#11: "Nomen oblitum / Forgotten Name" by Jessica Handler

~This piece previously appeared in New South, 2011

My habit is to watch for small things. In gentle green grass I spy a single earth-caught feather, arced and crenellated, its knife-edge up. On inspection I see it’s a contour feather, and three inches longer than my hand. The leading edge is rippled and split from use.

A tool, lost, discarded, this single feather, ex-crow. One puzzle-piece of a carapace, densely black. Collectively: a murder of crows. Raven made the world says the Haida legend, but I am no northwest Indian, I have no claim to what some people self-consciously call “first nation.” I am southeastern, urban, and white, third-generation American. My taxonomy is built of flights not my own, but the ground on which I have been placed. In my hand now, this single feather from a crow’s right wing. My own non-hollow, flightless bones are right-dominant; do I feel the sympathetic pluck and plummet here on my own right wing?

This feather, pick it up – lice, vermin silenced by flight, return. This feather pocketed, earth-placed by a window, my own closest place to flight.  

###

 

#10: Three Poems by Tony Barnstone

~This poem previously appeared in The Northridge Review (1997).

Express Train Boogie-oogie

(Read left to right, and also verticality down indentations)

As the station recedes its lights blister

Into raindrop halfglobes

Wet tracks shuttle the eye

From path to path

Now the whole city is revealed gleaming

Fishnet of light pulling in lives

Along the avenue painted numbers

And panting engines flash into mind

Little balls of light the wind pulls

Across the glass like taffy

And now the train slides out of town

Into a flowering darkness

Here's the warehouse district and Club 333

A dark industrial geometry

Dragging trails of signs and coinage

Across billboards

Yellow fireflies packed in a jar

Burst their bulbs

Black trees and leaves in a black sea shivering

Before they drown

People make random gestures

A ragged man pasted on a bench

Where money mates with anatomy

Through the panting interiors

The windowsquares of well‑lit lives

Peer through orchids and seaweed

Greenlit pines lining an empty block

Of grey concrete parking lot

The thousand faces of a movie crowd

Burst through the borders of my body

Of triple‑X theaters

And out the red velvet EXIT

Here are plunging lovers behind half‑drawn curtains

And a woman's silent O as her mouth yawns open

A rainwet warehouse redslicked with rust

Long streets climb a hill and spill

Where metal streamlines clash and overlap

Against a canvas sky painted black

Someone looking up from his written pad

Windows like the slow frames of a film

Through my reflected body

Shining like the tines of a fork

As carload after carload of light

Flickers and is eaten whole

#9: "Driving in Snow" by Joseph M. Schuster

~This piece previously appeared in New Virginia Review (1993)

        When Byrne's brother arrives, Byrne doesn't recognize him. At first, watching the passengers emerge from the gate, he wonders if Thomas missed the bus, or decided not to get on board.  But not even Thomas is that irresponsible.  Byrne must have overlooked him.  Thomas is, after all, not a large man, and the station is in turmoil.  An early spring blizzard has moved in, making buses late.  Byrne has been waiting for an hour and a half in the midst of the lines of angry passengers, the masses of people planted on upturned luggage because there aren't enough benches.

        He is shoving toward the ticket counter to ask if a second bus is due from St. Louis when he spots Thomas, standing a few feet inside the gate.  He was one of the first passengers off the bus, Byrne realizes, but it's no wonder he didn't recognize him.  In his uniform, Thomas looks like a different person, with the starched creases in his trousers and the black necktie just visible at the collar of his coat.  Byrne is amazed at the transformation.  His brother seems innocent and young, like someone playing soldier.  It's the short hair, he realizes.  The long hair Thomas had before he enlisted hid his face, as did the blond wisps of the beard he tried to grow.  Now that face seems exposed, naked.  Byrne is reminded of the schoolboy in the pictures his mother had on her bureau at the nursing home.  Thomas in the second and third grades; Thomas before he turned bad.

        Byrne raises his hand to wave but sees that his brother isn't alone.  A woman cradling an infant is talking to him, her mouth close to Thomas's ear.  Byrne lets his hand fall.  Thomas hasn't said anything about a woman, and the circumstance of the visit -- their mother's funeral -- is hardly social.

#8: "Autumn Harvest" by Jane Delury

~This piece previously appeared in StoryQuarterly (2001)

     Jacques crouches in his father’s garden, coaxing leeks from the hard November ground.  Six rows of cabbages away, the old man is digging up bouquets of mâche with a grit-encrusted knife.  Jacques grabs a shoot of leaves and pulls out a stem, slick with saliva-like bubbles.  The leek slaps into the basket and his father looks over, his glasses steamed by plant breath into two opaque circles.

     “Getting them all?  And the roots?”

     “Fine, Father,” Jacques says, “I’m doing just fine.”

     He waits for the slice of the knife to resume, and then clutches another cold jumble of leaves.  The earth buckles and splits, belching a sweet, rotten smell.  With the leek in one hand, he uses the other to pull up the socks that have bunched around his ankles, exposing his heels to the bite of the air.  A hollow eye stares up at him from the plank where his loafers balance, precious and inappropriate against the warped wood.  “For your city shoes,” his father said when he handed him the plank at the gate.  Jacques wonders again what is really being protected— his shoes from the soil or the soil from his shoes.

     The old man has finished the last row of mâche.  His gray gardening coat ripples over the emptied soil as he heads toward the main path.  Reaching down for the last two leeks, Jacques notices his father’s misbuttoned collar, which rises high on one side and lies flat on the other.  The collar is like the napkin the old man could not find the previous morning—sitting under his fork—or the letter he set out to mail twice or the reading glasses he misplaced on the top of his head.  Jacques’s mistake was to point out the glasses.  At the time, his father said nothing, simply lowering them to his eyes and flattening the newspaper against the table.  But that afternoon, he called Alexis and Emmanuel to the garden and they came running by Jacques, who was on his knees, mending a hole in the chicken wire.

     “Don’t yank, son.  Pull.”

#7: A Poem by Brandel France de Bravo

~~This poem previously appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review (2011)

 

Grammar School

America the Beautiful was our soundtrack, each of the twenty-four

frames per second as bottomless, open as the holes in our desks

where the ink bottles weren’t,  like the cloakroom without cloaks—just

parkas and yellow raincoats.  Hands perpetually raised, the smell

of mimeographs redolent as our mothers’ perfume, violet fingers

quivering in the air. God shed your grace on me, which would be

the lavatory key,  shackled to a wood brick bigger than a 7 year-old’s

hand, thighs, buttocks clenched against shame.  And naps

at our amber waving desks on pillows of crossed arms, my soul

 to keep, as the radiators, skeletal beneath the windows,  sang

their hiss and clang lullaby. Waking, we tied on our thinking caps,

index fingers ready to march once more across the Weekly Reader,

 to bushwhack through the dense green words,

fearful of ambush.

America the Beautiful was our soundtrack, each of us a majestic

 purple note, and each of the twenty-four frames a forspacious story,

until the projector, its young eaten, stutters to white, until Mrs. Boston,

roaming the aisles, would single out the one not seated

to teach us proper speech. “Where’s Antony?” she’d ask, or “Where’s

Jerome?” and Denise, Deborah and “T,” falling like straight men,

hang men every time would point to the student clapping erasers

or standing startled at the pencil sharpener, and shout, proud

to know the answer to something, “There he go!” And Mrs. Boston,

hands on hips, would turn to us, smirking slightly and using

the double negative I found so thrilling—my white mother would have

slapped me for it—to correct: “I don’t see him going nowhere.

There he is,” she scolded. I knew the difference between the two verbs

but the lesson came too late for me, going always  a substitute

for being in a life spent leaving: this classroom, this brotherhood,

this sea to shining, and Antony still

not nowhere.

 *****

 

#6: "Black Hole" by Walter Cummins

 ~~This piece previously appeared in Outerbridge (1993)

                                      

            The cloud cover thickened just as the cable car began its ascent, lifting off from the wooden boarding shed and skimming the tall spruces on the mountainside. Paul knew they had lost the sun for the day; only a small circle of blue sky remained far in the distance.  When they reached the peak, even the nearby ranges would be swallowed in grey.

            "We won't see a goddamn thing."  Paul kicked a boot at the side of the car.

            "Stop pouting," Leslie told him. 

            "I came here for mountains."

            Their eyes locked, and Paul quivered with resentment.  An hour before, maids clattering outside their hotel room, they had thrashed in lovemaking, not caring that their cries could be heard in the hallway.  Now he found her lips thin and mean as she clenched her jaw.  We're only good in the dark, he wanted to tell her but instead turned away from her face.

            Below the dangling car, the village and its lake shrank into postcard perspective.  But the plastic windows of the car were yellowed and scratched, blurring his view.

            Perhaps most people had known clouds would ruin the midday brightness.  Only a few others were in the car with them, pressed against the sides and peering outward: a very old man in hiking breeches with a gnarled walking stick; a mother and young daughter with the same plump sullen face, side by side but saying nothing to each other; a middle‑aged couple in shorts and thick boots over heavy woolen socks, their legs tanned and muscled.

            When the car reached the first of the towering pylons that braced the cable, it rumbled over the metal base and pitched sideways.  Paul panicked: the wires were snapping, they would plummet.  He gripped a handrail and then‑‑an instant later‑‑felt foolish, wondering if Leslie had noticed.  She stared out at the treetops.

            "The top of the world," he scoffed.      

            Leslie turned to meet his gaze.  "I'm as disappointed as you are." 

#5: "Tourist Season at Auschwitz" by Mark Lewandowski

~~This piece previously appeared in The Gettysburg Review (1999)

On the morning of the October day that England qualified for Italia ’90 (the World Cup soccer tournament), a small group of Englishmen were seen by some of the sports press at Auschwitz, laughing and posing as they took pictures of each other—doing the Nazi salute.

Pete Davies, “All Played Out”

           

At Birkenau stands a mound unlike those dotting the countryside that Poles have built in remembrance of past generals and statesmen.  You will not see picknickers lay out blankets on it or watch their children roll down the slopes.  The Birkenau mound is a mass grave for Soviet soldiers killed by the Nazis.  The bodies were packed so tightly together that they are still decomposing, and when it rains now, almost fifty years later, human grease rises to the surface and fans out through the grass in a brilliant rainbow of color.

            Not far from the mound lies what looks like an ordinary pond.  Bend over and peer into its depths and you might be surprised not to see a minnow or two, at least, in the water.  Take a stick.  Dip it into the water and movie it in circles.  Soon, a whirlpool of gray ash will funnel to the surface.  This pond is only one repository for the remains of the Jews.

            A Polish actor told me that these were just a couple of the sights in the Auschwitz complex most tourists miss.  I was with two American women I had met in a youth hostel in Kraków.  This was the summer of 1990.  The Berlin Wall had been down for only seven months.  American tourists were still a novelty to most Poles.  The actor, who spoke English fluently, spied us three on the rickety commuter train from Kraców to Oświęcim, site of Auschwitz and Birkenau.  He was going to visit his mother, who was a librarian at the Auschwitz museum.

            “By all means,” the actor said, “do not spend the entire afternoon in Auschwitz.  After you have watched the movie and seen the major displays, go to Birkenau.  The barracks still stand unmolested by museum directors.  Wander the buildings and you will read messages written in coal by the inmates.  You will find fragments of clothing, steel cans, rotted straw, heating stoves.  Leave the barracks and follow the tracks to the gas chambers.  They have not been reconstructed.  They have been left the way they were found, a much more profound statement to the horrors of the Holocaust than the glitz you will find in Auschwitz.  Why would the retreating soldiers bother to destroy the evidence if they were not aware of the incredible crimes they had committed against humanity?  Do not believe that they felt justified or that Hitler brainwashed them.  They knew their sin.  You will not experience their guilt among the glassed-in cases of human hair and suitcases at Auschwitz.  Only in Birkenau, the much larger of the camps, will you find what you are seeking.”