#86: "Visions and Revisions" by Art Taylor

~This piece previously appeared in North American Review (2004).

    Tending the spaghetti, Sandra studied the cabinets on the wall beside her. Their whiteness, she knew, was proof that she had painted them, wasn’t it? After all, they had been brown once, surely. She remembered picking them out with her ex-husband before the house was built, choosing them from the builder’s ragged catalog, and later she had painted them white when the marriage was over, just to make them hers alone. One hand on the stirring spoon, she raised the other to smooth her fingers across the face of the nearest cabinet’s door. It was slightly wet with steam from the boiling pot, and there was a small smudge near the handle. She’d need to clean that up. These too—the cabinets, the steam, the smudge—were real.

Her eyes swept across the kitchen: the sink, porcelain not stainless (her choice); the sponge perched on the corner, sticky with soap and destined for the trashcan; the microwave, the toaster, the can opener; the pass-through window separating kitchen and living room, its ledge decorated with a small gathering of imitation Herend rabbits, and beyond that her boyfriend Curt slapping her nine-year-old daughter Wendy; a spice rack; a series of containers for sugar, flour, coffee and tea, ceramic containers whose surfaces were shaped like basketweave; the jolt of the cabinets as his hand struck her cheek; a stray red oven mitt, just out of reach.

     Sandra gripped her thumb and forefinger around the counter's edge, pressed it hard. Then she turned her attention back to stirring her spaghetti—turned her attention, in fact, more completely to its swirl and tumble in the big black pot. She half-hoped that the busy flow of bubbles or even the twist of the noodles themselves would begin to form some pattern, restore her sense of order. She half-expected, after what she’d witnessed over the last few weeks, that the spaghetti might even curl itself into a group of letters: WATCH OUT or HE DEVIL or even HELP. They didn’t, of course, and as the steam formed a film on her glasses, she closed her eyes, fought the urge to thrust her hand into the pot—a burn to chase away the images that were chasing her. She knew already that later that night, after she had put Wendy to bed, after she and Curt had gone back to her bed, after they’d had sex and his snores had settled into a slow, steady rhythm, she would do as she had done too many nights recently. She would lift Curt’s right hand and examine it in the moonlight straying past the dogwood just outside the window, compare his right with his left to see if it seemed any more red or any more swollen, search in vain for some proof of his violence. She would go into Wendy’s room then and sit on the edge of that bed, peer down at her daughter’s cheek in the light from the hallway, gently turn the girl’s head from side to side to look for the bruise that was never there.

      Sandra opened her eyes. The film had dissolved from her glasses. The spaghetti was almost done. She looked through the passway beneath the cabinets into the living room where Curt was simply helping Wendy with her homework, just as he’d been doing all along.

#85:Two Poems by Daniel Bosch

~This poem previously appeared in Turnstile (1991).

Mackerel

—and Roy came up from his deck chair shouting "God-

dam, boy! This is really living!" and reeling back

hard, the cold bottle of Heineken between his legs

splashing his plaid shorts and falling to the deck

of his immaculate Ramblin', just as the fish,

curving into bright hooks, the stripes on its sides

fracturing gray into light, liquid as anything living

underwater could be, and free on twenty feet

of fifteen-pound test taut from a struck rod,

came aboard, vertical, flashing, twisting, writing its name,

mackerel, and landing so hard it spattered

blood over the ice chest which was half full of ice

but roomy enough for the fish to slap itself cold.

Roy was out of breath, but "Goddam!"—another fish,

on the other line, the glas whipped to the gunwale

and the spool giving with a whine—"You take her, boy,"

Roy said, pointing, and I knew he meant the pole,

the fish, not the wheel already in my hands.

So I let her go and picked her up, and Roy

fell across the deck chair he'd forgotten

he'd been sitting in trying to take over the helm,

and she, Ramblin', bucked into a swell

rolling under us, and past us, toward the coast,

the color of wet sand. There we were,

right where everything changes:  old man, fish,

and beer bottle in a reckless dance, twin Merc's

stuttering on troll, and me, for the first time,

at fifteen, with a her in my hands not wanting

to be steered or shifted; for whom, once hooked,

there was no reverse, no leaving the dance floor

terrified and ashamed because I'd pressed

my awkward, unmediated body against hers.

"Goddam," I'd said, walking home. Too soon?

Too hard? What did you have to do or be?

Cool? I had friends said they merely jerked 

them in—"Tip up, boy!" Roy was screaming, "Tip up!"

hardly in control.  I planted my feet on the deck,

foamy in an inch of Gulf and beer. "She's yours,

boy, don't let her get away!"—but she pulled

much harder than I ever wanted to believe

she would, and then she broke the water, spectral,

duplicating Roy's fish but further out and further off

Ramblin's starboard, as if the time between

his fish and mine were a mirror angled up and away,

and the mackerel danced there, three-quarters of an inch

of metal threading its mouth, seeming a part,

somehow, of the pole straight up in my hands, and suddenly

the gulls above it scried, and it was if they spoke

for the whole goddam run of mackerel, hundreds of them,

blue and yellow, we were running across. I wanted

to see her snap, to twist, to flash, and so I jerked back

hard and she came flying in at me, hard and wet

and shivering water from her body, and the blood—

*****

#84: "What the Living Do" by Judith Barrington

~This essay previously appeared in Creative Nonfiction (2007).

If you’ve never had reason to visit the North Front Cemetery in Gibraltar (and why should you?), you might find it hard to imagine how it sprawls across hard flat ground with that famous wedge of rock jutting into the clear blue sky, watching over the strategic Strait to the south and over the dead to the north. At its foot lie Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and nothing-in-particulars, all taking an eternal sun bath beneath this piece of British soil just eight miles from Africa. There, too, lie my mother and father.

I don’t claim to have made a comprehensive survey of cemeteries, but I have visited quite a variety. I like wandering where the spirits of the dead linger and, in fact, just three blocks from my house in Portland, Oregon, is a beautiful graveyard. My dog used to love it as much as I do; we spent happy hours there together, I reading names that now belong to city streets as well as to early pioneers, and she gamboling among the old oaks and cedars, dodging between headstones with her tongue hanging to her knees, sprinting after squirrels that scurried up trees to spit their squirrelly curses down on her head. Together, we wandered among the Wetherbees and the Birrells, turned past chipped urns and carved stone trees, our bodies breaking the pearly spiders’ webs that stretched between granite markers and the iron bars of a mausoleum; sometimes our feet and paws stepped accidentally on the slabs naming Viola Cadonau and her Patricia, who died at three days old. But that was before the No Dogs went up and the place began to be patrolled by an army of women from the Cemetery Preservation Society or some such organization.

In New Orleans I discovered that the dead lie, not discreetly underground, but overhead in massive tombs. In Mexico, I visited Patzcuaro, where the dead lie on an island in the lake, and on the Day of the Dead little boats full of festive, singing people, make their way through the reeds and across the water, while the music of guitars and trumpets echoes around the shore as night falls, the lanterns and candles on the island merging with the galaxy overhead. In London, I hunted down the square block in Old St. Pancras Church which memorializes Mary Wollstonecraft, and explored Highgate Cemetery where George Eliot’s grave is surrounded by a wilderness of old-growth trees, flowers and shrubbery that shelters birds and foxes. Her friend and admirer, Elma Stuart, clearly knew the importance of a final resting place, having fought vigorously to be buried next to the writer.

To one who grew up by the blousy bluebell woods and smooth-flanked downs of Sussex, nothing will ever quite equal an old English churchyard. Indeed, I’ve never been able to shake off a certain regret that my parents do not lie near daffodils, under chestnut trees, in a graveyard filled with crooked stones and birdsong. Though they were infrequent churchgoers, the square Norman tower of the church, the lich-gate, and the local woman coming in to do the flowers, would have been comfortably familiar. But like so many who are buried at Gibraltar, their final resting place was dictated by the sea.

#83: "In Glue We Trust" by Joanne Rocky Delaplaine

 ~This poem previously appeared in Poet Lore (2004). 

In Glue We Trust

I believe love is the glue that holds the world intact.

I believe in the temporary bond of Post-it notes, 

the L-5 bus driver who took me out of the cold,

the wet, whose hands were God’s, delivering me

to the promised land, though I believe promises,

like lives, are bound to come undone.

I believe in Duco Cement. It smells blade sharp,

dries on your skin like it’s peeling down to

raw bone. I believe in the glue of your bones

against my own. I believe in the glue librarians use

to bind books, I believe in the invisible glue

that binds them to their work.

I believe in hot wax on hard copy, putting

the newspaper to bed, in a union shop, many hands

hauling to a common song.  I believe in going home, 

and coming back to work. I believe in the solder

and acetylene torch. I believe in the jazz of steel on brass,

in Ella and Louie delighting in a B-flat, be-bop scat.

I believe in the law of magnets: that opposites attract,

the alchemy of Muslim and Jew, thin and thick, of white

and black. I believe in clay slip used to cover cracks,

the broken leg that’s wrapped in a cast, the aloe vera balm

on burns, the salve of words,  I believe my salvation

is buried in the cell tissue of my scars.

I believe that gentle hands can know the knife, the cut,

the sword. I believe in Kali and her necklace of skulls.

I believe there will always be wars. I believe we are born

with the knowledge of our death, that we make it up as we go,

flying on a dream and a curse, hanging by the blues,

swinging from a high note of grace.

I believe when my daughter was Rumplestiltzkening

inside me, we spun the finest gold on earth. 

I believe I bring my spider’s silk with me

to bind me fast to this oh-oh, this no-you-don’t,

this Devil-May-Care-, this roll-of-the-dice,

this doo-wah, doo-wah, wind-blown world.

*****

#82: "Keeper" by Steve Adams

~This story first appeared in Glimmer Train (1998).

Keeper

There was the smell of the dust, and the smell of the sand, and the smell of the rides, and the smell of the crowds which each day had a different smell, and there was the smell of the horses and the morning and the night. There was the smell of The Thing and The Thing's shit. So it smelled. What didn't?

Well, he thought. Alright, then. So he changed it.

"I'll need talc, or corn starch if you don't have it, and a first aid kit in case it's got sores from being swaddled up so. Don't tell Old Man Dawkins. He keeps changing it every morning just like before. You use diapers?"

"Yeah."

"So we'll go through twice as many diapers. If I'm gonna do this I don't want to be running out."

Jacobsen stared at the kid. "Okay. We'll get more diapers."

"And I'll need somebody to help with the trash. "It's too much for me already. If I got to take care of it, too…"

"I've had men quit can't take its screaming. Once it starts up…night after night screaming and won't stop. How the hell do you make it shut up?”

"I dunno."

"What do you do?”

"I dunno. I sing to it. That's one thing."

"You sing to it?"

"That's one thing."

What he meant was, what he wouldn't tell Jacobsen was, The Thing stopped screaming before he ever sang to it. It stopped the moment it saw him.

#81: "Rise That We All May Rise" by Maud Kelly

~This poem previously appeared in Natural Bridge (2009).

Rise That We All May Rise

One moment your neighbor is vibrant. As you mulch your lawn she walks by, two children striding alongside, headed to school or home.

The next she’s gone. Or not exactly. She’s receded, gone ill.

She’s bald shadow, or something, an eagle, maybe, turning her head to look at you when you bring the casserole, when you smile and squint your eyes and tell her she looks good.

There’s an art to it, a kind of sport, to hovering, to gathering the neighbors, and you do, and put your heads together: blonde heads and redheads and children’s heads, books and movies in baskets, and your own walking back and forth across the lawn, making it nice, the thoughts you shake off.

Later, after your visit, your skin lathered in the shower and the steam, a picture comes to you. That owl, the big golden and cream-colored owl that appeared out of nowhere one day and perched right on the edge of your road, inches from the cars.

As they rolled by it barely moved its boxy head. Just the wind ruffled its flurry of neck, and its shoulders seemed – stalwart – was that the right word?  Probably not, but it seemed to ache, and you’d have thought it would have hidden itself in the trees, but it hadn’t.

Usually you would have called the sanctuary and had them come but something in it spooked you and you pulled into your own driveway instead, got out, turned toward the broom, or, no, to the rake, or was it just that you reached into your pocket for the keys. Whatever, it didn’t matter now.

But the way you felt then, as though every still thing in the world could stitch itself like a stone under your skin and keep you from moving, too. Like any one thing you did would matter no more than any other.

*****

#80: Four Poems by George David Clark

~This poem was previously published in Smartish Pace (2011).

The Plush

                        “In the shadows a bad guy upholsters his weapon.”

                        -typo in a student’s fiction

He cocks the parlor lamp to throw a blade

of light across the contours of the problem:

the gutted wing chair that his young wife paid

for with a five. To cover it will rob him

of the evening, but if she comes home to fine

décor, she’ll be in debt another favor.

Their meal last night, the veal filet and wine,

has canceled out the flowers that he gave her

and his note: you do too much. So, to do more,

to best her, hold her hostage in the name

of sacrifice, he sinks a knife into the chore

and staple-guns a crewelwork to the frame.

When he hears her car, he stands and aims

the chair, that padded weapon, at the door.

 ***