fall on an unlucky traveler on this lonely road. My tears or rage or letters to the editor might have stopped the killing if I'd known what they were planning, but now it was a moot point. The road commissioner rejoined the other workers, and I watched them lower the tree onto the bed of the truck and chain it down. Then I went ahead on to town. When I told my sister later, she said, "Well, now I won't be able to take the country way to come see you. I won't know where to turn." What does it do to a community when the landmarks are erased? How will we find our way home?

Mourning Doves

Elizabeth Lerman

You are woken up early by a woman in white. Rub your sleep sealed eyes, adjust to the sun and see the same, sacred kaleidoscope of light land against the wall, where, just the other day, she stood pressed, desperate to be cast in color. You dress, save the socks for last, as if they are shoes, then glide down a hall where the floors are waxed and waiting. You walk past the round tables and wave to three wild-haired women with their mouths full of fruit. One smiles, one screams, one says sit down. You are not hungry, but your stomach still growls. You curl up in a chair by the window and think about eating the book you began last night. You don’t belong here, but you do. There is cooing coming from the edge of the only unspiked sill. You shut your lids tight, see that light again, and listen to two sky born souls share something like a song. Something too, like a sob. You open your eyes, watch the gentle pair of them and try, very hard, to remember the moment morning doves became mourning doves.

Home Away

Eileen Nittler

She was in my belly when we bought the house, the size of a pea, maybe, or a walnut. He was in my arms, not yet walking, the size of an infant.

Two small children, a new job in a new city. We bought the first house we toured with a real estate agent we picked off the newly available internet. It was 1997, and we were moving to Eugene.

She was born in the back room of a three-bedroom house, already remodeled from two. Over the years, this room was a bedroom, a family room, and then a bedroom again.

They had bunkbeds for a while when they shared a room, filled with the energy and the detritus of young children.

Then he had a lofted bed, though he preferred to sleep on the floor. We painted ocean scenes on the wall­—fish, octopi, crawdads, jellyfish. We pasted stars and planets on the ceiling. When it was demoted, he stood on top of a desk to pull the paper Pluto down, never to be called a planet again.

She wanted to paint her room when she was eight. Stick figures and pumpkins adorned the closet. At fifteen, she wanted a change, so we spent time painting graduated blues up the wall, rows of tiny mountains along the baseboards, mismatched ceiling lights.

We buried one dog, two cats, and a guinea pig in the back yard. We buried the ashes of loved ones, a treasure chest of Polly Pocket toys, and a handful of marbles. We planted fruit trees, and rhododendrons, and cucumbers they ate off the vine. We planted flowers that looked like six-foot-tall fried eggs.

We built a sidewalk, and they drew their names in the concrete, in English and in Japanese. She said it was her name, but I don’t speak Japanese and can’t prove it.

We built a fence to keep them safe. We built a swing set and a tree house. We built a shop and learned to build furniture, weld, and work on trucks. We built a home.

He moved to California. She moved to Montana. He died and we mourned, quit our jobs, neglected the yard, ignored the leak that peeled some of the ocean scene off his walls, until we were ready to breathe again and ready to repair.

And she asked us to be closer to her, to the home she is building with someone new, with their own trees and paint colors and fences. And we said yes, of course we can.

Twenty-seven years after we bought the house in Eugene, we are selling it. I walk through the rooms, one after the other, and think of the lives it helped nourish.

I wonder about the next family. What will people think of the fried-egg flowers? Is that Japanese word really an insult? I want to tell them all the stories. A small part of me feels embarrassed by the paint colors, eight faded planets on the ceiling, warning the new family where they made find the bones of a Rhodesian Ridgeback. A large part of me wants to strip the paint off the walls and bring it with me, dig up the old dog and inter him in Montana, hold these tangible things close to me, so that I never, ever forget the home and the life that we built.

Real In My Life

Amy Smith

I remember piles of clothes on your floor and teen mag photos of Devon Sawa taped to the walls. Plastic makeup bins and tangled cords of curling irons of varying widths by the full-length mirror leaning against the wall. I remember smashing big, hairy spiders into the carpet with our shoes and the time you sucked one up with the vacuum (which was brilliant).

Before the remodel, I remember piles of papers on your dining room table. We ate at the kitchen bar. I remember when your parents painted the walls dark red. The house became a country cave tucked away in the tropics.

I remember your stepdad. Tall with leathery skin and kind eyes. I photographed him for my college photography class and developed the film in the art department’s lab. I thought that the texture of his skin and his crow’s feet would be beautiful in grainy analog. I sent your family a print. Did you see it?

I guess I caught the photography bug early. Until this past Christmas, when my mom texted me the incriminating photo, I had forgotten that New Year’s Eve when you and your sister stole empty bottles of wine, and we posed with them in a moment of teenage inspiration.

…

My earliest memories of you are in my preteens. I’d never met someone so mature and immature at the same time. Someone who knew what it meant to feel horny (your word) and had an extensive repertoire of fart sounds produced via mouth, armpit, and back of the knee.

I remember you telling me about all the boys you wanted to hump. Again, your word, not mine. Quote: “I want to hump him so bad.” As if sex was as animal an activity as sneezing (both of which were hilarious to us).

Can we stop and celebrate how immense an achievement that was? How boldly you pursued adulthood while preserving the silliness of a teenage girl? How that silliness reverberated in our bodies in the form of uncontrollable laughter while adulthood was hiding around the corner?

I still giggle when I hear the word “hump.” It’s so irresistibly juvenile. I only use it in my mind, and only to conjure your sense of humor. Yes: the word “hump” is reserved in my mind just for you.

…

I studied at the dining room table after dinner, fueled by Mountain Dew and nachos (microwaved with shredded cheddar cheese until it became a gooey mass). You got in trouble for bad grades (and consumed an equally disconcerting amount of Mountain Dew and nachos). It’s possible that our parents paired us for this very reason. I was the good influence. You were the one who would bring me out of my shell. But we were made of the same ingredients.

I remember how you’d make a fart face with your mouth and grab your boobs at the same time to get a laugh out of me (it always did). Or maybe you did those things separately. When I close my eyes, I see multiple exposures of you on a single negative.

You taught me how to tweeze my eyebrows into thin lines and flat-iron my hair. You convinced me to wear a crop top and dark lipstick. Any boldness or sexiness in my physical appearance today (which isn’t much, to be clear) bears your influence.

At the county fair every year, you were always on a mission to find boys to go on rides with you and feel you up. I didn’t understand why you wanted to do this, but I was your devoted disciple. You were teaching me how to be wanted. I didn’t understand why I should want to be wanted then, other than it was obviously good to be wanted. I had faith in you. I still wonder what you knew that I didn’t.

…

Your love of country music was infectious. The hours spent in your bedroom while you belted out LeAnn Rimes songs are forever sparking neural connections when I hear a country song in the grocery store. Laying on my stomach on your unmade bed, I was an audience of one to your magical displays of teenage catharsis.

Almost half of the words in the song “How Do I Live Without You” are captured in that one repeating phrase. We were the same age as LeAnn Rimes when this song hit the charts. I was honored to be your audience. To witness your duet with another 14-year-old, one who became world famous (or infamous, depending on whether or not you were a parent of a minor at the time) for waxing about having her heart broken by a lover. A 14-year old who, like you, wanted and was wanted.

Whenever I hear the pre-chorus of “How Do I Live Without You”, I want to replace “real” with “good”, because having all the good taken away in one's life is much less terrifying than having everything real taken away.

What does it mean for reality to be gone? I never had a chance to ask you.

…

When I went to college, we lost touch. There was no such thing as social media, and talking on the phone wasn’t really our thing. When I went home to visit family during my first year in Miami, I found you.

I remember a nondescript apartment building near the Walmart and sitting on a dirty couch in an otherwise unfurnished living room. I didn’t stay long. I remember you were suddenly thin. Your chipmunk cheeks were gone.

I was going through my own transformation. The top of my class in high school, I was lost in a sea of students who were better educated and richer than me. I was in an extended state of shock. When I returned home, I hardly recognized you. It was as if I’d not just gone to college but to another dimension.

I wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed. I wonder what would have happened if you’d escaped.

When you had your motorcycle accident, I heard that you lost part of your calf muscle and that they had to graft your skin. I heard you were in pain. By the time I had my own near-death experience, we’d lost touch. You were one of the few people in my life who might have understood how a single experience can divide your life in half. But we were too far apart by then.

…

To this day, my mom is friends with yours. I learned about the accident from my mom. She sent me a link to your small business weaving strands of shimmery threads into people’s hair (I think it’s called “mermaid hair”). When you had a baby, she told me. I learned from my mom that the baby was taken away. When you were found dead in your apartment, my mom sent me the news.

On a trip home after I’d moved to California, your mom came over with your daughter and your sister’s daughter. I feel awful that I can’t remember if you were still alive then. She held custody of both girls at the time. Your baby stumbled around the living room and picked things up to put in her mouth. Every now and then the girls would get into a spat. Your mom would look at them, sigh, and go back to the story she was telling.

How does one quantify the labor of being both mother and grandmother? I don’t know enough to say. But I do know that I felt powerless in a room of mothers (my own and yours) whose authority I had no right to impede upon. That mothering is such a personal thing, that non-mothers have no right to tell mothers how to mother.

…

Before I could drive, my mom would chauffeur me to your house and catch up with your mom, then leave me to stay overnight. When we got out of the car, we’d be greeted by labrador retrievers. “Outside dogs” that had ticks and fleas. They’d disappear into the property once they were bored of us. We never explored the property much, though I remember vignettes from a few of our walks – the horse’s neck drawing the wire fence taught, a shed with cobwebs and rusty tractor parts. A campfire.

When I imagine you now, I don’t picture the woman you must have been when they found you, or the one who had a baby, or the one who got in a terrible accident. I still see the boy-crazy teenager who captivated me: jet black hair, pencil-thin eyebrows, lip liner, halter top, and that beautiful chipmunk-cheek smile. When we drift, when our lives diverge, when we become new people, do we still know each other? Do we lose each other?

The answer is yes. Yes we do.

Palms Upturned

Angela Townsend

Palm Sunday, and I am not thinking about Jesus. Do I take my Lord for granted? Of course I do. This has been our core competency since the first meat stuck to our ribs. I comfort myself by saying “our.” I hide myself among the leaves of better books.

My first-grade teacher is thinking of Jesus. She is thinking of me. She has not seen me since you could wrap two hands around my waist and have fingertips to spare. Back then, my only vainglory was hair long enough to sit on. I knew nothing of the feather boa you wear at forty. Now I pet my own neck. I trust my sweetness. I fancy myself a legend. Not everyone’s first-grade teacher remembers them.

But my first-grade teacher is thinking of Jesus. Her felt-tip pen is purple for Lent. Ninety-three years have not turned her letters craggy. She asks if I will greet my mother. She asks if I will be busy with my church this Holy Week. My mother, my church. I have only one of these.

She has enclosed another bookmark, Jeremiah 29 this time. God will give me a hope and a future. It would not occur to her that I do not give the best part of my day to Jesus. She sees me in a pink armchair with my New Testament and my prayer journal. She knows I went to seminary. I have a concordance for a pillow.

My first-grade teacher asks if I still work at the animal shelter. She asks this every other Easter. She alternates with questions about my mother. I wonder if she keeps spreadsheets. Maybe pivot tables ensure she will not forget any ex-child. She does not proselytize. Some little girls receive cards with three-dimensional chicks, fuzzy to the touch. The neighbor boy who went to Dartmouth gets bookmarks with Pysanky eggs. But she knows I went to seminary, so I get the lilies and the cross.

I tell myself I think of Jesus so fluently, I forget I am thinking of Jesus. I am thinking of Jesus when I salt my spinach. I am thinking of Jesus when I read my mother’s poetry. I am thinking of Jesus when I dust the Art Nouveau cat pressed into my arms by the dying shelter volunteer. “This has been with me for longer than you’ve been alive.” I am thinking of Jesus when my blood glucose is 353.

I was thinking of Jesus in fourth grade, drawing a diamond and writing His names in the facets. Wonderful Counselor. Prince of Peace. Daystar. The pastor said I might be getting “the tap on the shoulder.” All my beta cells died. My mother said Jesus put diabetes in my book, although we couldn’t know why.

I thanked Jesus for backyard toads and aspartame. I prayed over decisions like cutting my hair. The stylist cried and gave my mother my ponytail. My first-grade teacher saw me in the hallway and said I looked like Mary Tyler Moore. Her church and our church had Soup Wednesdays together all Lent. She brought me palm fronds braided into parcels as dense as cakes.

I used to respond to her letters. I told her I was infatuated with a Dutch priest who believed everyone is loved. I wrote that I was binging on Bonhoeffer and singing shape-note hymns at the 9am service. She saw my name change and change back. She did not see me gallop through churches where I thought I was Jesus. She may not know what happens when you think you are Jesus.

She did not see my churches. Little boys still fence with palm fronds, stabbing with intention. She did not ask why my name changed back, but she wrote Ms. instead of Mrs. in felt-tip pen.  Now I just tell her that my life is “zany and lovely.” I send her pictures of my shelter.

I always read two books at once, something fibrous and something I want to read. I pay my dues with those who name-drop all three Persons of the Trinity. Only then am I allowed to read about thriving after divorce, or how the constellations got their names. I pray when it suits me, apologizing for slipping in and out of my cassock like a seal. I thank Jesus for Diet Coke and the cat’s hazel eyes. I forget that Jesus chose to have bones that hurt.

Palm Sunday, and I drink coffee and write lethargic poems. I forgot. The other seminarians were ordained. My Master of Divinity hangs like an open locket around my neck. The picture fell out, but I don’t know where I was when it happened. A pastor friend texts me: “Don’t let the rocks cry out on your behalf!” I look at the cat on my desk and say, “Hosanna. Jesus loves you.”

I tell myself I think of Jesus the way a jazz pianist thinks of scales. Once you know the basics, you get to improvise. I tell myself that there were “basics” back there. I forgot that it’s Palm Sunday, so I write to my saddest aunt and press a leaf in The Complete Works of Emily Dickinson. I leap around my condo, forty and unseen. I jump up and down until I am breathless. I stop thinking about myself, my kidneys, and my end of the bargain that Jesus will let my mother outlive me.

My first-grade teacher will wash feet in four days. She will caress old heels slick with Gold Bond, soaping ankles that stink of Ben-Gay. She is practiced in the presence of God, so she flows from servant to child and back, mercy’s Möbius strip. She will laugh when Mrs. Oldfield unintentionally tickles. They are fluent in humor, God’s jazz.

I tell myself that I did not forget Palm Sunday, but I did. My hair is long again, and I am small. I like my cheeks pink as strawberries. I remember faces turned kaleidoscopic in the stained glass. I am counting on being remembered.

Fiction

Shades

Ann Birch

Jeff wondered whether he’d been smart in accepting his father’s invitation for a weekend at Long Beach Island. His father was not his dad. Dad was dead, and Mom, too. His father and he had connected through a database, and Jeff had always been curious.

 “Our little Einstein,” his parents had sometimes called him. Never particularly questioning, the couple who had adopted him as a baby were always firmly on his side whenever he probed. The Sunday school teacher had been angry when he pressed her to explain exactly how the Holy Trinity worked, but Mom and Dad told him not to worry about anything she said. Learning to diagram sentences in middle school, Jeff had maintained that “man” must be the subject of the sentence “The dog bit the man,” because the man was hurt, and so the sentence was about the him.  “I see your point,” Mom had said, when he explained it to her.

Occasionally Dad had employed an old bromide like, “Curiosity killed the cat” or “Let sleeping dogs lie,” but mostly his parents encouraged Jeff’s curiosity. Still, maybe if Dad knew about this meeting with his biological father, he might say, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

His father showed keen interest in him when they first talked by phone. He was all questions. What did Jeff think about this, do about that? Where did he stand on artificial intelligence and on the upcoming election? Jeff looked forward to spending time with someone whose approach to life might be as eager as his own. Perhaps, though he had loved Mom and Dad, he had been holding his breath all along until he would find a family where he fit more naturally.

He hadn’t expected the little boy who met him at the gate of the beach house, but it appeared that Jeff was not his father’s only son. The child, who must have been about six or seven years old, was playing alone in the sandy yard when Jeff drove up and parked. He might, he marveled, be seeing the image of himself at the same age.

As Jeff introduced himself, their father, who must have heard his arrival from inside the house, bounded down the porch steps and offered a hearty handshake. “How long did it take you to get here?” he asked. Then he saw the Volvo and said, “Nice car! How many miles to the gallon?”  It surprised Jeff that, unlike either of his sons, this man had red hair and freckles.  As if just remembering the child in that moment, their father tousled his straight brown hair and explained, “I have him for the month.”

“I’m Ernest,” the boy said, and it took Jeff a beat to realize that was the boy’s name.

“Ernest has some other half-brothers on his mother’s side, don’t you, kiddo?  What is it?  Two?  Three?” and turning to Jeff he said, “You like seafood?  I hope so.  I’m making stuffed clams. They’re my specialty.”  Jeff had arrived in the middle of the process.  He and Ernest watched as their father mixed the ground clams into the cracker meal.

“Jeff here is working on his doctorate,” their father said, as if certain this fact would be the one a second grader might find most interesting. “He’s a physicist, Ernie, and that means he’s interested in motion and forces and particles.  You know what particles are?”  Their father was mixing everything manually and going on about protons and neutrons and electrons. Jeff and Ernest looked at each other.

“You ought to ask him about black holes,” their father urged. “They’ll devour the whole universe sooner or later.  Just gulp down those galaxies till finally…,” at this point he held a ball of the clam mixture in both hands and then squeezed it through his fingers as if to illustrate.

After he had stuffed the clam shells, he began peeling potatoes.  “Are the eyes of the potatoes poisonous?” he asked Jeff.  Jeff said he wasn’t’ sure but that it might be safer not to eat them.  “Well, I’ve heard if you plant the eye of a potato, a new one will grow.”

Jeff thought maybe what he and his father shared should be called “the why chromosome.”  He offered to help with preparing the meal, but their father shook his head.  “In a minute I’ll pop this stuff in the oven and we can sit down and get to know each other better.”

“That’ll be great,” Jeff said. “But I’ve been sitting in the car so long, it would sure feel good to walk on the beach and stretch.” Ernest caught his eye. “Want to take a walk with me?” The child nodded hard.

“Be back in forty-five minutes!” their father commanded. As they left, he pointed to a box of mixed seashells. “That’s Ernest’s collection,” he said.  “Ernest, maybe your brother here can help you identify your shells while he’s around and get them organized.”

Theirs was a quiet walk, but they were comfortable. On the beach, Jeff thought the boy seemed to bloom, like the paper flowers they used to buy that were hidden inside shells. The shells were wrapped shut with a strip of paper, but after they sat in a tall glass of water for a while, the paper dissolved, the shell opened and a red paper flower floated up into the water on a thin string.

“Do the black holes scare you?” Ernest asked, and Jeff told him they were scary only if you thought about them in a way that made them seem real.

“They’re probably just something we’ve made up to explain something we don’t fully understand,” Jeff said. 

As they walked, Jeff remembered how his parents used to stroll during their seaside vacations, smiling, along different stretches of sand beside the same ocean.  “Morning’s at seven,” Dad would sometimes quote in contentment.  “The hillside’s dew pearled, God’s in His heaven, All’s right with the world.”

Ernest scampered ahead to pick up a shell.  He held it up to the sunlight. It had a blue tinge. He turned and held it first to the sky and then to the ocean. “Blue’s best,” Jeff heard the boy whisper, before slipping the shell into his pocket. Jeff nodded and knew the shell would join the jumble in the box, never to be classified, and that was all right. Actually, it was best.

Art from the Heart

Abbie Doll

Shauna grew up poor, and she knew it.

But love didn’t cost a thing, so there was always an abundance of that, and she knew that, too.

It was just her and her Mama, who was so easy to love it might as well have been a sin. Shauna didn’t see her enough, but that was okay because it taught her to appreciate the time that they did share that much more. Shauna learned young. And if there’s one thing she knew for sure, it was how hard her Mama worked to keep their little family afloat.

They were so poor that poorness itself became a possession—an odd way to look at it, sure, but it was undeniably hers, after all, and besides, poorness got a bad rap; Shauna’s lack of personal property ended up enhancing her innate sense of creativity. Turns out, when it comes to imagination fuel, need can’t be beat. But Shauna didn’t need a ton of toys—no assorted-pile-of-plastic mountain, no whiny doll that conditioned these fresh-out-of-diapers schoolgirls into caretakers themselves. Her mind was better than all that. And if you asked Shauna, she, herself, made an excellent show-and-tell contender; her body made it tangible. She was poverty on display—a living, embodied portrait of it.

The teachers, while less convinced, still admired her ingenuity. 

Shauna and her Mama slept in the same square room in their little studio apartment. Sure, it was all they could afford, but it was enough; Shauna liked living in a pocketsize place, liked the closeness of the walls, the intimacy of the space. It resembled a womb: plenty of room for growth.

But the best part of their meager life, by far, was their dainty décor. They couldn’t afford any furniture that wasn’t secondhand, no museum-quality artwork, hardly anything that wasn’t based in necessity…but there was one thing. One papery, precious thing.

Payday was grocery day, a joyous time, where Shauna got to sample the benevolence of Father Christmas. Twice a month, Shauna’s Mama let her pick a shiny pack of paper plates off the shelf. It was their one indulgence. Now, while their frugality never ceased (the plates were reused and milked for longevity), Shauna was permitted to keep one fresh and pristine. For the wall. Those plates got the gift of preservation, the gift of being memorialized as art on an otherwise barren, off-white wall.

Shauna secured them sensibly, using an inch-long piece of tape wrapped in a loop—just enough adhesive to stick each plate in place. They budgeted everything, but her Mama always allowed her this one luxury. And after years of scraping by, their wall was filling up—faux fancy platters with shiny splashes of gold, vibrant Van Gogh recreations, mesmerizing mandala galaxies, all sorts of intricate designs that made Shauna’s heart soar. Each one was a pictorial burst of imagination that inspired memories of meager meals, yes, but also treasured time shared.

Holidays, of course, had the best in-store availability: all the haunted houses, grinning jack-o-lantern’s, coal-smile snowmen, decked-out trees with present piles beneath. Each depicted a snippet of merriment that otherwise would’ve been out of reach, but through their festive depictions, Shauna got the gist.

The plate wall served as her place of worship, a trusted confidant, full-time guardian, an ongoing geometry lesson, and a security blanket all cocooned into one. They didn’t own a TV, so she’d gaze at the plates for entertainment, often drawing up elaborate backstories until each evolved into a full-fledged character and friend. With every new addition, she’d conduct this whole choreographed ceremony, welcoming the newcomer to her wall of fame with a dance and a smile.

The plates were her true gurus. They themselves were indisputable proof that anything possessed the capacity to be art—even the most mundane commodities. The plates taught Shauna that art didn’t need to lug all these limitations around; there were always fewer boundaries than the world led you to believe. Someone had designed these images that now wallpapered their home. Any object married to meaning, to memory, was undoubtedly art.

Part of her considered bringing a plate or two to show-and-tell, but she couldn’t bring herself to disturb the collection. Considering they were also camera-less, she couldn’t snap a pic of it either. Maybe it was better that way…sharing risked misunderstanding.

The plate wall was a provider in its own right. No birthday parties, but she had a plate for each year bursting with balloons. Direct proof of their celebratory love. Fresh flowers, too, were out of the question, but not flower-rimmed plates—livening up the room with bright, exotic blooms that never wilted.

Sometimes her Mama even let her design her own. Shauna had one pack of crayons, all down to stubs, but what a privilege to make her own! To contribute. To be up there right alongside those legitimate designs was the greatest gift she could’ve gotten.

Their impoverished life taught Shauna to be meticulous, thoughtful, and never wasteful. She knew how to make the most out of every little thing and every little moment, and she kept that paper plate wall up long after her Mama was gone. It grew into a memorial for their relationship, one she couldn’t bear to tear down, even with the privilege of disposable income.

The plates never fell, never loosened. It was as if they were adhered to the wall with love itself, and the tape, never necessary.

Shauna became a first-rate artist in her own right, using the very same paper plates as her canvas. She made it her life’s work to prove their plainness was a mere façade—to share that fierce love embedded in their pulpy hearts.

Dead center of that wall-to-wall display was a single polaroid—faded now, but the one picture they’d taken together when she still toddled, taped to a glittery, heart-shaped plate, both of them beaming raw like hardships were never a thing, like they never needed anything more than the love they’d made.

Ragweed Farm

Mary Lucille Hays

That first summer Ruth and David didn’t mow at all. They had enough work to do inside to make the house livable for the kids. Ya was five, and Duncan was just a toddler, and anyway, when Ruth went out to start the mower, the pull cord broke. David said he could fix it, but it would be a bitch. They decided to just let the yard go this year. How bad could it get?

Turns out it could get pretty bad. The ragweed grew up all over the back yard about fifteen feet high—tall, thick stalks that choked out all the grass and then got woody at the end of the summer. Ruth got a machete and chopped a path out to the machine shed. In the front, it was thistles and goat’s beard and some sunflowers. That patch only got about waist high, and was kind of pretty, so she let it stand.

That first summer Ruth planted a vegetable bed to the west of the house, where it was sunny from late morning and then all afternoon. Just the basics. Tomatoes and peppers, potatoes, onions, and turnips. She had never even had turnips before but decided to plant them because it seemed so homestead-y, and that first summer turnips grew in abundance. Ruth and David tried them steamed, but that was kind of dull, so they sliced them thin and sautéed them. That was okay, but the best way was mashed, like potatoes, with butter and salt and pepper. She planted spinach, too, but it didn't do well at all. It was stunted and the bugs chewed the leaves down to lace. She pulled some onions when the stalks were green and crisp. She sliced them, green parts and all, for salads and to stir-fry. But one day the leaves began to wither and brown until they fell over onto the ground. Then she pulled them up, crumbs of earth clinging to the roots and braided them into long braids and hung them in the kitchen stairway to cure.

Those first years, two kinds of spiders lived on the farm. In the house were big brown ones that could straddle a quarter with their spindly legs, maybe even a half dollar. They were shy and built ghostly tunnels in the dark corners of the basement and even upstairs in places. Oh, there were lots of crevices for spiders to hide when Ruth and David first moved to the farm. You get used to them after a while, and these brown house spiders quietly watched from their tunnels, their many eyes like shiny black beads, two big ones on their face, smaller ones clustered where their mouth should be, all blank, but somehow watching.

The outside spiders were even bigger, but less creepy. They were more colorful, for one thing. Black and bright yellow, bumblebee colors. Fat bodies, like berries, and they kept their legs together in pairs, so they were like big X's. They made spreading, beautiful webs in the garden and all over the yard. Their webs were the size of a dinner plate or bigger and had a zigzag pattern of white down the center.

Then there was the nighttime spider, who made a web across the doorway every evening when it was black-dark, and then tore it down before dawn. If they came home to a shadowy house late at night, the first one in would get a face full of web if they didn’t remember about the spider. But if the kitchen light was on when they came home, the web would be backlit, and everyone would admire it before reaching for the doorknob and ducking under it to go in. In the morning, though, it was always gone, and once an overnight guest told Ruth and David that he had watched the spider deconstructing the nest when he got up before dawn to go for a run. He said it was cutting the support lines one by one, and balling up the silk.

In those early days of weeds and spider webs, the machine shed had bales of hay stacked higher than the big barn door in the back. The shed was like a giant tunnel, so you could drive the combine in the front and park it, but the back door was blocked by the hay, so you couldn’t drive it out the back door anymore. Hay was piled in stair steps, and the rope was still tied to the rafters—the same rope that Ruth swung on as a kid when her grandpa was still alive. It had a knot big enough to sit on and you would carry that knot to the top of the hay and then straddle it and jump off. You'd swing to the front of the barn and almost out the front door, and then back up over the hay and then forward again, but not quite so far, and back again with that feeling like you left your stomach behind just a little bit, and again and again for a long time, but each time a little lower, a little slower until you ended up almost hovering a bit above the floor and then you'd hop off and the next person would have a turn.

And now Ya and Baby Duncan would grow up out here. Ya was big enough to swing on the rope, but Ruth didn’t let him swing from the top. Duncan was too small. But she let him climb around in the bales of hay. Once when Ruth was at work and David was home with the boys, they went out to the shed. David figured it was okay. He was working on a painting when they asked to go out. Ya was now seven and Duncan was two, and David figured that there was nothing to hurt them out there. Later, when Ya came in without Duncan, David felt the shadow of panic, but brushed it away. Ya said he thought Duncan was in the weeds by the apple tree, but David called and called and didn't find him there. David felt fear knot his stomach and grow gradually into a near terror, but after a long fifteen minutes he found the baby in the machine shed. Duncan had fallen down between some of the bales of hay. He was just sitting in a hollow between the bales, looking up. He was quiet now, but David saw tear streaks in his dust-stained face. Duncan silently reached his pudgy arms up and David felt a choking in his heart. He reached down and pulled the boy up out of the hay and held him tightly, nuzzling his head. Duncan’s hair smelled like baby sweat and dusty hay. He lay his head down on David’s shoulder, and David cupped the baby’s curls in his big hand, and stood there, suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of relief and responsibility. When Ruth came home later, he told her about it like it was joke, a funny thing that the boys did, but as he stood in the big barn looking at all that hay and felt the tiny hand softly pat-pat-patting his shoulder, he felt his heart swell and his throat close up and hot tears form behind his eyes. He brought Duncan inside and fed the boys lunch and then got down on the floor and played Legos with them for the rest of the afternoon.

Galvanized

Rob Keast

A red-tinged puddle, hubcap-sized, on the basement tile near the foosball table. She spotted it peripherally—it was the sheen of it. Helena waited. Ten seconds later, a drip. She carried the stepladder over, under the main bathroom. When she reached and pressed her finger against the rust spot, she felt the moisture. The pipe’s stain reminded her of a bug bite. She gathered rags, a sponge mop, a spray bottle of cleaner. She positioned a bucket, then used her phone to time the drops. Eighteen seconds. The resonant thook of drip on plastic. Twenty. Something always happened when Ray was overseas.

That night she checked the bucket: clear orange, an inch full. The next morning, another inch. She emptied it into the laundry tub. After dinner she showed the pail to her son and daughter. “Check twice a day. Whenever you’re home. Don’t let it get near full.”

“Who?”

“Both of you.”

“Can’t we fix it?”

“Can you?”

The pipe ran along the ceiling’s bare beams together with old cable TV and speaker wires—a previous owner’s. The speaker wires, pointless as anything, probably worked just fine, but her actual water pipes? Mutiny by decay.

Helena didn’t like workmen in her home; they left it dirtier. The one time she had splurged and paid painters, supposed professionals, the crown moldings looked like a first-grader’s smudges. She’d redone most of the work herself.

Thook. If she were trapped in a cave the heavy drop might be the sound of survival, but in her basement it announced the spending of money. Again. Plumbers’ websites. Reviews. She typed, “Will a dripping pipe get worse?” It will. Either gradually or all at once. When she discovered a woman plumber, Helena called. “Are they galvanized?” the plumber asked.

“I don’t know.”

“When was your house built?”

“Fifty-four, I think. Will it be you who comes out?”

“I’m the owner. I’ve been doing this twenty years. Unless the house was re-piped at some point, they’re galvanized.”

“Is that good?”

“That’s bad.”

Where Ray was, you didn’t collect water just to dump it down a sink. Years ago he’d been deployed to Afghanistan. Then Iraq. Now he keeps going back as a civilian contractor. More money, shorter stays, supposedly safer. Leaving Helena to run the house.

How could galvanized mean outdated? Anything subjected to galvanization should last forever. Were the powers of fire slipping? Was vulcanizing next? At her next Parent Input Board she’d ask Jack Jeffries. Jack was in charge of the school district’s buildings and grounds. What kind of pipes did the high school have? Wasn’t it about as old as her house?

A few mornings later the plumber backed her trailer into Helena’s driveway at 8:01. Her name was Mel. Helena asked, “Does rust ever settle in the leak and fix itself?”

“Ha.” Mel crisscrossed the basement, pointing a flashlight upward. “You want rust to be the good guy?” What if each turn of Mel’s flashlight revealed a new flaw, a fresh revolt of wood or metal? Every board, bolt, and bracket paying what’s owed to the god of rot. The previous century’s builders and their delusions of permanence and their ignorance of carcinogens. Galvanism sounded like Calvinism: certainties that haven’t aged well.

Mel spun the open stepladder and climbed it nimbly. She pinched the pipe and beamed her light from close range. “Right now it’s a pinhole leak.”

“Can you plug it?”

“I can but I won’t. At the very least you should replace the pipe from here” —she pointed—“to here. Let’s see what else you’ve got.” Mel roamed the basement, and if water passed through it, she didn’t like it. The main line emerging from the floor: corroded. The water heater: on borrowed time. The wastewater drains. The pipes to the kitchen. “Give it enough time,” Mel said, “and water always wins.”

On the Parent Input Board, Helena never supported shortcuts. Spend more now, do the job right, save in the long run: her budgetary golden rule. Where Helena and Ray lived, they knew what it was to neglect infrastructure. To swerve around potholes as wide as their bathtub and half as deep.

She couldn’t ask Ray, not while he was gone. He would snap, over email or Zoom, “I can’t think about pipes. Just make the right call. You’re managing the show, so manage it. I don’t ask you how to do my job here.” But Helena remembered the deployment when she had bought a new car, not because she had wanted one, but because it had been repair after repair. Ray never seemed convinced and told her, incorrectly, she didn’t know what the phrase “good money after bad” actually meant.

Mel went outside to her trailer, returning with a splotchy pipe the length of a yardstick. “I cut this out yesterday, a ranch about as old as this house. See that? I’d bet anything your lines are just as bad.” The pipe, rough-edged from the saw, was so full of black corrosion that it was all but plugged. By the end, how had water even reached the faucet?

If Helena spent money they didn’t have and they dropped into the negative again, that was her fault. If she opted to replace just the one short section, and a few months from now when Ray was home a pipe blew out and the basement flooded, that was her fault too.

“It’s not my house,” Mel said, “but if it were, I’d get it all done at once. Then, your water’s clean and your basement’s safe. You ever thought about a reverse osmosis system? I could put that in at the same time.”

Helena peered into the corroded hole. It had the mouth of a lamprey gargling asphalt. Soon they’d be paying two tuition bills. The galvanized pipes might hang on.

She couldn’t think; her head had clogged. Only her ears worked. Another rusty drop squeezed through the pinhole, thooking the bucket.

What Have You Got to Lose?

Joseph E. Lerner

I awake to find Lena no longer in bed beside me. I search for her everywhere, bathroom, kitchen, living and dining rooms. Finally, I slip on my coat and boots and go outside.

It’s still raining. Waters flood the riverbanks and surge toward our front door. Slogging through the mud, I head toward the small boat-shed where we store our kayaks and canoes. I see a lantern glimmer within.

Opening the boat-shed door, I find Lena crouching inside one canoe. Barefoot, shivering in her nightgown.

The canoe, secure in its rack, is where we keep our cache of postcards, photos, letters, tape cassettes, and old phonograph albums, both LP’s and 45’s. They’re mostly Lena’s from before we were married, she childless and long divorced, and I, an aging bachelor.

It’s Lena who asked me to move the boxes, saying she no longer wants them in the house, but the boat-shed’s roof leaks badly, and I thought it would be a temporary move and Lena would change her mind. Still, I covered them in tarp to store well off the floor in an old canoe we no longer used.

I step past the other kayaks and canoes, several in disrepair. My parents owned a tackle-and-bait shop in town, and, when they died, I expanded the business to include rafting trips and other guided tours. It was how I met Lena, vacationing with other retired schoolteachers several years ago. She was with someone else then.

Lena’s reading a letter now, folded and refolded many times. I avert my gaze, respecting her privacy. She looks up, her face flush, beautiful, aglow in lantern light.

“Lena, please come inside the house.”

“I’m fine, I can’t sleep.”

She doesn’t hide the letter, but doesn’t want to talk about it, either. Lena’s life has been long and eventful, her students adore her and still write to her. Once she hinted she had a child, but I’ve seen no photos of one, nor of her husband.

I crouch beside her. Out the window, we watch the waters rise and hear the rain beat against the glass. An icy breeze blows through the cracks, and the boat-shed whines and shudders.

“At least let me fetch you a coat or blanket.”

She says nothing, but I retrieve an old horse blanket hanging on the wall and wrap it about her.

“Winter’s nearly over, we can go kayaking again, just the two of us, before the crowds come. If you’re up for it.”

“Yes, but not the tandem kayak, I want to use my single.”

As late as last summer, the waters were swollen and the rapids dizzying, dangerous. I don’t dare state the obvious, that she hasn’t been well the past two winters and can no longer handle the rapids alone.

The rains and winds abate. Through the window, the full moon glimmers, reflections dancing upon the waves.

Finally, she rises unsteadily, and I help her out of the kayak. Together, we refold the tarp over the boxes, tucking them in as if they’re a sleeping child.

Leaving the boat-shed, my wife leans on me for support. Around us, cedars and redwoods climb to the sky, their girths stately as pillars, vigilant and immobile, beside the still raging waters.

In the mudroom, I gently wash Lena’s feet, slip on clean socks and slippers, and lead her to bed. Soon she’s asleep, but sleep eludes me, and I rise from bed.

Lena’s letter, which she took with her, has fallen to the floor, where it’s bathes in a pool of moonlight. I gather the letter and go to the kitchen, where I light the gas lamp, stoke the wood-burning stove, smooth out the letter on the tabletop.

The hand’s nearly illegible, the letter dated three years ago, before our marriage. I’m tempted to toss the letter, unread, into the flames, which leap, snarl, roar.

“Darling,” it begins, “you can’t possibly love him, come with me, what have you got to lose?”

I stop reading, refold the letter, and set it on the table. Slipping on my coat, I go outside, where I stand in the rain, the river surging, the cedars and redwoods casting their long shadows, the lantern still aglow in the boat-shed.

My hand, my letter. I return to the house.