#66: "A Gospel of the Human Condition" by Jennifer Militello

~This poem previously appeared in The North American Review (2010)

A Gospel of the Human Condition

And we are left on the cold sills of a world.
Years come and loiter in the bottles

we discard, years come and stir

with the wind, years singe like cigarettes

as they burn past their filters, the papers

of winter as they ladder to the ground.

Even here, in this mechanical hour,

dying becomes a hundred armored lords.

A grain of sand wears a volt of thought

more soft than the green of torture.

An asymmetry of irises.

The stars, that bed of nails.

It is the howl we make instead of love,

while the pigeons stir their ragged sleep

and sleep their dirty rivers, while

the evening is a crier of wounds.

Hewn, we are the minnows. Shallows

hold us in the bare of our shadows.

Alone, we are mourned by

our own ruined shrines, and the voyages

mine through our waking. What takes, what

makes scalpels of each of the eyes, each

a called mile, each a spun-sharp waiting.

We are faithless, fainting, praying.

The hair shirt is not enough. The fish hook

is not enough. We kiss in the corners

of subway stations. We undress in public.

We are cruel to animals. When we sing,

we sing poorly. Some mechanism in our hearts

fails and this causes a tinkering of happiness.

The old laws take hold. The single hoof

of each of our hearts remains unshod.

Our half-starved dogs are beaten, their ribs

listen to the darkened apartments within,

our voices trim the windows. We are

sure to be forgiven. We are sure to

feast. We oxidize in several winds.
There is shrapnel in the rain. We fade

like several finches. Ourselves

at the periphery. Begotten, not made.

*****

#65: "Midrash" by Sandell Morse

~This story was previously published in the New England Review (1997).

             Bessie Feldman parks her car in front of Hebrew College in one of those spaces marked with the symbol of a wheelchair. She does and she doesn't like this privilege. Her hip replacement is healing slowly, and even now, months after the operation she feels pain and walks tilted, will probably always walk tilted, the doctor says. Now, he says this. Not before. But that's the way life goes. It happened with Erv, her husband, the year before. A "routine" operation, gall bladder, and then, his heart stops, and they take her to the meditation room. A small room with quiet walls, quiet chairs and a closed door, and Erv's regular doctor isn't there. Some emergency. And she's standing with a thin young man, who has somehow been singled out, and Bessie wonders what he's done to get this job. "Mrs. Feldman... I'm sorry." Later, Sally, her daughter, says that in ancient Greece, they killed those messengers, the ones who carried bad news.

            Bessie reaches for her purse, a small leather shoulder bag. She lifts the strap over her head. "Carry it this way," Sally has told her. "It frees you." Frees me. Sally worries about her hip. She calls every day. She wants Bessie to sell her house, to move to one of those retirement places. Aaron, her son, wants this too, but not as fiercely as Sally.

            Bessie eases her body out of the car and reaches back for her cane. She slams the door. Then, she sees her canvas bag still inside on the seat. Her lunch, her pad, and her pen. She steps off the curb and leaning hard on her cane, she opens the door and takes her bag. She sighs, deeply, and slams the door a second time.

            Bessie is short, and she's heavy, too heavy for this new hip. She tries to lose weight, to exercise. To do what the doctor tells her to do, and in the supermarket, she buys low-fat milk and tasteless no-fat cottage cheese. Then she throws a half-gallon of chocolate ice cream into her cart. Alone, at night, she opens the carton and without even scooping the ice cream into a bowl, she spoons the cold sweet treat into her mouth  This she does for company. Ice cream is company.

#64: "The Summer of Ham" by M.E. Parker

~This story previously appeared in The Briar Cliff Review (2006).

                      

          Fried chicken, cantaloupe, fresh squash, the moment she smelled her grandma’s kitchen marked the official start of summer. Since her mom never cooked anything that didn’t come from a box, bag, or frozen tray, Diane spent the two months at her grandma’s house every year as a bear, fattening in the weeks before hibernation.

          Even the old standbys, bacon and eggs, a simple slice of toast, tasted better there, but it was more than just flavor, it was the experience, doughnuts and pancakes for dinner, steaks for breakfast. The memory of every summer was a food--a feeling that set it apart from every other time in her life. Watermelon, between the second and third grades, invoked the smell of chlorine and musty towels, fried okra, the cracks in the ground on the back end of a two-year drought the following year. After sixth grade it was ham, a ham on Sundays and any succulent variation of leftovers in between. 

          If the summer she turned twelve were a ham sandwich, it would taste the way leather smells, licorice and wet grass, cigarette smoke and thunderstorms, and to wash it down, a tall glass of root beer, which would always be the wind outside her grandma’s window, the soothing howl of a gust of air skimming across the glass.

          It wasn’t the summer of her first boyfriend. That happened the year before, asparagus and cobbler, when she and Bobby kissed in the abandoned shack on the other side of County Road 80. It wasn’t the summer she became a woman either. That was four years later, and not during a visit to her grandma’s house. Ham hadn’t pulled her hair out of its ponytail or swapped out her boots for a pair of espadrilles. Ham had taken her to California. 

On Hiatus

Redux will be on hiatus until January 14, 2013.  Thank you for your continued support.  We're looking forward to bringing to light many wonderful new stories, poems, and essays in the new year!

#63: "Aubade" by Bill Beverly

                       

~This story was previously published in Indy Men’s Magazine (2003).

Sanders liked Tuesday on the subway, its sunken-in comfort, the lawyers happily moored in their battle suits. The papers thinned down and the tourists thinned out and the sleepy heads rolled behind their newspaper sails as the tracks dipped and swelled. Above the ground an August rain was falling, and at each station Sanders smelled it, warm and silty in the brushed cold of his mouth.

At Van Ness the man boarded the train, with a shaved head, a small paper bag held in at his belly like a dagger. Sanders was annotating the morning's news from the war, circling who was saying what about whom. But he sensed the man there, standing still, winnowing, gazing up the car. The doors slid shut and the man came up the aisle, glancing side to side, not looking for empty seats, but at the faces. Sanders reached down to touch his wife's thigh—she hated to be disturbed at reading—and he dipped his paper so she could see.

Her body stiffened on the padded bench.

She whispered, “Is this one?”

“Maybe.”

She lowered her paper, too.

Directly in front of Sanders sat a young Asian woman, perhaps Korean, hair so black and shiny it looked blue. The man in the aisle swallowed his breath when he saw her, and for an instant he froze, as if he'd forgotten something. Then his body carried him forward and he drew the paper bag away from what it concealed, and Sanders knew what he was.

#62: Two Poems by Anna Leahy

Editor’s Note:  Anna Leahy was on the inaugural Editorial Board of Redux.

~This poem previously appeared in Rhino (2003).

Recidivism

            Hill Correctional Center, 1991

The boys huddle on the playground,

whistle and play kickball like inmates trading

cigarettes—one with his lips

threaded together and him not saying

but listening to all he can think of now,

and another’s stare like someone

who knows it is twenty-four hours from

here to there, there to here,

like a soldier remembering limbs,

and the variety of ways they laugh and touch

to distinguish and rank themselves—

and their hands, all their hands

like my hands, simple, almost indistinguishable

like rosary beads and their repeated prayers,

even the small shiny space between

the Our Father and the Hail Mary:

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever

shall be, world without end.

I know of their uniforms—light

blue shirts, dark blue trousers, repeated wear,

a way to equalize with fabric

the rich kid and the poor kid,

the straight-A student and the one

who was left behind like the sixteen-year-old

who tried to kiss me,

put his big hands on me,

the way it made me feel, the forgetting

of the prayer—O my God,

I am heartily sorry for having offended thee

and I detest all my sins—the need

to revise later, the rapist and the carpenter

and the murderer and the altar boy, all the same,

just look. What else can you do

when the priest asks you

to hit him to help him

atone for his sins and be forgiven

but pick up the sturdy two-by-four

or that shiny chain with the nails

and swing away?

*****

#61: "Foot Notes" by K.L. Cook

~This essay originally appeared in Shenandoah (2002).

Feet are our primary proof of existence.  We are first identified by them: the nurses take us from our parents, clean the blood and womb fluids from our bodies, stand us on an ink pad and then on our birth certificates.  I asked a nurse why they did that when my second son, Tristan, was born.  Why not a fingerprint?  “The foot contains the more reliable markings at this age,” she said. “And we would hate to send you home with the wrong baby.” 

            We are a species of trackers.  We follow our quarry and identify our enemies by the footprints they leave behind.  We search for the fugitive, the absent parent, our ancestors by tracing their literal or metaphorical tracks.  On a recent PBS program, an archeologist shined a flashlight on footprints in a newly discovered cave, where there were drawings and a stone fire pit.  The footprints looked fresh in the dirt, as if they had been left there the day before.  The archeological tests revealed that the prints were over four thousand years old. 

            Feet are our basic mode of transportation, our direct connection with the earth, evidence of gravity.  The greatest track and field champions have always been those who win the sprints, those who can fly.  We may admire the endurance of the milers and marathon runners, but it’s Jesse Owens, Bob Hays, Carl Lewis, Florence Griffith-Joyner, Michael Johnson, and Usain Bolt we truly love.  They are the ones who remind us most of Hermes, the amiable fleet-footed messenger of the Greek gods.  The brilliance of the Nike commercials was their exploitation of our innate desire to defy gravity, to be like birds or gods, invulnerable, able to walk on air.

         Reflexologists tell us that every erogenous zone in our bodies has sensors in our feet.  I’ve heard a reflexologist claim that he can, by simple pressure to my foot, make me cry, recall my birth, or have the most intense orgasm I’ll ever experience.