#197: The Remedy by Tim Mayo

 ~ This poem was first published in River Styx (2011).

You were fat in those days: neglect

had slipped like a towel from your waist

showing the whole world the soft rolls of yourself.

How it all glowed under your skin

like a radium dial,

becoming in the end:

a thick envelope for a thin heart.

And on summer nights, when the heat

dripped off the leaves like fat caterpillars,

you’d hang out sniffing cognac, putting on airs

in the only class restaurant around.

Those were the days when haute cuisine

were still foreign words

meaning something more than meatloaf.

How it moved you purposely along

up an invisible ladder

toward some new decorum.

Still, you dared to ask the slim dishwasher,

her first night ever on a job,

to go for a swim after work.

She was a young slip of a blonde with corkscrew hair,

whose father had wired your house and whose lightning wrath

you had never known,

but always feared

like a biblical child fears his Maker.

Nonetheless, somewhere in that part of your brain,

where things dwelled under the surface,

as quiet as crocodiles,                                    

you both knew the pitter-patter

and thump of your intent.                      

*

There is a safety in numbers

when a handful of strangers all begin to disrobe at once,

side by side,

in the sweltering privacy of their own dark space.

Everyone concentrates so hard

to liberate their right foot

from the left leg of their lonely lives,

they see nothing else, and nakedness goes unnoticed.

(But let’s forget about the others.

They are irrelevant.)

The two of you slip into the water

as pat as opposable thumbs.

You swim out to the raft

where a host of faceless bodies

loll about like Romans.

The idea of numbers is still in play.

Then, one by one, the faceless bathers

roll off the raft and swim away,

taking with them the peeled grapes

and nibbling minnows of their hands,

and only the two of you are left to count the stars.

*

You know how it is about the dark,

how even in a moonless sky

the night stars can seem strong enough

to show you things as if it were day.                        

That’s when you noticed                    

the statuary-beauty of her body,

(as if your art had suddenly found art)      

but what you remember most about that night,

and knew you would,

as you stood watching

her leggy presence

cross and uncross itself,

before she reached up to, finally,

clasp her hands behind the bustle of curls

bedding her head

––so unabashedly at ease––so unafraid––willing to show you––

every delicate portion and pocket

of her being,

that it was hard to believe she was that young,

and that you did not touch her––not out of fear––

nor youth––nor even any unwritten law of decency––

but out of an inkling that, one day, this memory

of her fearless poise would be more precious

to you than what you sought.

*****

#196: "Somebody for Everybody" by Kathy Flann

~This story first appeared in The North American Review (2011).

How he had knocked, Francine could not guess. But here he was. Or at least here was his head. Floating in the hallway outside her apartment, as if it had wafted over on the aroma of Mrs. Singh’s stir-fry. Here was the sun-kissed face from his Match.com profile. The broad forehead and faintly hooked nose. Somehow, though, it had seemed like the head would be attached to an equally rugged, sun-kissed body. Had it been presumptuous to assume, at the very least, a torso?

The two of them blinked at one another. Why hadn’t she thought to use the peephole?  Then again, would that have painted the picture? Maybe the best thing to do was to back into her apartment, real easy, pretend she hadn’t noticed anything out here, go back to listening to big band music in the living room and waiting for her date to show up – her whole date.

“You can’t send a guy flirty emails for two weeks and then close the door in his face just because he’s different,” he said. He slurred his words, and he sank as if deflated, hovering over the carpet. Against its Persian pattern, he was like a genie. She caught a glimpse of his bald spot – another thing the photo didn’t reveal. No wishes to be granted today, it seemed. Down at shin-level, he tilted his face to look up at her, eyes bloodshot.

“Are you… drunk?” She felt a flush of shame about their electronic repartee, the quick-fire IM chats about politics and old flames.

“I don’t know why I bother with dating,” he muttered.

It now seemed significant that he’d left blank all of the slots for physical characteristics on his Match.com profile. Francine had assumed that he was simply too busy (i.e.successful) at his job as a trial attorney to bother. Or at worst, that he was unusually short. Which would have been okay – Francine had dated a jockey once, when she lived back in her hometown of Smoky Ordinary, Virginia. But this….

#195: "Aqui" by Li Yun Alvarado

~This poem first appeared in PALABRA: A Magazine of Chicano & Latino Literary Art (2008).

Aquí

En esta vida falta          espacio

para tanto amar.

Chillidos, murmullos,

acero contra acero.

Estos latidos, el tren.

Y soñar es vivir

y dormir es soñar

y aquí, aquí mi niño,

dum dum dum

este corazón.

translation:

Here

This life lacks         space

for so much love.

Screeches, whispers,

steel against steel,

these heartbeats, the train.

And to dream is to live

and to sleep is to dream

and here, here, my child,

thump thump thump

this heart.

*****

#194: Three Poems by Kerri French

~This poem was previously published in The Southeast Review (2010).

 

Shelton Laurel

In January 1863, 13 accused Union sympathizers were executed by a Confederate regiment in the Shelton Laurel Valley of Madison County, North Carolina.  Having followed the Confederate soldiers to learn the fate of the men and boys who were taken, the women of the valley were caught and stripped of their clothing, tied and beaten, and hung by their necks until they were nearly dead.   

The birds spoke slower, then,

the eyes of each bound girl unstoppable.  

What became of us was a field,

roads submerged under a tale

of blue, the trees calling each starry

point a lion or a liar, a man pouring

water over heads.  Across miles,

we counted leaves gripped low

beneath the storm, orange clouds

shaking the pulse of our throats.  

When the last girl lost her center,

the music churning through the fall,

we retraced her steps until the hours

bled into snow, each backward glance

a moan unrecognized, the weather

a ceiling displaying the scene

of what happened, girl after girl

of seasons circling beyond return.  

*****

#193: "May or May Not" by Sandra Gail Lambert

~This essay was previously published in New Letters (2013).

~Selected by Kenneth Fleming, Assistant Editor.

I remember always seeing the underneath of things.  I'm sitting on a bath rug, and black and white tiles spread away from me and foreshorten into corners.  Summer sunlight illuminates the soap smears and family hairs around the claw feet of the tub.  It's Norwegian sunlight and has no humidity to blur the edges.  Each small hair throws a shadow.  The tub is deep, which means high over my head.  I don't remember how I get into the tub any more than anyone who hasn't left her braces and crutches in the bedroom and crawled to the bathroom remembers how she got in a tub.  But perhaps I pull myself onto a close-by toilet and then swing over to the rounded edge.  It's nineteen sixty-six, and at fourteen I'm strong and agile from a life of crutch walking.

I have probably balanced the beers on the back of toilet.  Or maybe there's a table beside the tub.  Yes, a table.  It wavers into view—a marble square set on turned dowels of pale wood.  Is this the same table that came to me when my mother died and now sits beside my bed supporting a water glass, body lotion, and always a stack of books?  I do remember the black plug on a chain.  And the swaths of precious summer light through the window—glinting on faucets, creamy over the porcelain, slicking the tiles.  It must have been a Sunday afternoon.  Afternoon because of the slant of light.  Sunday because of how my mouth stank with thirst.  On Saturday I would have passed for eighteen in my madras skirt from the Montgomery Ward Catalog and gone to bars.  I don't remember that Saturday night, but mostly, on a Sunday morning, I never quite remembered the night before.  Although I would have caught the last before-curfew bus out of the city and not missed my stop.  Sometimes I remember a sloppy groping with a stranger in the back seat.  Had I met him at the bar?  On the bus?  Perhaps on this Sunday my lips feel bruised. 

#192: "All She Knew She Learned at the Movies" by Lois Roma-Deeley

~This poem was previously published in Sow’s Ear (1991). 

i

Paper Covers Stone

Some flicker of morning

light breezes through the blind

of my kitchen window

strikes the wall white. A drum

stick from last night’s dinner

lies alone on top the bed

of baby peas. Close up

I’d say my lines

around the mouth

are much too fine

to see. In fact I’m often told

by perfect strangers on the street

I look like Bette Davis

in Dark Victory. Only the eyes

go soft when I

bite my lip: a thousand times I said no

don’t buy me a solitary

pearl set in gold.

He married

poorly, and when they took off—

all the way to God

knows where—I swear

I was relieved.

ii

Scissor Cuts Paper

Time has two hands

around my throat

and you’re urging

him to squeeze me

harder. Aren’t you

satisfied? Look

in your wildest dreams

envy

is the enemy

who points a finger

at your wrist, watches

the tantrum of blue veins

blister thin skin, then smiles—

                   spitting in your ear:

he should have married me.

iii

Stone Smashes Scissor

No one in the world

cares to hear the story

of how it all began or

if in fact they were

a perfect looking pair.

No one in the world knows that

when she bites her lip

she needs to be alone;

when she speaks of love, she only

talks of him—how much

he cost her: cruelty

is a shock for those who feel

no one in the world

leaves a light on at home

without locking every door

twice, without closing

all the windows tight.

She hears a knock downstairs and sure,

she gets up to answer, but

no one in the world

is there. The winter

wind, trapped deep within

a wall, comforts her,

that’s all. She knows the roar,

once a sea-rose of pink sound,

carried him far out

to the shallows of her

well-lit house. There, wading in

the pools, she made love

feel like a world

where no one ever goes.

*****

#191: "The Cumulative Effect" by Jon Chopan

~This story was previously published in Post Road (2010).

~Selected by Kenneth Fleming, assistant editor of Redux.

The Cumulative Effect

In April, one month after my father went off to war, leaving my mother and me behind, my mother made me dress in a button up shirt and one of my father’s ties and she took me out on a date.  That’s what she said: “We’re going on a date, mother and son.”  I was seventeen.  The invasion of Iraq came and went and then the hunt for Saddam Hussein began.  I imagined my father hunting him, hiding in remote locations or marching for days through the desert.  We lived in Rochester, New York in a house on the east side.  My mother worked part time as a waitress at a little diner around the corner from our house called, The East Ridge.  My father would never have allowed us to eat at a fancy restaurant.  In fact I couldn’t remember ever eating out before that night, so I was shocked when we went to a swanky restaurant in the arena district.

            I pressed my mother about that. “How can we afford this meal?” I asked. 

            “Combat pay,” she said between bites of her 16oz steak.  “It’s the one good thing your father ever did for us.”

            “Does Dad know about this?”

            My mother set her fork down and wiped her mouth on the cloth napkin.  She rubbed her chin like she was thinking about something and then she picked up her fork again, waving it in front of her while she spoke.

            “What he doesn’t know won’t kill him.”

            I wasn’t comfortable being in a restaurant.  Mainly because I had only been in them on our infrequent visits to my mother’s parents.  I wasn’t really sure how to act.  But also I felt like we were betraying my father’s wishes.  I picked at the steak my mother insisted I order.  

            “Do you think he’s coming back?”  I asked.

            My mother put her fork down again, this time making eye contact.

“Honey, we aren’t that lucky.  He’ll be back.”

*