#70: "Requiem" by J.D. Smith

~This poem previously appeared in The Raintown Review (2012).

Requiem

A teddy bear, an R.I.P.

            Spray-painted on a wall,

An empty bottle mark the place

            That saw a young man fall.

His name reads like leftover type

            Or random Scrabble tiles

Appearing now, if not before,

            In transcripts and case files.

Perhaps a hard look or a word

            Translated into beef:

The seed unknown, the harvest come

            To customary grief.

What counsel could be offered here

            That wouldn’t be declined

As some attempt to, once again,

            Impose a whiter mind?

From habit, hope or vague good will

Some write checks and some vote.

Awaiting the desired effects

            Leaves ample time to note

A teddy bear, an R.I.P.

            Spray-painted on a wall,

An empty bottle mark the place

            That saw a young man fall.

*****

#69: "Plot, Variations I, II and III (Chapters One through Ten)" by Robin Black

~This essay first appeared in The Colorado Review (2007).

PLOT

VARIATIONS I, II AND III

(CHAPTERS ONE THROUGH TEN)

One

i.

I bought my family’s burial plot in early April 2001.

ii.

The students in my Advanced Fiction Writing course have continuing difficulty distinguishing between what—if anything—happens in a story and what—if anything—it means.

iii.

I’ve been trying for more than five years to write something about the days right after my father died.

Two

i.

The plot is large enough for me, my husband, my two brothers, my sister-in-law and my parents. When I bought it, I stopped at that number, recoiling at the thought of the next generation—my own children, niece, and nephew—ever buried there. Or anywhere. And anyway, I decided, by the time they’re all old enough to die, death will almost certainly have been cured.

It’s just about a mile from my house. My mother lives in Manhattan and my brothers north of Princeton, but we settled on a place here in Philadelphia for two reasons. First of all, it’s beautiful—a Civil War–era cemetery filled with mature trees and marble monuments landscaped into hills. Some of the mausoleums are true works of art. The other reason we chose it is that when the decision came up, when it became pressing, I told my mother and my brothers that I would like to have Dad nearby—that I’m a cemetery visitor by nature and would find comfort in his proximity. That was about a month before he died.

ii.

“On a sentence by sentence level,” I write on one student story, “your work is really very fine. I found myself making very few line edits. And I have a vivid sense of the characters and the setting. You might want to check for areas where the descriptions could be tightened—you’ll see I’ve marked a couple of those, but basically you should be very proud of the prose itself.

“I do have some questions, though, about the larger meaning of the piece. A lot happens, but it isn’t clear to me what you want me to take away from having read this. I’m not insisting that Harvey go through any kind of earth-shattering epiphany here; that doesn’t feel like what you’re going for and trust me, I don’t think every story needs that kind of ending. But still, all these events you’re recounting don’t seem to add up to much—I don’t have the feeling by the end that I understand something more or better than I did when I started reading—even just something about the story itself. That sounds a little harsh, I know, and I don’t mean to be harsh—because, really, there’s a lot here to be admired. One of my own teachers used to talk to me about the difference between a story and an anecdote. We can speak about this more when we meet, but I wonder if pondering that distinction a bit might be useful for you?”

iii.

This week, I tell my mother it’s useless trying to write about the whole what the hell went on with me around Dad’s death thing. After more than five years, I’m done trying.

“Not everything that happens is a story,” I say. “I should know that by now.”

#68: "The Silents" by Adam Vines

~This poem first appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review (2011)

THE SILENTS

Her platinum finger-waves fallen, her roots dark as liver,

bearing witness like Nora’s I.O.U.

in A Doll’s House, looking now like a faded star’s comb-over,

Anita Page trades Clara Bow her mackerel-blue

brooch for three cigarettes. Thunder

cracks over the delta. Alice Joyce armors

her cheeks with her hands and squats under

a bush, her eyes empty as an itinerant farmer’s. 

Vamps, virgins, and flappers wait for the curtains

to meet, for the subconscious noises

from critics cueing the Wurlitzer

for the upturned faces of those relegated to vaudeville haze.

The yellowing Friday Photoplays burn,

the women’s I dos and I can’ts engraved

in their expressions on the covers--words

their lost, soft tongues never had to crave.

Buster Keaton rows up to the shore,

then suddenly--arm raised, hat cocked--

his peevish “Ladies . . . ” diffracts the sun-glare

from the firmament painted across the backdrop. 

*****

#67: "World Without Columbo" by Kim Church

~This story was previously published in Shenandoah (2004).

            After the hurricane, when our cable service was finally restored, we began picking up channels we hadn’t paid for.  It’s been months now and the company still hasn’t caught on.  My husband feels guilty, but I tell him to look at it this way: we’ve been given a gift, the best kind, one we didn’t expect or deserve, and we should make the most of it, especially since we know it can’t last forever.  The truth is, I don’t want to lose my Columbo reruns.  One of our new stations plays two Columbos every Monday morning and one on Thursdays, and I’ve been taping them all.

            I’ve always loved the show, the puzzle of it.  Every episode is an inverted mystery: early on, you witness a murder; you’re in on the murderer’s construction of an alibi.  The object isn’t to come up with who did it or how or why, but to pick out the flaw in the murderer’s deception, the telling clue.

            Columbo notices everything.  He has an eye for inconsistency and always zeroes in on the one detail, however small, that doesn’t fit the big picture.  The streak of shoe polish on the living room door.  The victim’s radio tuned to classical music instead of country-and-western.

             I had just started middle school when the series premiered in the fall of 1971.  It came on every third Sunday, part of the NBC Sunday Night Mystery lineup, and I watched with my father, the only thing we regularly did together.  Unlike his other shows, this one was quiet — no canned laughter, no gunfights, no screaming.  Even the music was understated, sometimes no more than a single piano note played over and over again, steadily building suspense. 

            My reason for watching was different than my father’s.  I wanted to learn to think like Columbo, to have the kind of mind that would always recognize what was important.  My father wanted to be entertained.  He went in for all the corny side plots involving Columbo’s unnamed basset hound, his sputtering French car, his rumpled raincoat with the half-smoked cigar in the pocket.  Columbo’s bumbling-cop routine cracked my father up.  Columbo could never leave a room only once; he always had to duck back in with — my father would call out in unison — “just one more question!”  Mostly my father liked Peter Falk.  “That’s actually Peter Falk’s raincoat,” he would say.  “That’s his own suit.  See those shoes?  He brought them from home.”  He would study Peter Falk’s face to figure out which of his eyes was glass.  That was the mark of a truly great actor, he believed, when you couldn’t tell which eye was glass. 

#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.