#110: "In Black and White" by Terese Svoboda

~This story previously appeared in The Yale Review (2003).

                                                 

                       

            Henry does not want to sink heel nor toe into it. He unlaces and removes his shoes and then parts the cane and thorn and rubbish that the land here offers over itself but the laces snag even in Henry's uplifted hand while the thorns scrape deep into its white side. What I hear is what you might, words he learned from his mammy or so he says his father calls her when she curses, words I can hear even over the pump and the child, even over the gush of one and the howl of the other. As Henry fights his way through the briars barefoot, curses his way past the Cad and the boat and the Something Else vehicle you can't see from the street the thorns are so thick, the rat pink baby limbs get soap-rinsed and so slippery some tight gripping is involved, then some quick wrapping and baby soothing, some milk up front.

            He kisses us both, all lips buss air, and he pinches my cheek bottom to make the baby suck harder.

            He is putting in the horse stove, I say. Inside.          

         Henry says he has such a movie he is going to make, he is almost sure to make. Where is this stove?

            Before I can think how he will steer past the fallen wood and shingles to the stove place, the baby, nakedly post-pumpbath nursing, pees straight up at me, pees right into my ear as my head is turned toward Henry who now finds a smile you could shake up and find frothy.

#109: "Migration" by Laura Van Prooyen

~This poem originally appeared in Meridian (2008).

Migration

Listen, then.  Quiet as a dream.  As the moment

she held her breath to see the man who touched her

all night was not the one next to her sleeping.  If

that was a dream.  The man she met in the woods

with whom she stood knee-deep in mayapple

naming one hundred birds.  On the woodchip path

he took her heart outright and called it a ruby, a painted

rose-breast, a crest, a blood-red crown.  Even

without her heart, even within a dream, she knew

to put her plume in his hand was never to go back.

*****

#108: "Reprieve for the Minor Pain Ladies" by Sunil Freeman

~This essay previously appeared in WordWrights! (2001).

          Melodious, rhythmic, two words trip off the tongue with a dancer’s grace, four syllables each, each with a long vowel sound sandwiched between short vowels and a percussive shimmer of consonants: Ankylosing Spondylitis

            Ankylosis is a disease process in which joints become rigid. A spondee is a type of metrical foot in poetry – two heavy stressed downbeats. I’m taking some poetic license, since the: “spondyl” in the disease name refers to the spine, but it’s close enough for me.

            “Itis” is inflammation. About 25 years ago a friend maneuvering through the crush of people at a crowded party brushed against me, then nearly jumped back. He said heat was radiating from my neck. It was the “itis” in ankylosing spondylitis -- the flame in inflammation, the heat in the fire. A piece  of a word came to life.

            So: “Heavily stressed poetic units growing inflamed, becoming rigid.”  It almost sounds like some rare breed of erotic poetry.

            Much jazzier than the generic “arthritis,” as in “minor pain of arthritis.” That old phrase evokes a world of advertisements featuring bored actresses whose mildly troubled expressions barely hide the smiles that will shine when a couple of over-the-counter pills make everything all right.

            In in my early teens, walking in Sligo Creek Park, when a bee stings me on the hand. The year is 1967, or maybe ’68. A sudden inspiration accompanies the throb that follows the initial electrifying shock. It’s a thought so far outside my ordinary train of thinking that it nearly turns my mind inside out.

            Paraphrased, it goes like this: “Don’t label this experience as ‘painful’ or ‘bad.’ Just observe what you feel and see what happens.”

            I focus on a pulse, intensity increasing and decreasing in wave-like patterns. The rhythm of that throbbing becomes musical, like the drone of a tambura which sounds in the background of Indian classical music.

            The play of my thoughts is a melodic improvisation rising from that pulse; the bee sting grows into a gorgeous concert playing in my hand. Freed from the straitjacket of language, the experience becomes so enjoyable I almost miss the pain when it finally begins to subside. I don’t understand exactly what has happened, but know it’s important.

            We get clues in our lives, a sort of fragmented roadmap of what’s to come, if we can only read the signs. In the winter of 2001, recuperating from my fourth hip replacement, I recalled the bee sting, that fascination with pain. What is it? How do we deal with it?

#107: "Makeup" by Hadley Moore

~This piece was originally published in slightly different form in Midwestern Gothic (2012).

So this was what it was. Champagne gold read the label on the box. Anne Marie looked at the silver-colored pot in her hand, its contents like a dessert, a blondish mousse in a miniature ramekin. Against the lip of the pot’s smooth white insides the champagne gold seemed dark, but impossibly pale for its intent.

Was her face champagne gold? Champagne gold where it wasn’t port wine?

            Fifteen minutes ago her mother had returned from shopping in Traverse City. Among the bags she brought home was a tiny unmarked vellum one in which was nestled a tinier box (in which, Anne Marie knew now, had been nestled the still tinier pot of this mousse-like makeup).

"I found it at Macy’s," her mother told her.

Anne Marie had smiled and said thank you and asked if she should wait until tomorrow to open it.

"No. It’s not a birthday present. But listen, Anne Marie, don’t be mad."

And Anne Marie had wondered what she meant. The package looked like it could hold a pair of earrings, or a lip balm, maybe.

"Don’t be mad," her mother said again. "It’s just…I saw it, okay? I ran across it. And I thought of you. You’ll be thirty-nine tomorrow, honey. I mean, thirty-nine. That’s almost middle-aged."

Maybe not a lip balm, but earrings, perhaps, or a brooch.

"It’s not a birthday present. It’s just that it seemed…it seemed time. All right? Now I’m going out again for a bit."

When her mother gathered up her things to leave, Anne Marie had the sense she was being given privacy. She’d need the whole house to herself, apparently, to open the tiny package—and then she’d wondered, panic traveling up from the middle of her chest, what kind of sex thing could be so small. Was her mother giving her a filthy toy? Or birth control? Oh Lord, it made sense: "Don’t be mad," "You’ll be thirty-nine tomorrow," "It seemed time."

"No, Mom!" Anne Marie had shouted.

"Don’t be mad. I’ll be back in a couple of hours," her mother said, and shut the door behind her.

#106: "Chelsea Hotel, Room 101" by Allie Marini Batts

~This poem previously appeared in New CollAge Magazine (2001).

Chelsea Hotel, Room 101

is where they bring the gurney.

Between sodden lingerie, the knife’s rough part

grins like teeth in a tissueless tract where babies can’t grow.

Closed tight or half-open still, you think of your fingers

and count the times I didn’t call.

It’s like a hunger, this ache in my belly.

There’s a wet suck as it leaves my belly,

divesting me of Cupid’s arrow before raising the gurney.

If I had air left in my lungs, I’d call

for you, but I don’t. That’s the hard part.

I can feel your fingers,

even as the chills grow.

It is New York, cat-calls and traffic and sirens grow

loud too early in the day, and my belly

was full and tight now two hours ago, your fingers

did not trail behind the gurney

looking for one last touch through a cloth part.

You start to wonder if I did call.

Perhaps you slept through my call,

deaf to my voice in your opiate dreams; this can grow

tedious, the way television and smack is the part

of our day that never stops. You touch my belly

in your dream, and I turn into grey flesh on the gurney,

then straight back to ash, slipping through your bruised fingers.

Under the sink, my fingers

spread open wide from wanting. I grew sticky, my call

was too quiet for you to hear. I can see the gurney

for a split second, before the lights in the room grow

blurred. I have an echo in my belly,

spilling onto the tiles, my secret inside part.

In that desperate, strung-out part

of sliding away from you, at last I could feel. My fingers

found steel, mumbling inside my belly.

I am bleeding beneath the leaking sink. I don’t want to call

out to you, because you won’t let me grow

cold on the tiles, waiting for the gurney.

This is the part where I call goodbye to you.

I grow backwards, born again bloodless, a screaming baby again with closed fingers.

I can’t see you anymore from the gurney; I am curled up inside my own dead belly.

*****

#105: "Calling Up Billie" by Susan Starr Richards

~This story first appeared in Brilliant Corners, A Journal of Jazz & Literature (2004).

            That carefully breathy voice speaking out of my phone in the middle of the night, conjuring up my whole lost world—the late-night city world I left behind.

            “Are you sitting down?” the voice asks me.

            I’m lying down, in the bed. It’s 3 a.m. I live in the country now.

            But I’m wide awake, suddenly. “Why? What’s happened, Jo?” I ask.

            A pause. “This isn’t Jo. This is her sister,” the voice says.

            But it’s still Jo’s voice I hear. A voice that knows just how to let itself drop at the end of a phrase—the end of a moment—the end of a set. That music has a dying fall. So does the voice.

            And now that same voice—it says it is her sister—is telling me Jo had a dying fall, herself. Out the window of her apartment, fourteen stories down. What’s wrong with this conversation? Everything. How can someone who killed herself be telling me so on the phone?

            “I thought you’d want to know,” the voice says, before it drops back into the dark. “Since you were such good friends.”

#104: "Bounty and Burden" by Kelly Martineau

~This essay originally appeared in Quiddity (2012).

Bounty and Burden

Hunger

In those days, when my parents were still married and we lived in the white colonial on a tree-lined street, I began curling my shoulders forward, wrapping my body so that my chest sagged and became a hollow.  Once, when I was four, I wore a candy necklace—an elastic round punctuated by pastel beads that I could crack with my baby teeth.  My father’s best friend bought the necklace at the grocery when he and my father escaped from their wives long enough to buy more beer on a muggy Saturday afternoon.  Long after the candy was gone, the adults still emptied the cans.

Balloon

            In yoga, much work is done to open the chest.  Note the breath as it enters the lungs.  Lift the chest to the sky during sun salutations, in standing poses.  I breathe space into my upper body and feel my breastbone rise as my shoulders ratchet open, tugging against the years of internal rotation.