FALL 2014

1

The room is rented. It doesn’t belong to you. It is nicely anonymous, even luxurious, the kind of rustic that the internet has made famous: high, unadorned walls, a beamed ceiling with a triangular window well above anyone’s line of sight hung with a gauzy white curtain. Everything—the walls, the beams, even the hardwood floor—is immaculately white.

There isn’t much furniture. A long empty table against one wall, a white door on white sawhorses. Against the other stands a tall white bed with a white iron frame, bars on the headboard, the bed made with ironed, much-washed sheets, four pillows in pillowcases, and a thick down comforter in a duvet cover. Beside, a tall white lamp.

Sometimes the room is more like a hotel room, with a slim flatscreen mounted above the table and a small closet in one wall. Sometimes it’s messier, with piles of clothes and books of poetry, smudged half-empty cups of water on the floor, a pair of glasses lost under the bed. But the room stays white.

If there’s a door, you don’t know where it is.

2

Who is he? You couldn’t pick him out of a lineup, would struggle to describe him to another person. His height, his weight, even the shape of his body: unfixed. His face is blurry when you try to look at it. In shadow his skin is swarthy, blue-dark, but in the scanty light from the high window it rounds up rosy, pale, alabaster. His hair shades from black to pale, hangs in his face or disappears. Wet with sweat, it curls.

You try to urge the man into a familiar image, your friend, your coworker, your teacher, your student, your uncle’s best buddy, the guy at the gas station, the waiter who’s always nice to you, the produce clerk who leads you to the avocadoes at the grocery store, the tall foreigner with the impossibly fragrant cologne you once passed on the street, the college boy who helped teach you high school French, the grown man who paid you to tutor him for an important professional test, the kid who smiles at you in the bookstore, the friend’s son you watched grow from a waddling baby into a skinny, taunting adult. You could organize these men on a gradient, a timeline. Try to plot him on it.

Sometimes he is one of these people. You can force him into that shape for a few minutes, half an hour, once. But then something distracts you, some feel takes you, and he is faceless again.

Most of the time it doesn’t matter. You need his lips and tongue and eyes and nose. You don’t need to see them. Then over hours it creeps on you, that sense of being lost, of needing a referent. The horrible sensation from dreams of losing your sight in bits: your peripheral vision blacks first, and then you can’t see in front of you, as in ocular migraine. Waving your right hand in front of your face, trying to see. Like the recurring nightmare that comes just before waking in which you live in a tunnel, careening and blind, and the world hurtles past in mundane asteroids.

You try to find his features. You can’t. But the white room is not a nightmare. The man’s blurriness is a sign of his acquiescence. Of your power. Who cares if his face is only dimly grasped? You are not there to look at each other.

3

You come here from elsewhere. A curtain of dense red velvet is drawn between your life and the white room.

In your life you step out of your day clothes and into your nightclothes. You brush your hair back from your face, pin it at the nape of your neck, bow your head to clean your teeth and skin. You go to the bedroom and slip into bed. If it’s a cold night, you might sleep in a sweatshirt and pajama pants, or just a t-shirt and the pants. More often it’s just the t-shirt and a pair of underwear, or more often still, no nightclothes at all, only your own sweet humming skin. You pull the covers up, tuck your hands between your thighs, and close your eyes. The lights are put out.

Then you’re there on the edge of the tall white bed. The man found you, sought you out.

He knew what to say to get you to the white room. He recognized a tendency in you, a habit of lingering, and spoke the unlocking words. A spell you don’t know, couldn’t repeat.

4

You sit beside him on the bed. Or maybe you stand facing him, next to the desk.

You are nervous and casual, drumming fingers on the comforter, humming a little. There is no small talk in the white room.

“I’ve noticed something about you,” he says.

“Oh?”

“I can tell that you think about it all the time.”

There’s no point in asking what he’s talking about.

“It’s fine. It’s normal. What, are you embarrassed?”

Maybe you blush. His hand floats to your face.

“Why are you flushing?”

“It’s involuntary,” you tell him.

“Big word.”

You’ve heard this before. Your face shows your lack of interest. He will have to try harder.

“I don’t think it’s involuntary. I think you do it on purpose.”

You lean in. “How would I do that? Why?”

His hand goes to your neck, cups the curve there. “Because it looks good. C’mon.”

5

The first kiss is good. His tongue rubs yours, twists against it, triggers an adolescent memory: the first time you felt desire in your mouth, hot and hopeful. That’s what we lose, that’s what goes away: hope, mistakenly thought to be urgency. Excitement of the new. Joy at the idea it will continue.

He breaks the kiss by taking a handful of your hair and drawing your head back.

“No dark thoughts,” he says.

You look at him. “Sex is dark thoughts.”

“Not that kind of darkness.” He tightens his grip on your hair and everything inside you stops. He’s good. This is something he does, you think with relish. What you wanted. An expert.

“Look,” he says. “I want to mess around. Okay?”

“Okay.” You are aware of your shortened breath. The room swims.

“You first.”

“What?”

He releases your hair. You lunge to kiss again, but he pulls out of your reach.

“You gotta tell me,” he says. “What we’re going to do.”

You cock your head, a question.

“What I’m going to do,” he says.

You don’t blush this time. “Bite my neck,” you say. “Hickeys.”

5

He bends his head, takes a mouthful of your skin, and pulls it against his teeth with his tongue until a red spot grows behind your closed eyes.

Hickeys. Love bites. Spit-swabbed wounds, impossible to cover or ignore. Has there ever been anything better than hickeys? The little throbbing wound under your chin left by teeth that want your blood. A wonderful tree of bruises bloomed into your life around your fifteenth birthday. By the time you were twenty-five they wilted on the vine.

Other women tell you they hated them. Such a pain in the ass to cover the damn things with turtlenecks or awkwardly tied scarves or caked makeup. So inconsiderate. What did men think these other women were, teenagers?

You loved them. Marks that said mine. The idea of being marked. You were the thing marked mine.

Blood vessels burst under his sharp teeth, spreading an uneven purple cloud of bruise across your neck, beautiful and sore. You become just the skin in his mouth, your brain drifting beneath the surface of a pink sea.

Then he stops. You are used to sadness, but it surprises you every time: how quickly it rushes in to fill everything up. 

6

“Put your hand on me,” he says.

You put your hand on his shoulder, a warm round bone that fits into your palm, and he laughs.

“Not there.”

You are both clothed, but like his face the clothes are impossible to fix. You’re wearing whatever. The oxford shirt, jeans, and suede brogues you wear to work. A sundress and sandals. Black leggings, a black blouse, black shoes, and black eyeliner, what you put on when you need, desperately, to feel like yourself. It could be something overtly sexy, a backless dress or short-shorts, the kind of trashy teenage costume you love but rarely wear anywhere but your bedroom. But normally it isn’t, and why would it be? The white room isn’t a place where clothes stay on.

What he wears matters even less. Pants and a shirt. Maybe jeans. A suit. He wants you to touch the delta of his crotch, where an erection strains against his fly. He hasn’t laid a hand on your body save for your face and neck and your waist, which he used to steady himself during the hickey, but now he invites you to grope the most obvious part of his own. He doesn’t have to ask twice.

For what have you loved more than the feeling of an erection through pants? You have loved the fleshy bas-relief from your first initiation into the unsubtle charms of the hard penis. You loved it poking into your sixteen-year-old thigh as you love it now cupped under your left hand, warm and insistent. You lower your head and rub, nosing him, pushing the round end into your cheek, feeling grateful. You can smell his loamy scent through his pants. Or maybe you can’t. Maybe it’s just sweat, or your own smell. You tongue the fabric.

“Okay,” he says, laying his palm down on your neck. You search out the fly, bracing yourself against a childhood terror: teeth against zipper.

“Not yet,” he says.

You immediately sit back up, rigid as an ironing board. You don’t want to do anything he doesn’t want. You are well trained. You have learned through long and painful experience how badly this can go. Everything can change now. You can be lifted out of the room as you have so many others, a yanked puppet, and every single pleasure can be taken from you, locked away in a high cabinet, the key melted and remade into a bullet loaded into the gun that hangs on the wall above it. But you thought that this wouldn’t be an issue here in the white room, that you wouldn’t find yourself doing the same thing you always end up doing. Pleading with a man for sex.

All of the tapes begin to play in your head at once. You’re not beautiful enough, not thin enough, not young enough, not interesting enough, you didn’t let him start the way he wanted, you should have tried watching porn first, he’s probably just tired, men always want sex in the morning but women want it in the evening (is it the evening? No way to tell in the white room), men like to be in control, give him his space, don’t be so pushy, just don’t think about it.

So many people have told you: honestly, I think you just think about it too much.

You lean back, away from him, as far away as you can get. You think about a door. None appears.

Maybe the white room isn’t what you thought it was. Maybe it’s just normal. The world.

You smell his hand before you feel it smooth your hair: spit.

“It’s my turn,” he says.

7

He undresses you. He isn’t rough, or mean; he doesn’t strip you, or rip your clothes, as happens in certain ridiculous films (is that sexy? you always wonder, watching the actress peel off her torn cocktail dress). He is thorough and focused. Coolly brutal, if you will.

It’s another thing you’ve been looking for: brutality. Too many men have confused this desire for a kind of limp masochism. You’ve never been disciplined enough to be a true masochist, or sadist, for that matter. But true masochism isn’t what your hapless lovers have expected; instead, they have fumbled for a kind of porno masochism. A woman in a not-too-tight headlock begging for it from behind, calling some blank-eyed penisbearer “Sir.” That’s not it, either. You can play at that, but it’s like crab stick in a California roll: it gets the job done, but you know the difference.

What you’ve been after is what’s happening now: a man’s full attention. Nothing else behind his eyes but the sight of you. No tentativeness, no confusion. He takes off your clothes in the order you put them on: unbuttoning your shirt, undoing and unzipping your fly, until you stand before him in a bra and underwear. You stare at the white wall, trying to keep your breath. Something will go wrong now, you’re sure. You have learned to always temper excitement with caution.

In darker moments you’ve considered finding a man for this very purpose. And it has been the very thing that has prevented you from doing so, because what man—what high school classmate, barfly, supervisor with boundary issues, shut-in neighbor—could be counted on to do what this man is now? To strip you bare and then just look for a second with wet eyes?

“On your knees,” he says.

8

Giving oral sex from a kneeling position is a banality that you’ve elevated to sacred rite. You grind your kneecaps into the hard floor and unzip his fly, expecting every moment to be told to stop. But the command doesn’t come. He says nothing at all. You hear only his breathing, slow and steady. You reach in and pull out his cock.

On the internet, you once found an amazing image: a bouquet of erect penises, thirty or forty all edited together, circumcised and not, every shade of skin at every possible angle. An image created for bachelorette parties and email pranks. But you found the dick bouquet deeply moving. You couldn’t find them funny, the cocks massed there like that. They were lovely and vulnerable. Some women, you realized, have actually seen that many. When you were younger you felt a certain pride at your relatively limited experience, but now it just seems like another failure. Your eye was drawn to the thick vein on the underside of each disembodied flower-cock, the squiggly line of pleasure you love to trace with your tongue.

This penis is very nice, exactly the right size. Although there is obviously no right size. Aside from one lover, you’ve never taken issue with any man’s dimensions. All penises are strange and otherworldly. Each is touching in its way. Like holding someone’s heart in your hands.

You got that from some book, long before you ever saw one: a cock in your palm is like holding somebody’s heart in your hand. You liked that. Said it to your first boyfriend when you did it for the first time. You don’t remember his reaction.

You close your mouth on him, feel him harden slightly, twitch. It makes you want to cry. You find the vein with your tongue.

He puts his hand on the back of your head and holds you there, gently at first, then unyieldingly. You labor and labor under his hand, gasping for breath and repressing your gag reflex. You open wide and wider. His breathing deepens. Sometimes he readjusts your head or moves your hand, which you appreciate. Your favorite thing is just to suck and lick and bob. Your favorite thing is your job. This work.

His hand is unrelenting. Your neck starts to hurt. White paint flakes up under your knees. Time is passing around the two of you. Close your eyes. Memorize this. Taste the salty musk. Swallow your spit. Inhale.

9

He pulls you off by your hair, puts his hand under your chin, and tilts your face up. You see his eyes in a blinking, rotating aura. Blue.

“I wanna be nice to you for a while now. Make out with you and shit like that.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yes. I’d like that.”

You stand, stretch, and sit on the bed. He takes your face in his hands and kisses you until there’s nothing left, his thumbs grinding into the red lace cups of your bra. He gropes everything, the doughy rise of your tummy, your flattened thighs, their white down. He jams one hand into the crease between your thigh and labia and just pushes, reminding you of the most wonderful day when you were twenty and a boy touched you like that and you died and died again of good feeling.

He puts his hand in your hair and closes it in a fist, pulling against your scalp. He takes your earlobe between his thumb and forefinger and presses hard until you see a purple spark. Then he twists it, hard.

Before you can say it—I thought you were going to be nice—he thrusts his mouth and licks and licks and you’re fourteen again and a boy is showing you what his tongue can do to your ear. Between your legs you pulse and spurt.

It’s fucking perfect. He pulls away from you, sniffs the air, rubs the hand against your crotch until it comes away damp. He raises the hand to his face and breathes.

“Fucking perfect,” he hisses, pulling your hair.

10

The bra comes off easy. He hooks his thumbs into the waistband of your underwear and takes them down.

He takes off whatever he’s wearing, drapes his jacket over a chair, unbuttons the dress shirt, slips the t-shirt over his head. Steps out of his pants. You see him briefly in his underwear—briefs boxer briefs boxers—and then they’re gone, too. You’re both in your flesh suits, and he’s on top of you.

In the cosmic joke that is your sex life, or more accurately your lack thereof, you haven’t had a lover in years that didn’t prefer you to be on top.

The world’s image of sex, of the sexual dynamic between men and women, is like a funhouse mirror of your reality. You are not dumb or uneducated. You know all about the forces behind that image, who made it and why, who makes the money and where it goes. You know it’s bad. But sometimes that quotidian, problematic badness seems pretty appealing, if it means a man could want you, want to get on top of you. If it means that your man would.

In the white room the man lies full-weight on top, breathing filth into your ear, licking your neck. His hand works between your legs. How you’ve missed it, this jumble of limbs and parts, the awkward back-and-forth between his hand and cock, your crotch battered by half-droplets of the stuff best called pre-come and your own slick moisture.

“Spread your legs.” His hand lingers at your throat. You do, reaching to clear the tangled overgrown pubic hair, but his other hand stops your wrist. With a quick swipe of curled fingers he does it for you and moves inside.

How you’ve missed it: that first sting of entry, the sense of being reorganized by his cock, the gentle bob of his balls against your perineum. Whenever this happens in movies it’s always soft-focus and stupid, some wide-eyed naïf opening her eyes even wider. As if every penetration is another iteration of deflowering. As if it’s always the same.

It’s been a while, so it does hurt at first, but he handles himself well, pushing deeper and deeper each time, eyes steady on your face. He knows how to lean so that his pelvic bone presses against your clitoris. You imagine your insides as a quilted wall of pink diamonds. Again and again he enters you, and it never gets old. He holds your hands above your head. He turns you over and buries your face in the thick pillows. He takes you from the bed, sits you on the desk, and enters you that way, standing.

You feel a wonderful fire. The head of his penis pulls at a swollen knob inside and unleashes the flame. You scream. You promised yourself that if you ever had the chance to scream at good sex again, you would, and loud.

You’re getting close. He holds you at the waist, biting your neck again.

“Please,” you say. “Please.”

A feeling like static electricity builds in your feet, your calves, your knees. You see stars. Close your eyes. Stars.

“Say it.” You shake your head. His hand comes back to your throat. “Say it.”

“I’m going to…”

He quickens his pace, holding you tight at the hips, looking at you. You seek his face, but it’s not there. “Say it.”

When you do, it’s straightforward, almost calm. “I’m going to come.”

And just then, on the edge, glow shining a corona around your skull, he takes his right hand from your waist and slaps you hard across the face.

He reaches immediately to catch you, his hand cupping the back of your head to protect your neck.

Pain. Beautiful golden electric pain. Back to brutality.

11

The buzz lingers. The red shape of his hand is embossed onto your face. You are back on the bed. He kneels and licks at your sex.

The hours upon hours of your life you have spent dreaming of this act. Oral sex. Cunnilingus. Eating pussy. Eating out. The most reverent and tender of the sex acts. The female genitals receive kisses better than any other human part. How many lovely folds to kiss and plumb, how many deeper depths to penetrate with tongue and finger. He eats until you are just the parts that touch his mouth.

This is what you wanted, all that time: to disappear.

You walk on the rim of your mind, peering down at the two of you there on the bed in the white room. From above, washed of all color, his body and yours look like a famous photograph, a Western landscape, a study in light and dark, a meditation on light.

Before, when he was fucking you, you felt light gather and adorn every bone. Now it’s different, now you’re filled with pain and electricity and joy. Power. Power. Power.

He does what you always wanted but didn’t know how to ask for, turns you over and eats you that way, his nose tapping your wet asshole. You arch and moan and moan.

When you are exhausted—when there is no more capacity for pleasure in your shot nerves—he turns you onto your side and lies facing you. Then, he reaches for you, kisses you, and enters a last time. The two of you bob on eachother, eyes slitted, until everything glows and explodes and deep inside you feel the warm liquid comfort of his ejaculate.

When you start to cry, he returns to the space between your legs and licks you clean.

The white room swirls shut. You are alone. Hands tucked between your legs. Prayer position.

12

A stab against darkness. That’s what it is. People think that darkness is in sex, and they’re right, but they don’t see the difference between the rich, rejuvenative darkness of the night sky or the thick purple of the Pacific Ocean, and the dull darkness of loss and hurt. You’ll never understand women who hate to be touched, who treat love as a chore. You bristle with jealousy at what they’ve got, the luxury of turning down touch and rejecting coitus.

You cling to memories of summer days when you did it in the middle of the afternoon, the times you woke in the middle of the night to a map of desire in the shape of a man’s body, the early morning times when, barely waking, you ventured under the covers and met there. You limn these memories for their gold, the moment of your young husband drawing back the covers to the bed after a perfect evening, the way he opened his arms and drew you in.

These things don’t last forever. No one will give them back to you again.

When people complain or joke about sex—when they disapprove of varieties of it, when they are disgusted, when they are tired and turn away—you are moved almost to violence. You think, I would cut it away from you. I would take it. I would cut it away from you and have it for myself.

You see it as you fall asleep: a knife of bone or tooth drawing a swift cut on the other body. Falling blood. Escape into the luminous wet night. Outside: another new place.

Lisa Locascio’s fiction and criticism has appeared in n+1, The Believer, Santa Monica Review, Salon, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Sou’wester, the 2013 anthology California Prose Directory, and elsewhere. Her work on the life of the author Roberto Bolaño has received mention in The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, and Bookforum. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is a PhD candidate in the University of Southern California’s department of Creative Writing and Literature.

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The rowboat has a few good seasons left in it. It is upside down on sawhorses in the field beyond the house. Patching the bottom with tar—it’s got holes. It’s got cracks. Father works in the noontime sun with the sweat dripping from his nose. Help Father. The sun beats down. The tree line is up behind you. The small grey house sits, a box, out past the backyard and clothes are on the line. A face comes in a small screened window by the back door.

Lunch! she cries. Come in—it’s lunch.

The face is pasty white and suddenly disappears.

Mother.

Father stoops and taps the tar can top back on with the handle of a blackened screwdriver. Our hands are spotted with tar; filthy. Our shirts are spattered with tar; filthy. We go through the brush lining the back yard and across the grass, being careful not to touch the hanging blowing clean white sheets on the line. We have our work; Mother has hers. Father goes to the back of the house and gets the red rusted gasoline can. He pours some into a large dented coffee can. There are rags on the ground; old torn shirts long ago thrown away. We wash our hands in the gasoline. The smell is strong and radiates out from the can and the rags wipe away some of the tar, most but not all. After the gasoline we wash our hands in cold water from the tarnished brass spigot thrusting from the foundation wall.  The smell goes down, most but not all. We shake our hands dry; shake them hard.  Father kicks his feet against the grey foundation knocking globs of tar from his heavy work shoes; you do the same; tar flies.

Go on in up the back steps. They creak. The paint flakes off. The old paint.  In the kitchen stop and take off your shoes. They lay in the corner. Mother’s at the refrigerator bringing out the lunch meat; brown and grey—sliced. She puts it on the table and speaks with a crooked face.

What’s that awful smell, she says—it smells like gas—

We washed our hands, said Father—we had tar—

You washed your hands in gas?

Yes.

She puts out her hand, shakes her head—her blonde hair’s frizzed out.

No, she snaps—don’t sit at the table—go wash with soap and water—you always wash your hands in gasoline—I’ve told you, I have—nobody with a brain washes their hands in gasoline—why do you wash your hands in gasoline anyway—Jesus, Christ—

It’s the only way to get the tar off, Mom, says Father.

Then don’t get tar on your hands—wear gloves—do something—use your head—I hate that smell—

Father bites his lip and turns to the kitchen sink and turns on the steaming water. As he begins to squirt in detergent, you go to the bathroom down the hall to use the sink in there. The floor creaks—the peeling flowery papered walls of the hall go by—come into the bathroom.

Start the water.  Put in the drainplug. Grip up the soap.

Wash.

The water runs into the sink, bubbles up. The soap struggles to escape your grip, like a slimy fish. Out in the boat on the water you will fish—you will catch one. Struggle it into the boat—wash the hands—the lather boils up. The water is hot. Not like out in the boat where the water is cool and still, here and there the fish break the surface—the rushing water is loud, violent, hot, foaming in the small sink. The hands wring together. The drainplug pulls up—the water escapes—it spirals down the drain. Rinse the hands, rinse. The fish is on the stringer off the boat in the cool water. Smell the hands. Clean. The fish is caught.

Need to pee. Shut off the water. Step to the side, raise the toilet lid. Zip down the fly. The penis is there—grip the penis. The stream comes. It plunges yellow into the water—the fish plunges back in the water, escaped. The fish is let go. The stream ends. Too small; too small to keep.  Flush the toilet and the fish is gone in the rushing; the rushing spirals down and takes it far away—nothing like the calm brook water holding the boat; tuck in, pull up, zip, turn. Go back down the hall toward the kitchen between the flowery walls. Walk up the path from the brook between the skunk cabbages and come onto your street; the kitchen. There’s a platter of meat; there’s a loaf of bread; there’s mustard, there’s ketchup. There’s soda. There’s beers. Sit. Mother and Father sit; Mother and Father are there, talking.

—I see more shirts and pants are ruined, said Mother—you and that old boat—that tar—

That boat brings in food for our table Mom; when we fish in the summer—

She waved a hand.

Not that much fish comes in—what good is fish when you ruin perfectly good clothes slapping tar over the damned old boat all the time—

It’s not all the time. It’s once a year—listen you don’t have to curse—

I’m not cursing! I guess you might as well throw those clothes away when you’re done—I can’t get out God-damned tar—I won’t even try—scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing for nothing—they never look right again never—

Father said nothing more but bit his lip as he got two slices of bread onto his plate and a piece of ham from the platter of meat and mustard, and he put the sandwich together and greedily tore half the sandwich off into his mouth, all the while staring at Mother. You sit down at the table between them and get bread and baloney and mustard and take a bite; take a bite the way the fish bite out in the brook in the evening but not to be caught this time—honest food, honest—not with a hook embedded in it—a hook in the lip—my God does it hurt?

You know, said Mother, chewing—if you’d take a little bit of that overtime down at the plant you’d be able to buy yourself all the fish you want, and get rid of that old boat—

I hate the plant, said Father, pointing—I hate the plant and won’t work a minute longer than I have to—we’ve got enough money—besides I like to fish don’t you like fresh fish in the summer? I clean it out back you don’t have to clean it—all you have to do is cook it don’t you like that?

Clean the fish he cleans it on a plank on sawhorse back in the field beyond the cats always come around take a bite of the baloney sandwich as she chews fast to get ready to answer; take a bite the way the bass do in the night like her answer is a lure making you bite because you know what the answer is going to be like it always is going to be—

No, she said, after swallowing—I don’t see the difference between the fish you catch  in that damned boat and the fish I can buy in the store.

Swallow the baloney; swallow the hook; Father’s answer pulls on you—like a taut line—

I like to fish with my boy in the summer—what’s the matter with doing something just because you like it—I spend time with my boy—gee  Mom what’s got into you today?

—he sets the hook—the words pull—nearly drop the sandwich, nearly gag—he pulls her like a fish—she sits up straight and lays her hands palms down on the table.

Nothing’s got into me, she says—listen, she says, eyes open wide as dinner  plates—let’s put this back into perspective—what I said I hated was the tarry ruined clothes—let’s not get into the God-damned fishing this has nothing to do with the damned fishing!

—swallow—spit out the hook—take another bite—dumb fish never learn—

Father waves his hand down over his clothes.

This is an old shirt and pants, says Father—it was ready for the trash anyway—

She threw up her hand—like casting—casting a lure away into the place under the shade of the oak leaves, where the big bass sleep in the cool shadows.

Yeah but look at the boy’s, she says—those are perfectly good clothes ruined.

Put a hand on your chest—swallow—feel the clothes—pick at the tarry stain—it is bait—it is all turning to bait—you are bait—she’s coming mouth open teeth bared.

Well I’m sorry about that, says Father softly. She says nothing. Father eats his sandwich without a word, without looking up. Mother does the same. Eat the baloney in the silence boiling up all around like cattails and saplings and thorn bushes and eat and swallow and start making a second sandwich—

Oh, you must like this lunch boy, says Mother gently. Two sandwiches—sure that’s not too much?

No it’s fine, you say, taking the cold cuts.

You say that like you mean it—but no you don’t mean it you do why do you always think you are lying? Guilt comes up—from somewhere, black—but from where, for what—it’s a terrible feeling—it fills you all the time—

Father’s first sandwich is almost done. Mother speaks, calmly now. Listen. Listen. The surface of the brook is mirror-smooth. There’s no wind, no rain—perfect—quiet enough to listen. The guilt sinks into the brook it’s forgotten the thought is forgotten—

Oh, she says—and remember—we’re going to Mom Cotton’s tonight after dinner.

What? said Father, eyebrows rising. Why are we going to Mom Cotton’s?

For a visit. She’s expecting us. I told you the other day. Why, what’s the matter—you used to always want to go there when her Freddie was still alive.

Father puts down his sandwich and raises a hand.

Well, said Father—you can go to Mom Cotton’s tonight by yourself—I’m not going. We got to finish working on the boat. It’s going to take until nightfall and it’s got to be done today.

Why does it have to be done today—oh, she said, rolling her eyes and smiling. I get it.

He sits back, mouth open.

What do you get?

You only used to go there to visit Freddie—him and that damned electric train set that took up his whole cellar.

I used to like to take the boy there to see it—

Yeah! And now that Freddie’s gone, and his train set is gone, you don’t give a damn about poor Mom Cotton.  She’s all alone in that big house—she was always glad to see all three of us but that damned Freddie pulled you and the boy away into the cellar, down to that damned train set—and you’d spend the whole visit there and never say a word to her—

I give a damn about Mom Cotton! said Father, waving a slice of bread. I just need to get that boat done and in the water tomorrow—trout season starts Saturday we got to be ready it’s got nothing to do with Mom Cotton!

Mother’s brow is set.

Yes it does, she says, nodding. You don’t like her.

Who said I don’t like her—you’re saying it, not me—

Then come with me—to see her—

Go by yourself—tell her I’m busy getting ready for trout season—she’ll understand—

—but I can’t go alone I’ll never find it—

He takes a deep breath, then speaks, pointing at her.

Listen and listen good! I do what I have to do! I am the man here!

The lines are pulling pulling toward that quiet closed in dark dead cellar where the train set sits forgotten, full of cobwebs and covered with coal dust from the big coal bin and disconnected and in disrepair embedded in shadows colorless and grey forgotten since the death—death, of Freddie Cotton.

So go see damned Mom Cotton, said Father, rising, throwing the bread across. Go ahead and see her—you don’t need us! Just tell her we said hello!

He turns and speaks more softly, to you.

I’ve had enough son—come on we got to finish the boat.

That’s it? she says—you’re going to leave me like this?

Father went and sat in a side chair and pulled on his tarry work boots.

Come  on son, he says.

Go put on the shoes. After having a drink of soda Mother poured you the soda she knows you like soda she knows what kind you like what kind you’ll bite on—she knows what bait to use to keep you coming back—but Father but Father—

She sits at the table stunned saying to Father You really don’t care about me do you—you really don’t—

Not when you give us all this shit!

I gave you no shit! I just—oh God—what did I do—what did I God-damn do to deserve this—I didn’t mean anything I really didn’t mean anything—

Her voice trails off and her head goes in her hands. Father goes out. Look at Mother, sitting alone—alone as if in the boat out on the brook at twilight, on the glass smooth water with the bass breaking water all around, but unable to bait a line cast a plug catch a fish alone alone just sitting there alone with the dark settling down over her—

Father calls from the door.

Come on son we got a boat to finish!

—but Mother is alone—

Come on!

—I have been alone—it’s terribly black, dark—like night across the brook—

Come already!

Her eyes rise unbelieving.

I am guilty. The door slams behind me, and I am guilty. And I realize—this is where it comes from—this! This is where the guilt is—the black guilt that never leaves. Somehow, this is all my fault. I was there.

I said nothing. Nothing the whole time. I was on the brook—the still darkening brook—

You go out to the boat. Father pops the top off the tar. You start to work.

The sun is lower. The tar spatters. The tar stains.

Father says This rowboat has a few good seasons left in it.

Just a few, though. Just a few.

Jim Meirose’s work has appeared in numerous journals, including the Fiddlehead, Witness, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Xavier Review, and has been nominated for several awards. Two collections of his short work have been published and his novels, “Claire”, “Monkey”, and “Freddie Mason’s Wake” are available from Amazon.

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–for Jo-Anne

My father called them “transportation cars.” My mother called them by other  names. The cost of a transportation car usually fell somewhere between fifty and one hundred fifty dollars. The operational requirements were minimal: the car needed to be fit enough to make short daily trips, within a ten mile radius of home. A decent battery was helpful—or at very least, a good enough clutch to enable compression-starts. Amenities such as heating, windshield-wipers, radio, and spare tires were optional. The car’s appearance was irrelevant.

The first car that fit the description was a dull grey thing with suicide doors and a bent hood ornament. But my father didn’t call that car the transportation car; he called it “the car.” At the time it was the only car we owned, and it had apparently transported us from Illinois to California. I was only two-years-old when my family uprooted and moved west, so I can remember nothing of either my birthplace or the cross-country trip. My first confirmed memories kicked in when I was about three. That was the year we traded in the old grey car and upgraded to a five-year-old 1948 cactus-green Nash. It would be another two years before we would add a transportation car to the fleet. That car, a 1936 Ford Coupe, would carry me to my first day in kindergarten.

For the most part, moms drove the transportation cars: ferrying children to and from school; picking up groceries, dry cleaning, or postage stamps. Dads drove the “good cars”: to maintain dignity (and regular hours) at their workplaces. My father allowed my mother to use the good car on the weekends. That’s when he would be busy with household repairs or bloodying his knuckles in the oily innards of the number two car. It was a mystery to me how my father had acquired the knowledge to do all the varied tasks around the house. I knew he had fought in the war and gone to college, but when and where had he learned to do automotive, plumbing, electrical, painting, carpentry, and even masonry jobs?

My mother also had a mysterious side. When I was around six years old, Dad surprised her with a used Schumann upright piano. She let out a girlish cheer, left the room, and returned with an old suitcase filled with sheet music. She seated herself with a flourish and proceeded to amaze and delight me by rendering snippets of Bach and Mozart. I had no idea my mother was capable of such magic.

We had moved to Southern California for the weather and the booming aerospace industry. My father landed a job at Northrop, and with help from a GI loan, purchased a tract home. I don’t know exactly what my father did at Northrop, but I learned the term “layoff” early on. It became a regular cycle: Dad would work for a spell, be laid-off for a spell, and then cap the cycle by being rehired.

The layoffs were tough on my parents, but I rarely suffered from the financial shifts. I was fed daily and sheltered from the elements. Although the social stratum was not invisible, it was certainly less obvious from the eye-level of young boys. We were far less clothes-conscious than the boys of today. Most of us got our new clothes at the beginning of the school year, and, by the time the weather changed, our knees would be arrayed with iron-on patches. For summer attire, our mothers would cut the legs off our tattered long pants.

But I could always sense by my father’s demeanor when a layoff was approaching. He would drink more and smoke more and grow darker in mood. There was also a conspiracy involving inanimate objects: a claw-hammer would deliberately smash Dad’s thumb; an ice tray would refuse to leave the freezer; a lamp would burn out while he was reading the sport’s page.

The end of all layoffs came when the television died: just as Ralph Kramden was about to threaten Alice Kramden with a trip to the moon.

My father’s head drooped to his chest. He appeared to be beaten. He then rose slowly from his arm-chair and calmly announced: “I’m not going back to Northrop.”

“You can’t be serious,” my mother said.

“Oh, yes. I am serious.” He seemed almost happy.

“But how—what will we do?”

“Don’t you worry. I’ll take care of everything.”

My father took pride in the stoic notion that it was the man’s responsibility to carry the load: “to bring home the bacon,” as he would say. He found a part-time job at a music store (another talent unfurled from his mysterious past): selling pianos, home organs, and Vega banjos. He also took a graveyard shift at a machine shop. He slept during intervals between jobs.

One weekend Dad brought home from the machine shop a few boxes containing all sorts of small parts. He said he had a fun project for me. He demonstrated how to assemble the varied pieces into chair gliders. He then set me up with my personal assembly line on the kitchen table. “Your turn,” he said. “Have fun.”

It was fun. I pretended I was making time-bombs. After I had assembled a dozen or so time-bombs, my mother came into the kitchen and stood silently behind me. She then walked out to the living room where my father was reading the newspaper.

“What do you have him doing?” she said to my father.

“He’s learning how chair gliders are made.”

“Why does he need to know that?”

“It’s a learning experience. It’s good for developing dexterity and patience.”

“Isn’t that piecework from your job?”

“Yes.”

“That’s child labor. There are laws against that.”

“It’s not child labor. I worked in a factory when I was only a few years older than he is. That was child labor.”

“Just because your father abandoned you during the Depression, doesn’t mean you have to take it out on our son.”

“I would never abandon my son. Never.”

Half an hour later my mother sat at the kitchen table with a large black typewriter. I didn’t know we owned a typewriter. I didn’t know my mother could type. She was really good. She typed just like Lois Lane.

“What are you doing?” my father asked.

“I’m getting back in shape.”

“In shape for what?”

“If we need additional income, it should come from me—not our child.”

“It’s my responsibility. You’re not getting a job.”

My mother continued typing.

That evening my parents sat in living room smoking and drinking and not talking. After I went to bed, I heard them start to talk. The talk got louder, and when they started swearing at each other, I put the pillow over my ears so I couldn’t hear.

The next day, at the music store, Dad sold a home organ to a man who said he was an inventor. The inventor called my father a “natural salesman,” and asked if he’d be interested in working for him, selling some of the products he had developed. The following week, Dad was loading boxes of packaged cotton candy and fold-up boomerangs into our 1956 Ford Parklane Station Wagon (the “good car”).

Gas was cheap in those days, so after a few weeks of canvassing, Dad was able to turn a small profit selling the novelties to roller rinks, movie theaters, and Owl Drug stores. He sometimes invited me to accompany him during his Saturday merchandise deliveries. Mom allowed the adventure, but she’d warn Dad against having me lift any heavy boxes.

I enjoyed helping my father. The boxes were light and easily carried, and it was exciting for me to watch the teenage girls skating. The selling of novelties, of course, would in no way bring in enough money to support our family, but the experience helped my father realize that he really was a “natural salesman,” and gave him the confidence to begin studying for a real-estate license.

Dad’s first job as a real-estate salesman was at a new housing tract in Corona—a little over twenty miles from where we lived. He bought himself a new suit from Robert Hall, and got retreads and an Earl Scheib powder-blue paint-job for the station wagon. He also changed the oil and spark plugs in Mom’s “new” transportation car: an oil-burning 1950 Studebaker “Bullet-nose” Champion. He went in the hole for these job-related expenditures.

Dad started out working seven days a week in the Corona sales office. For the first few weeks we ate hotdogs and beans or Shipwreck Stew, on most days, and cheese toasties or potato pancakes, on Fridays.

“You should never have left Northrop,” my mother would often lament at dinner. My father would stare at his plate and say nothing.

Things picked up considerably by the time Dad brought home his third or fourth commission check. He pulled the check from his inside coat pocket, like a vaudeville magician, and handed it to my mother. “How’s that for a paycheck?” he said. “I never got a check like that from Northrop.”

We went out to a nice restaurant that night.

In a little over a year, my father was working for a more profitable company: selling commercial properties as well as tract homes. He started taking off every other Saturday, and even talked about getting a new car—a “new” new car.

One Saturday afternoon, when Mom was out shopping with her sister, Dad browsed the TV Guide and suggested that he and I watch How Green was my Valley. He told me that he had three favorite movies: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (he’d read the novel in high school); The Third Man (it was clever and reminded him of Europe during the Occupation); and How Green was my Valley (he gave no reason).

“You’re going to love this movie,” he said as the credits started rolling.

I loved the movie. The central character—a boy, near my own age (played by Roddy MacDowall)—was intelligent, compassionate, and courageous. I became completely immersed in the story. The Welsh coalminers sang beautifully. I rooted for the maligned village minister (Walter Pidgeon), and I fell in love with Maureen O’Hara. The end of the movie, however, caught me completely off-guard.

A mine explosion traps some miners, and Roddy MacDowall is permitted to go down into the mine to search for his father (Donald Crisp). Searching, he calls out, “DaDa,” in eerie and melodious minor-thirds, echoing above an obbligato of trickling water. The boy soon hears his father’s weakened voice, and finds him in time to exchange a few words. The scene cuts to above ground, as an elevator emerges from the mine, with the boy cradling his dead father in his lap.

I was too old to cry, but my eyes watered and I couldn’t find my voice. I had  been given a taste of future grief and I didn’t know what to do with it.

My father jumped in to break the spell. “It’s a sad movie,” he said. “But a really good one—don’t you think?”

I could only nod.

Dad received a good commission check the following week. He bought gifts to honor the bounty. He gave Mom a bottle of Chanel No. 5, and presented me with a Revell kit model of PT-109.

“Tonight we dine at The Palms,” he said. He told me I could order whatever I wanted, but I was not to feed Jerry the Chimp.

The Palms Restaurant was surrounded by a jungle garden and miniature zoo. Jerry the Chimp was known to throw “things of his own making” at unwary visitors. I greeted Jerry, from a safe distance, as we made our way through the jungle to the restaurant.

I was wearing a necktie and pretended I was Walter Pigeon. I smiled like an adult at the young waitress, but when she returned the smile, my face glowed and I promptly shifted my eyes to the menu. I ordered the prime rib—my voice forced far below its natural range.

We enjoyed our meals but Dad had a bit too much to drink. Mom, who was only a little tipsy, was elected to drive us home. She was not happy about the arrangement, and did not respond to any of Dad’s comedic musings.

Dad didn’t look so good the next morning. He stood weaving like an ailing statue of Justice: his left hand holding a fizzing glass, his right hand a cup of black coffee. He studied the fizzing glass then downed it in four long gulps. He set down the emptied glass, grabbed his briefcase, and said he’d see us later.

“Take your jacket,” Mom said brusquely. “It’s raining.”

The hospital called late that afternoon and informed us that Dad had been admitted to the emergency room. He had suffered a heart attack while changing a flat tire. I could not believe a man my father’s age could have a heart attack. My father was too young and too strong to have a heart attack. He had grappled with German tanks at the Battle of the Bulge; he could make a precision cut along a six foot length of plywood, using only a hand saw.

Driving to the hospital, my mother juggled anger and prayer. “That big dummy,”  she’d mutter. And then: “Dear Jesus. Please Jesus.”

A sweet medicinal odor sickened my stomach as we entered the hospital. The harsh lighting made things appear two-dimensional and unreal.

“How is he?” Mom asked the nurse. “Is he alright?”

“You’ll have to talk to doctor.”

“Can’t you just tell me how he is?”

“You’ll have to talk to doctor.”

“He’s gone,” the doctor said.

GONE. The word hit me right in the gut. It seemed a callous way to report a  death to a family. But “gone” was an accurate description: His body was here, but he was  gone. I felt a sudden overwhelming absence. But I also realized that the “he” part was  not some fist-sized organ tucked neatly into the human body; it was my father’s soul: an  enormous, invisible something gone elsewhere.

The doctor handed me a small bag containing my father’s “personal effects.”

“I’m sorry, son,” the doctor said. “Looks like you’re the head of the household, now.”

He was wrong. My mother would be the one carrying the bulk of the load—for a long time, starting then and there.

We left the hospital shell-shocked. It was raining hard and my mother seemed too upset to drive home, but since I was only thirteen, she had no choice. It was cold, and the heater didn’t work, and we had to roll down the side windows so the windshield wouldn’t fog. The Bakelite wiper switch had long ago disintegrated, leaving an exposed metal pin. As my mother drove, I had to operate the wipers with a pair of pliers. It was dark, and the view ahead was blurry.

Timothy Reilly was a professional tuba player in both the United States and Europe during the 1970s (in the latter, he was a member of the orchestra of the Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy). He is currently a substitute elementary teacher, living in Southern California with his wife, Jo-Anne Cappeluti: a published poet and scholar. His short stories have been published in Relief, The Seattle Review, Flash Fiction Magazine (UK), Blue Lake Review, Slow Trains Literary Journal, Amarillo Bay, Foliate Oak Literary Review, Passager, and several other print and online journals.

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Before the birds or garbage trucks begin––before anyone separates from sleep, the sun splinters through dark drapes, startles me, although I know dawn’s growth is gradual. A shadow hangs, like a half-mast eyelid or a baseball cap whose bill is tipped too low. I crick my neck, hear little boney protests from my cervical vertebrae––nothing else creases the silence. My heart beats loud in my ears. I stop breathing, full attention now on the high black-out: an eclipse cutting vision. The room, brighter by a few minutes is normal, except there’s no ceiling. My bird mobile, overhead fan are gone. The warm sheets, soft pillow, bed-side stand with books and writing journal are no longer of comfort. I think how rectangular the bed is, the shape of a coffin. How half a universe is not the same. How I never liked shadows. How much I hate the dark.

I shut my eyes and will myself to breathe, inhale, exhale, slow, long, like I’ve been taught in yoga, but the heart heats up, keeps pace with the sun’s ascension. I study the alarm clock, glad for the expanse of retirement––I no longer set the damned thing––calculate time-zones, additions, subtractions for my three far-flung children, my sister. Who will be awake, not hassling kids, who will be en route or in meetings. Then I give up, roll over to speak with my friend, Maggie, only a year gone.

Remember how you reassured me I wasn’t having a heart attack the first time I heard my heart pound? When was that? ’91 I think, because I was suddenly alone after thirty years. No child, neither husband, no one.

Of course I remember, darlin’. And I’ve missed you, missed speaking with you. It’s a treachery, all this distance––all these distractions, life-matters between us. How are you?

That’s what I’m calling about. Not so great. I have a scimitar cutting my vision.

Oh, did you decide to have those eyelids done then, darlin’? Is that what this is about?

No, no. Only now it would be my neck and the corduroy upper lip…but this isn’t about plastic anything.

Well explain it to me, slowly darlin’. And louder, I can hardly hear you.

Ohmygod, are we fading too? I couldn’t bear that. The news you weren’t on the planet––never mind how far apart we lived, how infrequently we spoke––flattened me for a long, long time. In fact, that’s what I feel now, pancake-flat.    I elbow upright, back against headboard, knees tucked tight to my chest. I wrap both arms around my legs. There’s no one to nudge awake when I’m scared or when a minor catastrophe hits at midnight or dawn. Oh, I have friends and children; I have people who love and care about me, but…

Darlin’? I can’t hear you at all now.

Sorry, sorry. There’s a shade cutting my sight in half. I don’t even know if it’s real. You remember I’m a doc, so I know visual fields, aging eye problems, but this doesn’t fit. Maybe it’s hysteria. Too much solitude.      But wait. Whenever we speak it’s always about me. Tell me, what’s it like where you are. Are you with Wayne? Are you happy?

There’s a long silence; my knees grow cold.  I’m sorry I monopolize our conversations so, always worried about my children, delighted with the grands, fretting over transient lovers––they never seem to last. Maybe this won’t last. I don’t ask enough about you. I assume dead is dead. Maybe not.

Well, darlin’, there’s way less to worry about now. But it’s not that restful, not like you’d imagine. Here now, all these folks, friends, relatives, lovers, people you hardly knew, asking for things, for favors.      A new baby or their dog to get well. They want their husband to stop running around. Intercede for me with Jesus, won’t you?

They want, they want. They want to know if their life matters.     And I say, god in heaven, pull yourself together. There’s enough splendor and marvels that you should be drinkin’ it in––revelin’ in it––it’s over all too soon.

Now I can’t hear my heart. Has it stopped? Is this how it ends, a shade bisecting the world, then pulled all the way down? No drama? My knees are icy cold. I scrunch below the covers, squeeze my eyes tight. I wish I were holding a receiver to my ear.

So, what are you thinkin’ now, darlin’?

I think I will faint if the cut-off is still there when I look, but I don’t say anything, cup my right hand over that eye, open the left, and see half of what I should. I switch eyes, stop breathing––ohmygod. I’m sobbing.

Are you all right then, darlin’?

Is this a 911 moment? Maybe I haven’t taken good enough care of myself. Maybe I haven’t been careful about the pre-diabetes, and have gone on, like the bulk of America, to full blown disease.        Maybe I’m being punished for all those years doing autopsies on children and babies. Pediatric pathology. Really, what kind of a life-choice was that? Maybe I’m going blind, just when I’m starting to learn the delicacy of truth, the value of love and kindness. Maybe it’s karma.    I’m afraid I’m being punished…

Woah, slow down. Who would be punishing you?

God? My parents? Me? I don’t know. The ex’s I’ve bad-mouthed?

Hold up, darlin’. Let’s change subjects, something a little brighter shall we? Tell me about the children and their children. What are they like, your new generation?

I think of the thirty years Maggie taught high school in Florida’s panhandle. How she couldn’t have children of her own and dedicated her life to hundreds of students who worshipped her honesty and tenderness, appreciated all that encouragement. How she cheered me, from the first day I met her at a poetry open mic in Port St. Joe. Me, a Yankee stranger, first reader, knees buckling because the poem was so raw with lust. She interrupted the meager applause, asked where I was published.

Oh nowhere. This is the first poem I’ve written since grade school.

Oh darlin’ never you mind. Y’all be in print soon, you will.

I start to talk about each grandchild, and my breathing slows of its own accord. I close my eyes against whatever is really happening. I stretch long in the bed, and whisper, Hello, hello? There’s nothing now except silence and an ache where Maggie’s drawl belongs, beside my ear.

Today is her death-anniversary I realize slowly. This variant of blindness, vivid and actual as any physical pain, is technically called superior bilateral hemianopsia. It’s a rare visual field deficit caused by a stroke or Herpes Zooster, the Chicken Pox-Shingles virus. I’m finally thinking medical again as I swing my legs over the side of the bed, press my feet into the rug and stand in tadasana, mountain pose, my eyes sealed against every eventuality.

Maggie had bad diabetes her final decade, suffered a stroke, heart failure, lost vision in one eye. She too, must’ve seen half a world. Am I simply mimicking her symptoms because I didn’t get to say goodbye in person? Am I creating a twisted metaphor, a koan?

I inhale slowly, pull her vowel-rich voice into the bedroom.

A person judges life like a cup: half empty, half full. Pessimist, optimist, we’re taught darlin’, but all y’all speak of is an emptiness, the upper half vacant, unknowable, and blind as the future.

Gail Waldstein practiced pediatric pathology for thirty-five years and single parented three children for fifteen of those years. She began writing seriously in the mid ‘90s. Her work appears in Nimrod, New Letters, Alligator Juniper, The MacGuffin, Carve Magazine, The Potomac Review, Harpur Palate, Zone 3, The Iowa Review, and numerous other journals and anthologies. Recent work appears in The Seven Hills Review, The Examined Life, The Comstock Review, I-70, Broad River Review, and Switched on Guttenberg and Solstice Literary Review. Two of her essays were nominated for a Pushcart. To Quit this Calling, Firsthand Tales of a Pediatric Pathologist, was a Bakeless finalist 2005; published by Ghost Road Press, 2006. A poetry chapbook, AfterImage, was published by Plan B Press, 2006. She writes and teaches creative writing and yoga in Denver.

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Sunday mornings at the Presbyterian Church on Ninth Street I felt empty. In that church basement, painted half beige and half lima bean green, I sat on a folding chair, scuffing and tapping my patent leather shoes against the linoleum, crossing and uncrossing my scabby ankles. My right shoe stuck to my left shoe, making a sound like the smacking of a sloppy kiss. Something was always amiss. My collar was too tight, the elastic on my underpants too loose.

The church basement smelled like an old folks home, like grilled cheese and cold vegetable soup. The air was steamy, damp but cool, and dribbles of wet wiggled down the windows over our heads at street level, inside and out. Our Sunday school teacher told us about sand and wind, flowing robes and turbans, camels and donkeys, dry heat. Growing up near a rainforest, a stone’s throw from Puget Sound, I couldn’t imagine deserts, couldn’t fathom heat waves undulating skyward, mirages, or oases circled with palms.

The teacher’s words made no sense to me, so I would squinch my eyes shut and will her to move a step to the right or a step to the left. Then I could see Christ, soft-eyed, hued in golden light, held in by an oak frame. Sometimes, for a millisecond, I could catch a burst of radiance. Then I’d refocus, and Jesus was just head, neck, and shoulders, a yellowish face on browning paper, water-stained from a ceiling leak.

On Sundays, I held a spit-shined quarter to drop into the offering plate to help the helpless and the hopeless: black-skinned kids with runny noses and flies on their faces or yellow-skinned kids with big sores on their eyelids. The teacher passed out color book pictures along with crayons that smelled like old toenails; we were to give life to nomads with curly beards, babies in rushes, babies in mangers. “Don’t scribble,” the teacher said.

The color book pictures, thick black lines on paper the color of oyster shells, made me bite my lip. The pictures were flat, and I knew that everything had a shadow. The teacher said, “Color the sky blue and the clouds white.” But I couldn’t. My mother had always encouraged me to make the sky purple or green or any color you can feel: “Look at a blade of grass. See the tiny white stripe? Grass isn’t just green. It can be yellow or lavender or blue. Put color on top of color. Don’t just use color straight out of the box.”

When I was in church, I felt like I was sinning. In our house, color books were banned. In the house of God, I was supposed to follow the teacher’s directions and color robes white and sashes brown; in my mom’s house, all coats were coats of many colors.

During Sunday school, my lips would quiver. I sucked on the skin between the thumb and the index finger of my left hand until it was red-raw and bleeding, and I bit my ring finger. After headaches and stomachaches created too many skipped Sundays, mom no longer made me go. Dad was fine with it. Whenever he talked about the church, it was with steely eyes and a tight frown. His face would turn blue-black like a storm, and his words would boil in spit, scaring my brother, sister, and me.

Every few years or so, we would rifle through his box of stuff in the closet. Army bars and army patches—34th Red Bull Division, gold flag-and-eagle buttons, bullet casings, a yellowed copy of the lyrics to “Lilli Marlene,” and a handful of tarnished metal pins, one for each year of perfect attendance at the Lutheran church in Rochester where he grew up. We knew better than to ask about the church pins. Once had been enough. He had raged, cursing his own mother for making him go to church every Sunday whether he had a fever or a broken arm or a bee-stung eye.

As I grew older, beaches and woodlands became my sanctuary.  Only in nature could I breathe from low down, full and deep, as if air were liquid, silking its way through me. What I knew of spirituality was wet. Rain dropping off juniper quills. The slapping of waves rolling over stones in the moon’s tides. A sea bird dipping its wing in water.

On Cypress Island at Eagle Harbor, just off the rocky beach into the dark woods, I built my church. I lashed branches to trunks of trees with hairy twine and lifted armloads of moss onto twigs I had leveled and tied. At first, they were tables and chairs, benches, and shelves. But they grew to be pews and altars, sacred places formed for my kind of worship.

Summer after summer, I returned with my mother and father, sister and brother, to these mossy sanctuaries. Rains misted down, pelted, shivered down, and the moss grew dense and thick. Salal berries clustered thick and purple-black, and bracken ferns unrolled tender new green. I made brooms of fir boughs and swept smooth my squares and rectangles of forest floor. I cut bouquets of the Indian paintbrush and chocolate lilies that grew on the point where the eagles nested and placed them on my piney altars. Each root, leaf, and bud; each feather, each stone was a prayer.

And I knew their names.

Lee Isaacson Roll is a writer and retired English teacher. Her students have won numerous writing awards. Her essays and poems have appeared in The Good Men Project and the anthology Occasional Writers.

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And this was the river, you say. This trickle, this terse complaint, won’t water a rat; think hippos at their wallow, slow subsidence of snouts under muddle of gray, and you’ll know how far we’ve come overland, dreaming the coolness of water. We threw away a mound of gold dust richer than our tribe. It choked us besides. Where water sloughed away, leaving corrugated waves like sand spits rife with pill bugs and mites at the low tide, travelers pitched tents and roasted corn and cod. Recall the press of heel and small toe, the streaming kites, the lone black lab nosing the berm. War advances to the saline shores, rusted men with muskets stake out land, cursing the tents. We heard this story years ago, filling our pails at the dripping pump, washing our clothes in the cackling stream: the last fight will be for water. We’ll be walking a long time, and the heavy bones of hippos, the fragile bones of cormorants, roll and roll like tumbleweed, and there is so much dust to swallow. This was the river, no place for a woman with child to drown.

If

a man on a dredger stares through the tide

jamming like yesterday’s shudder of flesh

while the floes nurse heat in their heart of ice

fingers of flame don’t burn

wheel engages secret wheel world as machine

made in our image churns with a hum

on the jetty white seals rivet to rock

while an oil slick purls the minor shoals

radios sing the spreading plume

terns in their nests  on a cliff festooned

brood the speckled odds of beak and thrust

and here is a dogfish         hard by a tress of weed

caesura of breath               skip of the faulty heart

the dredger man smokes a cigarette staring at the bay

finding a nugget shaped like the Christ he polishes it

he trades it for a woman’s thighs melting like the floes

is that a man she says once he was a man he says

if he should stumble into blue the hum would carry on

the hopper of the sea  swallow groans miraculously

ah the weight of him and the seals and the terns

and the icy clouds that drift past his dredger by the sea

Tuscan Retrospect

What does it cost to board this train, or not to board–

cost of losing the glimpse of a stooped back with hoe,

a splash of poppies at roadside raveled from cupressus trees

on the hills of Tuscany, which I glibly promised you?

And yet, they have waited here in all their terrible modesty.

The sky is remaking blue, body its tired breath.

Wind stirred by the train blurs poppies and trees;

they are fare-welling us, they lament our eye

wanting to please, seated backwards as we go.

Wheels run over small hard stones

that broke the plows of every principality.

Picking up speed, the train flings the heart with ease;

it is no longer difficult to imagine this world unseen,

having many summers, having tasted its green.

Royal poppies, how they bloody the fields!

Read that they danced the earth amidst all wars

and cupped shards of rain, for city states in their pride,

yet cared nothing for any of it, but for reigning beetle lust.

If only we could dismount and touch this doggerel dust.

Departure

A path limps to the paddock

where chestnuts and bays

bloom like Michigan maple.

Remember the funny line about goats,

Ou trouvé les petites chèvres méchants?

They’re here, worrying geldings and mares

with nudges of their stiff whorled horns.

Thirteen has drawn first blood,

which brings a girl near to the mares,

swell of their rumps and patient eyes

that look upon saddles with indifference,

champing at the wind-rocked crabs,

kicking idly at blue tail flies.

By a harvester, boots thrum in the dirt,

and a man with a rider’s width of thigh

surrenders one glance: not enough time

and there never will be, cartons stored

in the moving van, a map of a city

circled in ink, a name on an eastern street.

This man won’t see her bud and swell,

braids take on the sheen of hide,

nor press her trembling against a stall,

tangling a fall of coarse hair.

She won’t know the foals of spring

or the breaking of a brindle colt

or curses stung of a sprain,

reprise of opal frostbite on the trail,

nor again rein in for the sake of deer

breaking the ice shield of the creek:

to be denied at the very verge

where plodded grasses flatten out

and smuts whip the blades to gall,

a corn field falling sick, working

farm run down, all the dudes

gone back to town, keeping warm.

The nag nuzzles her palm,

sidles slyly, bows, walks on.

Skirting thickets of box elder trees,

males and females grasping the wind,

drooping flowers dried and brown–

things draw in. A slip of a girl

may be parceled anywhere,

from creek and field and barn,

from a low scrim of rusty vanes

run amok in November gale.

On the trail, death is everywhere:

garter snake and headless wren,

a tree stricken in the late storm.

By this swale, her hands first froze.

He warmed them with cold,

and her girl’s eyes dazzled

at the gold of his hair, muddy boots

by the range, sills caked with snow.

The harvester idles, the engine dies.

Unsaddle here, hang up tack

as a late sun clambers down;

the hour has come to turn east,

to try on early sorrow, unbutton

shadows where the yellow gorse blows.

Carol Alexander’s  poems have appeared in journals such as Bluestem, Canary, The Commonline, Chiron Review, Ilya’s Honey, Mobius, Poetica, Pyrokinection, Red River Review, River Poets Journal, The San Pedro River Review, and Sugar Mule. Her work has also appeared in anthologies such as Broken Circles, Joy Interrupted, The Storm is Coming, Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors (Poetry Finalist), and Surrounded: Living with Islands. She won the poetry prize for the anthology Through a Distant Lens (Write Wing Publishing, 2014) and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Alexander’s first chapbook, Bridal Veil Falls, was published by Flutter Press (2013).

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Us children and the dust. The dust and the yellow book bus. The yellow book bus and the utopia. A fallen utopia. An irrelevant utopia: an incomprehensible country. But a book is a book is a book. A red brick fortress in itself. And while other children play in the dust, my sister Tombur walks inside a bus-shaped utopia. An utopia that can be folded small, written on, marked, highlighted, scarred and then ripped apart. Tombur and I were born within that tearing apart. We knew, as a result, that ripping can take many forms: a ritual visit in an old cemetery, walking thousands and thousands of miles and recording every little catastrophe on the way, scratching out old words and making up new ones. Ripping can also be literal. Like ripping out pages from books. Uncle so and so says, that’s what he and our other uncles were trying to do when they were breaking the bones of the statues: tearing out pages that had long been feasted upon by rats, making spaces for new words and new writers, devising new words.

Tombur is not old enough to beat anything out of what it held. She walks into things, to see what they can fill one’s palms with. Including bruised utopias. When Tombur walks inside the book bus, she carries with her a piece of our great-aunt’s nipples, Saralkaku’s pierced lungs, and her own torn hair. When forced to slip inside the covers of the bed for an afternoon nap, we have speculated as to whether these things could be thrust back, pumped and glued back into the bodies they came from. But we have never met our great-aunt nor Saralkaku. No one even knows if our great-aunt is properly dead or not. And Saralkaku never came back. Not even as a corpse at the back of a truck. We need to find these bodies before anything could be thrust back on them. As for Tombur’s hair, she preferred it cropped. Boy short.

I follow my sister, dragging behind me, in a rope tied around its neck, an incomplete matrushka doll. Incomplete, because there is nothing inside – no smaller dolls, no sugar candies, no thumb-sized little girls. Not even sawdust. Nothing.

Utopia is a pitch-dark alleyway with ghosts. Utopia is walking five hours straight through that darkness for a kind of fruit that requires a sweeter soil, a colder climate. I watch my sister walk into that briskness, and linger on the steps of the bus. In the wooden crevices of my matrushka doll, dust-thick as vermilion, red as rust. This might have been the moment. This might have been the moment when a scarred utopia nursed too many possibilities. Like death, it hands out a new story every day, as tainted, cliched and fresh as the rising sun. My sister has lost the power to turn it down.

Inside the bus, tiny train stations with tinier cafeterias. The train gets heavier and heavier towards Siberia. Little boys in red fur coats. Cherry cheeks: brother’s fat fingers in his. Red fur coats. Red mittens. Red as scarlet. Red as traffic lights. Red as the petals of flamboyance in a summer afternoon. Tea boiling in samovars. Women who have recently graduated from maids to comrades tighten their head-scarves tighter.

The book-bus and its purple curtains – Tombur chews on its edges, the threads unspooling on her shoulders, slicing through the snow. My sister reads. And reads. And that’s how she learns to dig through castaway utopias. The book-sellers do not mind. It’s already the end of autumn and their buyers are dwindling in numbers.

Very soon, their books begin to dwindle in numbers too. Parenting manuals replace cherry cheek boys. And Tombur, thick in the history of the alleyway she had dug for herself, finds herself lost. And my sister would need to read more. But the books in the book-bus disappear. Like dust between our fingers. What is left – Tombur’s flattened nose on the windowglass, an atlas made of the grease of her skin. A sharpened HB pencil, thin as a needle in between the fingers of her right hand, drawing the ports and towns of the groans, gasps and gulps of the people she meet while hiking through the trails of what she has read.

What Tombur does not know is that I stole the last book. The last of the parenting manuals. And tore up its pages to stuff my matrushka doll with. If there is a sunset more rhapsodic than this, it must have involved watching the bamboo-castles burn.

When we reach home, streetlights are flickering above. Half an hour after the curfew, Tombur has just begun to gnaw at our father and uncle’s silences.

Nandini Dhar hails from Kolkata, India. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Potomac Review, PANK, Permafrost, Los Angeles Review, Superstition Review and Mother Is A Verb Anthology. Her work has also been featured in the anthology The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Speculative Writing. She teaches postcolonial literature at Florida International University, and co-edits the online journal Elsewhere.

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to my uncle’s yellow lab, Nick,

a dog that could herd fifty head of cattle

through a gate between two pastures

by himself. Or sheep—it didn’t matter.

Only it wasn’t exactly the same Nick.

The first got into the rat poison, see,

and twenty years later my uncle cries

telling me the story. The next was run-over

by the truck, and probably the horse trailer;

the third wandered off

into a neighboring farmer’s turkeys

and had to be shot. Etcetera.

But each time my uncle got another,

same color, and named him Nick.

Only if you weren’t always there—

a visitor, say, like me, and merely for the summer—

these accidents were slow to hear tell about,

so you didn’t always know.

I remember climbing the haystacks

with Nick, looking out over the whole

of Sanpete Valley, the barns and trees

so tiny in the distance. And I was sure

the dog remembered me.  When my uncle

wasn’t looking, I’d sic Nick after a cow

or stubborn horse. I remember riding

with Nick in the back of a pickup

and being transfixed by his long pink tongue,

touching it with my finger. Once I saw Nick

check a longhorn closing in on my uncle.

Infinite, perpetual, continuous

Nick. He was a good dog. Or were.

Dave Nielsen is from Salt Lake City. He earned a PhD in English from the University of Cincinnati. His poems have recently appeared in The Cortland Review, RHINO, The Southern Review, and other magazines. He and his wife have four children. They live in Cincinnati.

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A baker’s dozen: flutter, channel, arrogant, trace, sleeve,
winter, laugh, piano, dollar,
baggage, syrup, hunt, appear. A hamster’s heartache: bell,
alone, oven, soul,  damage.

All that morning she dreams of tornadoes. Hundreds of the
things swarm toward her
then veer off. She echoes them: eyes shut and arms tucked,
reeling and dizzy-drunk.

In a nearby town, someone is playing hide and seek with the
brown recluse spider
that lives under the washing machine. Each night it scurries
a bit closer to death.

The first verb in the Oxford American Dictionary is abandon.
To leave someone
or something. The first noun is abacus—a word that gives us
choice. Stay or don’t.

Betta fish look like tulips bent by rain, their tailfins petals
forever streaming behind.
Caterpillars always enact punctuation—an endless line of em
dash, tilde, em dash.

The year birds started flying only at night there was a 1500%
increase in the number
of poems written. That same year there was a 125% decrease in
poems with dentists.

Before taking a photo the photographer should take the lens
cap off. Before writing
this ghazal the poet, Staci, should have chosen a refrain.
She can’t follow directions.

Staci R. Schoenfeld received an MFA from Southern Illinois University – Carbondale and is the Managing Poetry Editor at Revolution House. A recipient of an Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and residencies from the Ragdale Foundation, Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the New York Mills Regional Cultural Center, her poems appear in or are forthcoming from Greensboro Review, Washington Square, Southern Humanities Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Stone Highway Review, Muzzle, South Dakota Review, and diode, among others.

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to be the drifting whimper of a thick dog
to be a singing ad initiate on air

dollop of thought-direction
thankless bad kiss of capital

to put the viewer in a mood
to be bad-ass in class respectfully

to be a shoe speeds past in teeth
above his brass cow-collar down from Alps

slumming at the neck of an American
mongrel making movies with a whisperer

who knew you’d ride the main chance
out from flat Falfurrias

butter capitol of Texans with no hats
no cattle no Battle of Flowers Parade

a Southern sweet sixteen
pennyless loafer looked to gain bouquet

from fond transplanted ex
to give to grandmother

a grifter made a plot with Nettie Mae
to die a tragic teenager

& so she wrote
“Haidee has passed away”

–success! now flowers in hand girls giggling
so far so good a scam

but he was gonna come to my grave
so we had to tell him

Kathleen Winter’s first book, Nostalgia for the Criminal Past (Elixir Press 2012), won the Antivenom Poetry Prize and 2013 Texas Institute of Letters Bob Bush Memorial Award.  In 2014 her manuscript “Tonic” won the Marsh Hawk Press Rochelle Ratner Prize, selected by Brenda Hillman.  She has received fellowships from the James Merrill House; Brown Foundation Residency at the Dora Maar House, Provence; Vermont Studio Center; and Prague Summer Program.  Her poems have appeared in Tin House, Poetry London, Colorado Review, AGNI, and The Cincinnati Review.

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“Through the Loupe,” which takes its name from the tiny glass that jewelers use to appraise the fine details of gemstones, will be a series of reviews that examine singular works — poems, stories, essays, etc. — that have appeared in recent issues of literary journals. Lately, I’ve been frustrated by book reviews that focus solely on “the project” of a book and not enough on the individual pieces therein. Though theme, organization, and subject matter are important elements to consider, I want to see more attention given to craft. My hope is that this series will provide critics a space in which they can focus on finer points of an individual work. More than anything, though, I envision these reviews working in the same way one friend might hand a magazine to another friend and say, “Hey, read this. It’s great.”
–James Davis May, Reviews Editor

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C. Dale Young’s “The Wolf”

C. Dale Young’s titanic, 135-line, twenty-seven-stanza poem “The Wolf” in the December/ November 2013 issue of American Poetry Review is, in itself, an argument for that magazine’s newspaper-style format. Open the magazine (Young’s poem covers all of the eighteenth page and a fourth of the nineteenth) and place it on the floor, as you would a road map, and the first thing you’ll notice, as I did, is that the poem itself, its shape, is beautiful. Maybe I’ve been reading (and writing) too many formless, irregular poems, so to see evidence of such meticulousness was a relief, like sighting the first manmade structure you’ve seen after days of camping in the woods. And that’s where Young takes us eventually, the woods.

A quick summary: Young’s poem describes a trip the speaker takes with friends, driving from Boston to the coast, most likely Cape Cod, to stay at a rustic cottage. Upon arriving at the cottage, the speaker leaves his four friends to go to the beach (anyone who’s been on a road trip with four people will understand his impulse), and, upon seeing the beach, remembers the death by drowning of a cousin when they were both six. Though tragic, the death is also alluring to the speaker; “I want to / lose myself the way a cousin did,” he writes, later adding that “although the adults cried, it seemed / amazing that one could vanish…” Far from amazing, the beach is dull and grey, especially contrasted with “the embarrassment of color” he saw in the autumnal woods, and so the speaker turns away, back towards the cottage and the woods where he encounters a grizzled, threatening hiker. More on him later.

Before New England, though, Young begins in the Caribbean, or at least the wind starts there:

From the warm blues of the Caribbean,
the twisting funnels of salt water vanish
as they quietly move north, vanish the way fish do
when they sense danger, when a predator is
nearby, these funnels in aggregate referred to as

a stream, the Gulf Stream…

Here, of course, we hear another poem, Bishop’s “The Moose,” particularly its opening stanzas and the famous way she, piling dependent clause upon dependent clause, delays the subject of that first long sentence for a whopping twenty-six lines. I admire the allusion for both its subtlety and its chutzpah.

If Bishop’s poem is about, among many other subjects, joy – “Why do you feel / (we all feel) this sweet / sensation of joy?” she asks near the end of “The Moose” – Young’s is about, among other subjects, danger, fear and, as we’ll see at the end of the poem, the frightening notion that we cannot lose ourselves – that we are who we are no matter where we are. In this, Young’s poem is more Frostian. He is, after all, walking through the woods in New England, and Young’s woods, like Frost’s, tempt him with their darkness.

But what I like about this poem more than anything else is not that it’s like other poems; rather, I like that it’s, well, not like any other poem I’ve read. Out of necessity, a narrative poem, especially one this long, has to have action, and so we would forgive the poet if he let up on, say, description or sound to move along the story. But Young doesn’t do that. Here’s his description of the path through the woods:

…not so much
a path as many small paths, the evergreens
having carpeted the ground in needles,
an abundance of needles, the squirrels
bounding over this carpet busy

with the work of squirrels, which is confusing
but seemingly endless.

Young’s woods overwhelm by abundance, to borrow a word from the passage above. The description of the too-much-for-us here – not one path, many; the profusion of needles; and the many squirrels completing their many tasks – conveys the speaker’s feeling of estrangement, and foreshadows the encounter with the wolfman. Nor does Young omit argument; in fact, in many ways the poem is a quarrel with a memory of an “old Jesuit mumbling / in front of the lecture hall,” who proclaimed that “To travel is to rid oneself of oneself.” Young’s speaker doesn’t strike me as suicidal the way some of Frost’s do, but there is a restlessness in this poem – the speaker’s perhaps “half in love with easeful Death.” There’s a desire to vanish, as the speaker’s cousin did at six. So he goes into the woods.

And that’s where he comes face-to-face with “the wolf,” a man who emerges from “the denser woods.” A bare-chested lumberjack without an axe, this man stares down the speaker, then “howls like a werewolf in a B movie.” Young’s speaker, understandably, sees this man as a threat, but not just a physical danger – here, the man seems to be saying, is what happens if you lose yourself, so go ahead and howl. But the speaker doesn’t howl, though he wants to. The standoff ensues, and Young offers a beautiful description of the panic:

When a branch tumbles to the ground, I jump,
feel the panic of the wings tearing through the muscles
between my shoulder blades, the wings erupting now
like a B movie, the wings ripping my shirt open
at the back, the force of it so painful I cry out.

A cry but not a howl. The amazing thing here is the way Young describes that sort of electricity that runs through us when we’re startled, that flight response at the shoulder blades as wings, wings we’ve lost but wish we had. The wolfman goes back into the woods – he, unlike the speaker, gets to vanish, and Young closes with these lines: “The old Jesuit lied, as adults are apt to do. We lose / so many things in this life, but we never lose ourselves.”

If Wordsworth upon speaking with the Leech-Gatherer finds a “Man so firm of mind,” someone who puts to rest his worries about what kind of old poet he may become, Young’s wolfman gives no reassurance. The only thing the howl seems to communicate is that the speaker – all of us, really – cannot change. And that’s frightening in a way that Frost would approve.

This is a masterful poem, one that makes me grateful to APR for its commitment to publishing poems of all styles, especially longer works. Young’s last book, Torn was published by Four Way in 2011. Here’s looking forward to The Halo, which will be out in the fall of 2016.

James Davis May

Jim Davis is a graduate of Knox College and now lives, writes and paints in Chicago. Jim edits the North Chicago Review, and will be appearing as the feature artist for the upcoming issue of Palooka Magazine. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in After Hours, Blue Mesa Review, Poetry Quarterly, The Ante Review, Chiron Review, and Contemporary American Voices, among others. www.jimdavispoetry.com

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